Eighteen and I Like It
RRWS Episode 2 | Originally published August 2, 2023
I wanted to start the podcast with this album. “Love It to Death” by Alice Cooper was supposed to be Episode 1. But then I realized that “Nothing Fancy” by Lynyrd Skynyrd had “Whiskey Rock-a-Roller” on it, and that felt like a pretty appropriate song to kick things off with. So Alice got moved back to Episode 2.
I would call the Alice Cooper Band one of my favorite bands. They hold a special place in my heart, and “Love It to Death” from 1971 was truly their breakout album, their third record.
The backstory
The band struggled a lot to make it big in L.A. Frank Zappa actually caught one of their shows and signed Alice Cooper to his record label, Straight Records. The band put out a couple of interesting albums, “Pretties for You” and “Easy Action,” that didn’t really do very well. It wasn’t until 1971 that Alice Cooper brought forth its third record, “Love It to Death,” and started to become the band that would go on to create hits like “School’s Out,” “Billion Dollar Babies,” “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” “Under My Wheels,” and of course, from this album, “I’m Eighteen.”
The band featured Alice Cooper (that was the band’s name, but it also became the singer’s name, his real name being Vincent Furnier), along with Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway, and Neal Smith rounding out the five-piece.
“Love It to Death” was crafted at the RCA Mid-America Recording Center in Chicago under the watchful eyes of the inventive and quite young (at the time) Bob Ezrin, as well as Jack Richardson.
Ezrin was kind of at the start of his career here, but he would go on to produce records for Pink Floyd (he did “The Wall”), worked with Roger Waters a lot, worked with KISS quite often, continued to work with Alice Cooper throughout his career including his last few albums, and has worked with Deep Purple, particularly the later Purple albums, among a lot of others. Those are some of his most famous. There are a lot of great and legendary record producers in the history of rock and roll, but I think Bob Ezrin is the guy responsible for more music that I love than any other record producer. Every time I hear an Ezrin-produced album, I really take note because he does so many cool, over-the-top, magnificent things with his records that no other producer quite comes close to. That’s my opinion, anyway.
This album became a hallmark of the band’s history. “Love It to Death” signified the start of a new Alice Cooper Band with a more catchy, straight-ahead rock and roll persona. The album was showered with critical praise and commercial success, and finally established Alice Cooper as a major figure in the rock and roll world. So let’s drop the needle on this classic record.
Track by track
“Caught in a Dream” opens the album and encapsulates straight-ahead rock and roll, symbolizing the new face of Alice Cooper’s music. The first couple of albums were a little different. “Love It to Death” was just a straight-ahead, good rock and roll album, and “Caught in a Dream” starts it off well.
“I’m Eighteen” is one of the Alice Cooper Band’s best songs, in my opinion. This song was actually released to rock radio ahead of the album to test the waters and test their commercial viability, and it started them off great. Really great guitar and a prominent bass line from Dennis Dunaway. It’s got that memorable guitar riff that opens the song and continues throughout, particularly in the chorus, and the lead guitar of Glen Buxton really shines through. An organ makes a little appearance at the end right before the closing tune, and I think that serves as a nice embellishment that sets the tone for what would happen next on the record and kind of foreshadows what Alice Cooper would eventually become: the gothic, horror-themed rocker. “I’m Eighteen” is a great song. We’re going to come back to it later.
“Long Way to Go” is a personal favorite of mine, I think because I love a song that starts out with a chorus. The lead guitar on this one is really good, particularly after the chorus with the harmonic parts. There’s a lot of interesting stuff to listen to. That organ is back on this one, continuing through, but it’s not your typical Hammond organ sound. The Hammond organ was pretty common around this time. This is more of a church pipe organ, an interesting touch that fits quite well.
“Black Juju” is one of the weirder songs in the early Alice Cooper Band repertoire, and there’s a big creep factor. Tribal drums fade in slowly, getting louder and louder. The organ that we’ve heard in the first few songs becomes more prominent. The style, the lyrics, the vocals all have a Jim Morrison feel, maybe a hint of early Pink Floyd. It’s also evocative of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly, with the repetitive drums and organ. The whole thing gives off a voodoo vibe with echoes of the Caribbean or New Orleans. In the middle part, where Alice is just saying “bodies need their rest” over and over again and “sleep” over and over again, it gets quite creepy, especially with that ticking clock in the background. It ends in a frenzy, building back up with loud, exciting rock and roll guitars. Then Alice whispers and closes out the song, and we move right into the next tune.
