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Hatchet review of the Vampires in San Francisco "Review: We Are All Complicit in Hollywood Vampires - May 15, 2019 - SF Weekly What is the true cost of watching Johnny Depp play guitar? I came to the Warfield not to praise Johnny Depp, but to bury him. Ever since I’d first heard word of Hollywood Vampires — a “superband” in the loosest of terms that features Alice Cooper, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, and Depp — I’d been struck with a deeply morbid curiosity as to why this group existed. On paper, Hollywood Vampires felt like the music equivalent of a novelty condom machine. One puts in their money with the knowledge that what they’ll receive is likely to be a disappointment — and also possibly glow-in-the-dark. Since forming in 2015, Hollywood Vampires have released one album and welcomed scores of cameos at their live performances. On the night prior to their Warfield show, Depp and company invited both Steven Tyler and Marilyn Manson to take part. In San Francisco, the only surprise was how quickly it became apparent that celebrity-driven musical side-projects are simply selfie palaces by another name. For most of live music’s history, the reason you’d buy a ticket was to hear music. Listening to Hollywood Vampires — be it their uninspired, original cuts or woefully miscalculated covers of greats like David Bowie and the Who — was clearly not the point for the lean crowd that showed up to film every second of Depp’s impression of a hard rock guitarist. Cooper and Perry got a little love as well, but the majority of the smartphones were focused squarely on Depp from start to finish. This scenario can be contrasted with another recent show that took place in San Francisco: Maya Rudolph’s brilliant Prince cover band, Princess. Whereas the notes and words were wholly irrelevant for the majority of Hollywood Vampires’ 90-minute performance, Rudolph’s role was to act as a divine conduit between the crowd and the Purple One. Individuals best known for their acting front both acts, but Princess attendees were there to celebrate Prince, while the fans at Hollywood Vampires were only concerned with capturing Depp’s image as many times as possible. It’s difficult to decide which moment best encapsulates the experience of watching a Hollywood Vampires show. It may have been when Alice Cooper, at the age of 71, bent over at the climax of “Rise” — from their forthcoming second album, get ready — to pantomime the flatulence sound effects that apparently serve as that track’s coda. Perhaps it was Depp’s take on Bowie’s “Heroes,” during which he mumbled out the lyrics with the conviction of roadkill. Maybe it was the band’s visual designer, who apparently was hired straight from an internship with Hot Topic circa 2005. In fairness, there were a few moments worthy of praise as well — although not many. For one, Depp may be a subpar musician but he was certainly kind to fans. Throughout the show, he bumped fists with those in the front rows and even returned following the group’s encore to rain down branded guitar picks. While Alice Cooper must shoulder some of the blame for allowing Hollywood Vampires to exist, the band’s best moments came when they played his material. During “I’m Eighteen” and “School’s Out” there were flashes of vintage Alice — the one that once gave a nervous Wayne Campbell a Milwaukee history lesson and provided the soundtrack for cinema’s most vicious high-school paddling. Given Depp is an actor and Perry’s heyday with Aerosmith is firmly in the rearview, Cooper is the one with the least enticing motivation to go the “superband” route. Yes, he was born in 1948, but seeing him brandish his evil carnival barker’s cane for the chorus of “School’s Out,” there’s no denying that the man still has it. No one wants to see Cooper relegated to county fairs and corporate retreats, but if the choices are to exit gracefully or to continue on as one head of a publicity-driven rock hydra, he may wish to reconsider his options. In truth, the problem with Hollywood Vampires is us. There’s no reason to slander Johnny Depp for wanting to be Pete Townshend. The issue is our willingness to pay to see it. We are the ones who bought this album, purchased tickets to the concert, and shared our good fortune for all our social media followers to see. Every time we decide the spectacle of a Hollywood Vampires is something we simply can’t miss, we tell venues like the Warfield not to book an up-and-coming performer. Every time we decide that three white men with plenty of power and wealth (but minimal musical talent) are deserving of our attention and paychecks, we deny those same resources to the kinds of artists who need them most. I went to see Hollywood Vampires with Depp in my crosshairs, but I left with the somber realization that I’m the one who needs to do better." |
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They have more talent at what they do (legends, both) than this ****ing prick could ever have as a journalist. |
