Friday, July 5, 2013

Hippies vs. Punks: Alice Cooper's Straight Albums

After posting last week's Hippies vs. Punks on Bloodrock, a band on the undercard of the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival that didn't appear on the national telecast, I decided to settle in and watch the entire hour-plus video of the broadcast, which is available on YouTube.

It was a warm night and I stayed up -- what for me is an extremely late hour -- after 11 PM. It was June in time present, and I was watching video of June time past, 43-years past. A couple of times I wandered into the kitchen to get something cold to drink. The only light was a low-watt bulb above my ancient refrigerator, a refrigerator older than my family's new frostless refrigerator that so fascinated me as a kid in 1970. I was fascinated by how clean and colorful and modern it was.

And what stood out for me watching Midsummer Rock was how colorfully dressed and clean and slender and well behaved the young men and women were who attended the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival. You wouldn't know that the nation was being rocked by bloody protests. Nowadays I think it's safe to say that one-out-of-six to one-out-of-five concertgoers -- 15 to 20 percent -- would be overweight and not nearly so well put together. The downside to that festival in 1970 was that everyone was lily white. At least now a big city popular music festival is much more racially diverse.

The other thing that really struck me was the Alice Cooper band. They were easily the most interesting act of the bands that made it on the telecast.

The performance of "Black Juju," which is a great track off the Love It to Death (1971) album, is famous because lead singer Vince Furnier, a.k.a., Alice Cooper, took a pie in the face.

Alice Cooper -- unlike Traffic, Grand Funk Railroad and Mountain, who all assumed the standard rock 'n' roll poses -- put on an iconoclastic, self-effacing, tight show. Watching them, trim and athletic as you would expect a former cross-country team to be, was like looking at a good Grunge band -- a group of guys who could play their instruments and think about what they were playing and poke fun at the whole bombastic rock festival hype; it was like seeing a band from the 1960s who had somehow listened to the future.

All of this took me sort of by surprise. The only indication I had that Alice Cooper had a history as an art-rock band was from their appearance in the party scene from Carrie SnodgrassDiary of a Mad Housewife (1970), a movie released the same month, August, that Midsummer Rock appeared on television:


Arriving to work this past Monday, a coworker, who knows that I enjoy Punk music, asked if I had ever heard of a band called Death made up of three black brothers from Detroit who were among the first practitioners of Punk. I said I had not and promptly Googled and pulled up on YouTube the 1975, released in 2009 by Drag City...For the Whole World to See album.

Reading the New York Times article by Mike Rubin, I learned that the Hackney brothers gave up R&B and switched to hard rock after seeing an Alice Cooper show in 1973. (Ah, synchronicity!) There's even a documentary about the band, A Band Called Death (2012).

This past week I decided to explore the first three Alice Cooper albums, recordings which correspond to the period when the band appeared in Diary of a Mad Housewife and the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival and which were done under contract with Frank Zappa's Straight Records.

I started out with Easy Action (1970). It's incredibly strong start to finish. The last track, "Lay Down and Die, Goodbye," is a combination of garage rock and noise that could have been recorded by Sonic Youth, assuming Sonic Youth had someone who could sing as well as Vince Furnier.

To give a sense of the band's versatility, take a listen to the agile harmonies of the preceding track, "Beautiful Flyaway."

From Easy Action, which I have not tired of hearing and think it might be my favorite of the three Straight Records albums, I moved to the first recording, Pretties for You (1969). It has more of a Beatles-via-Zappa vibe, which is definitely different and makes for good listening. Here are tracks one and two, "Titanic Overture" and "10 Minutes Before the Worm."

Then with the last album for Straight, the previously mentioned Love It to Death, the band's sound is getting closer to the blockbuster success of  School's Out (1972), which you can distinctly hear in the lead track, "Caught In a Dream."

Though all the albums are available to listen to in full on YouTube, I went ahead and paid the $10 apiece for MP3 downloads available on Amazon because I wanted to be able to listen on my iPod and my Altec Lansing docking station.

All three albums Alice Cooper did for Straight Records are dynamite. I've listened to each one constantly all week and have not grown a bit tired; my Independence Day holiday afternoon was spent totally immersed in the records. It's the sound from a time, 1969 to 1971, when Hippies could be Punks and people struggled to figure out what was going on. Robert Christgau did. But now it's apparent that the music was ahead of its time.

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