The most interesting Alice Cooper recordings are the ones few people ever heard. The first two albums included in this 15-CD box set, Pretties for You (1969) and Easy Action (1970), sold poorly and scarcely suggested what was to come. Pretties was experimental with furious rock jams, musique concrete and high-flying psychedelic lyrics. It sounded closer to Carnaby Street than the band’s Los Angeles home base. On Easy Action, Cooper focused on hard rock with prog aspirations. The lyrical allusions to West Side Story bespoke his growing interest in rock as theater.
Most people have forgotten that Alice Cooper was originally a band fronted by a man who called himself Alice Cooper. The best work was the band work. Tough and road tested, Alice Cooper paired the music down to essentials on Love it to Death (1971). The LP netted Cooper’s first hit, “I’m Eighteen,” whose empathetic lyric caught the confusion of growing up. By the time of Killer (1971), School’s Out (1972) and Billion Dollar Babies (1973), the tuneful rock hits and deep cuts had become components of a stage show alluded to insanity, rebellion, murder and mayhem. And then, after Muscle of Love (1973), the singer Alice Cooper fired his namesake band and kept on going.
His first solo album, Welcome to My Nightmare (1975), established him as a mainstream entertainer complete with a Top-40 ballad, “Only Women Bleed.” His later LPs occasionally produced hit singles and the show went on, but the album of note from those years was his shrewd response to punk rock. Flush the Fashion (1980) included a cover of a ‘60s song he knew well from his own garage punk years, The Music Machine’s “Talk Talk,” and made many allusions to Devo and other rising bands.
