Alice Cooper-Billion Dollar Babies, 1973

Normal people might write songs about cars, women, drinking and such. On this album Alice, Michael Bruce and a few other contributors wrote about tooth decay, loving the dead and all kinds of deviants. Yet somehow it's funny rather than disturbing. I think that's where the genius of this band really comes into play. I like Alice, but the real prime of his career was those five albums from "Love it to death" through "Muscle of love". The original band could play some crazy, raw arrangements and it worked somehow. Then they would pick crazy topics to write about and go with it whether it made sense or not. Sometimes you go "what were they thinking when they wrote this?". Yet you are smiling when you ask this because they are entertaining. The music world had plenty of good, normal bands so they needed an Alice Cooper to kind of balance things out a little. Another good thing about this line-up is the number of different sounds they have on their songs. This album is a good example of that as they really mix up the styles of music. Something like "No more Mr. Nice Guy" is a bit more straight forward in it's approach. Then you have songs like "Hello Hooray" and "Unfinished Sweet" that are bit more unconventional in their approach. This is a strong album and generally it flows very well. Despite their differences, all of the songs work on various levels. I think the band really playing with confidence by this point and it showed. One thing I was glad for was that the band never became too polished between 1971 and 1974. They became stronger with what they were doing, but they managed to maintain that off the wall sound that was a big part of their appeal. The music world would have been a very dull place without Alice Cooper and albums like this one. My favorite songs here are the title track, No more Mr. Nice guy, Elected, Generation Landslide and Sick Things. Oh and you have to love the album cover.