CD Odyssey Disc 357: Alice Cooper

After the briefest of classical respites, Alice Cooper has returned to demonstrate that his Reign of Terror (now so terrible as to be capitalized) is still in full command of the CD Odyssey. This next review is the 3rd Alice Cooper album in the last four reviews, and the 5th in the last fifteen.

Given that I have nearly 1,000 CDs, and I randomly roll each new review, the odds of this happening are astronomically high.

Disc 357 is...Muscle of Love

Artist: Alice Cooper

Year of Release: 1973

What’s Up With The Cover?: No, I did not spill something on this cover - this is what it is supposed to look like. It is designed to resemble an old cardboard box. The effort is lost a little in the translation to the CD, but the original vinyl album jacket is made out of corrugated cardboard, and very cool. I don't own this record on vinyl, but only because I'm on the lookout for one with a jacket in good condition (the years are not kind to corrugated cardboard).

How I Came To Know It: This is getting repetitive in recent reviews, but I've known Alice Cooper since I can remember walking. This album is one of the original "with the band" efforts, but probably the last of those I added to my collection - around ten or fifteen years ago, I believe.

How It Stacks Up: Again with the repetition, but for the sake of convenience, I have all 26 of Alice Cooper's studio albums. "Muscle of Love" is one of Cooper's strongest efforts, but competition at the top is fierce. I'll put this album 6th, a hair better than "Dada."

Rating: 4 stars

From 1971 to 1973 the Alice Cooper band put out five of rock and roll's great records (the whole band was once "Alice Cooper" not just the man born Vince Furnier).

"Muscle of Love" is the last of that great run. Shortly after its release, the band fell victim to that all-too-common fate, "creative differences." Alice Cooper (the man) wanted to delve further into fantastical stage shows and theatrical numbers. Alice Cooper (the band) wanted to focus on a more traditional rock and roll career. They were open to musical expirementation, but less interested in stage shows and musical numbers.

It is a damned shame they couldn't agree to do both in the long term, because "Muscle of Love" shows what they would have been capable of. This record combines the theatrical brilliance that Alice would show on his later solo albums like "Welcome To My Nightmare" and "From The Inside" but it keeps the rock and roll brilliance of bassist Dennis Dunaway and lead guitarist Michael Bruce intact. These two are often underrated by the casual fan, and are every bit as responsible for the band's early success.

Ordinarily, I like to wax poetic about Bruce's lascivious guitar (he plays it so dirty, you feel uncomfortable listening, but so well you can't stop). Bruce's skill is certainly present here. But with a renewed effort to expirement with their sound, Dunaway's bass comes through strong on this record, and deserves mention. Besides, bass players need all the love they can get.

Beyond the regular players, in places "Muscle of Love" features horns, classical violin, and even background vocals from none other than Liza Minelli (who appears on "Teenage Lament '74"). There is even a tragic song about a street hustler sung in burlesque style, "Crazy Little Child."

The song "Hard Hearted Alice" begins by showing the band's early Pink Floyd influences, with atmospheric acid rock sounds, eerie organ and bells, and Cooper singing in a ghostly falsetto. Halfway through, a quirky drum beat kicks it into gear, and the singing switches to the more traditional rock voice we all expect from these guys. It is a very proggy song, and it sounded like something you might expect from the band's 1971 masterpiece, "Killer."

"Hard Hearted Alice"'s topic mirrors the music, bemoaning how the band must conform to the expectations of their audience:

"Mind gets scrambled like eggs
Gets bruised and erased
When you live in a brainstorm
Noise seems logically right
Ringing into the night
When you live in an airport.

"Hard hearted Alice
Is what we want to be
Hard hearted Alice
Is what you want to see."

Numbed by the demands of touring, the band makes efforts at musical innovation, but ultimately gives in to what the people want. The music dutifully follows suit, but not without slipping something interesting in on the unsuspecting listener.

"Big Apple Dreamin' (Hippo)" is a more traditional rock song, and as good as the genre gets. I recently learned it has survived countless purges on Sheila's MP3 player, and will likely survive countless on mine as well.

It is a song about the wonder and grandeur of New York, and how it can grind down the unsuspecting and the soft. Like many of the songs on the album, this song blends two warring themes, whose opposition creates a third, disturbing hybrid. In this case, triumphant music paired with words about emotionally drowning in a sea of humanity.

A lot of people claim "Muscle of Love" is a concept album, entirely about a group of young teens that move to the big city and lose their innocence. While I wouldn't go so far as to call it a concept album, sexual awakening is definitely a heavy theme throughout. On this listen I particularly liked the title track, which is about the raging hormones that overtake us in our teen years. As Cooper sings in the second stanza:

"Well, I must've reached that crazy age
Where everything is hot
'Cause I don't know if the things I'm thinkin'
Are normal thoughts or not.
Holy muscle of love
I've got a muscle of love."

The song briefly references the heart as the muscle of love, but in typical Alice Cooper fashion, quickly switches to a more primal and literal interpretation which I will again leave for more adventurous readers to seek out on their own. In 1973 sections of this song would've been positively lewd, and was no doubt blamed for locked bathroom doors and long showers across America.

The record also includes "The Man With the Golden Gun" which was written to be the theme song for the Bond film of the same name. It never was: Cooper has claimed they missed a deadline to file it with the producers, but it is also reported the film's makers just happened to prefer the song by Lulu that was eventually chosen. Hmmm...Lulu or Alice Cooper... I wonder who got the last laugh on that one?

Only a need for brevity prevents me from going on, but if I did I'd be tempted to give this album five stars, thus putting my reputation as a hard marker into jeopardy, so I'll stop now and say simply that this is, far and away, the best Cooper album I've reviewed during his recent reign of terror on the CD Odyssey.

Best tracks: Muscle of Love, Big Apple Dreamin' (Hippo), Teenage Lament '74, Hard Hearted Alice