Quote:
Originally posted by Charlatan
He used to be the wild and crazy guy off stage but the alcoholism caught up with him and after too many mornings of throwing up blood he finally got the message and sobered up...
His music is about as hard core as say Led Zepplin or Black Sabbath. In the early 70s hard core like Metallica, Korn, etc. and the truly nasty aspects of Punk hadn't even happened yet.
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Quite true. What the original poster is lacking is PERSPECTIVE. In the early '70s nobody'd seen anything like Alice before. Sure there was Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, but those guys never staged their own executions. People were shocked by Alice Cooper because they (at the time they were more than just the lead singer) were doing something unique.
As far as musical heaviness goes, you have to remember that heavy metal, as a genre, was in its infancy. The heavy guitar sounds pioneered by some bands in the '60's was just now becoming seperate from mainstream rock-n-roll, thanks to artists like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Alice Cooper.
And yeah, Alice Cooper isn't the wild man he was back in '72. We all mellow with age, and Alice knew his addictions were killing him. If he'd remained the party-man he was then, he'd probably be a doddering burnout like Ozzy.
Recommended: Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits to start.
Individual albums - Love It To Death, Killer, School's Out, Billion Dollar Babies, Welcome to My Nightmare, The Last Temptation, Brutal Planet
Avoid - Flush The Fashion (a bizarre attempt at New Wave), Trash (unless you happen to like hair-metal), Dragontown (Alice's evangelical Christian side gets the better of him).