Kerrang has a new interview with Nita Strauss where she talks about Alice and fitness "Nita Strauss Is The Hard-Working Guitar Hero That Rock Needs What most musicians do, Nita Strauss does twice as hard. Between playing for Alice Cooper’s band, working on her solo material, appearing at guitar clinics, and writing and promoting her e-book about rock star fitness, the 32-year-old guitarist is a ****ing machine, focusing all her energy and talent into working nonstop in the name of rock and metal. Add to that the fact that she’s a role model for millions of women who want to play heavy music in what they’re constantly told is a “male-dominated genre,” and you’ve got a human being whose life should inspire all performers to do a little more, a little better. Simply put, if Nita Strauss is out there in the world, you’ve got your work cut out for you. Currently on tour supporting her crowdfunded solo album Controlled Chaos while simultaneously launching her own fitness challenge, Nita doesn’t have a minute to herself, and has every right to be exhausted and humorless. But when she stops by Kerrang!’s Brooklyn offices to chat and take some photos, she genuinely seems just happy to be here. When we ask her what it’s like to play with Alice Cooper, she breaks into the kind of grin that would make one think she was a fangirl who just met Alice backstage, rather than a vital part of his backing band. “It’s amazing,” she says gleefully. “I’ve played with a bunch of bands that were kind of styled from 80s acts, and we used to cover [Alice Cooper’s track] Poison. Now I’m actually performing the song with the man!” With your solo album, is there something you feel like you can accomplish musically that you can’t as part of Alice’s band? Definitely. The common perception of instrumental guitar music is that it’s nothing but shredding. I think the thing we really hit on the head with Controlled Chaos is that for people who wouldn’t normally listen to instrumental guitar music, it’s a lot more than that. I’ve had people tell me that after they listened to my album, they went out to buy an album from Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, that they would have never listened to. Just to get to expose people to these records that meant so much to me has really been awesome. Is there a way you’ve found to grab someone’s attention with guitar front and center, the way a singer does with a band’s lyrics? It all comes down to emotion. If you’re writing songs about something, it makes a big difference to a listener. The beauty of instrumental music is that there’s no definitive meaning to the track. With lyrics, it’s much more apparent what the song is about. If it’s about a breakup, the lyrics are there to tell you that. With instrumental music, the songwriter can write one thing, and it can hit the listener in a completely different way. It’s all subjective. When you’re playing with other people, whether as a guest guitarist or with Alice Cooper, are there moments where you wish you could blast out your full emotion, but you can’t because you might overwhelm the vocalist? Absolutely. Especially with Alice Cooper. We’re a supporting act to Alice. There’s this invisible line on stage that we don’t cross. If Alice wants us to take the front stage, we will run with it, but it’s his show, and we’re conscious of that. We’re there to make the Alice Cooper show as great as it can be, but not to be, like, Alice Cooper featuring Nita Strauss. There are three lead guitar players in Alice Cooper’s band: myself, Ryan Roxie, and Tommy Henriksen. There isn’t any room for the three of us to do that, especially with Alice there. We have to give the crowd that guitar hero experience while also not taking anything away from Alice. I’ve interviewed Alice twice for Kerrang!, and he always takes a moment to talk about you and your bandmates’ other projects. There’s this stereotype of the frontman who thinks, “I’m in charge, know your role,” but he was quick to say he wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you guys. That’s kind of him, because he would totally be here. Let’s not kid ourselves, he could have anybody in his band! For him to not only choose us, but give us that spotlight and mention our names, it’s so amazing. Any rockstar can learn a thing or two from Alice Cooper. Is there something that you’ve learned from working with Alice that you’ve taken with you, whether it’s about being a musician or just something like how to get fake blood out of a shirt? The real thing I’ve taken with me is appreciation. Alice could be a jerk. You always hear about the rockstars that aren’t even on Alice’s level who are just jerks. Then there’s Alice, who could be enjoying his dinner, and when a fan comes up to him to tell them their stories about having their records taken away from their parents, he’ll put the fork down, look at them, and then start a conversation, asking if they ever got the records back. He really knows that without those fans, none of us would be here. Working with Alice, have you ever gotten your head chopped off, or swung for the gallows? That’s strictly Alice territory! I don’t think they’d offer it, because I totally would! I’d do all the dangerous thing. I remember on the first date with Mötley Crüe, the pyro technician warned me that there would be a lot of pyro and not to use too much hairspray, and I was totally into it. She said, ‘I like your attitude!’ Today is the last day to sign up for your Body Shred challenge. Does fitness and staying healthy help with your performance? It has made a huge difference. Just purely on the physical side, I’m less winded and not sore all the time. I do my cardio, take my supplements, eat clean. I have a meal prep company called Trifecta Nutrition that sends out my meals when I am on tour. Your body is a Ferrari — don’t give it the regular gas, give it the premium! All this was the inspiration for Body Shred. I made this change for myself. First I wrote a book about it, “Body Shred: Your Guide To Feeling And Looking Like A Rock Star,” and that’s basically motivation and making good choices. That’s not to say you need to be sober or you shouldn’t eat pizza, but you should be more conscious and make better decisions. Then I thought of a way that I could get more people involved, which is where this challenge came about. You have to get people involved somehow, and what better way than to give a rad guitar and amp? So we’re giving away an Ibanez Jiva, my signature guitar, and a Marshall amp, and Trifecta is giving away some great food. We got all these companies to get involved in it, and it’s really exciting. Let’s say I’m a metal musician. I’m going out on my first couple of tours, and looking for a way to be healthier. What are some basic ways to start? The first thing you want to do is set yourself up for success. Already have the healthy food. Bring stuff you can use on the road, and getting yourself into it mentally. Tour isn’t a vacation, it’s work. Treat your tour like your day job, and set yourself up for success. As an outsider, I definitely think of tour like a blank space, where you could do whatever you want. Yeah, and you can’t. That only works when it’s a shorter tour. For me, I’ve been touring consistently for 17 years, and that just didn’t work for me. I gained a ton of weight, and even when I got sober that approach just didn’t work. You can’t say that calories don’t count when you’re on the road, because they do. Nita Strauss Ethan Fixell 5 I saw is that you recently played a live guest spot with Evanescence at the 2019 Epicenter Festival. How was that? Have you known the band for a long time? It’s always fun. My own music is kind of non-collaborative, being self-produced and self-engineered. My boyfriend Josh [Villalta, also Nita’s drummer] has known the other guys in the band for a very long time, and I’ve known [rhythm guitarist] Jen Majura very well, and they were kind enough to invite me up to play. Also, as a female growing up in the Evanescence era, there weren’t a lot of girls to look up to, but there was Amy Lee, proudly carrying the torch for girls in rock and metal. To be on stage with her and hear her voice through the monitors, I thought back to my childhood and how excited I would’ve been to even just see that. It’s awesome that you still have those moments. I’m sure with this as your day job, it’s sometimes easy to overlook how cool this all is. I’m still very much that person. Josh always reminds me that. I started playing guitar after hearing Steve Vai for the first time. I recently got an award called the Inspire Award, and the company She Rocks surprised me by having Steve Vai present the award to me. I was just standing on the side of the stage trying not to cry because I had to play, and I was hearing from my hero how I’ve inspired people. I tried not listening, because I knew I would take it to heart, so I decided to just relax and I’d watch it later. Then Josh put his hands on my shoulders, and said, ‘Think back when I first started playing guitar.’ Then I started crying on the side of the stage, and then I had to go out and cry and play! You can never lose that sense of enchantment. If you do, you need to go out and work at a bank, and see how enchanting that is. That’s an amazing story. Have you ever played a set while crying? Oh my God, so many times! The first time I played Poison with Alice Cooper, I cried so many times. When I was recording the album, there are these two ballad tracks that are just super personal to me, and I was just crying. Not even cute, movie tears, like actual bawling! [Nita does a hacking, open-mouthed sob] I’ve cried during guitar clinics. I’m a very emotional guitar player, so it’s not uncommon for me to cry. I just let it flow through me." |
May 25th, 1969 The first pre-release review for the debut album, 'Pretties For You', is published in the Arizona Republic The final paragraph mentions the trouble that was had with the cover image. When the album was originally released, the painting featured a woman showing off her underwear... ...Due to this, some copies were 'censored' by putting a sticker over the offending garment! Later copies reverted to the uncensored version. |
The rumour machine is starting up! People are suggesting that this is going to be back in the new tour set list. With a band that has three guitarists and no keyboard player, presumably the long and atmospheric intro will be cut |
