If Christmas has Bing Crosby, Halloween has Alice Cooper. At least half of The Coop’s catalog consists of sinister songs that range from merrily macabre to downright scary. “I Love the Dead,” “Ballad of Dwight Fry,” and “Feed my Frankenstein” get a fair share of play during this unholiest of holidays, but the jewel in Cooper’s crown of thorns has to be “Welcome to My Nightmare.” And not just the titular track, either. The entire album is an odd odyssey that takes listeners through the dreams of Steven, a crazed individual who can’t decide whether he’s a little boy or a great big man. Part rock album, part broadway musical, and part EC Comic, “Welcome to My Nightmare” is a Frankenstein creation brought to life by one of music’s most celebrated mad scientists. To celebrate Halloween, I welcome you to the history of “Welcome to My Nightmare.”
For those of you who have been living in a cave on Mars with your fingers in your ears, Alice Cooper is the top-hatted, black-eyed, snake-kissing showman who brought vaudeville to rock and terrified a generation of parents with his horror-heavy concerts. While shock rock was performed before Alice by guys like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Arthur Brown, Alice and his gang of hoodlums brought it to greater and gorer heights. Almost every band you see that plays with blood, guts, and special effects owes a debt of gratitude to The Coop. At the average Cooper concert, live snakes appear, victims are stabbed in a Hollywood-level display, monsters attack, baby dolls are ripped apart, and Alice himself is decapitated via guillotine. Good, clean fun for the whole family!
Before he was Alice, he was Vincent Furnier, the son of a minister, In high school, he started a band called the Earwigs, then the Spiders, then the Nazz, then finally Alice Cooper. Why Alice Cooper? According to legend, a medium had the band channel the spirits through a Ouija board. When Furnier asked who had been in another life, the board spelled A-L-I-C-E-C-O-O-P-E-R. Chilling. And also completely false. The actual origin was, unfortunately less supernatural. Alice himself said this: “I just kind of said, ‘Alice Cooper.’ It just came out of my mouth. That was it. It had a quality to it—a little deranged, a little wholesome, a little spooky, maybe. And . . . I felt like it would make people go, ‘Wait . . . what?! Alice Cooper? They’re all guys. Who’s Alice Cooper?’”
“Alice Cooper” was originally the name of the band and not the individual. Back then, Alice Cooper was just Vincent Furnier in black makeup. The classic lineup was Furnier, lead guitarist Glen Buxton, rhythm guitarist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway, and drummer Neal Smith. I won’t go into the full details here because this is about one particular album, but the band found massive success in the early ’70s. Their ghoulish stage show and teen rebellion anthems like “Eighteen” and “School’s Out” established them as rock’s #1 villains. In 1973, Vincent Furnier legally changed his name to Alice Cooper. Reports vary as to why, but the Alice Cooper group split up in 1974. While I’m sure there were many factors that led to that decision, a popular reason is that Cooper wanted to expand the stage show and the band wanted to focus purely on hard rock. Regardless of the reason, Alice Cooper released his first solo album in 1975: “Welcome to My Nightmare.” That’s right. We’re finally there.
With the original band out, legendary producer Bob Ezrin brought in the lineup from Lou Reed’s 1973 album, “Berlin.” The great sidemen Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner played prominent roles on Nightmare, particularly Wagner. Along with Cooper, Wagner wrote the album’s three singles: the theatrically creepy title track, the surprisingly sensitive ballad “Only Women Bleed,” and the amusing juvenile delinquent anthem “Department of Youth.” In service to its Broadway-meets-Hammer-Horror vibe, there is a wide variety of musical styles at play: hard rock, jazz, show tunes, soft rock, carnival music, chilling movie score-like pieces, and even some spoken word.
With the exceptions of “Department of Youth” and “Escape” (the album’s closer that keeps it from ending on a grim note), every song deals with some form of horror: the funky fear of the title track, the sleazy and potentially cannibalistic “Devil’s Food,” the monster movie madness of “The Black Widow,” the camp creep of “Some Folks,” the gross-out comedy of “Cold Ethyl,” and the psychological terror of “Years Ago/Steven/The Awakening.” Those songs are scary in a drive-in flick sort of way, while “Only Women Bleed” deals with the less palatable horror of an abusive relationship. Every track succeeds in creating the mood it was meant to. With its loosely connected story about the many nightmares of madman Steven, the album is like a sonic “Tales from the Crypt.”
The original concept was a little different. It came from an idea Cooper and Ezrin had for a horror film, “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. They’re going skiing in his private plane, there’s an accident. They are buried under the snow and when they are eventually found, there is only him. From that point on, he is transformed, and by night he craves flesh.” That’s how Ezrin put it. Essentially, it would’ve been a sort of vampire story about a rock star who can’t differentiate between reality and nightmares.
Though a proper “Nightmare” film never happened, the album did get some serious horror movie cred in the form of the priceless Vincent Price. In a move that surely inspired “Thriller,” Price delivers a deliciously hammy monologue about spiders, particularly the lovely and deadly Black Widow. Cooper fondly remembered Price, saying this about the man: “We were waiting for [Price] to come into the studio and expecting him to be dressed all in black. He comes in, and he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt and purple striped pants. 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. Then you look at him, and you just have to start laughing because he looks like Ronald McDonald. I really get along with him – we are very good friends.”
In a development that felt natural to the cinematic nature of the album, “Nightmare” gave us both a TV special and a concert movie, both of which are gloriously cheesy. The special, simply titled “The Nightmare,” is amazing because you get Vincent Price in nearly every scene. If you want dancers in goofy Halloween costumes and Price dragging Cooper along on a dog leash, you can’t top “The Nightmare.” While most of the songs are from the album, the earlier “Ballad of Dwight Fry” gets a performance here.
There are simply no words to properly describe the “Welcome to My Nightmare” concert movie. In a just world, it would be in a triple feature with “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Phantom of the Paradise.” It’s both unintentionally hilarious and genuinely impressive at the same time. One of the key features to me is a visibly drunk Alice, who slowly begins to sober up as the concert progresses. As the man himself says in the commentary, Alice was a functional alcoholic. Around him is this Broadway-quality spectacle with a horde of dancers, appearing sets, costume changes, magic tricks, and a menagerie of monsters. Alice jumps in and out of a movie screen! He fights a giant Cyclops! He smashes a neon headstone in slow motion! The weird combination of Alice’s grungy rock persona and opulent design is surreal. I recommend you add this to your Halloween viewing if you haven’t already seen it.
Alice would go on to do many concept albums with a horror theme: the showtune-centric “Goes to Hell,” the Bradbury-esque “The Last Temptation,” the serial killer story “Along Came a Spider,” and a few more that solidified his place as rock’s Edgar Allan Poe. in 2010, Cooper released a direct sequel called “Welcome 2 My Nightmare,” which would be another worthy choice for your Halloween playlist. Still, as great as all those subsequent albums are, nothing can really top “Welcome to My Nightmare” for a Halloween album. It’s every shade of spooky in one package. For those who are new to Cooper, let him welcome you to his nightmare. I think you’re gonna like it.
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