Album Review: Alice Cooper – Breadcrumbs

 

Alice Cooper – Breadcrumbs

October 31, 2019

ALBUM REVIEW

OVERALL (OUT OF 10): 9

 

Has Alice Cooper forgotten his raison d’être? I mean, Breadcrumbs isn’t a bad album, actually I’d say it’s 2/3 of a pretty great album and 1/3 of a thoroughly misguided mess, which is the best you can hope for really in 2019. But what Alice excels at (when he’s firing on all cylinders anyway) is crafting hilarious swipes at the foibles of life in our modern times with his uniquely satirical brand of songwriting. But we don’t get any songwriting from Alice on Breadcrumbs other than a tragically neutered version of “Detroit City” that excised and discarded all of the best parts of the original, and an excellent new original “Go Man Go” – other than that it’s a cover album. It’s not that Alice can’t do a fantastic cover song from time to time, his cover of “Pretty Ballerina” on Dirty Diamonds is one of the greatest cover versions of all time bar none. There was something supremely but subtly subversive about Alice Cooper covering such a pure, wholesome song with such an unquestionable level of absolutely unadulterated sincerity. When Alice Cooper gets that pure and wholesome, it kind of turns pure and wholesome on its head, so it was a cover version that worked on a multitude of levels in a chillingly perverse way, and the guy was probably just genuinely trying to sing the song the way The Left Banke did.

But when a songwriter as freaking hilarious as Alice Cooper can be releases a cover album, it’s hard not to be a little disappointed. Even if it’s really just a cover EP that can listened to in about 20 minutes. And it starts off on completely the wrong foot – “Detroit City” from The Eyes of Alice Cooper was three minutes and 59 seconds of Detroit rock brilliance, best song about the Motor City ever, totally kicks the crap out of Kiss’ “Detroit Rock City” (although any half-decent rock song does). One of Alice’s best songs from the 2000s on easily his best album from the 2000s. I love the chugga-chugga verses with that exquisitely fat guitar riff, those snazzy horns, and that gloriously riotous chorus “Well I was born there/Gonna die there/With all my long hair/Detroit City”…which Alice stupidly opted to remove from “Detroit City 2020” on Breadcrumbs. In its stead, we get a lame, monotonous recitation of vaguely Detroit-related things. I can’t even begin to describe how disappointed I was the first time I heard the new version, I was anticipating that amazing chorus which was the best part of the whole song, and instead we get a melodically sterile “Bleak town/Sleek town/Freak town/Detroit City/Downtown/Motown/My Town/Detroit City”. Simply awful. It’s making me question Alice’s judgment in his old age, why would he ruin such a great song like that? Right off the bat there’s a huge strike against the album.

But good old Alice, lovable scamp that he is, couldn’t let us down completely, and redeems himself with the only other song on the EP he wrote, “Go Man Go”, a fun rocker about a guy fresh out of prison whose wild girlfriend eggs him on to all kinds of acts of stupidity. With its edgy, jumpy beat and spirit of abandon, it perfectly encapsulates the sound of two troublemakers on the town raising hell. This guy really needs to get a new girlfriend though, she seems to get him in all kinds of trouble – I’ll bet his girlfriend is the one who got him jailed in the first place.

We ride into the night
And everything’s all right
I try to take it slow
But she yells, “Go man go”

After getting him into all kinds of trouble the song ends on a mysterious note, with the cops hot on their tail our hapless protagonist and his wild child girlfriend are coming up on a railroad crossing with a train coming fast, and although he’s not at all sure they can make it, when he’s asking “Should I slam on the brakes or step on the gas?” she urges him “Go Man go!”. And in a clever bit of storytelling we never get to hear whether or not they made it. I like to think they did. It’s a classic song, well worthy of the high standards I expect from Mr. Alice, better than most of the songs from his last couple of albums.

The cover of Bob Seger’s “East Side Story” continues in a similar vein, although this time it’s the girlfriend trying to hold her boyfriend back from wanton acts of lawlessness with her “No Johnny Johnny no”, and we can all guess how that ends up. I’ve never heard the Bob Seger original , and I don’t have enough interest in Bob Seger to bother, but the Alice Cooper version is cool enough I don’t see why I’d need to anyway. Bob Seger is about the last songwriter this side of Barry Manilow I ever would have thought wrote the song, it sounds nothing like “Against the Wind” or “That Old Time Rock and Roll” – and that’s a good thing. A very good thing. “East Side Story” is a far better song than we had any right to expect from a soft rock mediocrity like Bob Seger, and since I love the song it’s a dang good thing Alice Cooper covered it, because normally I wouldn’t voluntarily go within hearing range of anything by Bob Seger. The song starts out with such an ominous vibe there’s never any doubt how it’s going to end, and Alice’s delivery is pitch perfect spot on. Another winner.

