Alice Cooper’s favourite songwriter records
Alice Cooper is an eternal enigma. Take, for instance, the screaming rocker’s favourite hobby: A lot of people take up golf when they retire, but not quite as many transition from a period holed-up in a New York sanitorium straight to the course. Alice Cooper’s love for the most benign sport in existence even led him to write a book on the subject, Golf Monster: My 12 Steps to Becoming a Gold Addict.
In short, there is a mellow side to the man who once was accused of devil worship. This is evident in his love of soulful folk. One of his favourite artists of all time happens to be the spiritual Laura Nyro. When Forbes asked him for his favourite singer-songwriter album, he championed her 1968 classic Eli and the Thirteenth Confession.
“That and her first album, you listen and there’s not one mistake anywhere on it,” he said of her soulful oeuvre. “You sit there and go, ‘That’s songwriting’. And the other one is maybe Burt Bacharach’s Greatest Hits. Every single song is perfect, absolutely perfect. You listen to that and it’s like listening to the Beatles.”
These are stars who are renowned for their craft in the strictest sense of the word. As Cooper continues: “There are only two people I can think of that write perfect songs. That’s the Beatles and Burt Bacharach. Laura Nyro’s stuff was so personal, but it was so well written and so well sung. When I go to write with somebody, maybe I’ll go to their house and all of a sudden, I see a Laura Nyro album, or I’ll start out by saying Burt Bacharach. And I don’t care how heavy metal the guy is, they go, ‘Yeah, oh yeah’.”
Eli and the Thirteenth Confession saw the young Nyro “kissing seventeen years of her life – her childhood – goodbye.” Dealing with the adult world of love, romance, death, drugs and the midst of the counterculture scene, the album was a reflection on maturity. However, the sound was as assured as someone who had been writing songs on Tin Pan Alley for aeons.
Cooper always wants that sort of pop sensibility in his own work. He always has the down-to-earth sense of spiritualism present somewhere. Even his switch to heavy metal was fuelled by it. As he once proclaimed: “The late sixties and early seventies were kind of a breeding ground for exciting new sounds because easy listening and folk were kind of taking over the airwaves. I think it was a natural next step to take that blissful, easygoing sound and strangle the life out of it.”
And speaking of the golf-playing, Laura Nyro-loving, spiritual side of Cooper, he also has a ‘down to earth’ theory in a much more perfunctory sense of the phrase. “What most people don’t understand is that UFOs are on a cosmic tourist route,” he explains. “That’s why they’re always seen in Arizona, Scotland, and New Mexico. Another thing to consider is that all three of those destinations are good places to play golf. So there’s possibly some connection between aliens and golf.”
