...straight away this pile up of hepnacious grooves comes on like the yardbirds on heavy drug prescription, all the cats flailing away in different directions yet all heading for the same goal...with the second track there's some wiggy voodoo psych from the sleazy hollywood back alleys, oozing from the neanderthal sunset strip the alice cooper group would wander looking for the right moment to unleash the new sound they were cooking up...cats who are hep to the pretties LP will dig these earlier run throughs and groove on alices harp playing here and there that sounds like something from 'country joes fish's' first effort, that lonesome stoned basement echo sound...the 3 last tracks are some kind of rehearsal warm ups that hark back to the pre cooper name when they were a garage outfit wailing on stones/music machine/spencer davis type R&B which no doubt predate the demos...the prime piece of gristo featured on this disc is the first single (reflected/livin) in monural form (what else?) nestling at the end of all this the cool historical tuneage...sound quality does fluctuate but overall it's acceptable for whats on offer, as the original coopers were real yanquee contenders to take anglo psyched-out hard and tripped freakbeat R&B with that avant narcotic touch to a wider audience in the upcoming decade...an illicit trip into the dark adventurous underbelly of vietnam drained teenage weird worlds...
...this first alice cooper group outting is right from the start calling the faithful (if any existed at the time) with its demented street organ wailing letting the heads know something new is on the block as this is most definitely urban rock'n'roll, in no way is this rock of the country variety (1969 being the year country infiltrated the rock with some amount of gusto)...the coops had no time for any getting back to nature and vague and voguish muddle-headed ideas of keeping it real, they had the agenda from '67 psych-revolution and the next year 1968s street-fighting-riot-mongering all wrapped up in drama both psycho and theatrical...this whole shebang has a great doomed heavy bad trip vibe permeating through the grooves weaving a snakey dread sensation, yet at the same time there's optimism shown by the group in the knowledge that attacking the squares with their outrageous dragged up foppishness would surely unite the young forward thinking heads who wanted more than bubblegum or cowboy steel guitar...this is political MC5 for the mind, theatre of the absurd, mixing detroit street revolution with euro mind games direct from london/paris/berlin...heavy anglo vibes flow in from the UFO club with some pink floyd riff 'stolen' and put to good use (also dylans watchtower riff is liberated and given a new framework for the magic of the 'basement tapes' to come alive tangible in a dress) and from the marquee club, freakbeat slam and thud of the who/creation...a ladbroke grove bad drug smell of hawkwind/deviants is never too far from the surface and this mixes in with a sort of 'doors'/'crabby appleton' pop awareness to help snare the teenage mind away from numbness and vietnam waiting lists...more than a few rock elitists give this a bad rep as being little more than a zappa marketing ploy to get attention to his label (it does play well when on rotation with the GTOs) from the dwellers of the teenage malt shop who didn't heed his dire prediction for the NOW generation and the onset of plasticity through society sapping the will to question tyranical business and the corporate war machine and the influence of the mothers 'freakout' is always present, but this is most definitely the work of a group who had learnt some rock'n'roll chops working dances and low rent dives earlier in the decade...these cats ain't no side-show put on for any amusement of bemused spectators, these are cats on a mission to break-on-through, to find the next level in the 'artform' of rock'n'roll...this is shock-rock but not the way the cubes hoped it meant with their snearing laughing 'mock'/hatred, this shock is the shock to be alive, not the halloween 'fright sight' variety that alice sans group would later have to indulge in...listening in the here and now it's fairly obvious to any and all heads who've been checking the progress of west coast yankee underground rock from back in the day when it was all fresh and new that this alice cooper opus should have come out on elektra, the supposed leading indie label, as a harbinger of the (sub)urban revolution in rocking noise, from club/studio poprock to all out eruption of the senses...(elektra were at that time getting busy with such talent as 'quill' who they did get on the bill at woodstock, which in itself shows how that once excellent and trustworthy label was becoming corrupted by the all consuming geetus pile)...the easist way to look at the relevence of this missive from cooperville is as a conduit from 1960s to '70s conciousness with another generation of rocking heads getting ready for something new and vibrant yet relevant to the oppressive nature of the times what with the draft reaching out to everyone with a social security number...it speaks of the loosening times and there is confusion abounding through the grooves with some interesting progrock stop/start rhythms and some brilliant stoner stereo fx...the finest cooper LP by far and certainly a future looking wax in all ways from elvis in a pink suit letting cats know there's good rocking tonight to the yet to arrive ziggy stardusts life on mars, it all speaks of becoming aware of dreams and not letting the downpressor society grind the life out of cats who dig a better groove than the one on offer from the old order of payment' and privilage...
