ALICE COOPER - LOVE IT TO DEATH @ 50

 

Alice Cooper used to be a band and not just the guy singing the songs. Back when this was true, 50 years ago today, on March 9th, 1971, they released their third album, Love It To Death. It’s success became the basis upon which they’d build their legend.

Alice Cooper, the band, had been around under various names since about 1966 and had managed to develop a reputation for some wild, theatrical live shows. After spending some time in LA and doing a couple of middling, commercially irrelevant psyche-rock albums for Frank Zappa’s label, the group relocated to Detroit just in time to find themselves surrounded by the likes of raw powerhouses like the MC5 and The Stooges with the furious Iggy Pop freaking out on stage. George Clinton was also firing up the stage with Funkadelic and these influences all helped to revitalize Alice Cooper. Eventually, after seeing them at Max’s Kansas City in NYC, greenhorn producer, Bob Ezrin, finally agreed to work with the band and, after rehearsing the fuck out of them for 10-12 hour days for a few months, got them to record I’m Eighteen as a single to prove to label Warner Bros. that they had commercial potential. The single was a solid hit for the group and got them into the studio to do a full album.

After all that rehearsal, Ezrin had managed to banish all the psychedelic excesses out of them, whittling 8 minute freakout jams down to concise three minute hard rock songs. The result was a tight, heavy album of rock that would come together at the perfect time to become part of the foundational cornerstones of the heavy metal music scene along with similarly influential works by the likes of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. And while those bands may have owned more of the credit for the music’s sound than Alice Cooper, the accompanying stage show the band put together to tour the album would be far more influential in terms of giving the burgeoning genre its style and aesthetic.

The album's influence, however, wouldn’t be limited to heavy metal heads. A few years later, as punk rock began to rumble in the streets of London and New York, both it’s primary respective instigators, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, would reference I’m Eighteen in their own songs, with the Pistols even legendarily auditioning front-man Johnny Rotten by having him lip-sync the Cooper hit on a Jukebox in Malcolm McLaren’s boutique. The immediacy and energy of the music simply worked as a touchstone for the punks in the same way that Hawkwind did for the emerging scene.

Alice Cooper, as a band, would produce several more classic albums before lead singer Vince Furnier decided to take the brand as his private, solo vehicle and leave the rest of the group behind. Love It To Death, however, is still considered the first proper Alice Cooper album and one of their best.