Alice Cooper is one of the greatest icons of the ‘70’s, one of the forefathers of heavy metal, and the rock star who pioneered stage theatrics like no other.
Now Alice is back with the sequel to his classic Welcome to My Nightmare album, and a deluxe box set of his pre-Nightmare material, along with unheard live tracks and demos.
The Alice Cooper “Old School” box set comes in a “school desk” package, like the cover of his classic School’s Out album, and includes four CDs with demos, live tracks, radio ads, pre-production tracks from the School’s Out album, a live gig from the Killer tour, a DVD with new features, bootleg vinyl of the St. Louis Killer show, 7’ vinyl from Alice’s original band The Nazz, and a 64 page program written by Lonn Friend, the former editor of the late, lamented metal / hard rock mag RIP.
And along with the Old School box set, Cooper has finally followed up with 1975 masterpiece, Welcome to My Nightmare, with the sequel, Welcome 2 My Nightmare, which brings back the surviving original band members for several songs, and former Cooper / Lou Reed guitarist Steve Hunter, who did the great live guitar duel on the live version of Sweet Jane with Dick Wagner, who also became Cooper’s second guitarist and writing partner on Nightmare.
Also on board at the helm is genius producer Bob Ezrin, who produced Cooper’s best ‘70’s work including Love It to Death, Killer, Billion Dollar Babies, and Nightmare. (Ezrin is also the producer of Kiss’s Destroyer album, and Pink Floyd’s The Wall.)
As Cooper said in his official electronic press kit for the new Nightmare, “Bob Ezrin was my George Martin. Classically trained, one of those guys who can take rock and give it that next level of acceptability.” Ezrin in fact built Cooper from the ground up when he went from making crazy, experiemental music, to one of the biggest rock stars of the ‘70’s. “We kept a lot of the madness,” Ezrin says. “We just controlled it and aimed it.”
Cooper is also bringing his nightmares as a Halloween Horror Nights attraction at Universal Studios, creating a maze complete with Cooper’s tunes, as well as guillotines, electric chairs, an insane asylum, snakes and spiders straight out of Alice’s stage shows. As a huge Cooper fan, it’s great to see him back with so much on his plate, with great members of his old school team backing him up as well.