Alice Cooper still possess artistry in spades. As their new album reveals, the band’s musical bond was too strong to be broken by time—or even by death.
In the history of popular music, it is extremely rare to find cases of bands that break up for long periods and return with the same vitality they once displayed. The original members of Alice Cooper, having spent half a century apart, would appear to be the most unlikely candidates for a convincing comeback. Compounding matters, co-founding guitarist Glen Buxton, who stamped his signature all over the band’s classic catalog, has been dead since 1997. Somehow, though, with The Revenge of Alice Cooper, Buxton’s surviving bandmates pull off nothing less than a musical miracle.
Before Alice Cooper went solo in 1974-1975, the moniker “Alice Cooper” encompassed both Alice the individual and the group he fronted. Yes, it’s confusing, but it also makes sense: by tagging himself as the band’s namesake, Cooper—née Vincent Furnier—didn’t mean to position himself as a more significant presence than his bandmates. On the contrary, he was acknowledging that their collective assemblage of talent was so bountiful he had no choice but to be subsumed within it. At least at the beginning, Alice functioned less as a leader and more like a channel, a kind of living hood ornament for the dynamic musical force behind him.
From 1969 to 1973—a gloriously creative span of just four and a half years—the original five-piece Alice Cooper group released seven albums of brain-twisting post-psychedelia that cemented their status as one of rock music’s most trailblazing units. (Buxton didn’t play on the group’s final album, Muscle of Love, but was credited at the time.) For perspective: this was a group that put such a peculiar twist on rock and roll that none other than Frank Zappa famously decided to sign them after seeing them clear out a New York club. Music that was unpalatable to the masses, Zappa reasoned, held a certain power.
Over time—once Alice Cooper decamped from Zappa’s Straight Records to Warner Bros.—the outré elements came to be harnessed by then-nascent producer Bob Ezrin. Under Ezrin’s guidance, songs, hooks, and arrangements emerged in the form of unlikely hits, including “I’m Eighteen”, “School’s Out”, and “Elected”. As the band honed their musical acumen, they still managed to preserve (and even amplify) the unorthodox approach that defined their aesthetic. Guitarists Buxton and Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway, and drummer Neal Smith transformed traditional roles like lead guitar, rhythm section, and timekeeper into complete worlds of sound.
Furnier is fond of saying that the group “wanted to drive a stake through the heart of the hippie generation”. Sure, their work reflected America’s lurch away from idealism into the acid-fried stupor of Watergate, serial murder, suburban malaise, homogeneity, and commercialism that defined the 1970s. That said, listening back to landmark albums like 1972’s School’s Out and 1973’s Billion Dollar Babies, there’s an almost wholesome spirit in the way Alice Cooper hearkened back to the golden age of musicals. Furnier may have wanted to take listeners on a horror-movie trip to hell, but his heart might as well have been on Broadway.
For their part, his bandmates provided beautifully grand backdrops for his parade of costume changes, which is not to diminish Furnier’s importance. When Alice Cooper first took the world by storm with 1971’s Love It to Death, Furnier performed the role of trickster/carnival barker with a relish that put him in a class by himself. His flair for switching guises landed him closer to a Vaudeville MC than to archetypal rock leads like Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, and Roger Daltrey. Indeed, Furnier paved the way for figures like Gene Simmons and Marilyn Manson. According to Furnier, even David Bowie drew inspiration from Alice Cooper’s stage show at a pivotal point in his career.
As a member of the band, Furnier pre-dated glam, metal, and—believe it or not—punk. (In Brad Tolinsky’s in-depth essay commissioned for the group’s 2011 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Tolinsky cites Johnny Rotten singing “I’m Eighteen” in his audition for the Sex Pistols. Tolinsky also argues that Cooper “spawned the goths”.) On his own, Furnier charted a similarly adventurous course through pop, new wave, and art rock, with a Bernie Taupin-written concept album and appearances on The Muppet Show and Hollywood Squares thrown in for good measure. Alas, by 1986’s Constrictor, the sharp satirical wit had dulled. Once known as one of rock’s most compelling characters, Alice Cooper had become a cartoon.
