Released 1971
Caught In A Dream
I'm Eighteen
Long Way To Go
Black Juju
Is It My Body
Hallowed Be My Name
Second Coming
Ballad Of Dwight Frye
Sun Arise
It came on the radio in the late afternoon and from the first note it was right: Alice Cooper bringing it all back home again. God it's beautiful it is the most reassuring thing that has happened in this year of the Taylor Family..(.John Mendelsohn)
I bought this album when I was 13, laboring over my choice for what seemed like hours, between this and Alice Cooper Goes To Hell. Or maybe a Who album. I'm glad I made the choice that I did (I got Goes To Hell, and the Who album - all of `em - later. Much later, actually). But Love It To Death scared the shit out of me.
Love It is a really radical album now. It was then, too. Perhaps not as much. Put on Side one and you're dealing with absolutely 100% high octane Detroit rock and roll (true, the Coop and his gang may have come from Arizona, and may have ended up in Hollywood soon enough after, but they ran on Motor City fuel, whether they planned to or not. Carpetbaggers they may have been, but the could still smoke The Frost). Stripped of psychedelic pretensions and tamed from the wild excess of the Five or the Stooges; they honed that Detroit punch to a lean machine, and then deployed it like a surgeon's knife. And when pure inspiration and pure rock`n'roll suss met, as they do head-on in "I'm Eighteen," their richly-deserved big hit, sandwiched between two fine though not necessarily essential slices of good r`n'r (yes, I have put on Love It just to hear those two songs - but not often), you can hear the heavens open.
Right there you have nine minutes and five seconds (I checked) of very fine rock`n'roll, Detroit rock`n'roll, bastard child of the Yardbirds/Stones/Who/Them and a thousand similarly-influenced garage bands that stormed and stumbled all over mid-sixties U.S.A. (see Nuggets and the Back From The Grave, and other series, for details - and, by-the-by, among those thousands were The Spiders, whose "Don't Blow Your Mind" can be heard on Back From The Grave Vol. 4, and who later metamorphosed into The Nazz, before renaming themselves Alice Cooper). Two good little songs with a flat-out classic between them. Perfect. It would make a nice three song single.
Then things get very quiet. And then, very slowly, you hear the drums coming towards you - dum-da-dum-dum ... (bongo roll) ... over and over again. The natives are restless tonight. And the organ, slowly rising in the mix as the drums get louder (closer), and then the band crashes in, with Alice shouting "bodieeeeeessssss" over and over again (was Johnny Rotten listening?) until the band moves into a dark, Doors-like groove, and Alice begins to spin his web. "...a melody black ... flowed out of my breath" he intones. The music is dark, pitch-black, and cold, like the grave he's singing about. Then into the very strange middle, as the music drops away, all except a clicking drum-pattern, like the ticking of a clock. "Bodies ... need ... rest ..." Alice croons, softly ... "sleep ... an eaaaaasy sleep...." and then, after a long and unsettling eternity, the drums begin to pound again, and the guitar to spin snaky lines, and then the band crashes in again and Alice is screaming, full of a venom that few others could conjure up (and even fewer could sound so much like they mean it, when they don't ... or maybe Alice meant it more than he lets on) "my evil is now! and I'm caught up in desire!" as the band tears into an assault that sounds like The Yardbirds jamming with The Doors, before it all comes to an abrupt and startling halt.
Rolling Stone called it the biggest bummer on the album. As a kid it scared me silly. Today I find it thrilling.
Side Two kicks off with their other (richly deserved) hit, "Is It My Body," a slinky bit of tough rock that's one of the sexiest things the Coop was ever associated with. Man, I miss Mike Bruce. Then "Hallowed Be My Name," presaging decades of punk attitude ("cursing the lovers, cursing the Bible") with its snarling, snotty vocal and tinny garage band attack. From there, things get even stranger, and darker. "Second Coming," with Alice as a fallen Jesus (or a deranged wanna-be savior?) "it would be nice to walk upon the water, to talk again to angels by my side" he sings over a pretty but ominous piano melody, until the band roars into another bit of Yardbirds-inspired drama. And then into the albums theatrical piece de resistance, the grand finale, "The Ballad of Dwight Frye," the story of a madman, and the things he did, and the things he saw. Alice has done a lot of variations on this idea over the years, but never more effectively, or chillingly, than here; "I saw a man that was choking there, I guess he couldn't breathe" he sneers, "said to myself this is very strange, I'm glad it wasn't me..." And then the men in white are coming for him again. "Dwight Frye" was the Coopers' epic, their "The End," their "Sister Ray."
The nightmare fades. Like the "Ave Maria" sequence in Fantasia, meant to banish the demons of "Night On Bald Mountain," a romp through Rolf Harris' obscure-in-America "Sun Arise," a would-be joyful song, and yet another Yardbirds rip. Yet, somehow it doesn't quite happen. The shadows the Coops conjured up don't dissipate so easily, and for all its jauntiness, "Sun Arise" still sounds loaded with menace.
So ... a little theatrical late-night horror-show dramatics and a lot of tough, Detroit rock`n'roll. For what more could one ask?
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