Alice Cooper

When, at the end of the Nineties, the whole of the United States found itself blaming Marilyn Manson and his shock rock for every conceivable episode of youth violence, unwittingly proving the artist and his exposure of the most uncomfortable undersides of the American dream entirely right, it was really just another instalment of the age-old game of hunting for the symbol of moral decay within hard-edged rock. A game that had already been perfected by Alice Cooper, almost thirty years earlier.

Not that the international music scene of the Sixties had been short of excessive characters. Mick Jagger's bad-boy image was distasteful to prim parents, Jim Morrison sang about sex with brazen nerve and mimed intercourse on stage, and Iron Butterfly spent a year in the US top 10 on the strength of a description of an acid trip.

Yet when Alice Cooper burst onto the scene singing of mental disorders, phobias, necrophilia, homicidal urges and the like, it became clear the game had reached a level from which there would be no easy way back. Excess turned into a representation of evil itself, no longer a mere tool of protest.

This psychological edifice built on the manipulation of horror reached its peak in 1971 with "Killer", when the name Alice Cooper still referred to the whole band and not just the singer.

Produced by a young, brilliant Bob Ezrin, the album opens with two radio-friendly singles written by guitarist Michael Bruce, though they prove somewhat misleading. "Under My Wheels" is a horn-inflected hard rocker in which the protagonist is pushed to the point of wanting to run his girlfriend over with his car, while "Be My Lover" - one of the countless variations on the riff from the Velvets' "Sweet Jane" - recounts a romantic encounter the musician had actually had some time before. Both are impeccably crafted FM radio rock classics, but they seem placed there deliberately to lend commercial appeal to a record that otherwise has precious little of it.

"Killer" is in fact the band's most elaborate album, capable of blending hard rock, glam and progressive rock into a single tableau in the name of theatrical - if not outright cinematic - staging, as shown by the third track, "Halo Of Flies", an eight-minute, shape-shifting ride overflowing with references, from lyrics that reconstruct a James Bond-style spy story, to the quotation of the melody of "My Favourite Things" - from "The Sound of Music" - that surfaces at 2'10".

Openly built to do something in the style of King Crimson, "Halo Of Flies" exceeds every expectation for sonic and structural richness, an unstoppable puzzle of interlocking parts in which every musician is at their very best: Dennis Dunaway with cavernous, hypnotic bass lines, Neal Smith with his battle-ready drumming, Ezrin with the futuristic pulses of the Minimoog and the sublime orchestral entrance at 5'10", Glen Buxton and Bruce trading metallic riffs, solos and Eastern-tinged scales.

The Western imagery of "Desperado" paints the tormented, melancholy figure of a seasoned gunslinger and killer ("I'm a picture of ugly stories / I'm a killer and I'm a clown"), set against an arrangement of liquid guitars, acoustic filigree and orchestral swells. In the Nineties Cooper put about the story that the song was written as a tribute to Jim Morrison, a version that is hardly credible, though, given that up to that point neither he nor the rest of the band had ever mentioned any such thing, describing the character instead as a cowboy.

"Dead Babies" sounds like one of those tracks that stepped straight out of a time machine. Both the jagged bassline that opens it and the echoing guitar refractions that follow it seem to come from the Eighties, anticipating post-punk with an accuracy that's almost hard to believe. It then slips back into hard rock territory, right up to the unsettling, childlike vocal harmonies that mark its chorus.

The lyrics tell of a little girl named Betty who dies after swallowing a bottle of aspirin, mistaking the pills for sweets. Her father - uninterested in his family - works far from home, while her mother is, as every evening, out drinking at the bar and so cannot come to her aid. These are lyrics of rare rawness, which caused more than a little controversy at the time, but which actually amount to a heartrending indictment of neglect toward children and the pain caused by bringing them into the world when one isn't ready to be a parent to them.

Closing the record is the title track, which recounts the execution of a poor soul who was dragged into a shady deal and, unable to handle the situation, ended up killing someone ("I didn't really want to get involved in this thing / Someone handed me this gun and I... I gave it everything"). The ending is perhaps the high point of shock rock, a slow march for organ and choir complete with a prayer in Latin, at the end of which one can hear the click of a trapdoor and twenty seconds of accelerating electronic buzz symbolising the approach of death. Stuff that, in 1971, can hardly have left anyone indifferent.

Younger audiences nonetheless proved receptive to the record, which sold even better than its predecessor "Love It To Death", climbing as high as number 21 and staying on the American charts for over a year. After that would come "School's Out", which would see the band consecrated on a global scale and earn the singer his well-deserved place in the collective imagination.

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31/01/2016