The Last Bass Outpost
Main Forums => The Bass Zone => Topic started by: westen44 on July 07, 2015, 10:51:44 AM
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Dennis Dunaway. Looks like a really good book.
http://www.houstonpress.com/music/bassist-spent-years-onstage-with-alice-cooperand-lived-7518205
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I'm almost finished, a fun book.
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I've been planning on buying a copy of this. But I keep on forgetting too. Thx for the reminder.
TD
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Watching with interest elsewhere... 8)
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Cool! I love Alice with his original band, very influential in younger years..... :-*
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Alice knows talent too!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJfuWhMQ3Tc
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Not clear if these are remasters, his catalog dearly needs it, those Alice Cooper Band CDs sounded pretty much crap:
http://www.guitarworld.com/rhino-announces-massive-15-cd-alice-cooper-box-set
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Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure these are not remasters.
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I've been planning on buying a copy of this. But I keep on forgetting too. Thx for the reminder.
TD
My copy of Dennis' book arrived in the mail today. I've got a couple of weeks off coming, think I'll have a couple of pints and read the book. It's got some great photos of the band in it.
Love it To Death is one of my favourite LP's, think I'll have a listen.
TD
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Finished it last week, a fun read. Except for Glen.
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For the most part remasters they are, got the box today, haven't listened yet ...
http://www.musictap.net/2015/06/16/alice-cooper-classics-from-warner-brothers-records-collected-in-15cd-box-the-studio-albums-1969-1983/
(http://www.musictap.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Alice-Cooper-The-Studio-Albums-1969-1983-1024x1024.jpg)
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I don't remember where now, but I had read somewhere from someone who appeared reputable that these were not remastered. But it's great that they are. It definitely makes it money well spent.
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They are not freshly remastered (i.e. for the purpose of this release) - the Japanese remasters used are from 2011/2012 or thereabouts, but were never employed outside Japan until now. But they are not the original Rhino remasters that were, say, contained in this 5er box a few years ago:
(http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81%2BEWJmFz1L._SX425_.jpg)
I have that too and listened side by side, no comparison, the old stuff was a murky and incredibly flat affair. And while Bob Ezrin's wall of sound productions have the habit of sounding a little indirect, the new(ish) remasters are much more there. At this point, the best quality of old Alice Cooper (Band) recordings you can get.
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I'd really like to get this, but I need to replace a CD player that's going bad first.
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Looking forward to hearing these remasters, those are good albums.
Got my copy of the book today, good reading! Thanks for this thread :)
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Looking forward to hearing these remasters, those are good albums.
Got my copy of the book today, good reading! Thanks for this thread :)
It's great music and I'm glad people appreciate it.
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One of my ex-guitarists (Rick Tedesco) who I played with for a few years has been Dunaway's guitarist the last four or five years. Alice also stole Al Pitrelli from us :)
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what was your bands name, since famous people were poaching your players. i want to do some research.
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what was your bands name, since famous people were poaching your players. i want to do some research.
I think he's talking about Toys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE6a9YzMtDY
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Me like (production aside)! Very NYC, kind of BÖC-edgy.
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Thanks to this book, and its accompanying signing tour, I got to meet Dennis and Neal. I also met the Bouchard Brothers, Al and Joe, who formed Blue Coupe with Dennis.
That was awesome.
I'm not objective. I was four when Alice broke up the band, so there's not even nostalgia per se.
The book is brimming with the joy that Dennis radiates in person. He knows how lucky they were, how lucky he is to be alive now.
It's not the greatest memoir, but it's one hell of a love letter to rock, friendship, and going for it in the name of your art.
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^^^
Great post
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It's not the greatest memoir, but it's one hell of a love letter to rock, friendship, and going for it in the name of your art.
That sounds pretty great right there.
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I always wondered why - fallen from the commercial heights that were the Alice Cooper Group in their prime - none of the other members reemerged in a commercially viable way (that rules the illfated Billion Dollar Babies and the smartly monikered Blue Coupe out). Where they washed out? On drugs for decades? Stinking filthy rich? Good pension accounts? Or just not taken serious by record companies and other musicians? Dennis was a wonderful, tasteful, melodic and inventive bassist, but even in the mid-seventies the rumours never died down that what you heard on the Ezrin produced albums was very little Alice Cooper Group and a lot of session musicians. Dick Wagner, for instance, was regularly named as having played on those records long before Welcome to my Nightmare as Alice's first solo outing (much as I liked the Alice Cooper Group, I believe that WTMN is Alice's musically most cohesive work).
