“I don’t remember a single song”: The three albums Alice Cooper has no memory of making
No artist gets a say in which one of their songs ends up getting popular. They are only the vehicle through which the music flows, and if they happen to have a massive following behind them, that’s usually a happy by-product of their hard work half the time. However, whereas Alice Cooper is known the world over for being one of the greatest names in shock rock, there are far more facets to his music than the rough garage rocker that he started out as when emerging out of Detroit.
Looking through his discography, Cooper has been one of the most eclectic rockers since the days of David Bowie. While ‘The Starman’ went much further in terms of broad genre outreach, Cooper was always willing to take a chance up until the present day. He may have settled into the same garage rock tendencies at the moment, but he was treated like royalty in the 1980s with albums like Trash and was an elder statesman to people like Rob Zombie when they started to blow up.
Right as Cooper entered the 1980s, he wasn’t exactly in the best frame of mind anymore. He had already spent years trying to kick the booze and had even gone into a mental hospital to offset his habit, but whereas From the Inside gave him a good target for his previous demons, he had picked up a few new ones in the meantime, and by the time he stepped out of the shadows, he had become addicted to cocaine.
But compared to every other artist coming out, Cooper was still out for blood. The punk revolution had been going on for years, but now that new wave was rearing its head, Cooper wanted to leave everyone else in the dust when making records like Zipper Catches Skin and Special Forces, complete with songs that sounded like bands like Devo and Sparks with a more feral edge to them.
That being said, Cooper was abusing cocaine to an alarming degree. Compared to everyone else working in the studio, you would have sworn that he was going for an Olympic record for how much he could have in his system, and when looking back on those records, Cooper felt that there was hardly anything he had worth revisiting.
“There are three [records] in particular where I don’t remember writing, recording, or touring them, and if you ask any of my real fans what their favourite records are, it’s those three.”
Alice Cooper
Compared to the true horrific classics like Welcome to My Nightmare and Killer, Cooper only saw the horror at that point, saying, “There are three [records] in particular where I don’t remember writing, recording, or touring them, and if you ask any of my real fans what their favourite records are, it’s those three. It’s like Dada, Special Forces and Zipper Catches Skin, and I’m going, ‘I don’t remember a single song from any of them.”
And looking at his physical state from around the time, Cooper was exceeding Bowie at his worst as ‘The Thin White Duke’. He had collapsed to become a skeleton of his former self, and while he did finally come up for air at the end of the 1980s, he managed to leave some good music behind on those albums, with a song like ‘Pass the Gun Around’ being a version of him that was a little too close to reality than he would have thought.
But whereas those albums are considered hidden gems in Cooper’s history, that doesn’t mean any of them are bad, either. They are each bold new adventures for where he would be going, and while the real horror show was taking place behind the scenes, his ability to toy with different genres here is what gave him permission to stretch out later on albums like Brutal Planet.
