Album Review: Alice Cooper Goes to Hell

Alice Cooper – Alice Cooper Goes to Hell

October 30, 2018

ALBUM REVIEW

OVERALL (OUT OF 10): 10

It’s almost Halloween, and what better way to celebrate this high holiday than reviewing an Alice Cooper album? After all, Alice is like the perfect embodiment of Halloween – it’s kind of spooky, it’s kind of scary, but it’s mostly fun, and no one really takes it seriously. Just like Alice Cooper. But after 50 years of cranking out albums, which one to review? His most popular and only #1 album, Billion Dollar Babies, with the title track and the marvelous “Elected” and perennial fan favorite “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and the downright icky “I Love the Dead”? His spookiest album, Welcome to my Nightmare, with the only Alice Cooper songs that truly give me the shivers, the unholy trio of “Years Ago” (“I’m a little boy/NO I’M A GREAT BIG MAN/No let’s be a little boy for a little while longer, maybe an hour?/Isn’t that our Mom calling?”), “Steven”, and “The Awakening”? What about his funniest album, Special Forces, which no one has heard and everyone should, where he proves that Arthur Lee should have just given “Seven and Seven Is” to Alice outright instead of recording it himself, and where he smarts off to every parent on the planet with “Don’t Talk Old to Me” (“Don’t stick that finger in my face no more/’Cause I might bite it off and spit it on the floor”), and gives us his funniest song ever, his sendup of military hubris “You’re a Movie” (“The bullets repel off my medals/And my troops are in awe when I speak/All chaos my strategy settles/My mere presence gives strength to the weak…move aside mere drop of water, let the ocean pass…), and updates “Generation Landslide” with a new, weirdly prescient verse (“No one gives an oink about prom night or football/Because just getting home from school safe is a gamble and a blessing”)? Or Dada, with its spot-on satire of redneck America circa 1983 (“I love that mountain with them four big heads/I love Velveeta slapped on Wonder Bread/I love a commie…if he’s good and dead!/I love America!”)?  Maybe the wildly uneven Zipper Catches Skin (“When zipper grabs skin/I’ll know I had it out when I should have kept it in”), with the hilarious “That was the Day My Dead Pet Returned to Save My Life”? His comeback album Trash, with the ubiquitous “Poison”? Dragontown (“I don’t do dishes/And I’m suspicious/Of any grown-up man that does”)? Maybe School’s Out, with, well, “School’s Out”? (But if ever a single song justified the existence of an album, it’s that one.)

I don’t know that I’ve ever typed a paragraph I enjoyed writing quite as much as the one above. It made me realize just how many smiles and belly chuckles I owe the man. That’s what a lot of people don’t get about Alice Cooper – yeah, he’s got the guillotines and the snakes and giant Frankenstein on stage and all that macabre shtick, but he is hands down the funniest guy ever in the world of rock. So after going through 50 years of Alice Cooper albums in my head, I settled on his second funniest, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell.

Hardliners will tell you the only Alice Cooper albums worth listening to are the albums by the Alice Cooper band, as opposed to the guy who took the name and most of their fans with him when the band imploded. While I have to admit they made some classic albums, I find that I go back to the best solo Alice Cooper albums far more often than the albums with the original band. Alice’s humor got lost sometimes when a bunch of other guys were also writing songs, even if many of those songs were classics, and I like my Alice pure and undiluted. And Alice doesn’t come any purer and undiluteder than on Alice Cooper Goes to Hell. And what’s more, it’s probably the most straightforward and understandable concept album ever recorded – on Tommy and The Wall and 2112 and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and A Passion Play and (Heaven forbid) Cat Steven’s Numbers you never know what the hell is going on.  Alice Cooper Goes to Hell is one of the few concept albums I can think of that clearly, consistently, and unambiguously communicates a discernible concept all the way through. So props to Alice Cooper for showing all those artsy fartsy pseudo intellectuals and prog rock poseurs how it’s done.

The album’s conceit is right there in the title – Alice dies and goes to Hell. No convoluted plotline about a deaf, dumb, and blind messiah who changes the world with pinball, or an alienated, isolated rock star who inexplicably becomes a fascist agitator, or whatever dumb story 2112 and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway were trying to tell.  It’s all right there in the title, couldn’t be clearer. Now that I think about it, Jethro Tull tried to do the same story with A Passion Play and no one could figure out what the hell Ian Anderson was talking about. Alice deserves a lot of credit for producing a concept album in the mid-70s that wasn’t so obtuse and into itself that no one could get it.

Parents in 1976 probably saw their kids with the album and thought it was a rock version of Dante’s Inferno. And if he had gone that direction, it would have been just as tedious as Inferno is (Have you ever read it? Yawn. I expected 14th-century torture porn to be way more interesting than it was). Your average metal band would have loaded the album with deadly serious faux Satanisms, but Alice is about a thousand times more intelligent and clever than your average metal band, so he made a comedy album instead. Right off the bat Alice gives the game away with the title track. Sure, it starts out with ominous sounding guitars, but “Go to Hell” is freakin’ hilarious:

You’d poison a blind man’s dog and steal his cane
You’d gift wrap a leper and send him to your Aunt Jane
You’d even force feed a diabetic a candy cane!
And you can go to Hell.