Where Furnier had once cleverly appropriated B-movie gimmicks in service of creating art, his albums started to feel like actual B-movies—and not the kind that walk a fine line between self-parody and satire. Shock, alas, had congealed into schlock, and the winking self-awareness was long gone. To say nothing of Furnier’s self-reinvention as a Christian conservative. Hats off to him for being able to maintain loyalties to both religion and rock and roll simultaneously, but the apparent discordance was less noteworthy without the music to support it. In this regard, The Revenge of Alice Cooper does not get off to the most promising start.
The Revenge of Alice Cooper opens with a smoky keyboard bass figure that’s supposed to send chills down your spine, but faux-scary movies for young kids do a better job of setting a tone. It only gets worse when Furnier sneers, “I think I’ll hide inside your bedsheets”. Admittedly, Furnier has tongue planted firmly in cheek as he taunts from the point of view of a black mamba snake. Still, at this point—not even 20 seconds into the album—it appears as if he couldn’t help but let Cooper The Comic Book Villain drive a stake through the heart of this reunion before it even gets off the ground.
From there, however, Smith, Dunaway, Bruce, returning producer Ezrin, and special guest Robby Krieger of the Doors swoop in to the rescue. With their help, as the music primps and swaggers in the background, Furnier immediately transforms back into the magnetic ringleader who went missing decades ago. Later, on “Kill the Flies”, Furnier truly comes to life as a psychiatric hospital patient who hallucinates flies buzzing around him. With doo-wop-style vocals ooh-ing softly in the background against Bruce’s twirling leads and tastefully restrained rhythm guitar crunch, the band strikes the perfect balance between humor and pathos—reminding us yet again that, in the right hands, the two moods can go together perfectly.
It isn’t easy to put into words just how convincingly this creative team resurrect not only its own spirit, but the ethos of an era. Fans of music from the early to mid-1970s—acts like David Bowie, the Stooges, Blue Öyster Cult, etc.—will undoubtedly pick up Bruce’s guitar timbres. On tracks like “Up All Night”, “Money Screams”, and “Inter Galactic Vagabond Blues”, listeners who lived through Alice Cooper’s heyday might find themselves wondering if they’ve slipped back into the past somehow. The Revenge of Alice Cooper contains myriad Easter egg-like references to the back catalog—too many to count, in fact.
The racing tempo of “Wild Ones”, for example, recalls “Muscle of Love”; the acoustic intro to “Blood on the Sun” nods to “The Ballad of Dwight Fry”, and several tunes hearken back to the dusty psychedelia of “Luney Tune”. Later, on “What Happened to You”, Buxton himself returns via an unearthed guitar part, giving us one more chance to savor the old magic he shared with Bruce. Nevertheless, Ezrin was wise not to settle for re-creating the production values he once helped invent. Despite the awareness of past glories, Ezrin does an admirable job of clearing away the cobwebs.
Much like John Cameron Mitchell showed us with Hedwig and the Angry Inch, it’s not enough to just exhume old sounds. Without an animate spirit, The Revenge of Alice Cooper would fall flat as the stirrings of an undead corpse. Today, with so many artists (and AI platforms!) keen on copying old production motifs, it’s the immediacy of the recording—and the heartbeat underneath—that stand out the most here.
A newly restored outtake of “Return of the Spiders”, another recording that sat for 50 years, offers a glimpse into the early days of the band, when they were still toying with blues rock. As an embryonic version of the iconic “School’s Out” guitar hook flickers in and out on the right side of the stereo field, Alice Cooper sound like spiritual cousins to the Doors. In truth, they sound virtually indistinguishable from countless other bands of the day. They would soon leave such genre conventions in the dust. Listening to “Return of the Spiders” in full knowledge of where the band ended up is what makes it so thrilling.
In 1973, Alice Cooper put out a song about necrophilia with the full blessing of Warner Bros., a song that never once explicitly mentions the act of intercourse with a dead body. If it’s true that there was more of an art to transgressiveness in the culture back then, Alice Cooper deserve a tremendous amount of credit for fusing transgression and art to the point where we couldn’t distinguish them from one another. Today, playing to a completely desensitized, demoralized, and overstimulated audience, there’s no sense in Furnier and company trying to shock. They can’t compete with viral murder videos—or 1970s copycat bands, for that matter—which means that artistry is the last weapon they have left to rattle us with.
Fortunately, Alice Cooper still possess artistry in spades. As The Revenge of Alice Cooper reveals, their musical bond was too strong to be broken by time—or even by death.