Anyway, the last of the "one off" randoms for a while was a good one.
Disc 18 is...Da Da
Artist: Alice CooperYear of Release: 1983
How I Came To Know It: I've known Alice Cooper since I can remember music. My brother is seven years older and was listening to Alice Cooper when I was six. This particular album came later, as it is hard to find - I think I got it in the late nineties.
How It Stacks Up: Alice Cooper has 25 studio albums. I am a big Cooper fan, and I have them all. Of the 25, Da Da isn't top 5, but it is close. I'd say somewhere between 6th and 8th best depending on my mood. When counting out of 25 albums, that is pretty strong. I certainly listen to it a lot.
Rating: 4 stars.
Alice Cooper has an incredibly varied and interesting career. When I did my 3 volume "Best Of Alice Cooper" mixed CDs, I divided his career up into three basic categories. "With The Band", "Drunk and Alone" and "Clean and Sober".
Da Da, which was released in 1983 goes at the end of "Drunk and Alone". It was the last album Cooper did drunk, as he sobered up in 1984 and still is today. Stylistically, it is very much the end of phase 1 of Cooper's solo career. It is weird, expiremental but at the end of the day, great rock and roll.
It is really a two year period - right after the awful 1980 Flush the Fashion and 1981 Special Forces, and right before the "eighties metal" phase begins with 1984's Constrictor. Dada and 1982's "Zipper Catches Skin", are probably Alice Cooper's least known great albums.
Da Da covers the usual run of Cooper shock-topics, including child abuse, kinky sex, vampires and my favourite - a song about a fat, transgendered multiple-personality disorder mall-Santa (No Man's Land).
The album covers grandiose satire with "I Love America". It opens with Cooper singing:
I love that mountain with those four big heads!
I love Velveeta slapped on Wonderbread!
I love a Commie - if he's good and dead!
I...love...America!
It is in your face as Cooper goes back to his well-traveled themes of decay in society. The song is funny, it is inappropriate - and it is a musically gifted dose of rock bombast.
Yet, the same album ends with the powerfully introspective "Pass the Gun Around", an obviously autobiographical song about what it is like to be an alcoholic slowly drinking yourself to death. That song opens:
"Sonny wakes up in the morning feeling kinda sick
Needs a little Stoli Vodka - needs it really quick.
Sees a little blood run from his eyes
Feels a little hotel paralyzed."
In short, Da Da is an album that takes big risks, and explores many facets of what it is to be Alice Cooper. In 1980/81 those risks fail, but on Da Da for the most part, they pay off. This is a strong album, and while I don't start trying to get someone into Cooper with this album, it isn't long before I sneak it into the playlist and see what they think.
Best tracks: No Man's Land, Scarlet and Sheba, I Love America, Pass The Gun Around
Odyssey update: After further review, Honeymoon in Vegas did not survive this round of the CD Odyssey. Despite Dwight Yoakam's glorious "Suspicious Minds", the album will be put to pasture, opening up much needed space on my CD racks.
1 comment:
I love this album - it's one of my favourite AC discs...but as you say, how do you choose when there are so many great albums??
I'm glad you're selling Honeymoon in Vegas. Bah.
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