Alice Cooper Week on Maidenfans (Oct 19-25, 2009)

SinisterMinisterX

SinisterMinisterX

Illuminatus
Staff member
Oops! We skipped a week again...
The poll was tied, so I chose Alice Cooper for this week and Children Of Bodom will happen next week.

NOMINATIONS ARE OPEN!
Nominate a band to discuss, but please remember:
1. At least 5 studio albums.
2. Reasonably well known.
3. Any rock subgenre is OK - doesn't have to be metal.

My nominee for a future week: The Who.

As to Alice Cooper: I really only know his hits. But I recently acquired his discography, and I'm loading it into the iTunes now. I'll be listening to it starting tomorrow.

I must say, I'm not really looking forward to this, because his hits never impressed me much. I probably dislike two-thirds of them. A few like "Muscle Of Love" or "Is It My Body" are good, but mostly I've just never gotten why people like Cooper at all.

However, I'm putting his albums in my queue, and I'll give them an honest listen. I'm really hoping his album tracks turn out better than his singles.
 
My first taste of Alice Cooper was trash.. erm.. Trash-- the single Poison, which I thought was pretty rockin' at the time.  It fit into my recollection of pop hair metal for, what was what, 1987ish?

Afterwards, I started listening to older Alice-- I'm Eighteen, School's Out, No More Mr. Niceguy, etc.  I like the tunes, but looking back, they never had the really 'heavy' feel that I had always associated with the 'Alice Cooper' mistique.  Everyone said he was so dark and demented, but I just don't get that feel. 
 
Wasted CLV said:
Everyone said he was so dark and demented, but I just don't get that feel. 
Click to expand...

As I've been loading his albums into my iTunes, I've been seeing some of his song titles. Haven't heard the music yet, but the titles are dark and demented indeed.
 
I listen to his radio show a bit in the mornings, where he's pretty funny.

Of his albums, I have 5. The best of which is Billion Dollar Babies. I don't very much like Dragontown or School's Out, while Trash is very listenable with some nice rocking numbers.
 
So, for a nomination I have a question:  since we had some genre bands, how about doing a 'grunge' week?  More specifically, a Nirvana/AIC/Soundgarden/Pear Jam type week?
 
I never liked Alice Cooper's music, but I always smile whenever I see him on t.v. playing (quite well) in celebrity pro-am golf tournaments. 
 
His book from a couple of years ago was quite interesting. Chapters were alternately about golf and his career/life, of which the former subject was fairly dull even though I have a small interest in the sport.
 
I would like to nominate Kreator for discussion some day.

As for Alice, I've never got into his music at all. However, as a kid, School's Out was just one of those anthems you simply could not ignore.
 
Wasted CLV said:
So, for a nomination I have a question:  since we had some genre bands, how about doing a 'grunge' week?  More specifically, a Nirvana/AIC/Soundgarden/Pear Jam type week?
Click to expand...

Good idea, since both AIC and PJ just released new records, and the AIC record at least is great. (PJ album is good but for fans only, not good enough to interest newbies.)

So I finally got through some albums in my queue (including the new Epica, I should post in that thread now) and I am officially listening to the entire Alice Cooper studio discography. This first album, Pretties For You, comes from 1969: the days when hard rock was young, and heavy metal was little more than a stray thought twitching at the back of Tony Iommi's brain. And to be honest, it's not very good. It's little more than hard-edged psychedelic rock, with a lot of weirdness.

Then again, IIRC, Frank Zappa produced this album. (I know Zappa discovered Cooper and released this debut on Zappa's Straight Records label, at least.) And there is some affinity here between Cooper's early music and what Zappa himself was doing at the time - affinity which is stronger than the mere influence of a producer. Alice Cooper really was almost as weird as Zappa!

