1975’s Welcome to my Nightmare represents what I think of as Vincent Furnier’s full commitment to Alice Cooper as a theatrical act on his records as well as on stage. Of course, The Alice Cooper Band already had a fully realized stage show that incorporated many of the elements we tend to think of when we imagine Alice Cooper’s live act—guillotines, straightjackets, and impaled baby dolls (and was perhaps part of the reason for the band’s split)—but unlike albums like School’s Out or Love It to Death, which were wonderfully written and arranged, but still conventionally structured, Nightmare was deliberately written to play like the soundtrack to a big production. There’s more than a hint in the long instrumental breakdowns and segues between songs that tell the listener, “there’s something here you’re not seeing. Yet.” The same year the album was released, ABC aired a 90-minute television special, titled The Nightmare, showcasing every song on the album (plus “The Ballad of Dwight Fry”) and suggesting the kind of stage performance that would be delivered live (along with a couple of specially recorded alternate versions of certain tracks—more on that in a bit).
The album is thematically tied together, and while not as narratively tight a story as Pink Floyd’s The Wall, for instance, it’s undeniably a concept album. The story is simple: a boy (or perhaps a man regressed to childhood in his dreams) named Steven experiences a series of troubling nightmares culminating in a terrifying revelation upon waking. The title track is a prologue, introducing the listener to the concept. It’s catchy and clearly influenced by theater. The song as a whole straddles the kind of fusion of rock and Broadway showtune that Cooper already explored on “Gutter Cat v. The Jets.” It’s our opening fanfare to the show that follows.

Next up, though, “Devil’s Food” isn’t easy listening or all that danceable. But damn, if it doesn’t sell that this is an album of nightmares. A song about cannibalism, the lyrics communicate the anxious anticipation of Alice/Steven getting ready to cook and eat a human being. It’s aggressive and bleak. Contrasted with what precedes it, there’s not much camp here. It’s all creep. There is an alternate version of this song which appears in The Nightmare special and as a bonus track on the 2002 reissue of the album. Lyrically, it reverses the roles of eater and eaten, positioning instead of a nameless woman in Alice’s pot, him dangling above a witch’s cauldron. One imagines this change was made to satisfy network censors who couldn’t justify an unambiguous song about eating a dead woman, but could handle the fairy tale logic of witches about to cook a living boy. While the alternate lyrics and performance have a more desperate feeling, due to the lyrical content and the different (almost live) production, the original is a more effective and sinister piece overall.

The album version of “Devil’s Food” segues without a break into “The Black Widow” with a piercing scream and then a haunting monologue by horror legend, Vincent Price (that predates his appearance on Michael Jackson’s Thriller by almost a decade). Price, playing a museum curator (reimagined in the TV special as “the Spirit of the Nightmare”) lovingly describes the neurotoxic effects of black widow venom before the song launches into a raunchy stomp where Alice sings, as the titular spider, “Love me!” and is answered by a chorus of child-like voices, “Yes, we love him!” It’s grotesque and exciting and practically dripping with threat. By the third song on the album, it’s becoming a nightmare all right. “The Black Widow’descends again into a grandiose calliope melody that suggests a circus procession as much as a rock concert. Which expertly sets up the next song.
“Some Folks” is unabashedly a showtune. With blaring horns, snapping fingers, and a jaunty blues rhythm, the song begs for a choreographed dance routine. Right up until the mid-point where it takes on the signature Alice Cooper sound and a guitar screeches into a frantic section where Alice declares that he “just can’t live without it.” As a love song to addiction, it’s frenetic, celebratory, and desperately manic.

It’s the next song that stands out as an obvious hit that can exist outside of the theme of the album, but also as a foreshadowing of the second half of the record. “Only Women Bleed,” is a tender ballad about domestic violence sung from the point of view of the female partner in an emotionally and physically violent relationship. It seems like a divergent point in the concept of the album, but as the nightmare of violence plays out while the record continues, this perspective can withstand a reading also as Steven’s confession relating to his own relationship to women. Her perspective, his deeds, and his nightmare of being forced to view himself through the lens of her love. Prepare yourself. The dysfunctionality and danger of that relationship is about to play out, dear listener.

I suppose that I’d be remiss in failing to mention that facile audiences mistook the song as being about menstruation when it first came out owing to a surface-level interpretation of the title, Only Women Bleed. It’s a cultural Freudian slip inasmuch as people who thought the song was about a woman’s period are ignoring the lyrics in exactly the same way the lyrics portray the loneliness of a woman who, as Alice puts it, is on her knees begging someone, anyone, to witness her pain.

