I’ve had a nice productive day of
getting chores done as well as fulfilling my creative needs. I’ve just finished a good two hour session writing
my new book, and now I’m going to come down off of that literary high in the
halfway house of the mind that is a blog entry.
This time it is a continuation of the Alice Cooper Reign of Terror. I've randomly rolled 4 Alice Cooper albums in the last eighteen reviews, three of those in the last eight. Weird.
Disc 447 is… Alice Cooper Goes to Hell
Artist: Alice
Cooper
Year of Release: 1976
What’s up with the Cover? A relatively boring head and shoulders shot of
Alice. With that tint to his skin he
looks less like he’s gone to hell and more like he’s gone to sea and found it
disagreed with him.
How I Came To Know It: I’ve known Alice Cooper all my life, and this
particular album since about my late teens.
I bought this originally on tape, partly because I knew I always liked
Alice, and partly because I’d never heard of any of the songs on it, and this
intrigued me even more.
How It Stacks Up: I have twenty-six Alice Cooper albums, which I think
is all of them. “Goes to Hell” is one of
my all-time favourites, but competition at the top is fierce, and it only
manages to work its way up to seventh.
Rating: 4 stars.
I’ve
never been a fan of musicals, but if more musicals were like “Alice Cooper Goes
to Hell” I’d have to rethink my position.
Make no
mistake; this record deserves to be made into a musical. It already has all the component pieces. “Goes to Hell” is a concept album that tells
the story of a man who is condemned to hell, where he meets the Devil, pleads
for his life and then ultimately admits his guilt, only to find it was all a
dream – or was it?
Yeah
this is a pretty tired plotline, but “Goes to Hell” covers it well and is a
hell of a lot more enjoyable than “The Wizard of Oz” and look how famous that
was. Unlike “Wizard of Oz” Cooper covers
pretty much every style of popular music along the way, from hard rock to disco
to Broadway and even a remake of “I’m
Always Chasing Rainbows” which was sung by Judy Garland in 1941. And so we come full circle and return to our
story.
The
album begins with “Go To Hell” a song
that lays down a funky bass line only to slather a thick coat of rock and roll
all over it. It is vintage shock-rock
Alice Cooper, as he decries his alter ego’s many crimes, starting with the real
ones:
“For criminal acts and violence
on the stage
For being a brat refusing to act
your age
For all of the decent citizens
you’ve enraged
You can go to Hell”
And
moving on to ridiculously malicious sins such as “making your Grandma sick”, “poisoning
a blind man’s dog”, and my favourite, gift wrapping a leper and mailing him to
your Aunt Jane. Yet for all its
silliness, this is one monster rock song that gets the album off with a bang.
Following
up on this song, our unrepentant anti-hero decides to go dancing, in this case
to a disco song called “You Gotta Dance”
which gets your hips moving, your body swaying and even features the finest of
seventies rock instruments; the cowbell, which is played with Will Ferrell-like
abandon.
After a
brief laid back-funk track introduces Satan (“I’m
the Coolest”) the album picks up again beautifully as our narrator tries to
figure out where he’s seen the devil before.
This song is Cooper showing his range from the hesitant piano that opens
the song with Cooper’s querulous “Pardon
me/But you see/I’ve seen that face before” and then launches into yet more
rock guitar greatness, mixed with a healthy dose of showmanship. Cooper is an actor and entertainer at heart,
and he plays all the characters in the song to great effect.
For all
its silly fun, “Goes to Hell” still manages to deliver some moments of pop
music magic that stand perfectly strong on their own outside the album’s
concept. “I Never Cry” is a five star ballad that I can’t go two days without
finding myself humming in the shower, even when I haven’t played it in months
(which is rare).
“I Never Cry” is a harbinger of Cooper’s
full descent into alcohol abuse, and it is written with the painful clarity of
someone who sees all his bad habits without filter or misunderstanding, but
pursues them anyway. Cooper describes
how it is to be so famous that you can get away with all manner of crimes to
yourself, and people will just watch you go down:
“Sometimes I drink more than I
need
Until the TV’s dead and gone
I may be lonely
But I’m never alone
And the night may pass me by
But I’ll never cry.”
“I Never Cry” is also one of Cooper’s
finest vocal performances. I’ve said it
before, but it bears repeating; he’s an underrated singer, likely because his
stage shows have always overshadowed his talent. “I
Never Cry” would work regardless on the strength of its got great song
construction and production decisions, but the magic happens because Cooper is
willing to completely put himself out there, both vocally and lyrically. Take my advice and YouTube it!
After
this song, the album returns to its showtune/musical quality as our hero pleads
for freedom (“Give the Kid a Break”
and then accepts his fate “Guilty”
before eventually waking up with “Going
Home.”
“Going Home” has some very schmaltzy
lyrics, and out of context it comes off a bit saccharine but the song itself
has a strong melody that caries it off, and within the context of the full
album, it is exactly what is needed to finish the record off.
“Goes to
Hell” is one of those albums that is sadly unappreciated, maybe because it came
out so soon after the splashy “Welcome to My Nightmare.” Also, if you only like
the hard rock side of Alice Cooper some of these songs are going to be jarring
for you, as he experiments with the other sounds of 1976 like disco and
soul. However it is this experimentation
that keeps the record so fresh for me many years later. It would be a mistake to overlook this album
simply because you don’t recognize any of the songs. You may not know them but trust me, you want
to.
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