It’s been over 16 months and 150
albums since I last reviewed an Alice Cooper album, but he’s finally back on
the rotation, and as welcome as ever.
Disc 604 is….Love It To Death
Artist: Alice
Cooper
Year of Release: 1971
What’s up with the Cover? There is no mess
more glorious than a rock band on the verge of stardom. Here they are, hanging
it all out there in their gold pants and fringe, their long hair and their
women’s blouses. Alice isn’t even painting his eyes yet but he’s still as
creepy as ever.
How I Came To Know It: I don’t remember. I’ve loved
Alice Cooper for so long and this album has been part of my life since before I
could talk. I’ve had it on CD for about twenty years and I’ve got it on vinyl
as well, although that more recently.
How It Stacks Up: I have all 26 of Alice Cooper’s studio albums (I’m
kind of a fan). “Love It To Death” is one of his finest. Really, it is tied for
first place, but since I’ve got to make only one album hold top spot, I’ll
leave that for “Billion Dollar Babies.” “Love It To Death” is a very close
second.
Rating: 5 stars
Two albums into their career,
Alice Cooper had plenty of talent and ambition, but their music lacked the
direction and focus needed to bring it all together. Enter producer Bob Ezrin
to kick start the career of one of rock and roll’s defining artists.
Gone were the wayward attempts on
earlier records to sound like the Beatles or early Pink Floyd. Instead, Ezrin
(and co-producer Jack Richardson) allow the melodic influences of these earlier
bands to survive but help the band find their own unique sound. It is so
successful most people think “Love It To Death” is the band’s debut.
Everything that makes Alice Cooper
great comes together here. Michael Bruce’s guitar is loose and nasty; founded
in sixties acid rock acts like Cream, and yet it is equally the harbinger of
harder rock riffs that would become synonymous with the decade this album
helped usher in.
The rhythm section is as good as
they ever were, and never more so than on the iconic nine minute horror track, “Black Juju.” The song develops slowly.
The tribal drumming of Neal Smith creates is paired with a gothic inspired
bass-line from Dennis Dunaway that leaves you feeling entirely uneasy. The song
is about the living dead – African style – and as ill-luck would have it, early
work shifts found me walking through the silent streets of my city in the dead
of night while listening to it. It was easy to imagine the zombie apocalypse
waited just around the corner and, you know, kinda fun. Cooper’s vocals are
amazing as well, but “Black Juju” is
more about the suspense and rising terror of a horror movie than any specific
lyrics.
Cooper is better vocally when he
gets introspective, such as on the equally epic “Ballad of Dwight Fry,” the story of a disturbed man who kills in a
fugue and awakes to find blood on his hands, and a vague understanding that he
is responsible. There are a lot of artists that lay their inner demons bare for
the sake of great vocals (Johnny Cash and Ozzie Osbourne also come to mind) and
Alice Cooper is every bit their equal.
The album wavers between the
terrifying Poe-like tales of “Black Juju”
and “Ballad of Dwight Fry” and songs
about the alienation and confusion of youth. The generation that first heard
this record were emerging bleary-eyed from the Summer of Love to find a mad and
uncertainty of foreign wars and domestic breakdown – it was the perfect
greeting card for the new world.
“Love It To Death” rarely gets
political (the closest they come being the dystopian “Long Way To Go”). Instead paradoxically it finds its strength by
embracing self-doubt. As Cooper sings on the album’s iconic hit, “Eighteen”:
“I’ve got a baby’s brain and an old man’s heart
Took eighteen years to get this far
Don’t always know what I’m talking about
Feels like I’m living in the middle of doubt.
Because I’m eighteen I get confused every day.”
My favourite song on the record is
“Is It My Body,” a song that captures
this same uncertainty while managing to be sexy as hell. “Is It My Body” is stripped down, featuring dirty guitar solos
combined with Cooper sounding sexy, creepy and confused all delivered in a mere
2:39. The song could have been a hot mess, but it has been stripped down to its
essential parts, allowing the innovative melody to carry all its disparate
themes with equal ease. It has Bob Ezrin’s fingerprints all over it.
All the record’s themes are brought
together with “Second Coming,” which
is equal parts demonic horror, troubled psychiatric confessional and youthful
angst:
“I couldn’t tell if the bells were getting louder
The songs they ring I finally recognized
I only know hell is getting hotter
The devil’s getting smarter all the time.”
The record is only 36 minutes
long, but it is 36 of the most challenging and amazing minutes in rock. It all
culminates with the final track, a cover of Rolf Harris’ 1961 song, “Sun Arise” (sadly minus didgeridoo). After such a dark journey through the psyche
and all the phantoms it can create, “Sun
Arise” is like a bowl of lime sorbet after a raw steak dinner. It is the
perfect final song for what is, for me, a perfect album.
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