“Department of Youth” picks up next, and again it feels like a divergence from the central theme, but in the context of the songs from Side A, it stands as a brief respite from the darkness preceding it. In my mind, it also sets up Steven’s central nightmare to unfold in the last act of the album. It’s a triumphalist anthem to youthful disaffection with the world and its troubles. The song depicts a point of view that embraces naïve vitality and is content with willful ignorance of the difficulties of adulthood. My favorite part of the song comes at the very end. A children’s chorus backing Alice declares “We got the power.” Alice calls out, “And who gave it to you?” And their enthusiastic reply is, “Donny Osmond!” Though this plays on the album during the fade, and is easily missed unless you’ve really got the volume cranked, on the television special, it is played for laughs at full volume. The children declare their allegiance to Donny Osmond, and Alice, shocked and petulant, throws down his cane and storms off the set.

Following that, is the crowd favorite, “Cold Ethyl.” Another high energy song, this one is not as innocent as “Department of Youth,” depicting gleeful necrophilia that stands in contrast to the dire sounding “I Love the Dead” of Billion Dollar Babies. The song is another energetic anthem with Alice declaring his lover “refrigerator heaven,” and shivering “Oooh, sooo cold!” with tongue jammed fully into cheek. Years later, syndicated advice columnist, Ann Landers would discover the song and decry its unsuitability for children. Alice responded, and she published his letter, which reads, in part:
"Actually, 'Cold Ethyl' is just a harmless number about necrophilia. The point I want to make is that the kids are not bothered by this — their parents are. The kids see the song and gruesome antics, like with the guillotine, for exactly what it is — satire, done with a sense of humor to a rock 'n' roll beat. Kids know I am harmless. It's their parents that make me out to be some kind of a monster." SOURCE: https://goo.gl/ZTa8SP

Alice’s defense is what one would expect from him, but the allegation made by Landers and defended by Cooper is a valid subject for debate. This album came out when I was five years old. My mother played it and I loved it in every way, from carnival stomp to elegiac dirge. By the time I was slightly older, Alice had become a semi-regular guest on children’s television, appearing, as I mention in my previous article about Pretties for You, on both the Soupy Sales Show on Saturday morning and the Muppet Show (more on his other television appearances in later articles—stay tuned!). By that time his persona, to me at least, was essentially dark but harmless. No one could deny that his “gruesome antics” were aimed at kids to no small degree. But times were different, I suppose. We all thought it was just antics and fun, and by the time we were old enough to know what in the hell “Cold Ethyl’ was actually about, it was too silly to be taken seriously. It was a vaudeville act. Like much of his stage show, a magic trick where something looked dangerous, but then the assistant stepped out of the box in one piece and everyone cheered because while the horror was ersatz, the joy of having been harmlessly shocked was real.

After “Cold Ethyl”, Side B takes a dark turn with a triptych of songs: “Years Ago,” “Steven,” and “The Awakening.” These are the most traditionally conceptual songs on this concept album, following the character, Steven, though the last throes of his nightmare. Cooper sings “Years Ago” in a childlike falsetto describing how all the joyful things of his youth are gone. Musically, it’s melancholy, with an uneasy organ grinder feel, as if one might be hearing it at the same carnival Steven sings has closed years ago. Maybe only as an echo after it has closed. After adult Steven begins having a dialogue with his regressed self, and his mother begins calling in the background for him to come home, the song transitions to a piano trill deliberately reminiscent of Mike Oldfield’s haunting theme to The Exorcist. Steven’s voice has become younger and more timorous and lyrically there is a heavy implication someone is dead. He fights with himself, trying to banish what’s haunting him, and a chorus blasts in, screaming his name and increasing the tension in the piece. Broadway Alice is on full display here, using musical leitmotif and rising crescendo to amplify Steven’s anxiety. Finally, Steven has a spoken word monologue before a musical swell that communicates his desperation perfectly. “The Awakening” finishes out the triptych with a musical cue that feels right out of a horror movie. Jarring discordant notes punctuate Steven following a trail of blood out of his basement, and finding that it’s his hands that are covered in blood, and awakening to the reality that he is not the child he thought he was, and that he is a killer. His final nightmare has no resolution, as the music fades out.

