Album Review: Alice Cooper – Road

Alice Cooper – Road

August 29, 2023

ALBUM REVIEW

OVERALL (OUT OF 10): 3

One of the more ridiculous aspects of the American secondary educational system is the way that coaches, band directors, drama teachers and the like completely warp students’ perspective on their life’s priorities.  Of course, the propagandization rife in the American educational system is pretty ridiculous as well (and is currently getting much, much worse), few things have rocked my world as much as reading James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me and realizing the extent to which my public school education had been exquisitely designed to keep me away from the skeletons in the American closet.  Gotta give those young ‘uns a sense of blind unquestioning patriotism, you never know when you might need ‘em for cannon fodder, and it’s a lot easier if they’ve been conditioned to go not just willingly, but enthusiastically.  After all, American business interests across the globe aren’t going to protect themselves (see War is a Racket, a remarkable and sobering book by the most decorated U.S. Marine in history and the original brutally honest writer, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler).  

But even if American high schools weren’t mostly designed to produce good little cogs in the machinery of the American military-industrial complex, they’d still be pretty ridiculous for forcing extracurricular activities to consume a young persons’ life.  The football coach thinks winning football games is the only thing that matters, so he makes damn well sure his players also think winning football games is the only thing that matters (quite willingly aided by overzealous parents who put their kids in elite little league teams from 3^rd grade on so they have a better chance of making the high school team).  The drama teacher for some bizarre reason thinks their version of Once Upon a Mattress is going to change the world à la Waiting for Guffman, so when it consumes their world for the whole semester, they make sure it consumes the worlds of all of the drama nerds too.  And marching band, don’t even get me started on marching band.  Marching band isn’t an extracurricular activity, it’s a cult, and its cult leaders mercilessly drill their adherents for hours on end on meaningless marching band routines that have exactly zero applicability to anything they could possibly do in their future lives.  I mean, how many people do you know who make their living as part of a professional marching band?

Somehow my son got sucked into that cult, and because marching band is the most important damn thing in the entire known universe, the marching band director thinks nothing of making dozens of parents wait an extra half hour past pickup time while he drills the students on their routines a couple more times.  And so it was I recently found myself with a little time on my hands to listen to the new Alice Cooper album, Road.  The point of all of this castigation of the American educational system (and I do have one) is that when the cult finally let my son go for the night, I was listening to “Rules of the Road”, and he listened for a couple of minutes and said “Dad, this song is terrible”.  And I couldn’t argue with that.  But when we got home, he walked in the door singing “These are the rules of the road…”, and he was singing it for the rest of the night.

And that, in a nutshell, is what I think of Alice’s new album.  The songs are painfully mediocre, nothing really grabs you, the album is chock full of the same guitar parts you’ve heard on every metal album ever made, along with halfhearted attempts at humor that don’t really land.  But the choruses are just catchy enough to stick in your head for a while.  Can you build a great album on moderately catchy choruses?  Screw “to be or not to be”, that’s really the question.

The best of these moderately catchy choruses is album opener “I’m Alice”.  It’s kind of anthemic, and fairly catchy, if oddly self-referential.  If Alice wants to engage in that kind of self-promotion, sure, whatever, that’s the biz really.  I get the song because I’ve been an Alice Cooper fan for more than three decades now, but if you aren’t a big fan of The Coop you’ll have a hard time figuring out what it’s all about.  Is it a song that really connects to me in any way?   Well, no.  But neither does “Tie Me Kangaroo Down”, and I love that song.  Is the chorus quite catchy enough to make me love the song like I love “Tie Me Kangaroo Down”?  No – it’s catchy, but it’s not quite that catchy, and that’s pretty much the story of the whole album – not quite that catchy. 

