ALICE IN SUMMERLAND: ​EASY ACTION BY WILLIAM TEA

 
Knowing what Alice Cooper would eventually become, it’s tempting to look at the band’s (yes, the name “Alice Cooper” once referred to a full band, not just Vincent Furnier’s macabre alter ego) second album, Easy Action, solely as a transitional item, an early oddity worth examining only for the glimpses it provides into a future still to come.

Admittedly, Easy Action can’t lay claim to any classic Cooper cuts regularly appearing on the man’s set list today, nor can it hope to hold the same historic importance as the first album, Pretties for You. Indeed, Easy Action is unlikely to rank as anyone’s favorite, not even with the aid of nostalgia’s rose-colored glasses.

Nevertheless, there’s more to Easy Action than just a stepping stone to greatness. It is a snapshot of a young band still experimenting and trying to find its own distinctive sound, yes. But it is also a portrait of a young band with surprising confidence in the power of its songcraft, and with an eccentric versatility that would somewhat take a backseat in later years as Furnier streamlined its style down to a purer and more iconic form.

About as far from iconic as you could get, the members of Easy Action-era Cooper make it clear they knows exactly the place they occupy in the 1970 musical food chain, opening the album with “Mr. & Misdemeanor,” a sarcastic retort to the apathetic response their first album received (and which this one would unfortunately replicate), boasting such lyrics as “Here’s another Pretties for You” and “Nobody likes me, but we adore you.” All cocksure carnival swagger, this one could almost pass for a Doors song were it not for the substitution of Furnier’s rougher, meaner vocals in place of Jim Morrison’s syrupy croon.

Offering a surprising counterpoint, follow-up track “Shoe Salesman” goes hard in the opposite direction. Sunny and mellow, it calls to mind lighter fare from The Beatles and Pink Floyd, leaning hard on jangly guitars while showing off Furnier’s melodic chops. All that brightness, though, conceals darker themes of infidelity and drug use reflected in coy lyrics like “I know a shoe salesman / He's an acquaintance of mine / One day he showed me some / Marks on his arm in a line / I did not know what to say / ‘Do you think those freckles will stay?’”

Fortunately, anyone worried that Cooper & Co. might be looking to abandon the strange psychedelia that was so prevalent on “Pretties for You” can rest reassured, at least for the time being, thanks to the presence of such cuts as “Still No Air” and “Below Your Means.” The former is an avant-garde freakout full of galloping rhythms and odd time changes, and the latter is a take-no-prisoners barnburner that builds on heavy riffs and great noodly guitar work until ultimately exploding into a jazzy extended jam session that brings side one to a sizzling close.

The band takes that aggressive momentum and molds it into something stark and new with the side two opener “Return of the Spiders.” A growling, jagged, hard-edged rock song that hints at the menace which would eventually become Cooper’s signature, this track offers the clearest picture of the future shock-rock juggernaut in an embryonic stage. Interestingly, the fact that this one has so much in common with latter-day Cooper results in it actually feeling somewhat out of place here, surrounded by tracks tapping into a rawer, less polished, more experimental impulse.

To wit, “Laughing at Me” seems to channel both David Bowie and, of all things, Carlos Santana (seriously!), “Refrigerator Heaven” dreams up a spacey sci-fi acid-rock epic that sadly ends just as it seems on the cusp of blossoming into something truly special, and “Beautiful Flyaway” returns us to the kinder, gentler Cooper of “Shoe Salesman” with its piano-driven Paul McCartney-style pop melodies and, most intriguingly, something we’d never again witness once Furnier’s facepainted supervillain became the star attraction: guitarist Michael Bruce taking over lead vocals (something he also did on the earlier “Still No Air”)!

It is album-closer “Lay Down and Die, Goodbye,” though, that may represent the best of what dirty, untested, salad days Cooper & Co. had to offer. A startling example of noise-rock before noise-rock was even a thing, “Lay Down and Die, Goodbye” allows the band to indulge its most outré urges, offering up seven-plus minutes of dissonant electronic ambience and booming fuzz-drenched riffage with no compromises made for mainstream appeal.

Sounding like a cross between an extraterrestrial apocalypse and the blissed-out chanting of drug-addicted doomsday cultists, when put into the context of what would soon follow, it’s hard not to see this as the climactic death-rattle of a band about to be reborn via the commercial success of its next album, Love It to Death, and the breakout single “I’m Eighteen.” This sensation is doubly palpable in light of such lyrics as “Well, I'll hang on another minute / But really I have to go / If you ever want to see me again / You know what you can do.”

Though it never quite manages to synthesize its disparate elements into a single coherent sound, Easy Action offers a fascinating, even exhilarating mash-up of the bouncy blues-rock of long-cited Cooper influence The Yardbirds, the hallucinogenic weirdness of the band’s label-runner Frank Zappa, and the muscular proto-punk of then contemporaries The Stooges.

As useful as this album is as an artefact by which to chart the evolution of the Alice Cooper we would come to know and love, Easy Action is also eye-opening as a portal into an alternate universe occupied by an Alice Cooper that never came to be.








 


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ALICE IN SUMMERLAND: PRETTIES FOR YOU BY BRACKEN MACLEOD