Notably, in the TV special, The Nightmare, Alice shoehorns “The Ballad of Dwight Fry” into the act here, which provides part of the missing resolution left out at the end of the triptych of songs preceding it, but narratively undermines the full weight of Steven’s discovery. “Fry” is musically consistent, but lyrically off. I doubt it mattered much to audiences in the ‘70s, though. It still plays like a peek into that stage show you the album was written to be that can’t come to town soon enough. And damn, if it isn’t cool because of that.

Finally, Alice closes out the album with another rouser titled “Escape.” While the music is uplifting and high energy, the lyrics suggest that the daily persona he (he being Alice at this point, and not Steven) puts on is an escape from past trauma and present pain. It’s not a literal escape from the nightmare he’s been performing, but an anthem to coping mechanisms and denial. It’s his final sleight of hand trick to show us dysfunction dressed as success and that Steven/Alice hasn’t actually escaped anything. The nightmare continues.

Again, here The Nightmare diverges from its source material here, and after “Escape” there’s a reprise of “The Awakening” with a slightly different final verse that unequivocally puts to rest any ambiguity about whether or not anything sung about or seen was a dream or reality. It’s all a dream of Steven’s. Though—as he’s done throughout the entire special—Vincent Price reappears as the Spirit of the Nightmare to tell us that “bedrooms are only temporary sanctuaries from nightmares.” It’s his presence in the special, adding commentary throughout that makes The Nightmare rewatchable.

This is, without a doubt, my favorite Alice Cooper record. Though I enjoy much of what follows and almost all of what preceded it, this is the album that I always think of first and most fondly whenever I hear the name, Alice Cooper.

This album arrived on November 20, 1973, with the single (Teenage Lament ’74) being released simultaneously. I loved that .45, though it wasn’t as hard-rocking as I would have liked. I did enjoy knowing what “gold lame jeans” meant, which most thirteen-year-olds didn’t, and I identified with the narrator’s issues, as teenageness was what I was struggling with at the time. “Hard-Hearted Alice” was the flip-side. I didn’t like it so much, then. But that was all I had until shortly after the first of the year, when I had Christmas money, and managed to grab a copy of the corrugated-cardboard-covered album and Bob Greene’s Billion-Dollar Baby on a family outing to EJ Korvette’s at Harlem and Cermak.

That album cover was a nod to the way ‘gentleman’s magazines” arrived in those days, and the general theme of guilty sex represented by the subject matter (especially the title track) were of a piece with this concept, and the band’s relatively frank treatment of the ideas spoke volumes to me. I was used to Cheech Y Chong’s snickering about sex and newly introduced to Frank Zappa’s more acerbic take on affairs, though by then I was familiar with the general science-fictional ideology, which had a good deal to do with my acceptance of Alice (the band) in general.

At that time, I was a socially-backward 12 1/12 year old, and had recently discovered my new toy. To say that I found the subtext of the album ‘gripping’ would perhaps be an understatement.

Readers of Creem and Hit Parader knew that the band was in dire straits, and that Glen Buxton might not have played on the album. I was one of those readers, with full-page band pictures taped to my walls, upon which I gazed adoringly as I deployed my Epiphone Coronet in reverent imitation of my heroes.
“Muscle of Love” found its way into heavy rotation, joining Montrose, Black Sabbath, and Uriah Heep on my turntable, displacing Led Zeppelin, who had knocked McCartney’s Band on the Run off the spinner. It was eventually replaced by UFO’s Phenomenon, but the album spent four or five good months helping to flay my ears. I can still play most of the songs on guitar, if I concentrate hard enough.

That all said, for background purposes, here’s a track-by-track review:

Contents: One MUSCLE OF LOVE

Side One:
1. Big Apple Dreamin’ (Hippo)

If anything starts out sounding like early Judas Priest, this is it, at least until the Hammond comes in, and it becomes something else entirely. This is a pretty catchy tune with that showtune undercurrent a lot of Alice’s work has, and good Michael Bruce guitarwork. I never did know what the (Hippo) refers to. I still don’t. 

2. Never Been Sold Before

This has horns, which was a change from their earlier stuff, and something that a few of my friends criticized, thinking that such inclusion put the band on a level with Blood, Sweat, and Tears and Chicago, which were seen as ‘lesser’ bands in their minds.
The opening sounds a lot like ‘Hair of the Dog’, with a similar E to B riff happening (Nazareth’s song was a year and a half away), and the song seems to be a paean to a prostitute. Pretty punkish sentiments…people class Cooper as hard rock, sometimes metal, but I always thought them glam like Bowie and Sweet and Slade.