“Welcome to the Show” is just a decentish chorus with a few formulaic lines in the verses, not much of a song really.  It’s got a couple of great solos, especially the one played by Nita Strauss (you can always tell which solos she is playing on the album, she has such a readily identifiable style.  Best guitarist Alice ever worked with bar none).  But the song is really nothing to get too excited about, and so here I am feeling unexcited about it. Nothing to see here, citizens, go on about your business.  Like the rest of the album, the song has a somewhat engaging chorus, and like of lot of them this one has a couple of really ripping solos in the middle – but somehow it just isn’t enough to pull me in. 

The whole album is like that. There just isn’t enough there to impress me.  Most of the songs are built on generic, rote guitar riffs.  A couple have some riffs that are somewhat engaging (that riff on “All Over the World” isn’t bad, “The Big Goodbye” is also a little better than the rest) – but it just isn’t enough.  After several listens, this just isn’t an album that’s compelling enough for me to want to hear it again.  The songs just don’t work for me.

With a couple of exceptions – “Baby Please Don’t Go” is surprisingly moving.  After listening to a bunch of songs that didn’t just reach out and grab me, this one took me by surprise.  Part of it is Alice’s emotional singing – he really, genuinely sounds like someone begging someone else not to leave.  He has always been a master of vocal acting – throughout his career he has time and again used his voice to play the part of a character in a song, I’m kind of surprised he never got into voicing cartoon characters, he has such a remarkable talent as a voice actor.  While all of these songs are supposed to be about life on the road, this is the only one that feels real, the only one that isn’t just going through the motions.  It’s the only song that feels like Alice is drawing on his own experiences rather than simply spouting clichés about life on the road.  Best new song on the album hands down.

Alice resurrected “Road Rats” from 1977’s Lace and Whiskey (an underrated album in my estimation), and it’s an awesome song, but this version doesn’t add anything to the original really.  The original rocked pretty hard, so this version can’t help but seem a little superfluous.  Adding a “Forever” to the title to make it “Road Rats Forever” doesn’t add enough to the song to make it different enough to be worth my time, I already had a perfectly good version as it was.  All of that said, this one’s killer, and maybe there is a point to putting it on this album for the billions of people in the world who don’t have a copy of Lace and Whiskey.  They should have invited co-writer Dick Wagner to play guitar on it though, that would have been a nice gesture. (Note – Several readers have pointed out there was a good reason Dick wasn’t invited, and that is because he died in 2014. My bad, I should have known).

I actually really like Alice’s version of “Magic Bus”, and it takes the album out on something of a high note.  The clever juxtaposition of the guitar part from Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” with The Who’s “Magic Bus” gets my attention, and there is some exceptional guitarwork on the song.  The vocals are fire, Alice is having a great time, and it shows.  Truly a joyful rendition, and hate me for saying it, but I think this version is even better than The Who’s version.  Except for the drum solo at the end, expertly played and boring as hell as all drum solos are, it does take a little of the shine off of what otherwise is a bright spot at album’s end.

But these songs are exceptions in a collection of rote, faceless rockers that all relate to the concept of touring a rock band.  That’s another problem with the album – I wouldn’t call it a concept album, more of an album with a theme, life on the Road.  Kind of an audio documentary of life on a tour I guess.  But how many songs can you really have about that without losing the listener’s interest?  Yeah, you tour all over the world.  Yeah, you see a lot of white lines on the side of the road from your tour bus.  Ho hum, you already told me about that in several songs already.  I mean, there’s only so much you can tell me about the life of a touring band over 45 minutes that I’m gonna find that interesting.  By the end of the album I’m not really in the mood to hear another song about life on the road again.  It’s kind of monotonous having one song after another talking about the crowds you play to and the roadies you travel with and the girls you leave behind and white lines on the road and whatnot.

