I remember it was the 70s, though unsure of the exact year. The entire decade contained a glorious potpourri of wonderfully eerie things for a boy my age to look at. But never to touch. Not at my age. Mother made sure of that.  
 
Film, pop culture, and musicians were exhibiting a dark side the likes of which we’d never seen before.  The Exorcist, The Omen, the wagging, blood-soaked tongue of Gene Simmons and the rumors surrounding just where exactly that tongue came from and did he really bite it every night to bleed for the crowd? My parents’ ominous bookshelf loaded with a genre that was slowly creeping into the mainstream with books like Jay Anson’s Amityville Horror, Felitta’s Audrey Rose, and William Peter Blatty’s purple-colored paperback with a face that to this day has me wondering what in hell it is exactly.
 
But none of the above held the same power over me as Alice Cooper (okay, maybe Gene did). None as alive and enigmatic as a malnourished man in ripped long johns that surrounded himself with the very thing I was so attracted to--monsters.
 
I don’t remember when my obsession started. It could have been after the Muppet Show appearance--though I swear the affair had already been established by then--or it could have been the televised concert aired by Blue Jean Network. Or it could have been the 8-track of The Alice Cooper Show Live that somehow made its way into my hands. Either way, by the time Alice had played locally, I was enamored. At my age, it wasn’t so much the music as it was the imagery. Being a fan of all things horror, I could tell this was my thing.  Alice was from my tribe. And I wanted nothing more than to be in the same room he was in while the monsters bound and hanged him.
 
My local paper teased of his appearance only one city over at Wings Stadium in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The ad displayed a picture of Alice hanging from a noose, succumbed to the punishment dealt him by an angry mob. Or perhaps self inflicted...for our enjoyment. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be there when it happened. To see Mr. Cooper sing amongst the cyclops, the spiders, the nurses and the plastic dolls. And while I drew up the courage to ask Mother if I could attend the upcoming event, I knew the inquiry would be done in vain. I wasn’t even into double digits yet.  Almost. But not yet.
 
Her adamant ‘no’ spun my life into intermittent fits of crying, and a hollow feeling in my gut--an emptiness--knowing that The Alice Cooper Show would be so close, but that I would be denied the pleasure.  
 
After missing the concert, whenever we drove by the stadium, I gazed upon the building as though it were a church and Christ himself was inside. I pictured Alice hanging there, crimson leaking from his mouth. Even the building itself held special properties for me. To this day, the building still represents the place where Alice hung from somewhere inside. And fortunately for me, nearly a decade later I would finally see him on that sacred ground.
 
And I did watch him hang.
 
One of the records I spun on my less-than-stellar stereo was KILLER.  The bright red hue with the head of snake warned of the dangers inside. Songs about dead babies and running women over, lyrics that would take my imagination to mostly inaccurate places while I was determined to make Alice much more sinister than the satirical gentlemen really was.
 
A pure, unapologetic rock & roll riff straight from the school of Chuck Berry opens the album that leads into a blues-oriented romp with the gritty line “The telephone is ringin’” that was intermittently yelled at perfectly timed bumps--a line that’ll have even your mom singing at each go-around. Well, maybe not my mom.
 
Be my Lover has a sexy swagger with a story to tell.  Even if you’re not the lyrical type--like me, when you don’t pay much attention to what’s being said until maybe years down the road--you’ll still pick up on the story being told and into the second listen will be reciting the Mae West-like “Ohh” that leads into the tune’s third chorus.
 
A chaotically progressive buzzing of guitars begins the darker tone of Halo of Flies that flirts with horror film soundtracks and driving diddies with a dash of nursery-rhyme melodies in an early bridge that ultimately leads to pure garage-rock-chugging as Cooper belts out “I crossed the ocean where no one could see. And I put a time bomb in your submarine.” The song as a whole is a blender full of hypnotizing riffs and unpredictable (yet pleasant) melodies at varying tempos. There’s a lot here and at over eight minutes is the longest song on the record.
 
