Très cool.
The Alice Cooper Group was a band where Vincent Furnier was very much in charge of the visual presentation, but not of the music which was mainly the band's/Michael Bruce's do. That explains all the differences between the two eras. And when the band felt that he visuals begang to overpower the music while Alice didn't want to mess with the recipe, the schism led to the split. Since then Alice has been looking for people to collaborate with him in writing music that offer the same consistency the ACG had. He's only been sucessful in parts me thinks though I really like Alice.
Related:
Billion Dollar Babies
Billion Dollar Babies was the name of the band founded in 1976 by Michael Bruce, Mike Marconi, Dennis Dunaway, Bob Dolin and Neal Smith after they split from Alice Cooper in 1974. Bruce's solo album, In My Own Way, had been sold to Polydor in Germany. Polydor did a very limited test pressing and decided to shelve it without release. Originally, Billion Dollar Babies started out in the hope that Alice would return and Battle Axe would be the new record from the Alice Cooper group. That wasn't the outcome, and everyone decided to proceed without Alice. Time Magazine featured the group in a brief but hopeful write-up in 1977. There had been a fantastic and very theatrical stage show planned in which Bruce and Marconi would battle each other in the fashion of gladiators. In spite of the positive start, the band was embroiled in a legal suit over the use of the name. The stage show was far too costly and the tour was quite brief. Their only release was 1977's Battle Axe. Unfortunately, the Battle Axe record lost any momentum it had when it was recalled for mastering problems which caused the turntable needle to skip. Bruce, Dunaway and Smith had also invested a large sum of their own money in the project. Jack Douglas, who had worked on Muscle of Love with Jack Richardson, was hired to fix the mastering problem. With so many problems weighing them down, the group disbanded.
I never knew about the mastering issue - it means they had way too much bass in the mix (also the explanation why vinyl can never offer the deep bass of a CD - the needle skips where the laser doesn't).
