Review: Alice Cooper, ‘Billion Dollar Babies (50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)’ – Revisiting Their Peak

I saw that Alice Cooper have released Billion Dollar Babies – 50th Anniversary Edition and while I think there has already been a deluxe version of that seminal 1973 album released, I couldn’t help but comment about this 50th Anniversary Edition. I can’t believe it, but this will be Alice Cooper’s first appearance on B&V and that seems like a criminal case of overlooking an important artist. In my defense, I was going to comment on Alice’s 2023 album Road, but time got away from me. Time gets away from everybody I guess…

Alas, I think I was too young for Alice Cooper. If I’d had an older brother with a cool record collection he might have gotten me into Cooper, God knows everybody slightly older than me was into him. I actually picked up Cooper’s 1974 Greatest Hits, a single album of their biggest songs, so I did get on the bandwagon at some point. I did have a younger brother with a cool record collection but in the late 70s he was fixated on the 60s. I was more likely to hear “Here Comes The Sun” than “School’s Out” emanating from behind his closed door. By the time I got into music in ’78 – ’79, Cooper was past his initial heyday of ’71 to ’74. I remember hearing songs like “Aspirin Damage” at my buddy Brewster’s house and that wasn’t exactly a gateway into Cooper’s back catalog.

Actually, in the early ’70s Alice Cooper was the band’s name. They were Glen Buxton (lead guitar), Michael Bruce (rhythm guitar), Dennis Dunaway (bass), Neal Smith (drums) and a guy named Vincent Furnier on lead vocals. I think they all went to the same high school in Phoenix. How cool would that be – forming a band with your high school buds and you make it big. I had so many friends named Steve in high school we probably would  have called ourselves, the High Stevens…but I digress. They named the band Alice Cooper because they were looking for something that sounded like famous axe-wielding murderer Lizzy Borden’s name. Eventually lead singer Vincent Furnier legally changed his name to Alice Cooper and the rest, as they say, is history. The original band only lasted seven albums (’69-’74) and then Cooper carried on as a solo artist under his new assumed name.

Alice Cooper (the band) put out their first album in 1969. However, it wasn’t until their third album, 1971’s Love It To Death, that things gelled. Somehow I missed Alice Cooper when I posted about bands whose third record was the breakthrough album (Third Time’s The Charm). That album saw them enlist Bob Ezrin as producer. He was a guy who’d worked with Kiss, Aerosmith and Pink Floyd and he led Alice Cooper into a harder rock direction that just worked. That was the beginning of a hot streak… I was only in first grade so I missed a lot of this, sigh. Killer, also released in 1971 continued the band’s rise in popularity. That led to 1972’s School’s Out. While I love the song, “School’s Out,” it featured prominently in my Playlist: Songs About… School, I’ve never been crazy about that quasi concept album. There’s a West Side Story thing, “Gutter Cat vs The Jets” that’s a bridge too far for me… Ezrin knew that this band’s two guitars, a rhythm section and a singer could rock and boy, do they. Alice (the singer), gets short shrift as a vocalist but I think he’s a natural born crooner. He does a lot of dramatic stuff with his voice. While Ozzy Osbourne (who we love around here) has made a career out of singing songs about how crazy he is, when Alice Cooper sings, you start to worry he actually is deranged. He’s part camp, part menace. With songs about necrophilia and rape, they were out to upset ’70s parents, clearly.

After those three successful albums, the band and Ezrin recorded Billion Dollar Babies. And while I love both Love It To Death and Killer (which I didn’t discover until well after college), Billion Dollar Babies is the ultimate Cooper album to my ears. I did know a guy when I was in fifth/sixth grade who loved Cooper’s debut solo album, Welcome To My Nightmare, which certainly should have been on my list of Favorite Solo Debuts. It’s a great album, but I’m still a Billion Dollar Babies guy. I’ve always wondered how my buddy got into Alice Cooper in the fifth grade, but that’s a subject for a psychology blog about aberrant parenting. Babies has been remastered here and it sounds great. Cooper has been referring to it as Trillion Dollar Babies, which seems more fitting for these days when billionaires have doubled their wealth since 2020 and are playing astronaut… This album has some of their biggest tunes: “Elected” (which featured on our Election Fatigue playlist from 2016), the title track, “Hello Hooray” (the perfect opening song?), and of course “No More Mr. Nice Guy.” Who doesn’t love that last track!

Beyond the hits, there are so many great deep tracks. “Generation Landslide” is probably the greatest Cooper tune nobody seems to know. “Raped And Freezin'” – with a controversial title, clearly aimed at stirring up trouble – and “I Love The Dead” about necrophilia, are actually damn good songs, especially the first one. “Unfinished Sweet” is another great song that could have been a single… it rides a great bass line and even has a James Bond section. There’s a lot to love on this album. I’ll admit that “Mary Ann,” a quiet, piano driven ballad is a huge left turn but it does prove that Alice really can sing…

The value of these deluxe editions always rests, for me, on the bonus material. Here we have a 1973 concert from Dallas, Texas and some outtakes/single edits. Single edits are where the record company took a song off an album and edited it down to fit the AM radio requirement of a 3-minute song. They didn’t like long tracks on AM radio. Those are interesting but really are only for the “completists” out there. Of more interest are the outtakes – “Slick Black Limousine” and “Coal Black Model T” (I’m guessing Alice’s car is black) – are both good enough they could have ended up on my Playlist Songs About… Cars.

The big pay off in terms of bonus stuff on this set is, as usual for me, the live concert. Man could these guys rock. Alice Cooper was always a very theatrical band. I think this is the first tour they took a guillotine along and did a fake beheading of Alice. The onstage antics were legendary. Alice was covered in fake blood carrying a snake around. Clearly Starcrawler‘s Arrow de Wilde was paying close attention. But the sheer force these guys play with on the live stuff is awe inspiring. They open with three Billion Dollar Babies tracks – “Hello Hooray,” the title track, and “Elected.” Very “in your face” if you ask me. The guitar solo’ing on “I’m Eighteen” will melt your face off. This is the great live album that Alice Cooper never released. I do know that Glen Buxton, during the recording of the album, had to be replaced by a different lead guitarist – who also went to their same high school, by the way – due to issues with booze and drinking. If you’re in a band with Alice Cooper, who was a raging alcoholic at the time, and you’re the one who has to be replaced, you really do have a problem. Anyway, I don’t know if it’s Glen or the replacement guy, Mick Mashbir, who’s on the live tracks but whoever it is, they play their ass off. This was as good a hard rock band as you were going to find in America in the early ’70s and this live document should help prove that.

Alas, this original line-up only put out one more album after Billion Dollar Babies, 1974’s Muscle of Love (on which was “Teenage Lament ’74” which featured on our Playlist, Songs From 1974). Glen Buxton’s drinking and Alice’s spending on the stage production and effects created too much conflict within the band. While the Billion Dollar Babies tour was a sold out affair (the album reached number 1 in the UK and the U.S.), they didn’t make as much money as they thought they would due to cost overruns. By 1975 Alice was a solo artist and Bruce/Dunaway/Smith had formed their own band, the Billion Dollar Babies. Hey, if you’ve got a hit, milk it… that’s show biz, baby.

Thank heaven somebody had a tape recorder turned on in Dallas in 1973. The album itself is enough to make it worth picking up this Anniversary Edition, if you’ve never owned it. But this live stuff is absolute justification for putting this in your record collection. Turn this one up loud and pretend it’s 1973… maybe paint on some dark eye make-up and scare the neighbors…”Hello, hooray, let the show begin,” indeed.

Cheers!