CD Odyssey Disc 444: Alice Cooper

Since the beginning, the dice gods have seemed to enjoy choosing Alice Cooper records for me to review.  This next review is my 18^th Alice Cooper record and the third in the last fifteen.  Weird.

Disc 444 is… Easy Action

Artist: Alice Cooper

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 21^st just above “Pretties for You” and just below “Constrictor.”  Yeah, I know I already assigned 21^st 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