NOT ESPECIALLY FORCED

     Special Forces from 1981 is the second of four albums which Alice Cooper (the solo artist) released during what has come to be affectionately known as his “Blackout Period” from 1980-1983 - after he dried out from alcohol but replaced it with a cocaine habit.  I personally love this period, regardless of how it was created, because it yielded some of the most interesting music from the Coop since the early days of the original Alice Cooper group.

     As with most of my formative years of being indoctrinated into the circle of Classic Rock music, my friend Chris and I were already avid fans of the predecessor to Special Forces, Alice’s 1980 album Flush the Fashion. To lay the groundwork here, I will tell you that Chris was a brand new member of the RCA Record Club at the time (13 albums for just one cent, remember?), so he had already received his treasure trove and was working on the promised “3 albums at regular club prices in the next year” stipulation he’d agreed to. We were both beginners when it came to Alice Cooper (meaning, we both knew and loved the song “School’s Out”), so Chris ordered a copy of the live Alice Cooper Show album, since live albums had never steered us wrong before. On the day the album arrived, we tore into the packaging but were disappointed to find Flush the Fashion had been sent instead of the live album. Chris decided to keep it anyway and it only took one or two spins to realize the album was an instant classic (I recorded a copy on cassette which just happened to have the self-titled debut from The Cars on the other side, so those two albums have always been linked for me and, as it turned out, I found the musical styles of both albums to be very similar).

     I told you that story to tell you this one (which should lead me into my review of Special Forces).  Chris and I continued our musical discovery together, so when Chris became aware of Alice’s follow up to Flush the Fashion, he grabbed it (along with a copy of From the Inside). Chris lived in the basement of his parents’ house, in a corner room he and his father built. One of the walls of the room was bare concrete, so he had the idea to paint it black so the black light posters he hung would look like they were floating in thin air instead of on the wall. Both of us also liked to draw, so we would reproduce our favorite band logos on paper and hang them on our walls since we couldn’t find anything similar to buy. While browsing in a hobby shop/art supply store one day, we found these cool items that I can only recall as being “paint markers." They were like a magic marker, but instead of ink, they were filled with paint. I don’t remember who had the idea first, but we both thought it would be really cool to try and paint all the band logos we loved on the black concrete wall of his room. Since the pens were something like $3.00 apiece, we could only afford to buy a few to begin with, but we augmented our collection quickly using another method I won’t discuss specifically here. Once we had the main 8 colors and some additional ones, we could get to work. No details are necessary about which bands’ logos we painted - that’s not the point. The point is, the soundtracks we played exclusively to fuel our inspiration were the two Alice albums I mentioned above: From the Inside and, particularly, Special Forces.

     Side One of Special Forces fades in with a short introduction of ambient keyboards before several staccato hits to the snare prompt Alice to ask us, “Who Do You Think We Are?”, which is a valid question, since this is definitely not your father’s Alice Cooper. But does Alice care? NO, HE DOES NOT. From there, the album practically runs like a series of comedy sketches starring bizarre characters the likes of which haven’t been seen since Alice’s ward-mates on From the Inside. The next track, “Seven & Seven Is," is a gutsy treatment of the song originally recorded by Arthur Lee’s LOVE. Alice adds so much grit to his version, that one has to wonder if his ball is gonna explode as it bip-bips against the wall. “Prettiest Cop on the Block” casts Alice as a macho, alpha cop who excels at his undercover assignments with the vice squad because he just looks so damn good in drag. “Don’t Talk Old to Me” features yet another disenfranchised youth being pushed around by the establishment and his declaration of rebellion that Alice has been trumpeting since “School’s Out” first hit the airwaves in 1972. The closer of side one is a 1981 reworking of “Generation Landslide” first heard on the Billion Dollar Babies album that gives the track a different, slightly more cohesive feel than the original while keeping the stream of consciousness poetry of the lyrics intact. I have to confess that this version is the one I heard first, so I’ve always favored it slightly over the original. DON’T JUDGE!

