Credit: Far Out / Sven Mandel
It’s easy to forget just how big the Alice Cooper band really were.
For a moment across the early 1970s, they were the world’s premier rock outfit. The road travelled had been a long one. Cooper and the gang had started life as a gang of unconvincing hippy stragglers, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Jim Morrison and Frank Zappa – the latter signing the group to his Straight Records label – and dabbling in Los Angeles’ sunny psychedelia for two albums before jumping ship to Detroit’s garage rock counter to the day’s Woodstock idyll.
Cooper was right at home in the Motor City, not least due to his childhood spent in Detroit, but the rawer whirlwind laying waste to the city’s musical underground with The Stooges and MC5 inspired Cooper to toughen their sound and pursue a harder rock attack for the 1970s. Embracing a little of glam’s glitter blowing across the Atlantic, Love It to Death would spark the first real Cooper album, with the live snakes and on-stage executions surrounding their shock rock frontman from then on.
The horror look, guitarist Glen Buxton’s immortal riffs, and a songbook packed with subversive snarl thrust 1973’s Billion Dollar Babies to the top of the album charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The American cultural landscape had never been so set in Cooper’s lyrical target with such deadly accuracy, from the political swill playing tug of war every four years on ‘Election’, the title track’s excoriation of fame’s grubby decadence, and flashing a giant ‘fuck you’ to the outraged church groups and moral crusaders on the smirking ‘No More Mr Nice Guy’.
All of the above were smashed together in one, scabrous splatter for ‘Generation Landslide’. Acoustic earnestness atop military drums score’s Cooper’s cool view of the 1970s’ generation gap, on one hand lamenting the death of the previous decade and its corrosive hurtle toward materialism and chemical hedonism, as well as offering a faint gesture to the aghast parents with an ever so faint conciliatory hark for the US’ traditional mores.
It’s a complex piece laced with lyrical barbs that made some of the most towering songsmiths of the age’s ears prick up.
“After Billion Dollar Babies came out, even people like Bob Dylan and members of The Beatles started saying nice things about us, which was the final stamp of approval,” Cooper recalled to journalist Jaan Uhelszki. “Dylan loved ‘Generation Landslide’, and John Lennon’s favourite song for a while was ‘Elected’. It didn’t get better than that.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Dylan was always highly complimentary of Cooper’s songwriting knack, telling Rolling Stone he was “overlooked” in 1978 when erroneously considering the new wave cohort at the time. But still, ‘Generation Landslide’s wade into the decade’s commercial decay may well have chimed with the old folk icon, having spotted the counterculture’s looming deadend earlier than most of his peers and retreating into his rootsy, personal output while the Summer of Love scored the flower power explosion.
Besides, who wouldn’t want such pointed and serrated lyrics in their canon like ‘Generation Decline’, radiating political arrest that rivalled even former Beatle and ‘Elected’ fan Lennon’s grabs at progressive radicalism: “The over-indulgent machines were their children / There wasn’t a way down on Earth here to cool them / ‘Cause they looked just like humans / At Kresge’s and Woolworth’s.”
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