Sticking with the darker tone, as Alice paints a picture of the wild west and the quick draw of the killer in Desperado. The chorus is full of Alice’s throaty snarl as he boasts of his gun-toting skills, while the verses ring of Jim Morrison’s sing-talking style.  Matter of face, rumor has it that Alice intentionally paid homage to his deceased friend with this song. On a side note, and you may not see it like I do, but bits of this song remind me a little of very early IRON MAIDEN. Perhaps the brits drew influence from Alice in their earlier days.
 
You Drive Me Nervous charges in with a Stooges-esque punk rock feel and gives the rebellious teen something to shake their fist at while Alice preaches about the control our parents hold over us, and we don’t like that.  Not one bit. It drives us nervous.
 
The sleazy rock anthems continue with Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. Alice’s voice was made for songs like this--that cracking, raspy scream holds just the perfect amount of aggression and righteous anger while still holding a tune. It just wouldn’t be Alice Cooper without it. A scream for the voiceless among us. It’s part of what makes Alice, Alice, and this song presents that attitude in full force.  
 
Dead Babies is one of my favorites from this album. I love the subject matter and the build into the chorus where I can’t help but sing along. We even get a little taste of THE BEATLES nestled in at the end of each chorus. To the uneducated, the conservative, and of course to the parents, this was nothing more than shock rock lyricism--two words forced together that should never be. A taboo chant. Dead Babies! But those of us paying attention hear the cry of a neglected child, a warning to parents to pay attention and get your ass out of the bottle! The song itself is as haunting as the title and the building bridge puts a chill down your spine as Cooper screams Goodbye! to Little Betty.
 
Killer, the final track on the album is a tribal, vaudeville-ish tune that, while good, for me is probably the weakest song on here. It feels like background music dreamt up by Cooper and the rhythm section of The Doors’ that finally ends with a clever funeral march complete with ghostly church organ. But honestly, it’s a decent closer if Alice wanted to leave us on a bewildering note.
 
Overall, KILLER is the perfect album to introduce anyone to Alice Cooper. It’s got the high velocity rock & roll, the sleazy sound of a Detroit garage, the bouncy anthemic catches, and the brooding atmospheric darkness all wrapped in one, sprinkled with lyrics that are never to be taken too seriously.  This is essential Alice.

 
In March of 1971, Alice Cooper released their third album, Love it To Death."

Now, before this they had released a pair of sprawling psychedelic monstrosities through Frank Zappa's Straight Records imprint.  With neither one doing much in the way of sales of breaking the band bigger as they had hoped.   Zappa ended up selling his imprint to Warner Brothers and newly appointed band manager, Shep Gordon and the boys approached Jack Richardson to produce their next album and he told them no dice but sent his apprentice producer, a kid named Bob Ezrin their way.

Ezrin took his newly acquired band of weirdoes and holed them up in a barn for twelve hours a day for a few weeks. They attempted and I'd say succeeded in harnessing that beast that was lurking in those long meandering weird opuses of the earlier albums. Ezrin had them work and whittle until that had an album full of hard rock songs with little of the psychedelic freak-rock aesthetic of the first two albums.

They recorded and released the single for "I'm Eighteen" first, to test the waters as they say.  It quickly became a hit.  A fan of all of the Cooper discography, I really think of this album as the "debut" of the Alice Cooper Band.  They really coagulated into a pummeling and brooding force, one of the best musical rock combos the world has seen and often criminally underrated.

Now, that the little bit of a history lesson is out of the way, let's dish on this album:

The opening cut is "Caught In A Dream" a simple straight-ahead rocker with razorwire riffs and a solo that's as much Rolling Stones skronk as it is pre-punk. And the patented Alice sneering vocals. This is blissful.

"I'm Eighteen" is next. Has there ever been a more accurate boil down of how fucking awkward it feels at that age? Expected to be an adult but after seventeen years suddenly having the training wheels yanked away--handle bars too--it's terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.

Third up is "Long Way To Go" another hard rocker with a bit of jaunty keyboard work. The album's title comes from a line in this song.

"The silence is speaking, so why am I weeping? I guess I love it, I love it to Death!"

The next track closed out side one (for those who listen on cassette or record format) "Black Juju" and heady and creepy track, influenced by numerous gigs with The Doors, featuring a slow building tribal drum beat accompanied with blossoming organ that gives sway to a bizarre voodoo-fueled nightmare to music. 

