Debate Club Dec 9, 2015 at 5:00 pm

Alice Cooper: Feed His Frankenstein

ALICE COOPER Perhaps the coolest golf-playing Republican owner of a theme restaurant on the planet.

Comments

1
Do yourself both a favor and get Dennis Dunaway's book from earlier this year (Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs!: My Adventures in The Alice Cooper Group). Can't recommend it enough.

And yes, I have tickets to the show on Tuesday (there was a $20 Black Friday deal for pretty decent seats). Don't give a fuck about Crue but saw the neo-Cooper show about a decade ago (co-headlining with Cheap Trick!) and it was a blast.
2
Alice's new album, Hollywood Vampires, is pretty awesome, as well.
3
I like Alice Cooper (OK, maybe just the early stuff) and think that side 1 of Killer is great. Crazy World of Arthur Brown (is there something other than early stuff?) was a fine band and I listened to the first album perhaps too many times...but...uhhh...

But if you go a little deeper into your Crazy World of Arthur Brown album, you can find a hint that, perhaps, Mr. Brown wasn't the first shock rocker. It's probably worth pointing out that his cover of "I Put a Spell on You" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins reflects Brown's own influences well. "I Put a Spell on You" is seminal in the development of rock and roll (and, after his death, we learned that Hawkins himself was seminal in the development of 57 to 75 children (it's hard to keep track)). In any case, Hawkins, who added a coffin to his act in the mid 50s, has kind of gotta be a better candidate for "the first, quote-unquote, shock rocker".

Considered this way, we might think of Crazy World of Arthur Brown (and Alice Cooper) as representative of something referenced by the title of one of Hawkins' last albums: "Black Music for White People."

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