Alice Cooper Made Fun of Themselves With ‘Billion Dollar Babies’

The breakthrough success of 1972’s School’s Out put the Alice Cooper band in an uncommon place: in demand. In this unique excerpt from the e-book Alice Cooper @75, UCR contributor Gary Graff explains how the band discovered time to make enjoyable of themselves, their newfound fame and the company bigwigs that have been abruptly throwing giant quantities of money of their course whereas crafting 1973’s Billion Dollar Babies.

The April 15, 1973, situation of Forbes journal, the conservative enterprise journal, featured a photograph of Alice Cooper, in white tails and high hat, and guitarist Michael Bruce on its cowl, declaring them “A New Breed of Tycoon.” And that’s precisely what the band’s sixth studio album was celebrating.

Cooper and firm weren’t billionaires by any stretch when Billion Dollar Babies was launched throughout February 1973. But they have been residing the rarefied life of the wealthy, residing (collectively) in a mansion, touring on personal jets, hobnobbing with celebrities—the works. It appeared solely pure to make that the theme of the brand new album. “That was us making fun of ourselves,” Cooper wrote in Golf Addict. “We’re Billion Dollar Babies, a bunch of ‘babies’ from Phoenix that large multinational corporations (starting with our record company) were now throwing money at. The same guys who couldn’t get a gig because we were too weird … and now, everybody wanted a piece of us. …

“We were laughing at our audience and at ourselves and at the circus spectacle and absurdity of our success.” And, we should always add, making some nice rock ’n’ roll on the identical time.

If School’s Out was about codifying the Cooper stage presentation, Billion Dollar Babies — packaged to seem like an enormous inexperienced snakeskin pockets — tightened any divide between the twin goals of rocking and surprising. The 10-track set was a single-stroke mixture of showmanship, satire, societal commentary, and rock ’n’ roll dynamics.

Its No. 1 exhibiting within the Billboard 200 — the group’s first and Cooper’s solely chart-topper — was at the least partly the end result of constructing momentum since “I’m Eighteen” pounded into the Top 40, however Billion Dollar Babies definitely merited that pinnacle by any measure.

The album began on the Galesi Estate in Greenwich, Conn., the place the Alice Cooper band and crew have been moved throughout 1972 and which housed some of the spoils of its success — notably fancy vehicles that included drummer Neal Smith’s Rolls-Royce. Producer Bob Ezrin introduced the Record Plant’s cell recording unit up from New York, and tough tracks have been created for a lot of of the songs.

The vary of materials would once more be large, beginning with the primary single, “Hello Hooray,” a vaudevillian music by Rolf Kemp that had been recorded three years earlier by Judy Collins (!). The Cooper crew saved its cabaret-flavored kitsch however added a extra muscular thump that made for an arresting album and (subsequently) present opener. The title observe, in the meantime, stemmed from a jam Bruce had with Rockin’ Reggie Vinson, a good friend from the band’s days in Detroit.

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