Side two opens with "Is It My Body" a song that is the best Rolling Stones song the band never wrote. I mean, seriously. It has Jagger and Richards drug-smudged fingerprints all over it but is drenched in enough spider web and ash to let you know it's all Cooper. Sexy and sarcastic.

"Hallowed be My Name" and the following song, "Second Coming" are a thrilling one-two punch of songs that deal with religion. Most likely coming from Cooper's upbringing steeped in the church. "Second Coming" is a beautiful meditation.  These two pave the way for the album's heavy hitter. A near seven minute opus titled "Ballad Of Dwight Frye."  a theatrical rock opera in one song about a man confined to an asylum. It opens with a little girl asking about her father who has been committed and then shifts to the POV of the father, calmly explaining how he came to be in his position. Over the lush acoustic guitar work which gives way to some nice rock guitar later. As the vocal voice grows from calm to more and more agitated the music reflects this so that by the time we're to the creepily subdued pleas of "Let me out of here. I've got to get out of here" which grow more and more frenzied until we get Alice's ragged howls of "Gotta let me outta here." we're at a near cacophonous level of musical assault.  This is a masterpiece and a benchmark for the style of thing we'd come to expect from the band.

The song barely fades out until it segues into the sunny disposition of the closing song, "Sun Arise."  It's a cover of a Rolf Harris tune and was included as a means to contrast the dark and heavy album material that preceded it. This album is among my very favorites. As I said earlier, I consider it a debut of the band. The Alice Cooper I grew to love was born on this album. I like the earlier work but give me the leather and lace, smeared make-up sneers and songs about lunatics any day.   Any Day.

 
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.

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)

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.
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It wouldn't be summer without rain, midges, dodgy barbecues and Ginger Nuts of Horror's annual celebration of music with a horror theme.  Following on from the hugely successful Summer of Sabbath and Summer of Maiden, we bring you our biggest feature to date Alice in Summerland.  A celebration of the music films and books of rocks Grandfather of Gore and Grandmaster of Glam the one, and only Alice Cooper. 

School may well be out for Summer real soon, but Ginger Nuts of Horror summer school of mayhem is more than happy to offer you a seat in our classroom of chaos. 

Original Alice Cooper Band

Pretties For You (1969) Bracken MacLeod
Easy Action (1970) William Tea
Love It To Death (1971) John Boden
Killer (1971) Chad Lutzke
School's Out (1972)Matt Weber
Billion Dollar Babies (1973) John Boden
Muscle Of Love (1973)Duane Pesice

Alice Cooper Solo

Welcome To My Nightmare (1975) Bracken MacLeod
Alice Cooper Goes To Hell (1976) Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
Lace & Whiskey (1977) Kit Power
From The Inside (1978) Andrew Freudenberg
Flush The Fashion (1980) Alex Boden
Special Forces (1981) Randy Michaud
Zipper Catches Skin (1982) Dustin Rhodes
Dada (1983) Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
Constrictor (1986) Shawn Macomber
Raise Your Fist And Yell (1987) Jim Morazzini
Trash (1989) Peter Germany
Hey Stoopid! (1991) Frank Edler and Mark Cassell
The Last Temptation (1994) Waylon Glunt
Brutal Planet (2000) William Tea
Dragontown (2001) William Tea
The Eyes Of Alice Cooper (2003) Nathaniel Kinsey
Dirty Diamonds (2005) Matt Hayward
Along Came A Spider (2008) David Owain Hughes
Welcome 2 My Nightmare (2011) Matthew M. Bartlett
Paranormal (2017) Shane Douglas Keene

Films/Television

The Muppet Show (1978) Andrew Freudenberg
Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) Duane Pesice
Monster Dog (1984) Michelle Garza
Prince Of Darkness (1987) Patrick Lacey
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) Patrick Lacey
Wayne's World (1992) Shawn Macomber
The Attic Expeditions (2001) William Tea
Suck (2009) John Quick
Super Duper Alice Cooper (2014) Eric Ian Steele

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If you would like to contribute to this series I'm sure we can fit you in drop us an email here