3. Hard Hearted Alice

Cool Hammond riff to open, very Zep-ish, and nice acoustic fingerpicking after. Cooper were good musicians and when they were ‘on’ they sounded as good as anyone. The grown-up me likes this song better than the teenage me. Alice, like Ozzy, has moments when his voice is the only one for the song, and this is one of those. Cool jazzy break, maybe a tad Doors-ish but I don’t mind. Really nice guitarwork.
I think this was supposed to be a signature song, but it’s too complex and un-anthem-ish to reach the mass. That pseudo-Genesis coda threw a lot of people off.

4. Crazy Little Child

Barrelhouse piano starts this one off – there’s a good variety to the sounds and tempii on this album, a sign that someone or someones were really paying attention, though the collection didn’t quite have the cohesion that they were seeking. Muscle of Love is a semi-concept album like Dark Side of the Moon or, perhaps more pointedly, Welcome to My Nightmare, but it just doesn’t make complete connections. This track is clearly a ‘street scene’ followup, a character piece, and the subtext is Mack the Knife. It’s good, but doesn’t have the sordid majesty of “Never Been Sold” and leaves the side ending on a down. Better listening on a cd, where that isn’t as obvious as it melds into the next track. Probably the most showtune of Cooper’s tracks to-date, moreso than even “Hello Hooray”, which the group didn’t write.



Side Two:
5. Working Up A Sweat

Harmonica and busy guitar figures introduce this rather ordinary little tune about cheap motel sex. Alice gets in a little bit of wordplay but this isn’t much, except for the cool middle eight that gets the guitars going for a bit. This is a song that another band could have done, not the most identifiable song in the group’s repertoire.

6. Muscle of Love

Better. Cooler guitar, that flying fingers bass, Alice’s nasal whine over the top of it all, while he talks like he’s hiding his boner behind his binder. It starts like it was going to be a different, meaner song but modulates down to stuff that meant a lot to me when it was current. Excellent ensemble playing, especially during the descending riff that conveys the chorus. Simple but very effective. Could do without the harmonies.

7. Man with the Golden Gun

Of course that was the next Bond film, and this is Cooper, Alice Cooper, with his faux-big-band style again. It’s pretty cool and mean-sounding, sort of like a Stray Cats number but without the overplaying. I like this one a lot, and it shoulda been in the movie (even Newsweek agrees with me). I bet they wrote if for the film. Scaramanga would have loved it.

8. Teenage Lament ‘74

“What a drag it is, these gold lame jeans.” Alice wails. “Is this the coolest way to get through your teens?” 
Had me right there, when I got the .45. Then “You gotta turn that damn thing down.” Oh shit. Anthemic as hell, on purpose, aimed at the “School’s Out” audience and hitting dead-center. Didn’t get a lot of airplay locally. The AM stations didn’t really like it, and it was too light for the still-undergroundish FM stations.
Lots of magazines made fun of it because Liza Minnelli sang on it. It took Hollywood Squares for people to understand that Alice himself was at home with showbix people. They were his people. Snoop Sisters’ The Devil Made Me Do It (his character name was Prince(!) should have been the tipoff but Vince played Alice then, instead of Vincent Furnier, who was soon to be permanently identified as Alice (which is why I call the band Cooper in this essay, to differentiate).
That episode premiered after the release of this album, but Alice sang “Sick Things” on the show, which was actually quite good (and prescient, mirroring the events of a few years later when “Better By You, Better Than Me” stirred up those demons.

9. Woman Machine

Alice channeling Lester del Rey (Helen O’Loy) in this finale, except that he forgot about the love and just went with transistors. This has some swing to it – it’s a good track, just perhaps not the most effective show-closer as it has that vision of sterility at the center instead of the gooey climax the set deserves.


I remember that Rolling Stone didn’t like this record, which was a selling point for me then. However, looking back at the review, they were mostly correct. It doesn’t reach the levels it should have, seeming unfocused and not hitting as hard as it might have, with some individual songs perhaps being a little weak.
Still, it rocks like crazy and I enjoyed listening to it over and over to do this.

