Alice Cooper is back! The shock classic rock music extravaganza that brought us “I’m Eighteen,” “School’s Out,” and “No More Mister Nice Guy” has announced The Revenge of Alice Cooper. Arriving on July 25th, The Revenge of Alice Cooper is the first album from Alice Cooper in more than 50 years. At this point, you might be asking, wait a minute, hasn’t Alice Cooper been recording, touring, and performing all along?
Yes and no. Alice Cooper, the man, has had a long and extensive career, releasing albums like Welcome To My Nightmare, Constrictor, Trash, and 2023’s Road. Alice Cooper, the band, went its separate ways in the early 70s. Now, Cooper has reunited with guitarist Michael Bruce, drummer Neal Smith and bassist Dennis Dunaway for The Revenge of Alice Cooper. The album also promises a special posthumous appearance by original guitarist Glen Buxton, who died in 1997.
The Alice Cooper group only existed for a handful of years, emerging from a Phoenix, Arizona-area high school band called The Spiders. Adopting the Alice Cooper moniker in 1968, the group lasted until 1974, and by the end, everyone was burnt out on drugs, touring, and a rollercoaster of fame. “In my eyes, the Alice Cooper band never broke up,” wrote Cooper in his memoir, Alice Cooper, Golf Monster. “There wasn’t any yelling. Nobody accused anyone of anything or pointed fingers.”
Instead, everyone went their own way and didn’t get back together – until now. With The Revenge of Alice Cooper on its way, it’s time to revisit the classic Alice Cooper albums – and find out which are billion-dollar babies, and which should be let out with the rest of school.
7.Easy Action
Alice Cooper Still Trying To Figure Out Who They Are
Alice Cooper’s second album isn’t bad, per se. It’s just a transitional moment when the band was still finding its footing. It opens with a fuzzed-out saloon cabaret number (“Mr. and Misdemeanor”) before segueing to a gorgeous, carefree, sun-kissed tune that’s laden with drug innuendo (“Shoe Salesman”). From there, we have an avant-garde cacophony that somehow works in a line from West Side Story (“Still No Air”). This is just the first third of the album. It’s a lot.
Easy Action is a fascinating time capsule, back to a time in America when you could scare the general population by being too weird. The album is slightly incohesive, with songs and elements from their pre-Alice Cooper days, when they played as the Nazz (not the Todd Rundgren band). You can tell that the band is almost there on Easy Action. They were missing something.In the five decades since the original Alice Cooper group went its separate ways, Cooper himself has become (rightfully) associated with shock rock and horror. Alice Cooper, however, always had a strange cabaret element to it, to the point that it’s odd that there hasn’t been an Alice Cooper Broadway musical yet.
6.Muscle Of Love
A Band On Its Last Legs (For Now)
When Alice Cooper sat down to start writing and recording Muscle of Love, the group started “to get more and more serious about the material,” according to Cooper’s Golf Monster. He wrote how the music became “more and more slick and commercial,” and more “deliberate” in its sound. “The songs became less reckless and less inventive. There were a lot of compositions where I basically felt like I was going, ‘Okay, if you guys really like it that way.’”
There is a lacquer to the album that keeps it from hitting harder. “Big Apple Dreamin’ (Hippo)” opens with Bob Dolin playing a Deep Purple-esque organ riff. It’s very proto-metal, a sound they revisit on the title track. But the lead single, “Teenage Lament ’74,” comes off less black leather and more brown fringe suede jacket. Having Ronnie Spector, Liza Minnelli, and the Pointer Sisters singing backup on the track didn’t help.There are some good songs on Muscle of Love, but the band was flaming out at that point. Their edges were blunted and, well… there’s a reason why this was the last album the Alice Cooper band put out before they went their separate ways.
“There was among us in those sessions a lack of enthusiasm for pushing the Alice Cooper character as we always had,” wrote Dennis Dunaway in his book, Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Group. “You couldn’t hear it in the music. And you didn’t sense it in our camaraderie, but it was lurking in our collective gut.”
5.Pretties For You
Wait, This Is Alice Cooper? Where’s The Scary Rock?
Released on Frank Zappa’s label, Straight Records, Pretties For You is unlike any other Alice Cooper album, be it the entire band or any entry in the solo musician’s lengthy discography. Leaning heavily into psychedelic rock and experimentation, which was the band’s forte at the time, Pretties For You is bizarre… in all the good ways. The first straightforward rock song (“Living”) comes five tracks in.
There are some echoes of The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper’s was released the year prior, and the White Album would come out five months after Pretties For You). There’s also a lot of Zappa in it; he produced the album (alongside Ian Underwood) and his presence can be felt in some of the more bizarre moments.
Compared to the rest of the albums, Pretties For You is not the most Alice Cooper of Alice Cooper albums, but there’s some charm to it. It shows where Alice Cooper – band and performer – was before all the snakes and guillotines. It also has some diamonds in the rough: the single, “Reflected,” would later be repackaged as “Elected” for Billion Dollar Babies.
