the LIFE AND CRIMES of ALICE COOPER

by

Alice Cooper

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This is a must have for all Alice Cooper fans. "Life and Crimes" is a four disk set that, in chronological order, showcases the genius that is Alice Cooper. You get quite a bit of the original Alice Cooper band's material from their 7 records together. I have seen other reviewers state that not enough disk space is given to the original band's material, but 2 of the four disks in the set are basically devoted to the Alice Cooper band years. You get all of the hits, "Eighteen", "School's Out", "Billion Dollar Babies" etc. but what I loved about this box set, is that for the first time I was able to hear the songs like "Don't Blow Your Mind" and "Hitch Hike", songs released when the band called themselves The Spiders. You get to hear how Alice and crew took a song called "Respect for the Sleepers" and re-tooled it into "Muscle of Love". You get a demo track "Call it Evil" that is lousy in production value, but as a fan, you can enjoy just the raw sound of the band at work. Alice's old bandmates even get a track "I Miss You" from thier Battle Axe album when they performed as The Billion Dollar Babies. There are so many unreleased and forgotten gems on disk 2 & 3, it's almost like discovering a new Alice Cooper album. You get Alice's great cover of the Beatles "Because" from the "Sgt. Peppers" movie he did with the Bee Gees. There are two songs from a Flash Gordon rock-opera that Alice performed, "I'm Flash" and "Space Pirates". A nice surprise are two songs from the fantastically awful horror movie "Monster Dog" Alice starred in, "Identity Crisis" and "See Me in the Mirror". Also in this set is the song that made it onto the Special Forces LP jacket, but not onto the record, "Look at You Over There (Ripping the Sawdust from my Teddy Bear". There is a great version of "Road Rats" from the "Roadie" soundtrack that sounds so much better than the Lace and Whiskey version, as well as a cleaned up version of "I Am the Future". And ending disk 3 you get "Hard Rock Summer" from the Friday the 13th soundtrack, that is just a great hair metal jam. On disk 4 there is a demo version of "He's Back" that was re-worked into "Trick Bag" off of Contrictor, plus the movie version of "He's Back" from the Friday the 13th soundtrack. Disk 4 also features quite a few songs that were attached to live albums or best-of's, "Is Anyone Home" and Alice's version of "Fire".

If you go beyond the music, this box set has a great, informative booklet, with forward by Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, and liner notes from Alice and bandmates about each of the songs. There are tributes to Alice from everyone from Dick Clark to Rob Zombie. As an Alice Cooper fan, this box set was just a great treat. If you are a fan of any of the Coop's music, pick this up! Hopefully, now that Alice has released 3 more studio albums since this box came out, he will have enough extra material to produce another box-set in the near future. Possibly with a song or two where he reunites with the surviving members of the original line-up?? We can only hope.

This collection provides a good overview of the Coop's career thus far. The remastering is revelatory, particularly when compared to the flat sounding reissues of the past. My only gripe is that they used single versions in some cases. There is no excuse for this on a $50-plus set. There are lesser tracks from the early-to-mid 80's that could easily have been omitted to make room for the full-length album tracks. It mars this set somewhat to have the intro gone from "Welcome to my nightmare," one of the Coop's seminal tracks. Still, this isn't a bad place to start.