Alice Cooper – Detroit Stories
March 7, 2021
ALBUM REVIEW
OVERALL (OUT OF 10): 4
Detroit Stories is a disappointment. However much I’d love to be able to say it’s a late career triumph for our old friend Alice, the sad fact of the matter is that if you have the preview EP Breadcrumbs, you already have the best songs on Detroit Stories, along with a really rippin’ cover of “Your Mama Won’t Like Me” that for whatever reason Alice opted not to include on the full album. Alice Cooper and Robert Plant are the only two old rock warriors I still hold out any hope for when they release a new album, but you let me down this time Alice. Robert, you carry the hopes of all us now. May the Force be with you.
I thought Breadcrumbs was mostly great – the update of “Detroit City” was a disaster, in that it excised a truly brilliant chorus from the song (“Well I was born there, I’m gonna die there, with all my long hair, DETROIT CITY!!!”) and replaced it with a lackluster recitation of vaguely Detroit-related things (“Bleak town, sleak town, freak town, Detroit city/Downtown, Motown, my town, Detroit city”. Bleh). “Devil with a Blue Dress On” was a limp wet noodle of a remake, but everything else was uniformly fantastic. “Go Man Go” was a fun new original about a moron whose hell-raising girlfriend is always getting him into trouble, “East Side Story” was a fantastic cover of a little-known Bob Seger song, and of course the cover of Suzi Quatro’s “Your Mama Won’t Like Me” was truckloads of fun. “Sister Anne” wasn’t quite as good, but good enough I wasn’t gonna complain about it. You can read my review of Breadcrumbs here. I also had pretty good feelings about Paranormal before that back in 2017, so there was every reason to think Detroit Stories would at least be a solid album.
So I had high hopes for Detroit Stories. But alas, Alice pulled a bait and switch and already released all of his best stuff on Breadcrumbs. Take those songs out, and I don’t think the rest of the album has much to recommend it, for two big reasons:
Alice forgot to pack his sense of humor when he headed up to Detroit to record these songs. Nobody – not even Weird Al – in the world of rock is funnier than Alice Cooper when he is firing on all cylinders. Who else has ever written a song with a title like “That Was the Day My Dead Pet Returned to Save My Life” and made it work? I still laugh my head off every time I hear “I Love America” off Dada. And even when he isn’t going for laughs, the guy is still generally pretty clever. But all attempts at humor on the album fall pretty flat. “Independence Dave” plays off a truly groan-worthy pun, and is really just an inferior re-write of “Fantasy Man” off of Dragontown. Now that, my friends, is a funny song: “I don’t do dishes/And I’m suspicious/Of any grown-up man that does…”. “Independence Dave” has nothing half so witty. None of the lines really land. I feel the same way about “I Hate You” – it’s supposed to be a send up of the way band members grow to hate each other, but it just isn’t all that funny: “I hate you and your stupid bass/What’s it like out there in space?… I hate you and that guitar pout/Those tired riffs we all laugh about/Hate your stinkin’, pudgy fingers on the neck/You’re the King of America, but you’re no Jeff Beck!” Lame. Too many lines in these songs just take up space without setting up or delivering a punch line.
I guess “$1000 High Heeled Shoes” is moderately amusing, but significantly less than marginally so, and not nearly as funny as Alice is capable of. Generally you can rely on good old Alice to put a smile on your face, but his attempts here really just don’t do it for me. Similarly, “Drunk and in Love” is supposed to be a humorous take on love on skid row, but nothing really tickles the funny bone. I don’t know, maybe the line “We can cuddle on the sidewalk where my buddy froze”, but you know, even that doesn’t strike me as funny really. I actually can’t put my finger on it exactly, but Alice’s attempts at humor on the album fall uncharacteristically flat. And “Shut Up and Rock” had potential (think Homer Simpson’s classic quote “Rock stars. Is there anything they don’t know?”), but it is mostly the line “Shut up and rock” shouted too many times, and not even close to the skewering of self-important Bonos foisting their opinion on the world it could have been. The idea had potential, but it fails to deliver. Besides, Alice fails to take his own advice with the too-serious-for-its-own-good and well-intentioned-but-unfortunately-superficial “Hanging On by a Thread (Don’t Give Up)” that sounds way too much like a poor man’s 80s hair metal anthem to be taken very seriously as a song of hope. Although I honestly respect the inclusion of the suicide hotline number at the end of the song, and if it saves at least one life it is worth having on the album. But it’s not a good song. So it’s a painfully unfunny album in all the places it was supposed to get a laugh.
And what is “Social Debris” supposed to be anyway? Stinging critique of society? Insightful commentary on how American life pulverizes us all into submission? Who knows? The song’s a hot mess lyrically, with unfocused, scattershot lines like “You said you’d treat me, but tried to delete me/You think I’m tragic, but I know I’m magic/Your eyes are everywhere/I see you spying there”. Same with “Wonderful World” – the lyrics are too obtuse to determine where Alice was really going with the song. Is it a song about how The Devil tries to seduce us with “So much sin, so much pain/So many souls for me to gain…It would be a wonderful world/If everyone was just like me”? Because if that’s what it is (and it’s so unfocused lyrically it’s impossible to tell), it’s a story Alice has told before, and told much better many times in the past. It’s pretty much the entire premise of The Last Temptation, which in my view is the last true masterpiece we got out of Alice (although Brutal Planet, Dragontown, and The Eyes of Alice Cooper were all pretty strong albums too). It’s ground that Alice shouldn’t try to cover again unless he’s got something new to say, and with “Wonderful World” he doesn’t.