I'm currently going through an Alice Cooper phase - after the boxed set, I decided to follow my completist urge and buy everything else as well. Currently listening to Hey Stoopid which sounds like Bon Jovi with Alice singing. Before that I listened to those Kane Roberts albums which sound like a Ted Nugent album with Alice singing. Mind you, Alice is no Derek St Holmes, but he sure beats Uncle Ted in singing.
I'm a sucker for Alice's voice (with its six or so half-steps range) when he does ballads. That is when his nasal delivery firmly moves into John Lennon territory.
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Just finished the book, so I listen to all the albums these days too.
If you think the billion dollar babies ´battle axe´album is worth a listen (better than other voices/full circle anyway :)), then check out Kane Robert´s solo album as well... The lyrics are so strong and bold they make Paul Stanley sound innocent!
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I'm now listening to that industrial Bob Marlette stuff Alice recorded around the millenium - Dragontown and Brutal Planet. Not really my type of music, but his voice fits well and the compositions have some thought in them. Reminds me in places of what Halford did in his ill-fated, but musically daring Two project with Trent Razor.
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Moving on to the next aisle - pleeeze ... don't touch the displays, little boy ...
I'm now wading through the box - Easy Action is finally in a listenable audio quality and has its moments, certainly a step ahead from the uneven Pretties for You (though that already features the "Elected"-prototype "Respected"). I really liked Lace & Whiskey (Goes to Hell not that much, kind of pale shadow of the much more intense Welcome to my Nightmare) and DaDa (which I only heard once before when it came out and then very casually) which sounds a bit like a(n) (also Bob Ezrin-produced) Peter Gabriel album with loud guitars! In comparison, the at the time much heralded "return" of a clean and sober Alice three years later with Constrictor sounds like severely dumbed down stadium rock.
And I've got the Dunaway book now as well. :mrgreen:
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i was a casual listener to alice but why no talk of killer. just chock full of toe tappers. ???
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Haven't listened to the Killer one (originally a Japanese remaster) yet, I'm grabbing CDs at will from the box, listening chronologically is boring!!! I have good memories of Killer, but the old Rhino master of it was ghastly, ruined all the fun of hearing it.
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i was a casual listener to alice but why no talk of killer. just chock full of toe tappers. ???
I'm sure almost every cooper fan ranks killer, love it to death and the other 'original group' albums as the best cooper albums.
For my part, though I'm no hardcore cooper fan, I listened to killer and love it.. so many times that I take a break from them and listen
to the stranger coop albums from time to time. Killer is really brilliant, though.
My older brother is a die hard coop fan, he can listen to any coop album repeatedly when he is at work, even on a small crappy plastic stereo. I must admit there are some decent tracks on the more recent albums, but on repeat on a crappy sound system... and all you hear is compressed guitars and Kenny Aronoff's snare drum!
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Of the more recent ones (post 2001), his "garage album" The Eyes of Alice Cooper was by far the best, as close to his 70ies highlights as anything he has done. Welcome to my Nightmare Part 2 isn't bad either, but you know how it is with "Part 2" of anything.
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I'm thru with the box! Of the Alice Cooper Band ones, Billion Dollar Babies and Love it to Death rule, Killer is good but not as good (as is Muscle of Love, bit more of an organic production there due to Jack Douglas) and School's Out (the album) sounds surprisingly weak, it seems to be like an album hastily cobbled onto a single (the brilliant title track) whose production sound has nothing whatsoever to do with the (great) sound of the single. School's Out (the album) sounds like a rush job to capitalize on the School's Out (single) mega hit. It probably was.
Of the later ones, Special Forces and Zipper Catches Skin are indeed nothing to write home about, it is amazing how a guitar trio that looks so formidable on paper (Wagner, Nitzinger and Pinera) could sound so limp in real life. I saw a gig of the Special Forces tour in Detroit at the time and the three guitarists failed to convince live too (and Alice looked terrible, unhealthily skinny), the Joe Perry Band which opened for them had so much more life and energy (with just two guitarists). Flush the Fashion, otoh, is not so bad, if totally mismonikered: Rather than flushing the fashion, Alice was chasing it by enlisting Roy Thomas Baker as a producer who gave him the sound of his Bostonian proteges of the time: FtF sounds like a The Cars album (right down to the guitar riffs, not just the new-wavish keyboard playing) whose master tapes have been stolen, with Alice secretly overdubbing his vocals. :mrgreen: But it has its charm (which Special Forces and Zipper Catches Skin are devoid of).
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Thanks for the review, seems like a nice christmas gift for my brother. I mean, he have already bought all those albums many times on many formats, so it´s my turn to chip in :)
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Sadly never saw the original lineup but caught the Hunter/Wagner WTMN tour, saw that 3 guitar lineup at Hammersmith, also saw the Kane Roberts Nightmare Returns tour... 1st was the best by a long shake of the stick...
