August 18 - Welcome To My Nightmare

I have already talked a little bit about how I discovered Alice Cooper - and linked him to my yuuge obsession with Kiss. The last Alice Cooper song I played was by the band Alice Cooper - today I am heading to 1975 and the title track from his first solo album: Welcome To My Nightmare. The band Alice Cooper had seen significant success with a great string of albums: Love It To Death, Killer, School's Out, and Billion Dollar Babies. However, their last album, Muscle Of Love, did not do well on the charts. Personally I can see why, as the album simply isn't that good. The title track is my personal highlight, and even that is only good - and nothing like their past four albums.

I wish I could say that I was eagerly anticipating Alice Cooper's solo debut, but at age 3, I had no clue who he was - and I was still about 5 years away from becoming a huge Kiss fan. However, in retrospect, I can honestly say that Welcome To My Nightmare blows me away - and it really still does today, 41 years after its release. He hired Bob Ezrin back as a producer - he had produced the string of four great band records mentioned above - who in turn brought in much of Lou Reed's backing band following his work on Reed's 1973 masterpiece Berlin. The album also features one of my all time favorite bass players, Tony Levin, who has played with Peter Gabriel and King Crimson to name just a couple.

When I first listened to Welcome To My Nightmare, I was drawn in by the mood of the album more than anything else. The album sounds like a horror movie - with the title track as a campy introduction before the darker songs start appearing, especially the sequence of Years Ago, Steven, and The Awakening, and of course a song like The Black Widow. Alice Cooper the vaudeville singer also shows up in Some Folks, and there are songs like Department Of Youth and Escape that only by some weird miracle end up fitting in. But make no mistake, this is Alice Cooper's nightmare. If you want to be frightened by music, find Years Ago, Steven, and The Awakening - but until then, Welcome To My Nightmare...