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Credit: Far Out \/ Sven Mandel<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to forget just how big the Alice Cooper<\/a> band really were.<\/p>\n For a moment across the early 1970s, they were the world\u2019s 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 \u2013 the latter signing the group to his Straight Records label \u2013 and dabbling in Los Angeles\u2019 sunny psychedelia for two albums before jumping ship to Detroit\u2019s garage rock counter to the day\u2019s Woodstock idyll.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The horror look, guitarist Glen Buxton\u2019s immortal riffs, and a songbook packed with subversive snarl thrust 1973\u2019s 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\u2019s lyrical target with such deadly accuracy, from the political swill playing tug of war every four years on \u2018Election\u2019<\/a>, the title track\u2019s excoriation of fame\u2019s grubby decadence, and flashing a giant \u2018fuck you\u2019 to the outraged church groups and moral crusaders on the smirking \u2018No More Mr Nice Guy\u2019.<\/p>\n All of the above were smashed together in one, scabrous splatter for \u2018Generation Landslide\u2019. Acoustic earnestness atop military drums score\u2019s Cooper\u2019s cool view of the 1970s\u2019 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\u2019 traditional mores.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a complex piece laced with lyrical barbs that made some of the most towering songsmiths of the age\u2019s ears prick up.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter<\/p>\n