LaRM day 89 (Ry Cooder-Alice Cooper)

The last bit of Ry Cooder is the sprawling compilation The UFO Has Landed (2008) which covers his entire career and includes songs and tunes from most of his solo and soundtrack releases, and is a useful reminder of why I should pick up the stuff I haven't already got. It's a pretty eclectic selection, leaving out most of his most famous songs, but it's a great general overview of the diversity of his stuff and the tunes from early albums Boomer's Story and Paradise & Lunch are especially good.
Alice Cooper's first album, Pretties For You (1969) bears almost no relation to the cabaret metal act that we all know and (sort of) love. Instead it's a valiant but ultimately insipid psychedelic rock album, which is fairly light both in terms of songwriting and performance. It is quite endearing in a forgettable sort of way, and in some ways it's rather charming, but there's not much going on that other psych acts weren't doing better and it's not got anything that hints of the direction they were going to take. The first faltering signs of the hard rock future appear on second album Easy Action (1970). Some people think Easy Action is one of the great lost rock albums but that seems way over the top to me. It's a great record certainly, but it's no masterpiece. It's still clearly indebted to the acoustic and psych scenes and those elements are not greatly improved upon, but it does have some really serious rock action - 7 minute closer 'Lay Down and Die, Goodbye' is the first truly Deep Purple-ish heaviosity (although still greatly suffused with Jefferson Airplane psych experimentalism) that Alice Cooper indulged in and it's great.

I haven't got the big crossover album, Love It To Death so it's straight on to the first big seller, Killer (1971). Killer starts with the superb blues-riffing 'Under My Wheels' and it's clear that this is the Alice Cooper that we're all familiar with. In some ways Love It To Death and Killer show just how much influence a producer has over a band's future. Bob Ezrin stripped out all of the psychedelia and all of the floweriness that had been such a fundamental part of the first two albums and left only the straight down the line rock and roll. I guess it meant sacrificing an interesting side of the band but it certainly meant that they were able to create a specific and identifiable sound. All of the songs on Killer are really solid, a few fantastic - 'Halo of Flies', 'You Drive Me Nervous', 'Dead Babies' and the title track are all brilliant bits of shock-rock, which although musically sound rather quaint now, still work as grand bits of blues based hard rock. Even better is 1973's Billion Dollar Babies (we've had to skip over School's Out, I haven't got it). Billion Dollar Babies is a quintessential early 70's rock album. It may not sound particularly hard now, but it is vicious, mean-spirited and wiry, and it's really quite brilliant. There are some big hits here ('Elected', 'Hello Hooray', 'No More Mr Nice Guy') but it's more than the sum of its parts. The guitar solo on the title track is a brilliant example of strung-out rock excess and Vincent himself is in incendiary form. Realistically this was the tipping point after which the band went from interesting and genuinely great shock-rock act to silly cabaret pop-rock, but as a last truly great rock album from the band it's worth its weight in gold.

Five days off now, so back on Thursday for the five hour box-set, The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper, which is a curate's egg to say the least...