It's somewhere around 1979, I'm upstairs in the large open room that serves as my bedroom when I'm at my Dad's house for our weekend visitation. I share this room with my little brother, Roscoe.  It's filled with normal childish things, toys and posters of superheroes and dressers and clothes, but there is a doorway there.  A special doorway that one has to recognize before it opens. To the untrained it looks like a piles (or two) of record albums on a big dresser.  To me, every album was a key. I often didn't even hear a note of what it held within its groove to be carried of to another place. I crafted stories around the cover art and song titles.  Billion Dollar Babies was a long favorite of mine. Lime green scales and a gold stamp depicting a baby with scary eyes. It opened up like a wallet and had a poster of freaky looking duds with wild hair and make-up.  It had song titles like "Raped And Freezin'" and "I Love The Dead."  I wasn't yet ten years old but I could see the writing on the wall...

The sixth offering from the Alice Cooper Band (although they went simply by Alice Cooper any fan will tell you that the original Alice Cooper Band was a true destructive force in rock and roll-an unholy amalgamation of Stonesy swagger-channeling progressive rock and garage-dimmed din and demanding you to clap your hands and notice) Billion Dollar Babies lands on an unsuspecting world.

The first song is the fitting "Hello Hooray" a simply smirking invitation to the event about to unfold in 10 shocking stabs of mayhem.  Alice sings his heart out and extends his hand for you to take and step inside. Do it.

Next up is the controversially titled "Raped And Freezin'" wherein a young man is picked up by a strange woman and after some , um, romantic mingling, left naked and alone in the desert night. After this we get one of his hits, "Elected" a tongue-in-cheek sneer at the then (and still fits as much today) political climate.  The fourth track, the titular "Billion Dollar Babies" is the Alice we've been waiting for. A dank and macabre lullaby duet featuring guest vocals by Donovan. Yes, he of the "Sunshine Superman" and "Mellow Yellow" singing about a unique relationship with a doll.

"Unfinished Sweet" is probably my very favorite song on this album. From the fuzzed out skronk of the opening chord to the incredibly bizarre James Bond-style theme of the interlude, this song about a bad trip to the dentist is something only Alice Cooper could deliver this effectively and brilliantly.
​
Next up is another of Alice's hit songs, "No More Mr. Nice Guy" a true anthem for the misunderstood and persecuted and maybe a little for the paranoid.  That opening squalling guitar and then the driving raw beat. This one gets the motor running, Boy. Rock and roll-- pure and simple.

"Generation Landslide" is a strange little ditty, part prose beat poetry almost over a sinister boogie complete with a harmonica breakdown. The lyrics to this are absolutely brilliant and terrifying in their ability to hit the target dead center.

"Sick Things" slowly burns from the black, a dark entity stepping stealthily from the shadows. From the first straining croon of Alice's vocal we know these are dark dealings. By the time the eerie chorus comes in , with the odd whisper harmony of the chorus, we're truly aware that we are one of his very sick things. Proudly so.

This is followed by the misdirection of "Mary Ann" a weird piano song that relies on a last word punch line to change the entirety of the song.  The album closes with a song that has landed them on many a banned music list. Gotten them singled out by Parent's groups and their albums fuel for many a fire--"I Love The Dead."  Sure, it's a grave deep and crypt dark love letter to necrophilia but it's so ridiculously somber in a tongue-in-cheek way I feel there was never much of a threat of there being an epidemic of spade-wielding teens with boners rampaging through the cemeteries.

This album, perfect in every way, would be one of the last by the original Cooper band.  Their following disc "Muscle Of Love" would sadly have that distinction.  The Alice Cooper Band= Dennis Dunaway, Michael Bruce, Glen Buxton, Neal Smith, and some fellow named Alice, were a band like no other and to this day I don't feel they've ever been paralleled. They truly embraced all of the contemporary rock styles, chewed them up and regurgitated them onto the sticky gutters they travelled.  What they gave back was the gross mutation of what they took in.  They took in bits of the psychedelic rock and prog rock and hard rock and they took those sounds and twisted their necks until they stopped twitching. They took the still-warm corpses and tried them on, stretched them in new ways and paraded around for us to like and man, did we like.  It's forty-five years later and I still like. I like it a lot.