...second mission statement from the coopers and the influence/residue of pink floyd is still in evidence with the first couple of seconds of side one having sonic squiggles courtesy of the cambridge foursome and the extended freakout ending side two is well into floydian territory though mixed in with a soon to come '70s hard rock thud...possibly not as adventurous as the earlier LP (but still cool enough for alice bores not to dig it), still operating in areas not quite mapped out, the feeling anything could happen, and it does, like when they suddenly get into 'west side story' which in '69/70 was as square as nixon/agnew/TIME and brother that's cubed anyway a cat looks at it...couple of tracks take on some west coast popism but not like crabby appleton, whose presence loomed on the first wax, more in the line of nondescript sunshine/singersong cats but the coops show how it's supposed to be done (if of course it has to be done at all) and come off well...these cats were really onto something with these two LPs, how it all slipped away is what a college thesis could/should be written on (probably has by now, what with 'rock' being used in college as an excuse for a doctorate/degree)...in fact maybe the crabby appleton presence is here, but it's turned into those texas psych heads 'fever tree', especially the guitar here and there, track 4 is the doors jamming with the tree if it's gonna stand up...and next up track 5 shows morrison morphing into alice so that clears up the mysterious disappearance of the doors frontman, he didn't even get to paris as he's now alice, this is getting TOO much into fortean logic for an appraisal of a rock disc, proving that the coops WERE onto something more and vital than just a few tunes...there's certainly dimension spanning magic at work here that must serve as some sort of warning if a cat looks ahead in the coop career (warning right there with that ugly word)...avant garde verses money/patronage, an aged dilemma in western climes if not in older civilizations, human nature being what it is...
...this is the LP that gave the coops the needed push to take it to the roobs, the great unwashed who'd been getting an eye/earfull of alice on the touring they'd been doing in 1970, taking their brand of psyched heavy garage rock to many dislocated nooks and crannies around uncle sams autocracy...they scored a hit single with 'eighteen' and the long player held many cool rockers, the first of which opens the disk, a totally cool underground garage blowout that would be one of the templates on which the '76/7 punk explosion would be modelled (sex pistols always had time for alice, and so too the dead boys)...track four on the first side is the 'black juju' stretchout where the coops take pink floyds U.F.O extended groove marathons from '66/7 and load it with hollywood drug paranoia, this is sunset strip sleazy voodoo that would give the laurel canyon whiners the jitters as they tried to usurp teenage thinking with earth shoe mysticism, the real mystic/carny groove is right here, not on some country rock waxing...theatricality raises its head on side two with the tune (homage to) 'dwight frye' surrounded as it is by more rock slabs of 3 minute groove attacks with cool proto metalic guitar runs, the perfect sound to take acid rock stringbending into the new decade...the wax ends with more voodoo, this time courtesy of rolf harris 'sun arise' (very sinewy 'acid' pop from early sixties in its original form) giving hope to disenfranchised cannon fodder waiting for the call to protect the empires business concerns, in the way the original cooper band did, they took the doctrine of beatnik living into the seventies when most had given up or never really beleived in the good vibrations to begin with...no filler, just total killer diller jack and that's the honest truth...
...this first alice cooper combo were certainly the best (only) version and this wax testifys to that proclomation four fold at least, with some real cool blowouts of underground rock...the whole shebang kicks off with a couple of rockers tailor made for the new seventies teenage market, the second gets a velvets riff going to ride the tune on, then the first of some amazing grooves, track 3 (halo of flies) comes on with some guitar noodle straight from some acid rock band like 'clear light' with trippy fx guitar strum, slightly psychy, then into a street level prog riff (no clever-clever college variety) sort of like the 'pink fairies' which makes a lot of sense as the coops always dug the anglo psych noise in all its different guises, later the track hits a love 'forever changes' string arrangement followed by tribal drum and more riff grooving on a russian cossack trip (this got to be coops contribution to temporal stradling 'world music' or something similar)...more 'forever changes' sounds start the fourth tune, which crosses into jimbo morrison quietly moaning, proof there's been some checking out by the cooper cats of old elektra acid rock LPs which were creeping into hep urban locales in various parts of the globe via bargain bins at the beginning of the seven ohs...side two gets underway with another couple of street rockers, the type of noise that would become common currency for leather jacketed underground garage bands for this new decade...track 3 again, (this time 'dead babies') tells the story of drug abuse from an interesting 'stepford-wives-gone-real-spazz' angle, in some ways it's the precient story of amerikkkan seventies youth with their addiction to quaaludes to dull the psychological effects of a claustophobic finking society with