2017 - July 17 - He's Back

My hiatus took a long time - which tends to be a pattern for me - but over the last weekend, I was inspired to start posting music on Facebook again, and so I thought to myself, why not get back to my Exiled Expressions again. I am less ambitious than before, but I will still post music and musings here without putting any major expectations on myself. So since this is planned to be a comeback of sorts, I thought I'd announce it with another comeback (and an appropriately titled one as well) - this time from 1986, I believe.

Alice Cooper's album DaDa from 1983 was the last in a row of gradually less and less relevant - or even interessant - albums, and later documentaries have spent a lot of time on his ever increasing alcoholism (From The Inside, his last really good album for a long time, was released in 1978 following a stint in a sanatorium undergoing treatment for alcoholism - and the lyrics, mostly co-written with the Bernie Taupin of Elton John fame, were about people he met while he was in treatment). While there were individual good songs on each of the album none of the four albums following From The Inside (1980's Flush The Fashion, 1981's Special Forces, 1982's Zipper Catches Skin, and 1983's Dada) were memorable. At all.

But in 1986, after yet another treatment for alcoholism as well as cirrhosis of the liver, he was ready to be back again, and it started a commercial renaissance that probably topped itself with the song Poison from the 1989 album Trash (just another 80s album that sounds like just about any other Desmond Child production - but it sold load upon load of copies). With a song from the movie Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Alice Cooper was finding his way back to the charts and the public, and the song was very aptly titled He's Back (The Man Behind The Mask). The song reached #1 on Swedish charts, but did not make much of a dent on the charts in either USA or Norway.

Despite the lack of chart placement, I still remember the excitement I had when my friend Geir purchased the 12" single of He's Back at Mail Music, a record store that specialized in mail order music, but also had a store of sorts in the living room of an apartment pretty close to our middle school. I don't think we quite knew what to make of the sound the Coop had come up with, but we didn't care: It was new music from Alice Cooper, the man who inspired Kiss, who were our main heroes, and so it had to be great! I am not sure how much it is holding up today, 31 years later, but here it is, in all its glory!