You know a song has reached near anthemic status when you can identify it by the third note that blasts out your radio. That’s what the title track of Alice Cooper’s School’s Out album brought to the world in 1972, like a call to action for every rebellious kid in America. The song is a bold invitation to break the rules, defy norms, and tell the establishment to stick it in their ear. It does this all at the behest of a shout-along chorus that’s got enough attitude to shake a teenager and is just catchy enough to corrupt their younger siblings. From the thundering drums to its rascally nursery rhyme, “School’s Out” has long been been one of my favorite Alice Cooper tunes—as much for its hard-rocking composition as for its winking nod to the anti-authoritarian streak in everybody. While I could write at length on my tendency to crank this tune to the limits of my speakers and leap around the house, throwing karate kicks and air punches, there are eight more tracks on this little opus, so I’ll give them some love too.

But before I touch on the album’s other songs, every listener should take a breather, sit back in the afterglow of “School’s Out,” and open your mind to a different experience than what you might expect in the wake of such a roof-shaking opener. Any true Alice Cooper fan knows the front man is both musician and actor, an all-around showman, and the band stresses their love for theatricality on this album through a variety of moods and musical styles, even giving the ol’ show tune a stab.

The record shifts gears from all the jumping and jamming with a more subdued track two. “Luney Tune” is a bass-heavy number that slinks and slithers along to a rolling drum beat, with Alice snarling a response to the melody before it builds into a gripping mid-song climax that grooves along until the end. I’ve read a couple of reviews that cited this as the best song on the album, but it’s no “School’s Out.”

“Gutter Cat vs. the Jets” is an ambitious effort that begins with a rumbling bass-line and a snotty Alice in full vocal swagger. The first half rocks with lines too irresistible not to sing—“House cat, you really got it made!” But be prepared for the stage play-esque breakdown halfway through, where the band throws you a loop with a high-pitched organ providing the crescendo for a midnight alley fight with rival gang The Jets, straight off a production of West Side Story.

The next cut “Street Fight” is cool the first time around but skippable on repeat listens since it’s basically a minute-long bass run with some city-squalor special effects. It doesn’t have enough scope, distortion or bloodshed for my taste. And there aren’t any lyrics.

“Blue Turk,” on the other hand, is a personal favorite. It’s a jazzy, sultry, smoldering number that showcases the singer in fine form, strutting his stuff at his top hat-wearing, cane-twirling best. Not so much a rocker as it is a sly stalker, “Blue Turk” is bass-centric and brassy, with an airy guitar that peeks around the corner rather than taking center stage. The song is a dark stranger that meets a lady on the street, seduces her with his wily charms, takes her out dancing, then leaves her dead the next morning. That’s what happens when “earthworms rule your brain.”

With its operatic piano intro, the next track, “My Stars,” careens in an entirely different direction. The piano motif frames the song and elevates this stomping rock tune with more emotional heft. It’s an odd marriage, pretty and gritty, but it works.

A title like “Public Animal #9” better come with some dirt and stank on it, and this seventh track doesn’t disappoint, kicking the album firmly back into barroom rock territory. It’s a timely change of pace with a brain-branding chorus, nasty guitar hooks, a pounding beat, and infectious backing vocals that make you wanna holler, “Hey, hey, hey!...”

The last vocal track on the album is “Alma Mater,” and I can picture drummer Neal Smith composing this song with a mile-wide grin, knowing it’s a perfectly wry fit for the band’s schtick. The song lures you into a false sense of security, beginning as a heartfelt ode to days gone by. Alice croons about how he misses his old high school, a sentiment he delivers with all the sincerity of the class clown saying “nice hat” to the nerd wearing a beanie. The band piles on the schmaltz thicker and thicker until they seemingly can’t contain themselves, reminiscing about the time they dropped a snake down schoolmate Betsy’s dress. Then the drums explode, and the music throttles up and fuzzes out as Alice channels Paul McCartney at his most earnest and soulful. It’s a tune you’ll play over and over. I know that I do.

Sticking with the theatrical theme, the final number on the album is strictly instrumental. But in its own right, “Grande Finale” is a pulsing, energetic tune with soaring horns and keyboards, something you’d expect to score an action/drama TV show of the era (think Mannix or Hawaii Five-O). You’ll picture yourself in hot pursuit of criminal perps, swerving down the highway in a high-speed chase, cuffing bad guys and winking at the camera.

To sum it up, this album is just a hell of a lot of fun. The only thing that might make it cooler would be to sell it with a pair of panties.

Wait! Back in the ‘70s, this album was first released with the vinyl record wrapped in paper panties! Hallelujah! As brilliant as it was tasteful, this ingenious marketing gimmick later had to be discontinued because the panties were found to be flammable.

But the legend remains.

Remember the Coop!