Alice Cooper - "School's Out" (1972)

Happy Friday Friends!

Summer is just around the corner and the kids are getting ready for their Summer vacations.

Hopefully there's some good adventures in store featuring cars & girls, beer cans & bottle rockets, parking lots & basement parties!

Enjoy!

Alice Cooper - "Elected" (1972)

Happy Election Day friends!

He's got my vote!

Alice Cooper - "Welcome To My Nightmare" (Live 1979)

Happy Halloween Kids!

Watch out for witches!

Yowsa!

Alice Cooper - "Under My Wheels" (1971)

Hello Friends,

Another gem from the Old Grey Whistle Test!  This from their debut season in 1971!

Doesn't get much better than the original Alice Cooper Band now does it?

Billion Dollar Babies

Alice Cooper - "Billion Dollar Babies" (1973) - Warner Bros.

Hello Friends,

Halloween is fast approaching and you know what that means... time to break out the Alice Cooper vinyl!

Billion Dollar Babies would be the band's sixth studio album and the fourth produced by longtime collaborator Bob Ezrin.

The band, Alice Cooper, had quite the run on their first six records introducing the world to sleazy yet well-constructed and theatrical garage rock with subject matter and themes that range from classic Horror imagery, to drug use, child abuse, insanity and Leonard Bernstein.

Billion Dollar Babies would continue with these themes and throw in some elements of glam rock, Cabaret-style theatrics, politics, necrophilia and other twisted perversions.

Undoubtedly, a great album from start to finish and like the best Alice Cooper, its also a very fun album with lots of great hooks, pitch black humor and not-so-subtle innuendo!

Kicking off with the Cabaret-inspired "Hello Hooray", the only non-original song on the record, written by the very German-sounding Rolf Kempf and originally performed by Judy Collins in 1968.  

"Raped and Freezin'" harkens back to what the band sounded like on 1971's Love It To Death.  A great road/driving song about a young male hitchhiker getting picked up (and sexually assaulted) by "some old Broad down in Santa Fe" who leaves him naked, raped and freezin' somewhere over the Mexican border!  We've been there before, friends!

The epic and theatrical sounding "Elected" points more to the direction that Alice Cooper (the solo act) would head in a few years later with Welcome To My Nightmare.  It also reminds us of something from Quadrophenia.  I would undoubtedly vote for whatever candidate uses this as their campaign song!

The great title track is up next and something we never realized until we read the liner notes to this record is that its none other than Donovan singing harmony vocals on the song!  Glen Buxton, the original guitarist for The Alice Cooper Band, is in especially fine form here as well.   

Alice Cooper's ode to his fear of dentists (anti-dentite?),"Unfinished Sweet", closes out the side and it too is great, but at 6:18 perhaps a minute too long! 

And speaking of sweets... 

I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing
Until they got a hold of me

Side Two kicks off with one of Alice Cooper's best and most revered songs, "No More Mr. Nice Guy".  

Full blown theatrics and operatics are back on "Generation Landslide", again which reminds us of something that might be found on The Who's Quadrophenia  (which, we should mention, also came out in 1973 but several months after Billion Dollar Babies was released!)

"Sick Things" is sleazy and creepy-sounding (both good things!) and sounds as if its coming from the pov of Charlie Manson or some other cult-type leader!

Sticking with the creepy theme is "Mary Ann" a soft piano ballad that being presumably being sung to a transvestite!? Or maybe a corpse?  Or a transvestite corpse?? Alice sounds a little like Wings-era McCartney or even Todd Rundgren here.

But speaking of creepy...

I love the dead before they're cold
They're bluing flesh for me to hold
Cadaver eyes upon me see nothing...

The album concludes (and climaxes) with the band's epic ode to necrophilia, "I Love The Dead". Alice Cooper might have fallen in love with "Cold Ethyl" two years later on Nightmare, but you don't need to do any Google searches on this one to interpret what this song is about!  Scatting and all!

Spooky!

RATING: 5 Sticky Sweet Suckers in the Halloween Air out of 5

Alice Cooper - "Cold Ethyl" (1975)

Hello Friends and Happy Friday,

One Thing, No Lie,

Ethyl's frigid as an Eskimo Pie.

She's cool in bed

She ought to be,

'cause Ethyl's dead

They don't write 'em like that anymore!

Two weeks until Halloween!

Alice Cooper - "Is It My Body" (1971)

Hey Kids... This is the Alice Cooper band in their prime!  

Sleazy, scummy, down & dirty rock & roll!  

They don't make 'em like this anymore! 

Alice Cooper & The Muppets - "Welcome To My Nightmare"

HAPPY HALLOWEEN FRIENDS!

Its our favorite holiday here on Vinyl in the Valley and we're celebrating with the unofficial godfather of all things Halloween, Alice Cooper.

Here's a fantastic clip of Alice performing "Welcome to My Nightmare" on an 1978 episode of The Muppet Show! Fan-fucking-tastic!

So friends, beware of ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night... we're off to go trick-or-treating and we'll (hopefully) conjure up some demons along the way!