“Is It My Body” has a Glenn Danzig sort of feel to it in the chorus. This is going to be a weird reference, but this show is all about tasting whiskey and coming up with notes. You might pull ideas or references from different places, and I’m doing that here too. I know Danzig, even with the Misfits, came after “Love It to Death.” But perhaps there’s a bit of inspiration flowing the other way for Danzig and crew. It’s got that sound, akin to what Glenn started doing on his solo records. The chorus is the best part, quite catchy with a nice hook that keeps some interest throughout the tune.
“Hallowed Be My Name” starts with an organ (again), a nice uptempo tune with some creepy parts and theatrical musical moments throughout, including screams and howls. Alice’s vocal syncs up with the instrumental part in some repetitive moments that are a lot of fun. It’s a classic Alice Cooper Band song and fits well right here.
“Second Coming” is another very theatrical tune, and we’re starting to see the beginnings of what would continue through Alice’s long career. It starts with a stripped-down solo part, just Alice with piano and some light drums. The lyrics are evocative of Christian religious phrases, words, feelings. The ending of “Second Coming” is actually my favorite moment on the record. The words end about halfway through, and there’s a repeated drum rhythm and guitar riff with some light piano in the background. But gradually, that background piano and the forefront drums and guitar shift places. You get a decrescendo on the guitar parts and a crescendo on the piano until finally the piano is the only instrument playing, this nice pretty little piece that transitions directly into the next track.
“Ballad of Dwight Fry” is an important track in the history of Alice Cooper. We’ve talked about a lot of beginnings here. It’s really the start of a lot of things for Alice, and it’s kind of the beginning of his madman persona. The straitjackets, the guillotine, all that stuff kind of started here. I don’t think everything would have gone quite the same way without the “Ballad of Dwight Fry.”
So who’s Dwight Fry? Dwight Frye was an actor most famous for playing Renfield in the 1931 motion picture “Dracula.” But the song isn’t biographical. The lyrics don’t really follow his life. They instead loosely describe a man, or a murderer, slowly descending into madness. It’s a theme that would be revisited over and over by Alice Cooper, particularly later in “Welcome to My Nightmare” and in the song “Steven.” Alice still alternates between “Dwight Fry” and “Steven” in his live sets. Usually each tour you’ll get one or the other, and it precedes the guillotine sequence in the show. It’s a creepy song that sonically is interesting, suspenseful, and very theatrical.
An aside: before I was a huge Alice Cooper fan, when I was just getting into Alice and before I actually knew who Dwight Frye was, I’d occasionally absentmindedly refer to the song as the “Ballad of Duane Reade,” which of course is an East Coast pharmacy chain and not, to my knowledge, the name of a character actor or a psychotic murderer. I just crossed those wires in my head. Not relevant to anything, but there it is.
“Sun Arise” flows directly out of “Dwight Fry.” So basically you’ve got those last three songs of the album all connected into each other, kind of a weird continuous suite of sorts. “Sun Arise” is an interesting song to close out the album because it almost has a Beach Boys surf-type feel, but slower, darker, more ominous. It’s actually not a song written by one of the Alice Cooper Band members. It’s a cover of a song by Australian singer Rolf Harris. Harris was a fairly famous sixties singer and songwriter. You may know the song “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,” which was also Harris. “Sun Arise” was another hit for the singer. There’s something interesting about Alice’s version being quite different. It’s one of only a handful of covers in the Alice Cooper repertoire, at least up until recently. He’s done more in recent years and on recent albums, including “Detroit Stories.” It’s a good way to close the album, kind of a fun song.
