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.