4.School’s Out
Alice Cooper’s Biggest Hit, But Is It Their Best Album?
Yes, this seems sacrilegious. “School’s Out” is Alice Cooper’s biggest hit. It reached No. 7 on the Hot 100. It established them as the band for rebels and delinquents in the ‘70s, showing off a punk attitude before there was punk. School’s Out, however, is just fine.
It just suffers from what happens to many bands: reverse engineering an LP after having a hit. “We had to write an album of songs that connected with ‘School’s Out,’” Cooper told AZCentral . “They had to point towards school or towards that era of your life. I just went back to the reality of my own school.”Recorded while touring for Killer, and it came out less than nine months after Love It To Death. It’s a loosely-connected concept album, kicking off with “School’s Out” and ending with the bittersweet “Alma Mater.” There are dalliances with Broadway (“Gutter Cat vs. The Jets”), jazzy bar-blues (“Blue Turk”), and theatrical rock (“My Stars”). It isn’t bad; it just feels a little scattershot.
But the album did what it needed to. Alice Cooper’s longtime manager, Shep Gordon, said Killer “sort of got us ready” for success, while School’s Out was “the breakthrough, musically and identity-wise. We really took over.”
3.Killer
Alice Cooper Shows They Really Can Play
The second of two albums that Alice Cooper released in 1971, Killer cemented the visual element of both Cooper and the Alice Cooper band, with drummer Neal Smith’s pet snake Kachina on the cover. The album, considered by many to be the band’s best pure rock record, kicks off with the humor rocker “Under My Wheels” (which remains a staple of Alice’s solo shows). It concludes with “Dead Babies,” an anti-child abuse song, and the theatrical title track, which ends with what sounds like the titular killer being subjected to an electric chair.
The album also has the prog-rock influenced “Halo of Flies,” an eight-minute track that was composed to quiet critics who thought the band couldn’t play. “Many of them seemed convinced that our theatrics were just a crutch to smokescreen our deficiencies,” Dennis Dunaway told outsider rock.
“So, years later, having a bunch of extraneous riffs and melodies kicking around, we decided to apply our knack for segues, and we came up with ‘Halo of Flies.’ It was the first time many critics finally admitted that we could play. And it proved that the band was self-sufficient in writing their own complex arrangements.”
2.Love It To Death
The True First Alice Cooper Album
Without Love It To Death, there would be no Alice Cooper today – both band and person. After two flop albums, the band finally found itself after connecting with Bob Ezrin. Ezrin worked with the band, helping them cut some of the excess found on Pretties For You and Easy Action. When presented with a bluesy rock “epic,” Ezrin “whittled [it] down, dissecting each little part to make sure everything worked and was tight,” according to Dunaway. That “epic” became a sub-three-minute rocker now known as “I’m Eighteen.”
“I’m Eighteen” is Alice Cooper’s big breakthrough hit, reaching No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100. The single’s success lifted Love It To Death to No. 21 on the Billboard 200, but the album is more than just one hit. The band embellished its spooky, bluesy improvisation on “Black Juju,” enhancing their dangerous, dark image (which they continued to pursue in “Is It My Body” and “Hallowed Be My Name”).The closing songs of “Second Coming” and “Ballad of Dwight Fry” paint a terrifying, paranoid picture, hinting at the terror Cooper would develop on Welcome To My Nightmare. Ultimately, Love It To Death is a complete image, a cohesive experience from start to finish. Cooper considers it the first real Alice Cooper album, and it’s hard not to disagree.
1.Billion Dollar Babies
Alice Cooper At Its Best
If Love It To Death was spiritually the first real Alice Cooper album, then Billion Dollar Babies was spiritually the last. Though technically the penultimate release before Alice Cooper’s members scattered, it’s got the pomp and circumstance of the grand finale. The album opens with a bombastic version of “Hello Hooray,” first recorded by Judy Collins. It feels like we are at the climax of a fantastic show, the curtains drawing for the final act.
The album perfectly encapsulated Alice Cooper: the cabaret theatrics, the dark humor, and the musicianship. Alice Cooper adopted the roles of self-deprecating jokesters. The title track is a self-depreciating jab, the band “making total fun of ourselves,” says Alice in Golf Monster. “We were laughing at our audience and at ourselves and at the circus spectacle and absurdity of our success.” Adding to the absurdity, psych-folk peacenik Donovan sings on “Billion Dollar Babies.”The camp in “Unfinished Sweet” is paired with the sincerity of “Generation Landslide.” The hard rock edge of “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and “Elected” is balanced by the sweet “Mary Ann.” Something about Billion Dollar Babies clicks, and it is successful from the album’s start to its closing track, the spookshow climax, “I Love the Dead.”
Though Billion Dollar Babies didn’t spawn a single that surpassed School’s Out’s success, it is Alice Cooper’s commercial peak, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart (a feat Cooper himself would not replicate). And sadly, the success of the album fueled the band’s deterioration. Though they would release Muscle of Love, this album marks the (temporary end) of Alice Cooper – but what a way to go out.
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