Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Group

[westen44]

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. 

[mc2NY]

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

[nofi]

what was your bands name, since famous people were poaching your players. i want to do some research.

[Dave W]

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.

[uwe]

Me like (production aside)! Very NYC, kind of BÖC-edgy.

[Guthrie]

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.

[westen44]

^^^
Great post

[gearHed289]

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.

[uwe]

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.

[amptech]

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!

[uwe]

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.

[uwe]

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. 

[nofi]

i was a casual listener to alice but why no talk of killer. just chock full of toe tappers.

[uwe]

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.

[amptech]

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!