BY BRACKEN MACLEOD
As I wrote in my article, “The Sun The Moon The Stars” for Ginger Nuts of Horror’s Summer of Sabbath, I grew up in a house filled with music. My mother had a decent-sized vinyl record collection (and 8-tracks because I’m that old) that included The Doors, Pink Floyd, Buffy Saint Marie, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and Deep Purple (the David Coverdale/Tommy Bolin era DP, but that’s a different article). She also had albums by Alice Cooper, and I loved them best. It didn’t hurt that Cooper was on The Muppet Show and The Soupy Sales Show (for those of you who aren’t from the Pleistocene, Soupy Sales was a vaudeville comedian who had a Saturday morning comedy show in the late 1970s)
https://youtu.be/qP0g6VINHbs?t=4
Alice Cooper and Kiss were alone among all the bands in my mom’s record collection that had an appeal aimed directly at kids like me. And for a boy with a nascent obsession with horror, Cooper edged out Kiss in my imagination nine times out of ten. I played School’s Out, Billion Dollar Babies, and Welcome to My Nightmare as much as I could get away with (more on that last title from me in a few weeks). Alice Cooper, more than any other act, was definitely my gateway into heavy metal. As a teen, I graduated from my mom’s collection to my own cassette tapes and with every dollar I could scrape together filled in all the blanks in her vinyl, buying School’s Out and Love it to Death and going back and back until I had everything. And then, one weekend I bought Pretties For You and the unauthorized live album Freak Out Song (a.k.a Science Fiction). I had no idea what either of them were like, but I had an idea and they were Alice Cooper albums and I had to have them. After listening to both, I still had no fucking idea what they were. Now, I wasn’t unaccustomed to ‘60’s psychedelica—I’d heard The Doors and early Pink Floyd and liked them enough—but at 13 I was a punk and a metalhead, definitely not a hippie. I wanted more like “The Ballad of Dwight Fry” and “Devil’s Food.” Pretties For You hit me pretty much like a patchouli-scented fart in the metal church. I didn’t like it at all and instantly regretted the purchase. After a couple of days of trying to enjoy it, I sold the album back to the record store for credit and didn’t listen to it again for decades. Flash forward, and in a moment of odd nostalgia, I remembered the record and wondered if it had been as bad as all that. After all, I’d had a similar expectations-meet-reality experience with Allan Holdsworth’s Metal Fatigue that ended up being my entry into a lifelong love of jazz and fusion. I went to YouTube to see if my memory of Pretties For You was distorted by inexperience and now might mesh with my significantly expanded musical tastes. Nope. Unlike Flush the Fashion and Special Forces, which have both aged better, Pretties For You is still pretty bad. It’s not entirely fair to say there’s nothing good there, though. There’s a lot on this record that’s both interesting and enjoyable in the moment it plays, but taken as a whole, the album is a hot mess. For every moment of prog-rock near brilliance expressed in an unexpected time signature or key change, there’s something in the bad production that mars it. A fuzz tone that’s too loud, or a distracting nonsense lyric. In the performance though, there’s a kernel of what’s to come later in a lot of the songs on the record. “Today Mueller” has a kind of carnival aggression that sounds like the Beatles and Bertolt Brecht fighting over a keyboard (that exact sound, incidentally, made The Dresden Dolls an indie rock sensation some thirty-odd years later). That kind of musical theater sound reflects in the songs “Go to Hell” and “I’m Going Home” from Alice Cooper Goes to Hell. “Fields of Regret” begins in a ponderous minor key that suggests the horror-rock act to come while still sounding like a San Francisco acid-rock improv before descending into an experimental noise and spoken word piece at about the three-minute mark, and then breaking back out into a long Doors-like jam. Much of the song “Reflected” got reworked into the classic hit, “Elected,” making that song, in context with its progeny, an interesting kind of embryonic artifact, like a fetus in amber. Finally, “Changing Arranging” starts out threateningly before hinting at the kind of teen anthem sound that Cooper later became known for with “School’s Out” (a very short but recognizable riff from which seems to appear here) and “I’m Eighteen.” Then, sadly, the song ends with a mess of aimless wandering that suggests the band had no idea how to finish what they’d started. Anyone listening closely can hear the seed of what grew to make the early Alice Cooper band a phenomenon germinating in fertile soil here. But, you know, there’s a hell of a difference between crunching into an orange seed and eating an orange. It’s not a listenable album as much as it’s an archeological oddity. I recommend it for historical purposes only. 
Bracken MacLeod has worked as a martial arts teacher, a university philosophy instructor, for a children's non-profit, and as a trial attorney. His short fiction has appeared in several magazines and anthologies including LampLight, ThugLit, and Splatterpunk and has been collected in 13 VIEWS OF THE SUICIDE WOODS by ChiZine Publications, which the New York Times Book Review called, "Superb."
He is the author of the novels, MOUNTAIN HOME, STRANDED, and COME TO DUST. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and son, where he is at work on his next novel.ThugLit, and Splatterpunk and has been collected in 13 VIEWS OF THE SUICIDE WOODS by ChiZine Publications, which the New York Times Book Review called, "Superb." He is the author of the novels, MOUNTAIN HOME, STRANDED, and COME TO DUST. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and son, where he is at work on his next novel.instructo, for a children's non-profit, and as a trial attorney. His short fiction has appeared in several magazines and anthologies including LampLight, ThugLit, and Splatterpunk and has been collected in 13 VIEWS OF THE SUICIDE WOODS by ChiZine Publications, which the New York Times Book Review called, "Superb." He is the author of the novels, MOUNTAIN HOME, STRANDED, and COME TO DUST. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and son, where he is at work on his next novel. Comments are closed.
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