its petty restrictions /cops on every corner like guards (or school hall monitors) in the plastic consumer concentration camp...some 'doors' style moves crop up again in the middle then the thing winds down by reinforcing the earlier sentiments like the inevitable will be the outcome from a society out of control/manipulated for dollars, blind obedience or death...there's a coating of '67 anglo psych smeared over this one but a cat can't be dozing or the vibe will leave...title track is last with more morrison grooves riding a psychedelic ballroom riff and some tribal trance drums and voodoo wailing and prayer to a high entity...a lot of this wax harks back to '67 but not a tangible '67, more a feeling of what could have happened if hard blues rock hadn't come in so strong and the yardbirds had kept jeff and jimmy wailing at marquee club sunday afternoon freakouts, if the 'doors' had been more rock'n'roll and morrison less ego driven, kind of like if jimbo had jammed political/spiritual poetry with the yardbirds during their velvet collar harpsichord journeys...the coops wouldn't again reach this high point, though the next couple of slabs were by no means slouchy this is the end of the initial cooper voyage to take rock'n'roll further by continuing the vibes started five years earlier with tunes like 'satisfaction' 'happening ten years time ago', pushed further by cats like the early 'groovies' and UFO habituaries floyd/deviants and the various elektra acid rockers/poppers (clear light/crabby appleton/morrison/stalk forrest group) who all got fixated doing their versions of los angeles meets swinging london psych...in a way it's fitting and inevitable this groove would finish in the early seventies as the drugs got heavier and more pervasive through straight and hep worlds, rock'n'roll became just plain old rock and attention spans became more limited only needing dull thuds from sloppy boogie rock...the veitnam fiasco was needing less cannon fodder as the decade progressed so teenage thinking was less important in the general game of consumer life, dullards, both heavy rock and singer songwriters took center stage with alice cooper becoming pop stars then pop star then golfer/comedian, and finally an irrelevant parody solo act...
...it was with this LP, the fifth outing that things started to go wrong, what with scoring that big hit around the planet and so making the cooper name outer-national and also making alice the personality, the star, with the other cats relegated to being the backing band, becoming just mere bit players...quite a goodly amount of the earlier joints 60s references are missing, making this a lot more in-tune with the times and that's the downside as it was the combos updating and continuance of the freakbeat/psych/avant jamming (plus a healthy dose of humour) that made them special and stand out from the rest of the pack...it's not a bad wax by any means but it can't be compared with the ones preceeding, it must stand apart and be judged alone and not even by the title track that ironically doesn't fit with the rest of the tuneage...
...fairly decent (non-fi) sound on these demos, two go rounds for each tune though not following each other like on some boots and 'proper releases' (especially blues/jazz comps) so its just like digging the LP all over again...the commercial production values are of course not present so its the coops rocking out in the studio, kicking ideas around, see if it works...what made the 'schools out' joint not really up to par for what the coops were capable of, was the rejection of the late six oh anglo psych moves, the way these cats took '67 psych/freak rocking and mixed in some avantness was really forward looking for a yanquee combo, (so much so they got labelled as a sham, a fake freak show and they may have been freaks but they sure weren't no fakes) coming on some time like jimbo morrison jamming with twin guitar yardbirds down the marquee club in london towne while the audience rolled around the floor covered in blamange (truely happening/ed) or coming through the ether like a sunset-strip pink floyd jamming out the voodoo riff...these demos show them wanting to get back to a more anglo influenced yanquee style but wishing to move it into this new glam rock decade so they grab some stonesian keef-boogie riff or a macca groove and throw in some '65/6 london visiting zimmerman and churn out some really acceptable garage seventies anthems...at this 1973 juncture in time the teen hippies on the block (and in rodneys english disco) had no idea what the new alice disc was going to sound like but through inter-dimension temporal transporting the demos are available for fresh perusal...some layabouts may wish to imagine the last wax was the killer joint and now the coops have turned into a less shambolic mott the hoople, though such a thing may not be desirous it may have been the best thing for all concerned when the future was rolled out and formula took over but for the bonghit of NOW its just a groove from coopersville (the only place to be)...
killer and billion dollar babies were a teenagers dream.... much darker than british glam pop of the time....see my baby jive... do me a favour.....alice was the sound of my teenage rebelliion.....that is until i discovered iggy......ho ho....
ReplyDeleteearly alice joints are great stuff, hope you like them...
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ReplyDeleteNice post - Alice Cooper ..Keep Posting (this comment was sent by the above but somehow got deleted, sorry hungry jack)...
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