Since the beginning, the dice gods
have seemed to enjoy choosing Alice Cooper records for me to review. This next review is my 18th Alice
Cooper record and the third in the last fifteen. Weird.
Disc 444 is… Easy Action
Year of Release: 1970
What’s up with the Cover? Modern Alice Cooper album covers usually have a lot
going on, and – love them or hate them – high production values. This one is from before the band made it big
so it is pretty basic. It looks like the
guys couldn’t even afford shirts for the photo shoot. How sad.
How I Came To Know It: I thought I had every Alice Cooper studio album, but
then a few years ago they re-released a couple of his very early records on CD,
“Pretties for You” and this one. I
snatched it up the moment it hit the shelves.
How It Stacks Up: I have twenty-six studio albums by Alice Cooper. This one ranks fairly low, likely around 21st
just above “Pretties for You” and just below “Constrictor.” Yeah, I know I already assigned 21st
to “Constrictor” but I’ll move it up one to fit in this new situation. When I’m finished all the Alice albums I’ll
be doing a full ranking of them anyway, so I’ll sort it out then. For now, you get the idea.
Rating: 2 stars.
You can
have all the right ingredients, but without a good recipe the meal still won’t
turn out right. That’s what “Easy Action”
represents in the Alice Cooper discography.
The
record has everything that would make “Love it to Death” a classic rock album a
year later, including provocatively weird guitar and bass work from Glen Buxton
and Dennis Dunaway respectively, the ‘all-in’ delivery of Alice’s lead vocals
and a willingness to experiment with traditional rock sounds and explore the
edges of the genre.
The album
opens with “Mr. & Misdemeanor” which
has that show-tune quality which Alice Cooper has expanded even further in his
solo career. In fact, similar to “School’sOut”, “Westside Story” figures throughout the record in direct lyrical and musical
references. The piano borders on cheesy
and juxtaposes passingly well with the prog guitar and Alice’s Lovecraftian shrieks
of fevered excitement.
“Shoe Salesman” is a pure pop ditty that
could just as easily be found on a Beatles record of around the same time. It has that same light and airy melody of a
Beatles song, and the same Beatles habit of overdoing the production wherever
possible. A number of the songs on the
record show the band had grown up listening to the Fab Four and were
incorporating what they heard (imperfectly) into their own still-evolving
sound.
Most of
the tracks are short, three minute songs crammed overfull with ideas, but there
are a couple of longer pure-prog tracks that had me thinking of early Pink
Floyd. “Below Your Means” and “Lay
Down and Die, Goodbye” both ‘explore the space’ to borrow from the Saturday
Night Live skit. Both songs show
promise, but at around seven minutes each, they also suffer from attention
deficit disorder, unable to spend enough time developing one musical thought
before arbitrarily moving on to another one. “Lay Down…” is a particularly unfocused song,
jumping from idea to idea with the discipline of a hummingbird.
As a
devoted Alice Cooper fan the imperfections of the album are enjoyable from a
historical perspective. It helps
demonstrate some of their early ideas in a very raw and unrefined way that then
assists in understanding the band’s future progression. I enjoyed the journey overall, but it was
maddening hearing snippets of greatness mixed together in an energy-laden, but
undirected stew.
This is
because for all of its promise, “Easy Action” is half-cooked on the production
side. It is almost there at every turn,
but desperately needs a good editor to cut back the excess and then further develop
the core of the work. What the record
needs is Bob Ezrin’s production.
Listening to it made me deeply appreciate what he did for the band. Ezrin must have heard the same promise in
these songs, and he had the ability and vision to draw greatness out of them
when he worked with them a year later.
Taken on
its own, though, the unfocused nature of “Easy Action” makes it an average
album at best. If you are a music
historian, you’ll enjoy its role in both the psychedelic music of the time, and
the specific development of the Alice Cooper band. However, if you want to hear similar ideas
better expressed, go a year into the future and buy the 1971 classic “Love it
to Death.” Once you’ve grokked that
album in its fullness, you’ll be in a better position to go back and appreciate
just how close “Easy Action” comes to greatness.
Best tracks: Mr. & Misdemeanor, Shoe Salesman, Return of the
Spiders
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