Movie Night: Class of 1984

Hello Friends,

Grab your popcorn and pull up a stool, its Movie Night again on Vinyl in the Valley!

Tonight we're watching the 1982 cult classic about High School kids-gone-bad, Class of 1984 and its pretty f'ing AMAZING...

Brilliantly weird & violent movie in the same vein as Warriors & Over the Edge.  Class of 1984 takes place at Lincoln High, your average American high school in the early 1980's (Actually, this was filmed in Canada, but you get the gist!)  Gangs of punks and thugs roam the hallways.  There's metal detectors at the entrances (can you imagine?)  Drugs are ingested and dealt right out in the open.  Students and teachers go to school in utter and absolute fear of these drug-addled marauders!


Enter Perry King as Andrew Norris, the school's newest music teacher.  He has no idea what he's in for, but he's not going to take any shit from anyone!

The film features Roddy McDowall as a jaded and disgruntled biology teacher; Timothy Van Patten as the gang's ringleader; and even a young Michael J. Fox in his first movie roll as Arthur, a do-gooder whose best friend gets hooked on heroin and plummets to his death after climbing to the top of the school's flagpole!

Directed by Mark Lester, who would later direct the Schwarzenegger-classic, Commando, and Stephen King's Firestarter, crafts a cynical, violent & dystopian not-so-distant future. The great Lalo Schifrin created a haunting, synth-heavy score and Alice Cooper even lends his talents to the movie's theme song, the awesomely-terrible, "I Am The Future" (here). L.A. punk band, Fear, contribute a couple of songs to the soundtrack as well!   



They don't make them like this anymore kids!  We give this one two raised cocktail glasses!

We'll see you next time, friends, until then the Tiki Bar is closed*.  

(* not really)

Rock 'n' Roll Animal

Lou Reed - "Rock & Roll Animal" (1974) & "Lou Reed Live" (1975) - RCA Victor

Hello Friends,

We've got a Lou Reed twofer going on tonight!

Rock & Roll Animal and Lou Reed Live are two albums from the height of Lou Reed's glam rock phase.  Guitar-heavy live versions of some Velvet Underground classics ("Heroin", "White Light/White Heat", "I'm Waiting For the Man") as well some solo stuff from the Bowie-produced Transformer and the uber-depressing Berlin. 

Both albums were actually recorded at the same gig at Howard Stein's Academy of Music (which later became the Palladium) in New York City in December 1973.  

Why they just didn't release the entire set as a double album will remain a mystery!

"Aaah... Me Like Lou Reed"

With only 11 songs between the two albums, Reed's lyrics take a back seat to some more complex arrangements and some heavy extended jams.  (Guitarist's Dick Wagner & Steve Hunter would eventually join Alice Cooper's band.)  You can even fool your hipster friends by putting on the first song on Rock & Roll Animal (an instrumental that leads into "Sweet Jane") and have them guess as to who it is.  We're betting you'll get more guesses for Zappa, Pink Floyd or even the Dead than you will for Sir Lou. 

Shine a light on love, indeed!

RATING (both albums): 4 Jim-Jims in this Town out of 5

Lace and Whiskey

Alice Cooper - "Lace and Whiskey" (1977) - Warner Bros.

Hello Friends,

From 1969 thru 1976, singer and songwriter Vincent Damon Furnier had quite the run. 

As the frontman for the band, Alice Cooper, young Vincent released seven classic records (including Pretties For You, Love It To Death, Killer, School's Out & Billion Dollar Babies) before ditching the band and forming a successful solo career as Alice Cooper.

His first album as a solo artist is the legendary, Welcome to My Nightmare; this was followed-up by his nearly-as-good sequel, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell. 

Quite the run, indeed.

A lot of people-- critics and fans-- were disappointed in his next release, 1977's Lace and Whiskey.  Its certainly not a bad album by any stretch, but it falls short of some of his much more interesting, harder-edged stuff.

Slickly produced once again by Bob Ezrin, the album is definitely more middle of the road than anything that had come previously.  We definitely like Side One better and think songs like "Its Hot Tonight", "Road Rats", "Damned If You Do" and the title track are pretty rockin'.  The Top 20 single that ends the side, "You and Me" is a slow rock ballad that is definitely a little too vanilla sounding for our tastes.  (its no "Beth".)

Side Two goes off a rails slightly.  "King of the Silver Screen" , "(No More) Love at Your Convenience" and "My God" come off as sounding very over-produced.  A cover of the rockabilly classic, "Ubangi Stomp", comes off sounding pretty silly.  

Side Two is saved by the power ballad, "I Never Wrote Those Songs".  With introspective lyrics like, "I've been livin' in my own shell so long / The only place I ever feel at home"-- you can tell that Vincent Furnier was by now deeply entrenched in his "Alice Cooper" persona and there was no turning back.

Before the end of 1977, Cooper would embark on a U.S. tour, record the Alice Cooper & Friends television special in Las Vegas and check himself into a New York sanitarium to help treat his severe alcoholism.  Bottoms up!

  

RATING: 3.5 Kings of the Silver Screen out of 5

Happy Birthday Alice Cooper!