Like all the true rock superstars to rise in the Sixties, Alice Cooper is a consummate master of imagemanipulation. He continually sees to it that new configurations are born in his studiedly outrageous stage persona and the spirit-force of his sound, with the end in mind of putting both himself and his audience through a steeplechase of changes and keeping everybody alert at gut-level. Whether the myth has much at all to do with Alice Cooper the man behind the role is highly debatable, but even if it's mostly fiction it doesn't matter all that much anyway. Alice is not that much more a self-invention and technician of forms and poses than Bob Dylan has always been. And if you think that's
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a far-out comparison, just listen to "Be My Lover" or "Desperado" on this album.
Killer (Warner Bros. 2567) is without a doubt the best Alice Cooper album yet and one of the finest rock & roll records released in 1971. It brings all the elements of the band's approach to sound and texture to a totally integrated pinnacle that fulfills all the promise of their erratic first two albums, and beats Love It To Death's dalliance with Thirties flick "spooky" cornball riffs by the sheer sustained impact of its primal rock and roll jolt. And it's necessary to emphasize those three bludgeoned-into-loam words because there has always been some question of priorities in regard to this band, viz. whether they wanted most to rave up the wang dang doodle or promulgate a kind of concentrated Ringling Brothers sideshow whose essential context and importance were extramusical.
You remember these guys, how they set back straights and hips alike by wearing makeup and throwing chickens to the mercy of the more illiberally aggressive sections of the audience. Well, I think the reaction to the latter freaked even them (Alice Cooper) out, and the other night I saw a fine and rather mainstream - sounding Northern California band called the Wackers do an "Ooooh"-perfect rendition of the Beatles' "She Loves You" from behind as much rouge and blue eyeshadow as Alice and the boys ever piled on. It gets harder to be avant-outrageous all the time, what with everybody so jaded and I even hear the next catch-phrase to drop from the Max's dens of iniquity into the Newsweeks is "gay chauvinism," so what the fuck are you gonna do short of copping a riff not even new when Gilles de Rais laid it down four or five centuries ago and taking to actually disemboweling virgins and infants on stage?
Sing about dead babies, that's what. Alice's material, as opposed to his stage business, was never that lurid in the past, but as the shock value of the live show has ebbed with the tides of history he has begun to think about injecting or impregnating the songs with more weirdities, fetishes, decadence and degeneracy in the form of archetypes derived from TV, pre-Wertham comic books, and the pages of paperback textbooks on deviation authored by spur