     Side Two opens with the mock comic horror of “Skeletons in My Closet” which showcases Alice in his best pyjamas, hiding under his sheets because he sees skeletons and bones everywhere in his house. The skeletons persist in calling his name until the frightened but frustrated Cooplet tears off the covers and demands, “WHAT?!? WHAT DO YOU WANT?!?”. Alice answers his own question in the following cut, “You Want It, You Got It” and promises all manner of excessive luxuries to what appears to be some unknown but exceedingly spoiled model brand female, who may just be the subject of the next and, arguably, most comedic track of the album, “You Look Good in Rags." Alice runs down a laundry list of female fashion criminals who have gone to extremes to stay at the top of the vanity heap and then indicts them all by informing them they’d look better in rags with dirt in their hair. He then drives his point home with a gang vocal section at the end of the song which features several male voices singing “rags rags rags rags, rag-rag-rag-rag rags” in a round (e.g. “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”) to hilarious effect. In fact, my above-mentioned buddy, Chris and I used to lift the needle and repeat the section over and over while pissing ourselves in hysterics every time. When we finally had our fill, we would let the grooves spin out and venture into the next vignette, this time casting Alice in the role of the ultimate military commander who is SO good, his subordinates keep telling him, “You’re a Movie." To which, the ubergeneral agrees but must correct them, “A very GOOD movie”. The final track, “Vicious Rumors”,"plays out like it’s over the credits of the sonic movie we just watched, is fittingly the album’s most straight-up rocker and could easily have been a cut on the previous year’s album, Flush the Fashion.

     Overall, Special Forces is an incredibly strong offering with finely crafted songs which continue in the New Wave style Alice initiated on Flush the Fashion. It may not sound like classic Alice Cooper at first blush, but taken on its own terms, it stands not only the test of time, but the test of the discriminating music snob as well.
- Randy “Trog” Michaud, 2018

I saw this film first-run in the theater, along with several other musically-inclined friends. We were unanimous at that point in damning this venture, not with faint praise, but with no praise whatsoever.
Other than the occasional AOR airing of Aerosmith’s sloppy take on “Come Together”, I have had scant opportunity to ever think of this adventure in film again. This was an opportunity to do so that I undertook with an awful lot of trepidation, having managed to bury all but vague memories of the thing.

I watched this film five times. My eyes! My ears! It actually might have been decent, for reasons which I will discuss below. But it wasn’t. I’m an original Beatles fan. I was enthralled by them when I was three and they were on Ed Sullivan’s show, and that has never changed.

We’re gonna do a reaction-shot thing here, complied from notes taken during the five viewings.

It starts with a voiceover by George Burns during the opening credits, which unreel like they’re supposed to be a WW2 take on Monty Python or Richard Lester, but Burns isn’t given Anthony remotely funny or sharp to recite and the Marching Band coming through the tanks is just silly instead of surrealistic as there’s absolutely no setup. Might as well have played “La Marseillaise” for all that was worth.

Subsequent attempts to make the narrative work by using short scenes of the band getting people to dance during the 20s and 30s just compounds the silliness, and it’s a sad sort of silliness, tired instead of whimsical.

Peter Frampton comes in wearing white bib overalls as Billy, and the brothers Gibb play the band in an attempt to cash in on Stigwood’s major acts, and they run through a weary cover of the opening number to the Beatles’ seminal disc and “With a little help from my Friends”. Frampton sings like he’s laughing at himself and the participants mug for the cameras.

Burns continues to narrate until he Milli Vanillis a bad version of “Fixing a Hole”…then the band break into a singularly bad rendition of “Getting Better”, wherein we are not surprised to find that Frampton doesn’t really have the voice to be the front man for this enterprise, though the Bee Gees do just fine harmonizing. Peter’s very pretty, though, and this leads into the weird Aliens-are-coming-to-take-our-money subplot and some weird frames of what I guess are supposed to be RSO executives making superstars out of Our Boys, who are still wearing smalltown rural clothing ™.

Apple must have been desperate for money. Sandy Farina sings “Here Comes the Sun” like Maureen McGovern the morning after a bender as the boys board a hot-air balloon for Hollywood and fame. The symbolism is inescapable and apparently wielded by Maxwell in lieu of a silver hammer.

There are hints of a self-deprecating sense of humor here, but just hints…and the inserts from Abbey Road don’t really help things very much, just a dumb little sexual subplot with no real life to it, just suggestive imagery. The silver Buick limo is cool though.

The Beatles knew how to ‘sell’ their music. Their performances were expert and propulsive and filled with urgency.

This film is quite the opposite. Trying to peddle the sleazoid stuff to pre-teens and nostalgia buffs with a PG rating and mugging for the camera doesn’t work…though the faux-Caligula orgy of buffet food near the end of the ‘medley’ while the LA-style guitar solo goes on kind of works as a metaphor. But only kind of.