I’ve heard those lines a thousand times and never get tired of them. And the song rocks pretty hard, too. Alice stole Steven Hunter and Dick Wagner from Lou Reed, and the guitar work on the album is stellar on every single track. Check out the Spanish sounding intro to the lovely “Wake Me Gently”, or the guitar hero fireworks on “Wish You Were Here”. This is the best that rock guitar had to offer in 1976 (of course, in 1977 Eddie Van Halen came along and re-wrote the rule book, but that was still a year off yet).

So after his arrival in Hell, what happens to Alice? Well, what could be more hellish than being forced to disco for eternity? “You Gotta Dance”. Alice cleverly pokes fun at disco for the “Disco Sucks” crowd while still getting a disco song on the album for commercial purposes at the same time – you’ve gotta appreciate that. We are then introduced to the Devil himself in “I’m the Coolest”, and it drives me nuts that I’ve never been able to find out who voiced the Devil on this album, or if it was Alice himself – either way, with his Barry White bass voice and smooth soul delivery, the Devil sounds pretty cool indeed. But Alice is a little slow on the uptake, because it only dawns on him who he’s dealing with on the next song, “Didn’t We Meet”:

They say that you are the King
Of this whole damn thing
But that only confused me
They say I don’t stand a ghost
Of a chance with my host
And it frankly amused me

But let’s drink a few
‘Cause lookin’ at you I’d swear
Didn’t we meet in the night in my sleep somewhere?

Side one of the album closes out with a surprisingly personal and moving song, “I Never Cry”. At the time Alice was floundering in the depths of alcoholism, and for the first time ever let out a little Vincent Furnier instead of his usual Alice Cooper character. It’s a genuine plea for help from a funny guy who has put himself in a very dark place. He sounds surprisingly vulnerable for a guy who has sneered his way through most of the songs he’s ever sang. And I love the intimate delivery – back in the day a rock star could sing a ballad without it turning into some stadium power rock anthem, and listening to this song it’s hard to not feel that rock music has lost something since the power ballad became the unchallenged platform for expressing an artist’s soft-but-not-sissy-soft side. There is power in this song, but it doesn’t come from power chords and a loud, blustery chorus. I like a great power ballad as much as the next guy, but if you really want to express human emotion, this is how it’s done.

Alice kicks off side two with his riotous dialogue with the Devil, “Give the Kid a Break”. How could you not love the back and forth between them?

Background singers: “Give the kid a break”
The Devil: “Give me one good reason why I should”
Background singers: “Give the kid a break”
Alice: “All right, all right, so I made a few mistakes, but listen, for heaven’s sake”
The Devil: “Watch your language, kid”
Alice: “OK, OK, don’t get hot…”

After realizing he can’t win an argument with the Devil, Alice ‘fesses up with “Guilty”:

Just tried to have fun
Raised Hell and then some
I’m a dirt talking, beer drinking woman chasing minister’s son
Slap on the make-up
And blast out the music
Wake up the neighbors with a roar like a teenage heavy metal elephant gun
If you call that guilty then that’s what I am
I’m guilty

And after that delectable barrage from the “teenage heavy metal elephant gun”, we get the lovely “Wake me gently”, with its Spanish guitar intro and soaring bridge that gives me chills every time. And when Alice sings “Please help me, I’m frightened…” at the end of that bridge, I’m honestly not sure he isn’t. Next up, the guitar duel “Wish You Were Here”, where Hunter and Wagner pull out all the stops, and my only complaint is I wish it was as long as the version on The Alice Cooper Show.

Only Alice Cooper would think to do a hard rock version of the popular standard “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”, and he’s smart enough to keep it to one verse so the song doesn’t wear out its welcome. Not sure how the song fits into the overall concept, but at the end of the song we hear an alarm clock ringing, and Alice begins waking up from his dream about going to Hell (yes, it was all a dream, I know, not very original. The twist at the end of Welcome 2 My Nightmare is a little more satisfying, although it’s a much weaker album). And as he is waking up, the woodwinds and strings usher us back to the land of the living with “Going Home”, a gorgeous song with an epic chorus. And how many of us haven’t asked ourselves

I wonder, did anyone miss me?
Or have I been gone so long, they though that I’d died.
How many said “I wonder what happened to Alice?”
How many shrugged or laughed,
How many cried?

And you have to love the defiant “Well I don’t give a damn!” that follows. One more epic chorus leads into an even more epic coda, with its horns and strings and bombast, and Alice has led us back out of Hell. And thus one of the finest examples of a well-done concept album I can think of comes to an end.

Not everyone gets Alice Cooper. A lot of people want to pump their fists to “School’s Out” and that’s about it. And if that’s all you want from Alice fine, but there is so much more. Alice can be very in your face, no question, but he’s also got a sly, subtle sense of humor that not everyone catches. Alice Cooper is a witty breath of fresh air in a world of rock and roll cavemen, and in my book never gets 1/10th the credit he deserves. Alice Cooper Goes to Hell is one of the best examples of what the man has to offer, and if you don’t get it, fine, turn your brain off and go back to listening to your Kiss albums. Now there’s a group that could have used some Alice Cooper wit to liven up all their deadly dull caveman albums.

Happy freakin’ Halloween!

 

 

“Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading The Wall Street Journal.” – Alice Cooper

 

“Alice, my old friend, if there was ever a rock star less deserving of the epithet ‘moron’, it is you. ” – Brutally Honest Rock Album Reviews