The verdict
“Love It to Death” is listenable from start to finish. There’s not a bad song on this record. Catchy, fun, interesting tunes, and you hear themes developing throughout. You hear that organ. You hear theatrical parts. You hear the music connecting into each other, going from really fun, happy music to rock and roll, to beautiful piano parts and some gothic, creepy, ominous areas, and it all just fits together. You can definitely hear some Bob Ezrin elements here that you’d come to hear on later albums from Alice Cooper, from KISS with “Destroyer,” and elsewhere. There are some signature Ezrin touches that I think are present here, and it’s pretty cool. It’s also kind of a blueprint for what Alice would do during the solo portion of his career, which has gone from 1975 through today.
For that reason, I’m putting Alice Cooper’s “Love It to Death” on the second-to-top shelf. This is a great album. Not quite the pinnacle, but close.
The pairing: Johnnie Walker Aged 18 Years
With a pretty high-rated album, where are we going to go with the bottle?
There are a number of ways I’ll pair a whiskey with a rock and roll record on this podcast. Some will be just a feeling, maybe location, geography, who knows. With “Nothing Fancy” last week, it was a very clear connection because they said “Old Granddad” right in the album. So what did they say in “Love It to Death?” They said “I’m Eighteen.” We have to get a bottle of whiskey that can also say “I’m 18,” right? Makes sense.
There are a few I could have gone with, but I didn’t want to have to buy another bottle. The one I had in my collection already is Johnnie Walker Aged 18 Years, used to be called Johnnie Walker Platinum Label. I’d call it a pretty refined blend from Johnnie Walker.
The tasting
On the nose, you get a warm, sweet wave of caramel and toffee and some vanilla. All your normal “stick your nose in any whiskey” notes. That’s just what you get here.
On the taste, it’s pretty rich and full-bodied. You get some dark chocolate, some caramel, and maybe a little honey, but then there’s a tartness as well and some spice. There’s a subtle underlying smokiness, which tells me there are probably some Islay whiskies in the blend. (We’ll talk about Islay whiskies another day. Those are generally peated scotches with a smokiness just because of the way they’ve always made their whisky, and it adds depth to the flavor profile, giving an earthy counterpoint to those sweeter notes.)
The finish is actually pretty long. The sweet elements of dark chocolate and caramel kind of fade off, and there’s a little smokiness on the back end. It’s a pretty nice whisky. Nothing that blows you away, which is usually how a blend goes, but it’s a nice experience throughout.
The connection
Here’s where it gets interesting. In Scotland, you can age whisky longer, but because of the climate, because of the humidity, it doesn’t mean the same thing as aging for the same amount of time in, say, Kentucky. In Kentucky, you get some pretty cold winters and some warm, humid summers, and those barrels sit in those giant rickhouses. From what I understand, you get a lot more interaction of the liquid with the barrel itself, the whiskey moving in and out of that oak. It’s a different story in Scotland. With American whiskey, the longer you age it, you really taste a lot more of that oak. With scotches and Irish whiskeys, because of the climate, longer aging tends to mellow out the flavors and make them more subtle.
That’s an interesting thing to think about, what climate and environment can really do. And that’s another connection to rock and roll. Think of Skynyrd from last week and the environment they were formed in. Think of Alice Cooper Band this week. We didn’t talk about it much, but they started in Arizona, all high school buddies. They spent time in Los Angeles, and then eventually they got picked up and signed by Frank Zappa and spent a lot of time in the Detroit area soaking up that sound. Motown, the MC5, and other Michigan rock and roll. Whiskey interacts with its environment the same way. A lot of different influences.
That actually made me think of “I’m Eighteen” and some of the things they talk about in that song. The protagonist in “I’m Eighteen” is really grappling with the limbo that exists between adolescence and adulthood. You hear it in the lyrics: “I’m a boy and I’m a man.” Johnnie Walker Aged 18 Years has that same feel to me. It’s crossing that threshold from youth and excitement to a more mature, refined, gentle whisky.
The recommendation
Do I recommend Johnnie Walker Aged 18 Years? If you’ve got a hundred bucks to spend and you want to, there’s probably better scotch you can get, but you’re not going to be sad about it. It’s a good scotch to drink. It’s the equivalent of going to Edinburgh and taking one of those bus tours that go through all the big tourist cities. You’re not going to be disappointed in it, but you’re also not going to go real in-depth.
See you next time.