MUSCLE OF LOVE BY DUANE PESICE
20/7/2018
 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.
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