Next up is a gender-bending cover of Suzi Quatro’s “Your Mama Won’t Like Me”, and this makes three great songs in a row. Alice plays the lines

I wear my jeans too short and my neckline too low
I’m getting stared at wherever I go
I wear my jeans too tight and I stay out all night
And when you turn me on, you’ll see how I can bite

perfectly, it’s a real hoot, he’s having a real fun time singing the part of a girl gone wild. More than any other song on the EP this one captures a 70s vibe, with its funky guitar and its sleek horns – I’d say a 70 year old Alice Cooper does a better Suzi Quatro than a 25 year old Suzi Quatro. Fun fact, she opened for the Alice Cooper band back in the early 70s (how would you like to have the job of being the opening act for a band with boa constrictors and guillotines? That’s a little hard to compete with when you’re trying to establish your bad girl image). “Na na na na na na na na na na na Your Mama Won’t Like Me”. Insanely catchy chorus, and Alice’s vocal has just the right amount of faux bad girl menace to make it the fun song it deserves to be. So here we are on our second cover song, and Alice has proven himself to be the absolute perfect interpreter of other people’s material so far.

But just when you think Alice has snatched victory from jaws of defeat after the disaster of the opening track, there comes a completely misguided cover of “Devil with a Blue Dress On”. The vibe is like someone sucked all of the energy and excitement out of a Motown song, it’s the most pedestrian Motownish arrangement you will ever in your life hear, and the hit version by Mitch Ryder and The Detroit Wheels wasn’t even a Motown song to begin with. The thing just kind of plods along, and if Alice feels any excitement whatsoever for that hot woman in the blue dress, you’d never know it. One of the worst cover versions I’ve ever heard that isn’t “Bluebirds Over the Mountain” (by any artist who ever covered it, take your pick, Newton’s Fourth Law of Thermodynamics is that is impossible to devise a decent cover of “Bluebirds Over the Mountain”, and there have been some pretty amazing artists who have tried). Lethargic, tossed off, and enervated, I really don’t know what Alice was going for here but is a total and complete misfire. Things pick up with the segue into “Chains of Love”, but while there is suddenly some energy, Alice is hopelessly out of his element here. One listen to the playback when he recorded it should have been enough for him to know this was better left unreleased. I’d call it a train wreck, but train wrecks are at least interesting, and nothing about this is. Even the spoken word intro manages to bore me, and it’s only a few seconds long. This cover version has no legitimate reason to exist. Skip it.

Alice closes out the EP with a cover off The MC5’s “Sister Anne”, and it’s a nice recovery from the massive stumble of the medley that precedes it. Alice is back on his home turf vocally, and turns in a fantastic performance. I’ll bet that’s even him playing harmonica at the end, until the tenth time I saw him live I’d never known he could play a pretty cool harmonica. Maybe he doesn’t do it very often because it’s hard to convince people you’re this scary Alice Cooper character on-stage when when you are blowing a harmonica, the least intimidating instrument this side of a xylophone. The song doesn’t really grab me like “East Side Story” or “Your Mama Won’t Like Me”, and I have a little trouble sorting out the point of it, maybe I’m just stupid but I’m not sure it says a lot as a song – but it’s a great performance nonetheless.

Alice invited a host of Detroit musicians to play on the EP, I have no idea who plays what, but the musicianship is uniformly excellent. Personally I think the best guitar solo is “Your Mama Won’t Like Me”, it fits best with the 70s vibe of the song, but there’s a great guitar solo on “East Side Story” too. And with the deplorable exception of “Devil With a Blue Dress”, there’s a lot of energy and oomph in the performances, led by Alice himself singing like a man 50 years younger.

While I would have loved to have a whole album of Alice Cooper originals, I have to say, the man is completely underrated as an interpreter of other musician’s songs, and this EP is pretty convincing proof of that. Maybe it’s the sense of fun the guy has exuded in his music for five decades now – I hear a lot of cover versions where the artist forgot to have a good time with the song (think Phil Collins’ cover of “Groovy Kind of Love” for the best example of that ever). With the exception of “Devil with a Blue Dress”, Alice is obviously having a great time with these songs, and knows what they need in order to be performed the way that they were meant to be. I’d say this is a far more successful release than The Hollywood Vampire’s Rise from earlier this year – while that one was mostly originals, they mostly sucked, so maybe I should take back my lament from earlier about Alice not writing more of the songs on the EP, with one glaring exception his cover versions are great on the album. I’d go so far as to say that God inspired Bob Seger to write “East Side Story” solely so that a few decades later Alice Cooper could sing it. God works in mysterious ways, after all, and after three solid decades as a hardcore Christian I guess it shouldn’t be so surprising that Alice has become an instrument in His hands.

I think we all really need to give Alice his due – after five decades in the business, and at more than 70 years old, the guy still seems to be having a great time. I saw him for the tenth time this past summer, and he was as fun to watch as ever. That same energy, that same campy bravado, that same sly winking “we all know this is a put-on, right?” faux menace – Alice is always up for a good time, and to be honest, I think that’s the secret to his success – unlike most other rockers in the biz, he’s never taken himself too seriously, never believed he was anything more than a great entertainer, never let his head get too big like a lot of rock stars I could name (cough, Bono). He’s like the anti-Roger Waters. If we are lucky, and if his health holds, we might even get another decade of fun out of him before Death – who he has been poking fun at for 50 years now – comes to take Alice to his eternal reward. And if there’s any justice in this existence of ours, the title of an album of his from 1976 got it all wrong, because there is no way in a just universe that some who has given so many people so many good times as Alice Cooper has is going to Hell.