So if Alice doesn’t come through with the originals, does he at least score with the cover songs on the album? Well, I am afraid that brings us to the second major flaw on the album.
The guy usually knows how to put a twist on a cover version that makes it his own, but he doesn’t do that here. One of the greatest cover versions of all time ever is Alice’s take on “Pretty Ballerina” off of Dirty Diamonds – because it is so heartfelt and sincere it completely discombobulates you that the guy who always sneers about everything is singing this happy sappy song so straight. He could’ve just done a nasty version, and that would have been easy – instead he made it into an honest-to-goodness homage and somehow made it ten times as subversive as it would’ve if he’d just gone for the easy shock of sliming the thing up. His version is a thing of beauty that is all the more striking because it is Alice Cooper that is singing this thing of beauty. If you’ve never heard it, you really need to, but be sure you listen to the Left Banke’s original first so you can get a sense of how lovingly Alice handles the song. The most perverse thing about it is he sings it like he really means it. He handles the song like the precious jewel that it is, and in doing so reminds me of the scene at the end of Blade Runner when Rutger Hauer beats the tar out of Harrison Ford, then saves his life and releases a dove as he dies. When Alice Cooper sings “Pretty Ballerina” in such a pure and earnest way, it’s like when I wonder “why the hell is Rutger Hauer holding a dove after beating the crap out of Harrison Ford”? How does such a beautiful act come from someone like that?
Alice has shown similar brilliance with other cover versions. He made “Clones” his own on Flush the Fashion. He did a sly take on “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” on Alice Cooper Goes to Hell. Rolf Kemp had no idea when he wrote “Hello Hooray”, but the song was never meant for Judy Collins – the sole purpose of its creation was so Alice Cooper could sing it. After hearing it on Billion Dollar Babies it could never make sense to hear anyone else ever sing it again. He out-Suzi-Quatro’ed Suzi Quatro on Breadcrumbs, it’s a real hoot to hear Alice sing “I wear my jeans too short, and my neckline’s too low”. The man knows how to make a cover version and claim it for his own.
But he doesn’t here. I’m probably supposed to gush about The Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll”, but I don’t think the song is that good to begin with, and Alice doesn’t bring anything special to his version, so what’s the point? “Our Love Will Change the World” is supposed to be unsettling, as this dark, weird vision of society is sung about in a happy, chipper, cheery manner, but the problem is there really isn’t anything that dark or unsettling in the lyrics, so the whole conceit falls flat on its face. Alice’s comment on the song is “And it was so strange, because it was happy and what it was saying was anything but happy — it was simply a great juxtaposition. And I got it immediately and said ‘OK, this is going to be great.’ The music saying one thing and the lyrics saying something else, I love that song. It is totally different from anything else on the album.” But the problem is there isn’t really anything sinister in the lyrics – it’s a brilliant concept, truly, but a total misfire in execution. And Alice doesn’t do much really to change that.
Alice sings cover songs on Detroit Stories, but never makes them his own. More’s the pity, because he’s shown us in the past he can take a song over and own it forever.
I’m the biggest Alice Cooper fan on the planet. I’ve seen him 10 times. I take all my kids to see him whenever he comes around. I’ve seen the guy beheaded repeatedly. I’ve seen him more often in the last few years than I’ve seen my own parents. I may be the only person living who still listens to Zipper Catches Skin (with its immortal lines “When zipper grabs skin/I’ll know I had it out/When I should have kept it in…”). I think Special Forces is the funniest album ever made, and hardly anybody’s ever heard it. I don’t like bashing Alice. But I gotta be as brutally honest with this one as I am with anyone else – this is not a good album.
And it isn’t like he didn’t try – it rocks hard. Musically it is solid. Solid, but not inspired. The that’s par for the course with Alice really. It’s been more than 40 years since Alice recorded with a truly groundbreaking guitarist – as much as I liked Ryan Roxie, he’s no Randy Rhoads. Guitar work on Alice Cooper albums tends to be competent, solid, professional – but never innovative. Not since The Last Temptation have I heard a riff on an Alice Cooper album that really grabbed me. So the album rocks pretty hard – but musically it is never memorable.
And I really don’t think Alice was just phoning things in – I think he really tried to write good songs. I think he really put a lot of work into it. I sense a good faith effort to make a great album. But a good faith effort that fell far short. I hate to say it, but it may be time for our old buddy Alice to retire from songwriting and just stick to putting on the awesomest classic rock show still on the road.
But then again, he’s had misfires in the past. Muscle of Love was a pretty big stumble for the Alice Cooper band, but Alice Cooper the solo artist came roaring back with Welcome to My Nightmare. The world of rock pretty much considered him down and out with Raise Your Fist and Yell, and if he’d thrown in the towel we wouldn’t have had Trash, and then the marvelous The Last Temptation after that. The man’s had ups and downs before, this down doesn’t have to mean there won’t ever be another up. But at age 73 you do have to wonder how many more ups he could possibly have left in him.
Alice Cooper is a living legend. His songwriting brilliance has never been properly appreciated by the world of rock at large. If you love rock music, you really need to hear Alice’s best albums. The word “genius” gets way overused in the music industry, but Alice has earned it over five decades of releasing some monster albums over the years. But does Detroit Stories belong among these monster albums? With this album I am afraid we need to paraphrase Wayne and Garth as they bowed before Alice in the 1992 classic movie Wayne’s World:
“It’s not worthy”.
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