Alice Cooper “Trash”
On Saturday, October 28, 1978, when I was just four years old — and several days before the first Halloween I can remember — I was permitted to stay up past 8pm to watch “The Muppet Show.” It was a darling evening, full of wide eyed anticipation, familial cuddling and not one, but two televised performances from a man with long, scraggly hair, ghastly eye makeup, and a black cape, who made a habit of decapitating himself during performances onstage and consuming ungodly amounts of beer and whiskey offstage.
The host that night — the man who appeared in between Fozzy’s “waka wakas” and Waldorf and Statler’s witty barbs — was, of course, Alice Cooper. Cooper was on the downslope of what had been an otherwise extraordinary decade. That night, he was pantomiming alongside puppets in support of “From the Inside,” a decidedly soft Rock album full of strings, lite horns and delicate touches that he’d co-written with Bernie Taupin. At the time, it sounded like a desperate response to KISS’s “Beth” from an artist whose career was spiraling. But, in retrospect, “From the Inside” is an unexpected, and occasionally lovely record from a man who’d lost touch with his stage persona and was left wondering what was underneath all the costumes.
1978 was a terrible year for Alice Cooper. He’d spent the previous seasons as the unofficial president of the Hollywood Vampires, a drinking club that resided at the Rainbow Bar and Grill in Los Angeles, and which also included Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson and Keith Moon. And though a highly functional alcoholic and relative lightweight compared to half the club, Cooper was in a bad way. Keith Moon died in September of ‘78. Weeks later Cooper would be “singing” “Schools Out” alongside Henson’s tallest beasts, while wearing in a red unitard and looking like Freddie Mercury after a two year bender. “From the Inside” was a flop and Cooper would be in and out of rehab for the next few years.
It goes without saying that I understood none of this in 1978. I don’t recall finding Alice’s appearance on The Muppet Show even the slightest bit odd. If anything, I remember it as being delightful. A human monster, dancing with puppet monsters, conjuring a ghost that appeared less threatening than Casper. Cooper more like Count Chocula than he did like Bela Legosi. And though I’d yet to even start kindergarten, I could get down with the message of “School’s Out.” Who didn’t love summer? I certainly did!
And that was the thing about Alice Cooper — kid’s didn’t need to understand him to “get him.” Kid’s didn’t even need to like his music to “love him.” He, with ample help from his manager Shep Gordon, spent the better part of the 1970s horrifying parents and experimenting with every puerile form of entertainment imaginable in an attempt to villainize parents and thrill kids. Alice was an impossible amalgam of Mad Magazine, magic, horror, schlock, cartoons, vaudeville, glitz and goth. Of the many unlikely superstars of the 1970s — ABBA, The Carpenters, Captain and Tenille — none were odder than Alice Cooper.
Alice Cooper obviously didn’t start out as “Alice Cooper.” In fact, before Vincent Damon Furnier became a superstar on his own, he was the lead singer of the band that he named “Alice Cooper.” And, before that, he was just a kid from Detroit — the son of an evangelist for the Church of Jesus Christ — who moved to Arizona and ran track in high school. He could not play any instrument. He could not sing especially well. But he was inordinately bright and curious and something of a ham. In the 1960s, on the basis of almost zero talent, endless naiveté and a spark of brilliance, he formed a (mostly) lip synching band with his track teammates. The germs of Alice Cooper — all chutzpah, stagecraft, laughs and teenage obsessions — were born that night in Arizona.
In time, those teenage runners formed The Spiders and then Nazz and then, finally, Alice Cooper. And between the summer of 1969 and the fall 1973, the band released seven studio albums, including three for Frank Zappa’s Straight Records, before their ascent on Warner Brothers. Early Alice Cooper was hard to pin down, in part because they were still so obviously unformed. “Pretties for You” and “Easy Action,” from 1969 and 1970, sound like a slightly southern, slightly psychedelic Rock band who never left the garage. You can hear a touch of Steppenwolf, some Little Feat and maybe, in their finest moments, a sliver of The Who. But, most of all, you heard five high school buddies who, musically at least, never left high school.
That arrested development proved to be much more a feature than a bug. “I’m Eighteen” and “School’s Out” took Alice Cooper from nowhere to everywhere. Their psychedelia became subsumed by spectacle and camp. Their big ideas gave way to B-movie kitsch. And, eventually, their music became the soundtrack to the bigger attraction — the performance.
