12. Alice CooperSchool’s Out
I’ve been an Alice Cooper fan since my early teens and timing wise, this album was right for me as I moving to another school. But what I found extraordinary about this record was you had title track but then it goes into stuff like ‘Luney Tune’ and ‘Street Fight’ and below the razzmatazz it goes into this really dark territory. You go off into this world of danger and you’d better be ready for it.
Even by the end you have these amazing orchestrations by Bob Ezrin swimming around and Alice is going, ‘I’m swimming in blood!’ And you’re like, ‘fuck! What happened? We were leaving school just a minute ago!’
And ‘Street Fight’ is just that but with a bassline. It’s all totally believable and when you get to ‘Blue Turk’, that does it for me every time. And then the next, ‘My Stars’, is like this weird homage to coming out of safety and getting splattered by the world. And then there he is: ‘Public Animal #9’ – that’s what you’ve become.
And Bob Ezrin is just a genius. He’s like, ‘you play along guys and I’ll sort out everything else!’ so you get these string arrangements and synthesizers but you still get the Alice Cooper from Killer and Love It To Death except that the production has been supersized. It’s genius.
