Mikeladano on #508: The Weirdest CD that I… Otherwise, stick to the Billion Dollar Babies deluxe package for a seriously awesome live 1970’s Alice experience. Serious fans will need it to complete the collection. It looks rushed, with truncated images of Alice and his live show. This record fails to deliver what Alice was really about. * Perhaps Warner should have shelled out for a full-on 2 LP set? But Alice was a fading property in 1977, with an infamous stint in rehab to follow. Nice Guy”, and “Welcome to My Nightmare” would have been perfect. ![]() Certainly the medleys and song excerpts make it feel like an overly rushed affair, and even considering that, it’s missing too many great tunes. It’s hard to say exactly why The Alice Cooper Show doesn’t completely click. They even featured Canadian bassist Prakash John who was previously in the original band Bush with Dominic Troiano (R.I.P). The band were outstanding, featuring some of the best players Alice has shared the stage with. ![]() I have nothing negative to say about the singing or performance. Then again, Alice has always done medleys of tunes, since he has so damn many. Likewise, there is an “I Love the Dead”/”Go to Hell”/”Wish You Were Here” medley where I wish I could have had more. “Sick Things” for example is less than a minute as it segues into “Is It My Body”. Aside from the fact that there are too many ballads (time-wise, over a quarter of this album are ballads!), a lot of the songs are truncated versions. The recording of this album is fine, but the record is far too brief. However, the albums were starting to slide - Go To Hell and Lace & Whiskey were more notable for ballads like “You And Me” and “I Never Cry” rather than idiosyncratic Cooper rockers or horror tunes. Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter were great guitar players who defined the late 70’s period of Alice. Having said that, the band here are not slouches. The Alice Cooper Show is far from a perfect example of Alice in the mighty 1970’s - for a much better live album experience, pick up Billion Dollar Babies (the deluxe edition) which contained a live album recorded by the original Alice Cooper band. ∙ Salvador Dalí created a holographic portrait using chocolate éclairs, ants, and diamonds, titled First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper’s Brain.ALICE COOPER – The Alice Cooper Show(1977 Warner Bros.) ∙ In 2018, he appeared as King Herod (opposite John Legend’s Jesus) in a live, televised version of Jesus Christ Superstar. ∙ In 2015, he formed the supergroup Hollywood Vampires with Johnny Depp and Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry. ∙ The band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. ∙ In 2003, Alice received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, located next to Gene Autry’s. He also counts The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and The Who as major influences. ∙ Alice has frequently cited The Yardbirds as his favorite band. ∙ They were personally signed by Frank Zappa to his Straight Records label. ∙ One of Alice’s early lineups was called The Nazz, but he changed the name after learning that Todd Rundgren’s band had beaten him to it. ∙ With the exception of the band’s drummer, all original members of Alice Cooper competed on the same high school cross-country team. Reflecting on the rumor that he once ripped the head off a chicken and drank its blood mid-set, he said he knew better than to refuse the publicity, instead going with the advice of early supporter Frank Zappa: “Whatever you do, don’t deny it.” A born-again Christian who once credited his sobriety to golf, he remains a classic example of the distance between performer and persona, of the act that stays onstage. ![]() Despite the decades they spent together, Furnier rarely took Alice Cooper home. It balanced early punk and metal (“I’m Eighteen,” “School’s Out”) with surprisingly tender ballads (“I Never Cry,” “You and Me”), laying the foundation for the New York Dolls, The Misfits, Poison, and Marilyn Manson. And while Cooper’s theatrics were the linchpin of his legacy, connecting rock’s innate sense of rebellion with the cheap thrills of Z-grade horror, the music was pretty inventive too. That Grand Guignol-style act made him one of the most inventive performers of the '70s and earned him the title The Godfather of Shock Rock. The son of a preacher who started out playing Beatles parodies at his high school talent show, Cooper (born Vincent Furnier, in Detroit in 1948) went on to form the band Alice Cooper before assuming the moniker as his own gender-bending alter ego, bridging snotty, hook-heavy anthems with a blood-spattered stage show that ended in his beheading by guillotine. Few artists understand the good sense in bad taste like Alice Cooper.
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