The songs have nothing like traditional structures. Intro or coda? Ha! Everything fades in and out in the genuine psychedelic tradition. Every time the band builds some momentum with some heavy rock, they stop and let it break down into psychedelic babble. Now this isn't quite terrible, by the standards of psychedelic rock - but it isn't good either. It's listenable, but not much more. I'm a little over halfway thru the album now, and the only song I can even come close to recommending is "Living".
Now I've listened to the 2nd album (Easy Action) and most of the 4th (Killer). Easy Action was much better than the debut. Still weak on the songwriting, though - I gave most songs 2 stars out of 5. The two best songs are "Mr. And Misdemeanor" and "Return Of The Spiders", but even these are just 3 stars. And don't even bother with the last song ("Lay Down And Die, Goodbye"); it's just directionless noise that sounds like an outtake from the first album.

Killer seems to be an album where they finally got it right. "Under My Wheels", "Desperado" and "Dead Babies" are 3 of this band's better songs. Even the weaker numbers like "Halo Of Flies" have good sections. Still, the production is subpar (even by 1971 standards) and Neal Smith's drumming is the weak link in the chain.

Next up is the 3rd album, Love It To Death. (My iTunes put Killer first because it has the same year, but is alphabetically first.) I know 2 songs from Love It To Death, and if the rest are as good then it should be a good album.
Love It To Death was indeed as good as I hoped. In fact, even better. Beyond the well-known "I'm Eighteen", the other standout tracks are "Long Way To Go", "Is It My Body" and "Hallowed Be My Name". The kind of psychedelic experiments that they did on their first album finally merged with early-metal-style rock and produced something incredible with "Black Ju Ju". The last 3 songs are subpar and drag the album down, but everything before that is phenomenal.

School's Out is just as dumb as I remember it being. There's a couple half-interesting songs: "Blue Turk" and "My Stars". But overall, this is just some boring ideas, barely adequately executed. Fortunately, the next album is back to the good stuff.
 
Billion Dollar Babies starts off good, with "Raped And Freezin'", the title track and "No More Mr. Nice Guy" as the best songs, but goes downhill from there.

Muscle Of Love isn't very good, aside from the title song. They had a horn section on this record, and it didn't work in my opinion.

Welcome To My Nightmare is the worst of these 3, a complete failure except for the title song and maybe "Cold Ethyl".

Now listening to Alice Cooper Goes To Hell, and this first song is OK... but the general sound is a lot like Welcome To My Nightmare, so hopefully this doesn't devolve into suckage like that album did.
 
I have now listened to so much Alice Cooper I think I'm going nuts.

I got through his late 70s / early 80s albums, but didn't like much from them. I can see the sort of direction he was going for, and in most cases he did it well - it's just not my thing.

Then I got up to Constrictor - and I remember this album being called a "return to form" when it came out. And while it wasn't quite that, it was a big step in that direction. Alice regained his hard rock edge and the songwriting got stronger.

I can see why so many people like Trash. It is certainly his strongest album since Billion Dollar Babies.

Right now, I'm checking out The Last Temptation and loving it. I remember this from 1994. The song "Lost In America" is fucking brilliant...
I can't get a girl 'cause I ain't got a car
I can't get a car 'cause I ain't got a job
I can't get a job 'cause I ain't got a car
So I'm lookin' for a girl with a car and a job
 
SinisterMinisterX said:
Right now, I'm checking out The Last Temptation and loving it. I remember this from 1994. The song "Lost In America" is fucking brilliant...
I can't get a girl 'cause I ain't got a car
I can't get a car 'cause I ain't got a job
I can't get a job 'cause I ain't got a car
So I'm lookin' for a girl with a car and a job
Click to expand...

Haha, I haven't heard that song in absolutely ages; I remember it as fondly as you do though.
 
I only know "Trash" and I really like that album. I haven't played it for ages but I remember that -besides the huge hit Poison- I also liked the ballad Hell Is Living Without You, Bed of Nails, Spark in the Dark & House of Fire a lot. Simple rockers but very strong choruses.
 
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