There was the swaggering guitar-flash of Escape – ‘ There’s no place to go/Just put on my make-up and get me to the show’ – and the arm-waving Department Of Youth, Alice’s best anthem since School’s Out, replete with demented kiddie choir, and a lovely touch of black humour on the fade as Alice asks “Who’s got the power?” and the kids answer: “We have!” Alice: “Who gave it to you?” Kids: “Donny Osmond!” With Ezrin leading the way not just as producer but also as co-writer and keyboardist on several tracks, and Dick Wagner also sharing writing duties, there was something for everyone. The rest of the album was similarly inspired. I really get along with him – we are very good friends.” Then you look at him and you just have to start laughing, because he looks like Ronald McDonald. Everyone is going ‘ That’s Vincent Price?’ Then he goes in and he does this really Edwardian dramatic reading, and it scares the hell out of you. “He comes in and he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt and purple striped pants. “We were waiting for to come into the studio and expecting him to be dressed all in black,” Alice later recalled. Not only did the two Vincents sound great together on record – so much so that years later, Michael Jackson was inspired to call on Price to perform a similar role on Thriller – they also shared the same pragmatic, arm’s-length attitude towards their respective onstage personas. While Alice, brought up on TV late-night monster movies, saw himself as the Bela Lugosi of rock. For Price, had he not been born to an earlier age, would have made a convincing rock overlord. When, months later, the singer and producer were sewing ideas together for Welcome To My Nightmare using some of the music they’d originally intended for their now aborted movie – including a track called The Black Widow – Ezrin suggested they call on Price to provide a spooky narrative intro. (Image credit: Tony Korody/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images) It was at this meeting, “united by Monte Cristo cigars,” that Ezrin half-jokingly asked Price, “How would you like to make your rock’n’roll debut?” Bemused, Price looked at him and said, “Really, do you think I ought to?” Ezrin told him, “I think you’d be a total rock star.” To which Price replied simply: “Let me know where and when.” Though the movie was never made, one of the directors they discussed it with, Daniel Mann, introduced them to legendary horror-movie actor Vincent Price on the set of Mann’s 1975 movie, Journey Into Fear. Let’s do this whole thing about this guy Steven, and let’s make it his nightmare.” And then Alice came up with the idea, we could do a movie, but let’s do this great stage show. “So we had this little thing our minds that Steven was having a problem differentiating between reality and imagination, that started the whole thought about the nightmare – and that’s where we looked at each other and went ‘Hey, that’s great’. From that point on, he is transformed, and by night he craves flesh. They are buried under the snow and when they are eventually found, there is only him. They’re going skiing in his private plane, there’s an accident. The concept for the album, Ezrin recalls, came from a movie idea he and Alice had been discussing, “which was about this guy, Steven, and the general theme of it was that this guy is a rock star and he’s having an affair with somebody. The album was recorded over three months at Toronto’s Soundstage studio, followed by stints at New York’s Record Plant East, Electric Lady and A&R Studios. Headed by the twin guitars of Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter, this was the same blisteringly hot line-up that had recorded Reed’s live Rock’n’Roll Animal album.Įzrin says, “On Welcome To My Nightmare, I was actually working with a group of people that I had worked on other stuff with – I made a band and brought them all to Toronto and made that album, fairly quickly.” The band members were, he recalls, “all really into the process, and every single day was exciting.” Given free rein to assemble his own band, Ezrin brought in Lou Reed’s backing group. Now, for Welcome To My Nightmare, he was back. Ezrin had overseen the four best Alice Cooper band albums, co-writing several key tracks, but had bowed out before Muscle Of Love, sensing resistance from certain band members who wanted to wrest power back from him. For his own first solo album, Alice set out to ramp up the theatricality, while taking the music to a whole new level of professionalism and panache.Ĭrucial in this latter respect was Alice’s reconciliation with producer Bob Ezrin. By now, both Neal Smith and Michael Bruce were exploring solo projects. As a result, the Alice Cooper band’s final album together, Muscle Of Love, in 1973, had been a prosaic, muso-driven affair, and consequently less successful than its predecessor, Billion Dollar Babies.
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