The 500 - #454 - Alice Cooper - Love it to Death

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

My plan (amended). 

• 1 record per week & at least 2 complete listens.
• A quick blog post for each, highlighting the important details and a quick background story.
• No rating scale - just an effort to expand my appreciation of diverse forms of music.

Album # 454

Album Title: Love it to Death
Artist: Alice Cooper
Released: March, 1971
My age at release: 5
How familiar was I with it before this week: A little
Song I am putting on my Spotify Mix: Is It My Body? (Suggested by educator Matthew Oldridge on Twitter)
Great Lyric:
"Lines form on my face and hands.
Lines form from the ups and downs.
I'm in the middle without any plans,
I'm a boy and I'm a man.
I'm eighteen!"

It was a weekday evening in 1974 when I first heard the name Alice Cooper. I was getting a ride home from a night attending after attending Cub Scouts. I was wedged in the backseat of a parent volunteer's car when the kid next to me started talking about watching Alice Cooper on television.

"Who's she?" I asked naively.
"He's a man!" he shot back scornfully. "Everybody knows that!" 

In retrospect, I guarantee that kid had an older brother who had tipped him to the Cooper persona. I'm also sure the kid grew up to be a pretentious hipster, sipping unnecessarily hoppy craft-beer through his "ironic" Van Dyke beard while misquoting Che Guevara and extolling the virtues of a vegetarian ecofeminism.

I was a casual Alice Cooper fan until 1980 and the release of the album Flush the Fashion. It was a record on which Cooper made a foray into the new wave/pop-punk sound and it coincided with a time in my life when I secured my first part-time job and had disposable income to build my record collection.

In early 1985, I went through an "Alice Cooper phase" after a chum, Jim, let me borrow his extensive collection. I taped everything he had from the back-catalogue, including this album, but spent most of that spring listening to Welcome to my Nightmare, which is still my favourite record from the Cooper discography. It contains the song Only Women Bleed, an incredibly underrated ballad with a message that is frequently misunderstood. On first blush, it can be misconstrued as misogynistic when, in truth, Cooper was sympathetic to the plight of a woman in an abusive relationship. At first, I was really surprised that Love it to Death and not Nightmare made this list.

Love it to Death grew on me over the multiple listens I gave it this week. It is a record with a connection to my hometown of London, Ontario, as it was produced by former Fanshawe College educator, Juno Award winner and Order of Canada recipient, the late Jack Richardson. 

The second track on the record, I'm Eighteen, was the first hit single for the band and is one of Cooper's best known tracks. However, I can't hear it anymore without thinking about an episode from the television dramedy Freaks and Geeks when guidance counsellor Mr. Rosso sings it to his students in order to "connect with them". 

I encourage you to listen to this record. It is considered a foundational record in the development of the heavy metal sound in the 1970s. I also recommend listening to this episode of The 500 Podcast with special guest, the legendary Shep Gordon. He is Alice Cooper's longtime manager and was the subject of the fascinating 2013 documentary Supermensch. His first-hand insights into the creation or this record are riveting.