Alice Cooper- Love It to Death/Killer 55th Anniversaries

Love It to Death in March 1971 may have been the third album by the band Alice Cooper, but that doesn’t change the fact that nobody bought the first two except Straight Records label owner Frank Zappa. Yet by December of that same year, EVERYBODY had heard “I’m Eighteen” off of Love It to Death,  and Alice Cooper had written and recorded a soon-to-be-classic additional full album, Killer. And indeed it was. Before year’s end, rock cognescenti would know that there were  new six-string gunslingers in town with  fully loaded clips of hollow-point hits, including “Is It My Body?” and “The Ballad of Dwight Fry” from Love It to Death and “Under My Wheels”,”Be My Lover”, the often misinterpreted anti-child abuse song “Dead Babies”, and the Jim Morrison tribute “Desperado”.

Detroit’s blue-collar bars and cheap motels along Woodward Avenue may be less than two hundred miles away from the steps of the  Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, but it  turned out to be a four decade odyssey for Alice Cooper. Only in rock’n’roll can a preacher’s son named Vincent Furnier dress up in make-up, leather, and fishnet stockings while simulating his own execution by hanging, beheading, and electrocution as 10,000 mesmerized fans gladly pay for the macabre experience. Formed by five friends from Phoenix AZ, Vince’s band had quite a struggle choosing the right name for the group. Among the early choices were The Spiders, the Earwigs , & The Nazz (but Todd Rundgren had dibs on that last one). By 1969 they had moved to Los Angeles with the name Alice Cooper, but after recording two unsuccessful albums – Pretties for You and Easy Action– on Frank Zappa’s Straight Records label, Alice Cooper headed for Furnier’s birthplace of Detroit in hopes of better luck. Inking a deal with Warner Brothers, they actually released two albums in 1971,  Love It to Death and Killer , with both albums becoming successful. When I first saw Alice Cooper (that was the band‘s name then, as well) shortly after the March 1971 release of their third album Love It to Death, he was genuinely menacing. Trust me, the audience never rushed the low six-foot stage that night in an Ohio cornfield near Bowling Green, fearing that Alice’s dark intimidating prowling would escape the invisible boundary that separated our hippie peacenik world from his dark vision. There was no hint then of the clever humor that would  inform some of his later work. At a time when Mick Jagger and David Bowie were sporting eyeshadow and feather boas, Alice Cooper was  appearing in a straitjacket… draped in a REAL boa constrictor.

Alice proves in my classic rock interview that  you can project practically any fringe, edgy, sociopathic image in rock and get away with it – as long as you deliver the hits. And beginning with “I’m Eighteen”, followed in rapid succession by “Under My Wheels”,”Be My Lover”,“School’s Out”,”Elected”,”No More Mr Nice Guy”,”Welcome to My Nightmare”, and “Only Women Bleed”, Alice Cooper and his long-suffering intrepid producer then and now on the recent Detroit Stories, Bob Ezrin, indelibly changed the rock world and revolutionized  American Top 40 radio. -Redbeard