The whole thing is telegraphed and leeringly suggestive, and the climactic moment when Billy drinks the ‘kool-aid’ and is seduced might have been more sinister if the proceedings had been less heavy-handed…and let’s not forget that it all runs counter to the actual spirit of the album that this mess is supposedly based on. Abbey Road’s sentiment is quite different from that espoused during the beginning of the ‘Summer of Love’.

The sentiment of the movie is more like that brought out in David Bowie’s Fame -- “what you want is in the limo” is the operative concept here, painted in disco glitter.

“Nowhere Man” briefly works as Barry Gibb croons the chorus and the band members remember that there are professional musicians. “Polythene Pam” succeeds similarly. Neither are great, and the urgency disappears in a winking and nodding version of “She Came I Through the Bathroom Window”.

I found myself looking at the band’s instruments and coveting the vintage Thunderbird bass. Frampton essays an all-too-brief solo during the intro to the Sgt. Pepper reprise, which actually works, though it’s obvious that Maurice can’t play the bassline or never learned it and his hands are kept in darkness.

Snatches of a bloodless “The Long and Winding Road” follow this almost-palatable interlude as Miss Fields misses Billy something fierce.

The aliens come back in for “Mean Mr Mustard” done in a fusion-y style that actually works, by Frankie Howerd and his band, and we proceed along to the videogame arcade and segue into the ‘aliens’ doing “She’s Leaving Home”…which is actually extremely effective in-context when the natural voices come in while Ms. Fields is leaving her home to join Billy, passing garbage-strewn streets and boarding a dilapidated bus in the best sequence in the film so far – one that has some real power. Of course that promise is immediately dashed.

But the music stays good. Dianne Steingard does a good job of playing Lucy as the Acid Queen while the winking and nodding and cheesy costumes carry on.

By this point it’s too obvious that nobody involved cares very much, and are just going through the motions to get the thing done.

I took a break to do some research. The story is that Stigwood bought the use of 29 songs, and that they were so expensive that he had to do something. He hired Edwards, who wrote a very-loosely-tied-together play around those titles. One wonders why then-current Stigwood asset Eric Clapton didn’t participate. Perhaps Stigwood didn’t have enough on him. He must have bailed the Bee Gees and Frampton out of some horrible contracts.

We return for Steve Martin’s ridiculous take on Maxwell…this might have worked if the surrealism that was hinted at was actually present, as in his turn in “Little Shop of Horrors”. Instead it’s tedious, and really odd and Zappaesque when the band comes in to fight Steve and his dancing dental assistants and Billy is electrified.

What I keep seeing is that this could actually have been good, if anyone involved gave a shit.

Finally Alice Cooper comes on, doing ‘Because” in his ‘evil Alice’ voice, lending a great deal of menace to the overall nuttiness, taking things in a different direction. Vince doesn’t mail stuff in.

He grimaces and chuckles (while basically looking like the frontman for Ghost) until his star turn is disrupted by a feedback loop and he passes out in a pie. The band takes over Mr. Mustard’s bus and finds some of their lost instruments. I wanted more Alice.

This contrasts mightily with the saccharine version of ‘Strawberry Fields” that follows, milked for the schmaltz content. Ms. Fields plays out all of the female characters in the film in Billy’s dream, in little vignettes, and she Prince Charmings his ass with a hug.

I wanted Blue Meanies. Instead I got a tepid rendition of ‘Mr Kite’, one of my favorite songs. At least it had Henry the Horse.

“You Never Give Me Your Money” incongruously comes in after this. It features Paul Nicholas and his paramour rolling around on piles of money, and segues into Earth, Wind, and Fire doing a really good version of “Got To Get You Into My Life” in their inimitable style – which is great, but it’s from Rubber Soul, a disc that’s as far removed from Sgt. Pepper as Abbey Road in terms of sentiment and musical approach.

But we’re beyond trivial concerns like artistic integrity or even conceptual continuity by now as the benefit concert begins. Ted Kiel (?) even starts making with the dance moves. Frankie Howerd does “When I’m 64” as if he’s doing a JG Wentworth commercial. Oh gawd, this sequence is bad. Where’s Passepartout when you need him? Why wasn’t Sir Richard Lester approached to do this?