While Alice Cooper, the band, would have other hits in the early 70s and while Alice Cooper, the solo artist, enjoyed tremendous success in the mid 70s, it was the spectacle, much more than the music, that made Alice Cooper among the most famous — and almost certainly the most notorious — artists of the decade. As early as 1971, the band had begun donning matching, sparkling unitards to reflect the lights in their shows. Soon, make-up was added. Then, the lights and the glitz was combined with shadows and eye-shadow. In time, Alice (the singer) donned a top hat, made himself up to look like Bette Davis in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” and began to (faux) hang himself on stage. Moms and dads were outraged -- disgusted. But teenagers loved it.
By 1973, all of the members of Alice Cooper not named Vincent had had enough. They wanted to play music in a band. Vincent wanted to perform in the theater. By that point, the frontman’s personas had subdivided like mutant, radioactive monsters. The snarky teenager was also a circus ringleader who was also a vaudevillian performer who was also a throwback magician who was also a snake oil salesman who was also a vampire and, possibly even, the grim reaper himself. At the height of his fame, most Americans could not name more than two Alice Cooper songs. But almost everyone knew that he was the guy who chopped his own head off in a guillotine every night in concert.
The novelty and the breadth of Cooper’s performances cannot be overstated. His early focus on fashion and glitz predated Bowie and T. Rex. His theatricality coincided with the stage performance of “Rocky Horror,” but also predicted Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf. His camp and schlock anticipated the New York Dolls. His spectacle foretold KISS. His gothic horror informed Heavy Metal -- from Iron Maiden to Marilyn Manson. And his high school brattiness inspired Johnny Rotten. For Nearly two decades, Cooper released albums that were either “fine,” “weird” or pretty good. But during that span, he helped define every form of Rock music that was more performance and subculture than form or musicianship.
All this while — through the constant touring and the stardom and while serving as public enemy number one to the parents of America — Cooper somehow maintained a very clear distinction between the private person named “Alice Cooper” (formerly Vincent Furnier) and the character on stage and record. The public persona was all shock, horror, thrills and laughs. The private version was articulate, relatable, learned and affable — even when he was three sheets to the wind. It was that version of Cooper that landed on every late night talk show, “Hollywood Squares” and, of course, “The Muppet Show.”
But, as Bowie figured out quickly and KISS figured out slowly, schtick gets old. By the late 70s, Alice Cooper was in dire need of rehabilitation — physically, mentally and, yes — creatively. Times had changed. His act had gotten stale. Way back when, he’d thrown almost everything he knew about teendom at the wall and, amazingly, most of it stuck. But more than a decade after he and his classmates had formed the band, and half a decade after he struck gold with “School’s Out,” all that was left on that wall was dried, fake blood and a couple dusty Gold albums.
The early 80s were no kinder. Sober, but restless, Cooper tried new gimmicks. He brought more snakes onstage. Bigger ones. He tried his hand at New Wave. He traded booze for golf. But nothing seemed to work. By the mid-80s, while Hair Metal — a genre that he’d in part given birth to — was ascending, Alice Cooper was nothing more than a charming “has been.” He was a relic of the 70s who’d show up on TV or celebrity pro-am golf tournaments and remind America that we were all getting older. He was the guy who’d inspired Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” but was not musically talented enough to make something so truly thrilling.
But then, when it seemed that he was all past and no future, Cooper caught a massive break. Desmond Child, a longtime fan and, more importantly, the super-producer of gargantuan, shout-along hits by KISS, Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, offered to help the forty year old, king of Shlock Rock reclaim his throne.
In order to succeed in the mission, Child had three requirements. First, he would co-write the entire album with Cooper, ensuring the scale and simplicity his anthems would be maintained. Next, he would invite in a cast of contributing guest stars, including Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Joan Jett and Kip Winger. And, finally, he demanded that Cooper sing about the one thing that all teenagers are obsessed with but which Alice had mostly avoided for his entire career: Sex.
