- Pretties for You (1969) and Easy Action (1970) - interesting curios, but by no means essential
- Love It to Death (1971), Killer (1971), School's Out (1972), Billion Dollar Babies (1973) - classics. No record collection should be without them
- Muscle of Love (1973) - good, but not essential
- Welcome to My Nightmare (1975) - essential
- Alice Cooper Goes to Hell (1976) and Lace and Whiskey (1977) - not essential, but worth getting. Alice does disco!
- From the Inside (1978) - my personal favourite Alice album
- Flush the Fashion (1980), Special Forces (1981), Zipper Catches Skin (1982) and DaDa (1983) - the 'forgotten years'. Recorded when Alice was an alcoholic, and by his own admission, he doesn't remember anything about them. All have some good songs, but none should be the first albums that you get
- Constrictor (1986), Raise Your Fist and Yell (1987), Trash (1989) and Hey Stoopid (1991) - the metal years
- The Last Temptation (1994) - a good one
- Brutal Planet (2000) and Dragontown (2001) - very heavy and industrial
- The Eyes of Alice Cooper (2003) and Dirty Diamonds (2005) - back to basics, almost garage punk
- Along Came a Spider (2008) - I like this, but many other fans don't
- Welcome 2 My Nightmare (2011) - possibly the best album since the 70's
For a new fan, just discovering Alice, you could do a lot worse than getting the 4 disc 'Life And Crimes Of Alice Cooper' set - it contains pretty much everything you need to know about the man and his music -
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Crimes-...f+alice+cooper
Billion Dollar Babies has been remastered as a double disc special edition. The second disc contains live recordings of most of the album ('Mary-Ann' is missing) and some early demos
When I get the time, I am planning of doing an album-by-album, track-by-track critique of the entire Alice Cooper discography