Page 42 - Classic Rock (February 2020)

ALICE COOPER
Alice Cooper at the Cincinnati Pop
Festival, June 13, 1970. Not long
after Easy Action, Alice Cooper would
be among rock’s biggest draws.
“The hippie side of LA and the freak side
of LA were like oil and water.”
Dennis Dunaway
really popular in LA at the time, and everybody
kept calling Alice Tiny Tim, so we decided to
change his hair colour.”
s the band’s notoriety spread, an
audition was arranged with freak
Akingpin Frank Zappa, with a view to
signing to his Straight Records label, for which
they famously arrived 12 hours early at 7am. An
impressed Zappa immediately signed them to
a three-album deal.
But all was not strictly as it seemed. Dunaway:
“By the time Frank agreed to put us on his label,
his manager had already told him: ‘We can’t afford
to do this.’”
Slicing expenses to the bone, the band’s Pretties
For You debut album was recorded in just two
nights, working “from midnight to sun-up”. “We
didn’t have time to work with Zappa. We basically
went in and he said: ‘Start playing, we’re gonna
record it.’ We didn’t even realise what was
happening. We were still warming up when he
said: ‘Okay, we’ve got about half the album.’ Then
Frank got sick and didn’t show up for the second
day. [Zappa’s manager] Herbie Cohen decided to
produce the record, showed up and proceeded to
fall asleep on the couch. So we were like: ‘What are
we gonna do?’ We didn’t know how to work any of
the equipment. Anyway, Ian
Underwood [the Mothers Of
Invention’s woodwind and
keyboard player] came to our
rescue. The only reason Pretties
For You sounds as good as it does
– which isn’t that good – was
because of him.”
Pretties For You may have been
flawed, but it had sufficient legs to
42 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
take it into the US album chart. Its modest
commercial success gave the band the option to
return to the studio and make a second record. But
Zappa’s management didn’t want to spend another
cent on Alice Cooper, so they set an implausibly
tight deadline within which to deliver the record,
wholly expecting the Coopers to buckle under the
pressure and fail.
Creatively ambitious, the Coopers needed time
to hone material, but without access to a rehearsal
room they were forced to pull together
compositions at sound-checks and write in the car
between gigs. Consequently, as they reconvened in
Sunwest Studios in November ’69 to record the
album that would become Easy Action, they were
far from prepared.
“We were only about a third of the way to being
ready to record an album,” says Dunaway. “If we’d
had a rehearsal room and enough time to get the
songs in shape, Easy Action would have sounded
more like [next album, in ’71] Love It To Death than
like an unprepared free-for-all.”
Just as with Pretties For You, much of Easy Action’s
material was wilfully complex. But with reality
biting, the band realised they had to buff up their
outsider art with just enough commercial sheen
to secure themselves a wider audience.
“In my opinion, Pretties For You was too
commercial,” Dunaway says,
laughing, “I wanted to go even
more abstract.”
But the band was a democracy.
Every musical idea, lyric, even
how the band dressed had to be
voted on, with every collective
decision passed unanimously.
Ultimately, on this occasion the
practical won out over the surreal.
“After Pretties For You we had a meeting and said:
‘This isn’t putting any food on our table. We need
to start learning how to write songs that are more
relatable to people.’”
Back in high school, when Alice was still Vince,
he and Dunaway were both in the same art class.
When they formed their garage band, they wanted
to incorporate artistic ideas in order to stand out
from the crowd. From the beginning, their live
shows were challenging: wilfully chaotic, ever-
changing, theatrical.
Initially, Vince wasn’t terribly comfortable on
stage. In their earliest incarnation, when the band
performed covers he’d channel the songs’ original
singers. But on original material he seemed lost.
He would even face the back of the stage rather
than the audience. Until it was suggested he sing
each song as a different character. One particular
character, a dark one that he’d inhabit during Fields
Of Regret, became a firm fan favourite. So more
songs were written specifically for this character
and, as it fleshed out, it gradually metamorphosed
into the alter-ego inhabited by Vince Furnier to this
day – the character of Alice Cooper. It was dark,
sinister, outrageous. And it was relatable.
hile the quintessential Cooper
character found on Easy Action’s most
Wenduring tracks (Mr & Misdemeanor, The
Return Of The Spiders) would develop a commercial
allure of its own with the passage of time, a more
immediate form of commerciality was sought in
the album’s single. Shoe Salesman, an inoffensive,
piano-driven ditty as market-targeting and twee as
anything one might expect of pre-Space Oddity
Bowie, saw the album’s unlikely producer David
Briggs (renowned for his work with Neil Young)
being more hands-on than at any other point
during Easy Action’s recording.
“He was one of those Topanga Canyon guys
with the tan fringed jacket,” Dunaway recalls.
“Now the hippie side of LA and the freak side of
LA were like oil and water, so when we walked in
he didn’t like the way we looked, didn’t like our
humour. Usually when we turned on the charm GETTY