Aerosmith almost save the day as Tyler and the boys screech and squeal through their star turn…they’re not quite as good at being bad as Alice or even Steve Vai but they still retained shreds of credibility at this point in their career and could ape playing their instruments well as they knew how to play the tunes.

1500 words in and I still haven’t hit the fast-forward. Neither has Ms. Fields, as she is pining for the fjords. “Golden Slumbers” has morphed from a lullaby into a dirge. Might as well have gone with “Baby’s In Black”.

Oh gawd. “Carry That Weight” to the pallbearers. Turn on the bubble machine.

Peter Frampton really isn’t a great singer. Or actor. Terrifically nice guy – I’ve met him a couple of times in my brief journey through the dark heart of the music business in Chicago. But he’s horribly miscast. I am amusing myself imagining Steve Marriott in this part. Or David Essex, who might have been a better choice.

Essex could have done “A Day in the Life” instead of Barry, whose tenor betrays no actual emotion as he sings one of the most emotional songs ever written. Pass me that doob, Donald.

In a moment that would be remarkable for its synchronicity, Billy Preston comes in and saves the day, singing and playing “Get Back”, which he (of course) played on. And so it goes, ‘round in circles.
He brings Strawberry Fields back to life and a cast of thousands sings “We are the World.” Oh wait, that was later. They do a Sgt. Pepper’s second reprise. David Essex is actually in this part. So are the Pointer Sisters and Sha Na Na.

Roll credits please. I promise myself that I will never ever watch this again.

When I was around the age of five years old,  there were two Alice Cooper songs I would listen to constantly, "Halo of Flies" and "Clones (We're All)."

Clones was the second to last track on an Alice Cooper best of CD that  saw frequent play time in my CD player--as in it practically lived in that thing for years. I remember wearing the CD booklet out looking at the collage of all of his album covers that had been placed in the back of the book. Even then the album art that stuck out to me the most was Flush the Fashion. While all the other covers had something interesting going on artistically, Flush the Fashion was this beige colored square with the name scratched on the front with nothing else and for some reason or another it piqued my interest . It wasn't until a few years later, I was probably about seven or eight that I snagged my Dad's copy one Sunday morning and decided to give it a try.
 
From the first listen I was hooked, I listened to it twice in a row that day and after that it was a once a week Sunday affair for me. Since then I've probably listened to Flush the Fashion dozens of times and I'm still certain that out of all of his albums it's still my personal favorite. It's an odd departure from the previous album, the shift from songs that sounded similar to musical numbers and soft rock ballads to straight up post punk/New Wave is jarring to say the least, and while some people may not find it all particularly impressive I feel that its strengths lie in the uniqueness of the lyrics and just how quirky the album is from start to finish.
 
"Talk Talk" starts the album which is just almost a straight up rock tune if not for the synths that kick in for a few seconds part ways in. It then fades into "Clones" which is a flat out New Wave track and was the only semi-hit off the entire album. "Clones" then fades out and my personal favorite track, "Pain." That one being a first person narrative from the emotion itself, sounds kinda corny but damned if it doesn't work.  That is follwoed by 'Leather Boots" which is just a cheesy little pop song. "Aspirin Damage" is a mutation of old Alice paranoia with new alternative trappings. Where in "Nucelar Infected" is another slab of off kilter synth rock.

The whole album does this thing where all of the songs are connected to each other, not really thematically or even musically most of the time but songs are often ended rather abruptly and then the next track instantly picks up, leaving almost no room for silence during the 20 or so minutes the album lasts.
 
Lyrically most of the album makes little to no sense most of the time, with some exceptions being maybe "Pain", "Grim Facts",  is followed by "Model Citizen" which featrues some of Cooper's patented snark and sneer. The n we get the ode to obnoxious yuppies, "Dance Yourself to Death" and then the album closes out on "Headlines." I think "Headlines" highlights this best with lines talking about stealing a float at the Rose parade followed up by popping up out of a cake at the Presidents ball.
 
If I had to come up with a term that best describes the songwriting on this album, I'd call it pre-internet Schizo-posting put onto a rock album, and that's mostly what I love about it. It's just so offbeat and quirky I just don't understand how anyone couldn't love it It's things like that make up the album for the most part, most likely due to Alice no longer being sober and having admitted later on not remembering anything about writing Flush the Fashion through DaDa. But as I said earlier that's part of the albums charm for me, something only a nutty drunken madman could've come up with.
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