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Now in the new place I've been trying to order a signed copy of one of these from Strand in NY (http://www.strandbooks.com/product/snakes-guillotines-electric-chairs-my-adventures-in-the-alice-cooper-group) but even though I've been going through their contact pages I've been hitting a brick wall as it will not accept a UK phone number on their order pages...
The signed copies they have (by sheer chance) are from June 9th (so it appears) which is my significant event date (birth), and I'd like to get one for my "Xmas" prezzie to me, so...
Anyone willing to order one and post over here please ... ? Happy to pre-pay by Paypal ...
Cheers in advance...
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You can get it via Amazon Germany. I did.
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But not a signed copy, at least not as far as I can see...?
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I can sign it for you!
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It would be an honour, sir... ;)
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Seemingly the original Alice Cooper Band reunited for a small show off the back of a book signing at some point in the last few days.
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Pics on FB DD pages... AC, DD and Neal Smith...
Still no takers for the DD book...? Oh well...
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I will look into it for you Ken.
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I saw a gig of the Special Forces tour in Detroit at the time and the three guitarists failed to convince live too (and Alice looked terrible, unhealthily skinny), the Joe Perry Band which opened for them had so much more life and energy (with just two guitarists). Flush the Fashion, otoh, is not so bad
Flush the fashion was my first concert. Davey Johnstone was with him and I remember that being an excellent show. I saw him a year later for Special Forces and liked it, but it wasn't the same. I didn't really know enough to know why, but I put it down to my being so excited the first time. Still good memories though.
I saw this the other day and I think it should probably go here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-bcxLB_xbA
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Ken, I ordered the signed copy for you. After it gets here I will repackage and get it shipped out to you. Message me your shipping info whenever you have the chance. Probably going to take about a week to get here.
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You Diamond Geezer...!
PM'd
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Flush the fashion was my first concert. Davey Johnstone was with him and I remember that being an excellent show. I saw him a year later for Special Forces and liked it, but it wasn't the same. I didn't really know enough to know why, but I put it down to my being so excited the first time. Still good memories though.
I saw this the other day and I think it should probably go here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-bcxLB_xbA
Very cool to see those old badgers recreate their sound so well - no one does it quite like them. It's refreshing to witness Vince without eye make-up and his usual "Alice, the Act" stage demeanor as just the singer of an - somewhat elderly - rock band. :mrgreen:
When I first heard that Davey Johnstone of all people was in Alice's band I thought "what an ill fit, an Elton John guy with Alice Cooper", but it worked out surprisingly well. Johnstone - ever since his Magna Carta days - is versatile without being bland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJO2YuQkkg0
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while not a die hard fan i do like many cooper songs. i never liked the dress up thing at all. it looked dated from the start and diminished the impact and cheapened the value of many great songs, imo.
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I was a budding adolescent when I saw Cooper first on TV (Top of the Pops) with this vid here, I'd have to lie if I wouldn't admit that I was completely mesmerized by his look. Ignore the music which is not original (but a credible tribute), I couldn't find an original TOTP performance that plays in Germany:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx8Xg6jQdxg
When I dug a little deeper and heard the rumours in school that "Alice Cooper kills chickens on stage"
(he never did, well just one, but that was an unfortunate accident as the chicken refused to fly when he threw it back into the audience - from where it had come too; young Vince had missed a lot of biology class which also probably explains that gender uncertainty evidenced by his later stage name)
that only added to the fascination.
Over time though, you're right, the image probably drove more people away than it initially attracted.
My first rock album ever was - no, not Deep Purple, that was my 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th - Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits. I adored loved (it) to death that album and its wonderful sleeve,
(http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_400/MI0003/591/MI0003591922.jpg?partner=allrovi.com)
thought every single track brilliant. Still know it by heart today. The pun inherent to the "greatest hits" title on one hand and the mob style cover on the other only dawned on me decades later though! :-[
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That greatest hits album was one of my first albums as well. I still love that album and the CD gets semi-regular spins during my drive times. I used to like Flush the Fashion too but not sure that has held up all that well. I still like "Clones" tho.
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First "album" (a tape) was Billion Dollar Babies ... bought Muscle on release and much of it up until he went golf-pro, then sporadic... it would be good if he did one more recording with what's left of the band though... a nice pic has emerged of the four of them together recently...
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Ken, your book arrived today. I won't be able to ship until Monday because I am leaving town directly from work tomorrow and won't return until Sunday afternoon. I will update you when it ships.
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Something may have arrived Andy... safe and sound...
In your dept, Sir...! ;)