Given his penchant to shock and his obsession with high school, it’s amazing how little sex there is in Alice Cooper’s discography. Perhaps it was on account of his Faith. Or perhaps it was a calculated decision to stick with cartoon horror. Whatever the case, Cooper had kept things PG-13 — at least on record — for two decades. But, in 1989, with the release of “Trash,” Alice Cooper finally relented. His eleventh studio album is consumed with poisonous love, bad love, sadomasochistic love, hot love, love gone wrong and every other cliche about love that made Winger, RATT, Poison, Mötley Crüe, Warrant, and even Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, so silly and so undeniable.
Surprisingly at the time, but much less so in retrospect, “Trash” was a massive hit. It sold over a million copies in the U.S. alone, reaching number 20 on the album sales charts. It’s first single, “Poison,” which sounded a good deal like Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine,” raced up the Rock and Pop charts. And, for good reason. With its lasers, synths, muscular guitars, cliches, a dozen backup singers and a gigantic, a bang on chorus, “Poison” is better than anything made by the band that shares its name. In fact, “Poison,” the song, makes Poison, the band, functionally irrelevant.
“Trash” reminds me of The Stones “Voodoo Lounge” — not musically so much as in the function it served for its makers. Both albums came at critical times in the artist’s careers, when their legacy risked some tarnish and their recent material had faltered. Both employed renowned, big money producers of the moment. Both simplified their formulas in order to shore up the ground they lost in middle age. Both sound like they were not cheap to produce. And both are completely good, and occasionally excellent, but rarely more or less.
If that summation reads lukewarm, rest assured that it’s not — at least not compared to the dreck that Cooper had been churning out in the previous ten years. “Trash” is a very solid album, full of mostly good and some great songs. In addition to “Poison,” standouts include “Only My Heart Talkin’,” which features Steven Tyler going full Steven Tyler and “Spark in the Dark,” which was co-written by Joan Jett and sounds like something Dee Dee Ramone might have written if he was trying to imitate “I Hate Myself for Loving You” (a Jett and Child creation). The former resembles a lesser, but still excellent, Jagger/Richards ballad. It’s got strings, acoustic guitar, a bittersweet melody and a generally ragged vibe that works because, as great of a frontman as Tyler is, he’s even better in a duet. The latter is far less complicated — drum, bass and no tricks, with the exception of a nifty Joe Perry solo that elevates the track from “simple but good” to “simply good.”
As for the misses, there are several, but none worse than “I’m Your Gun, which features Kip Winger, and comes dangerously close to a Spinal Tap B-side. Or worse — a Winger B-side. There are, of course, several Hair Metal moments that are derivative and mildly embarrassing. But “Trash” is a product of its time. It was the year of “Paradise City” and and “I Want it All.” It was a year full of Warrant and Skid Row and Winger. And, though I had mostly forgotten it by the time the 90s arrived, it was also the year of Alice Cooper’s comeback.
“Trash” was an endcap to Alice Cooper’s tenure as a star. It’s debatable if he really needed one last validation — his influence was so clearly expansive and well documented. Plus, his story was almost the opposite of a tragedy. He survived alcoholism and remained a happily married man, a prudent investor and a four handicap golfer. Whether he needed it or not, though, he almost certainly deserved it. There is no other Rock star whose impact was so profound, and yet so entirely non-musical. The through line from Cooper to Marilyn Manson runs through Glam, Punk, Metal, New Wave and Pop, before returning back to Metal. And while those roads of course don’t all start with Alice, they all run directly through him.
Alice Cooper was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, as much for his ideas and his spectacle as for his albums and hits. Around that time, when he was back in the headlines, I took a tour through his entire discography. Some records endured. Many did not. And a few provided unexpected delights. But, mostly, I was surprised by how much distance there was between his songs, on record, and his live performances. There was frequently some literal through line — B-movie horror, teen melodrama, etc. But musically, he mostly struggled to match the power of his showmanship in the songs themselves. Try as he might, Alice Cooper never achieved the theatrical force of peak Jim Steinman or Andrew Lloyd Webber.
It took many years, but finally, in 1989, Cooper’s magic was captured, bottled and given a dose of Viagra by a producer whose style was sufficiently refined and similarly bombastic. Thematically, “Trash” might be the least “Alice Cooper” album. Musically, however, it has the gusto that made Cooper a must see live act and can’t miss TV. It’s a force that has kept him on the charts even today, in his seventies, and that has landed him a third career as a snake-wearing, GEICO ad spokesman.