And as I said before, pretty much all of the stuff on the album that is meant to be funny just isn’t.  Take “Big Boots” (get it?  It sounds like big bewbs, yuck yuck).  You know, maybe just a line or two in a song saying a waitress has big boots might have been mildly amusing, but it’s not a strong enough joke to build a whole song around.  And again, like most of the other songs, its got a kind of catchy chorus, but not catchy enough to really grab you.  Same with “Go Away”, wherein Alice describes a pesky stalker who spams him every night and calls and texts and writes.  It’s clearly an attempt at humor, but it just isn’t really all that funny.  Actually, this one has some unforgivably bad lines: “She’s a thorn stickin’ in my shoe / Like a kidney stone that just won’t pass through”.  Sorry, Alice, that’s kind of awful.  Alice gives us a spoken word section in “Rules of the Road” where his delivery is excellent – it’s just what he’s saying doesn’t tickle the funny bone so much.  Alice used to be reliably hilarious – I don’t know, you know how most old people don’t seem to know what’s funny?  Maybe he just got too old to be funny or something, I don’t know.

By the time I get to “100 Miles” near the end of the album I’m grateful for a little variety – too much of the rest of the album sounds kind of samey – but I’m still kind of worn out on road touring songs, and it’s not a great song either.  Not a bad chorus – typical on this album – but not strong enough to carry the song.  And what that’s spoken “I see the sign ahead / It says a hundred more miles” at the end of the song?  I thought he was going to say something else after that, and the the song just ended, and I was left going “geez, what was the point of that?”

I don’t know that I think Alice Cooper ever made a bad album – I actually love some of the ones that are generally considered turkeys (Zipper Catches Skin for example. Ultimate Classic Rock might have put it 27^th out of 28 in their ranking of Alice Cooper albums, but don’t care what they say, I love that album. Hell, that line “when zipper grabs skin/I’ll know I had it out when I should have kept it in” all by itself makes it an album worth having. “Zorro’s Ascent” is hilarious. How could you not love a song called “That Was the Day My Dead Pet Returned to Save My Life”? And don’t you think the back cover is pretty funny given the title of the album? I sure do).

But Alice has certainly made his share of albums that aren’t worth getting excited about, and his last few have fit neatly into that category. As a matter of fact, it pains me to say it, but the last Alice Cooper album I really got excited about was 2003’s The Eyes of Alice Cooper. That was the last album that really had a lot of standout songs – “Man of the Year” and “Novocaine” and “Detroit City” and “The Song That Didn’t Rhyme” and several others are songs I still go back to time and again. 2005’s Dirty Diamonds did have a couple of winners, “Woman of Mass Distraction”, and especially Alice’s marvelously earnest-yet-somehow-still-perverse take on the Left Banke’s “Pretty Ballerina”. 2011’s Welcome 2 My Nightmare had the odd song or two that caught my interest. But after that, if I am going to be brutally honest with myself, I can pretty much take it or leave it when it comes to the albums that followed. Except Breadcrumbs, that one was great, that one gave me hope for the future. Unfortunately it was better than the album it was supposed to serve as a teaser for, Detroit Stories. Alice keeps trying, I’ll give him that – but in all the years since The Eyes of he just hasn’t felt like the same old Alice anymore. The guy is as old as dirt, maybe he just outlived his muse or something.

I’m about as big an Alice Cooper fan as there is. Two weeks ago I saw him for the 13^th time, and in October I’ll make it 14. I’ve spent literally hours of my life with a grin on my face thanks to Alice. Hell, he even wished me happy birthday one year – sure, only because my wife paid him via Cameo – but Alice sang just for me. How many of you can say that? And he was a riot in his Cameo video, he can be a genuinely funny human being (way more funny than the Rudy Giuliani Cameo my brother’s kids bought him as a gag gift). For some weird reason he isn’t funny on this album, and I’m not sure why. I hate to give Alice a bad rating, but I can’t really honor the spirit of being brutally honest if I go easy on him just because I love the guy so much. As much as it pains me to say it, this isn’t a great album. Maybe it’s time for our old friend Alice to just stick to touring, after all these years that’s the one thing where he’s never let us down. Just don’t let him sing about it.

P.S. Now the recent Alice Cooper-related release I’d highly recommend is The Hollywood Vampires – Live in Rio. The show is fantastic, and Alice is in better voice than I’ve seen him in years. Check it out.