Video: Watch Alice Cooper attempt rubber chicken Guinness World Record | Planet Rock "Alice Cooper has attempted to break the Guinness World Record for the number of rubber chickens thrown in the air at the same time. The Planet Rock DJ made an appearance on the Williams Sonoma Culinary Stage at the BottleRock Napa Valley festival on Sunday (26th May), where he tried to enter the record books. The official Guinness World Record for the largest rubber chicken toss was set by Soboba Casino in San Jacinto, California on 29th April 2017 when 1,013 people took part. Alice took to the stage at BottleRock Napa Valley to lead the world record attempt where he and attendees launched over 1,014 chickens skywards in unison. An official from the Guinness Book of World Records was present on Sunday, however the Mercury News reports that they couldn’t verify that the chickens were thrown in the air at the same time so the attempt was unsuccessful." |
Alice joins covers band Chevy Metal, featuring Taylor Hawkins from The Foo Fighters on drums, for a run through of 'Schools Out' |
June 6th, 1977 - Alice's snake died when she was bitten by a rat during dinner time! Never one to miss out on a bit of publicity, an open audition to find a reptile to replace her was held in Century City, Los Angeles the following week on June 13th This was covered in the Long Beach Press Telegraph https://www.sickthingsuk.co.uk/07-ti...Auditions].jpg |
Hollywood Vampires - Heroes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8VnYZLWr_s Obviously it's a great song anyway and the Vampires do it justice. |
New interview/feature in the Yorkshire Post "Alice Cooper: ‘We got banned everywhere and of course every teenager in the world wanted to go see us at that point’ Alice Cooper used to live life on the edge, but these days the veteran rock star is a Christian who enjoys playing golf. Duncan Seaman talked to him about his colourful life. For a man well versed in shocking audiences for 50 years, it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise to find Alice Cooper is in person thoroughly disarming. Now a genial 71-year-old with a wry self-awareness, the singer nonetheless confounds today both with his fondness for the gentle game of golf and ready mentions of his religious faith. In October he and his band will be touring the UK, bringing a stage show renowned for its guillotines, electric chairs, deadly snakes and lashings of fake blood. It’s an act whose reputation once so outraged the 1970s moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse that she demanded he be banned from Britain. MP Leo Abse followed suit, accusing Cooper of “peddling the culture of the concentration camp”. “My image became so over the top,” Cooper concedes today. “There was no internet then so everything I did was magnified totally out of control, that’s why Mary Whitehouse and Leo Abse and those people, they heard the rumours but they had never seen an Alice Cooper show. I agree I would’ve been a little wary of bringing Alice Cooper into England too if I’d heard they rumours they heard, but we couldn’t have paid them to say what they said. “They helped us so much just because of the fact that they kept going, ‘Oh this band will never play England’, and we got banned in Russia, everywhere, and of course every teenager in the world wanted to go see Alice Cooper at that point then.” Contextualised in late 60s/early 70s American counter-culture, the amorality of Cooper’s act made a certain kind of sense. “You have to remember I was of the age then where I was breaking loose from just about everything I’d ever been taught and I was in Los Angeles in 1967, ’68, ’69 which was Sodom and Gomorrah,” he says. “I never lost my religion but at the same time I took a vacation from it.” The infamous incident, in which a live chicken was torn to pieces at a concert in Toronto in 1969, was, he has long insisted, an accident. It was Frank Zappa, the band’s early mentor, who advised Cooper to neither confirm nor deny false accounts that he’d bitten off its head. “I didn’t kill the chicken, I threw it into the audience and the audience was either supposed to take it home as a pet or the bird would fly away – not knowing that chickens didn’t fly, I’m from Detroit, I never saw a chicken in my life. “The next day in the paper it was like ‘Alice Cooper kills chickens’, I became the geek of all time, and the audience were all too willing to believe that, they wanted Alice Cooper to be that, and so [Frank Zappa] says ‘Whatever you do, don’t deny it’. So people would ask me the question and I would just go ‘Well, you know…’,” he says, chuckling. Zappa had signed Alice Cooper – then the name for the full five-piece band, not just their singer, whose real name was Vincent Furnier – to his record label for their reputation as musical misfits. “The songs were so bizarre and so odd that everybody else in Los Angeles had turned us down, everybody was looking for the new Buffalo Springfield, and we were anything but that. Frank Zappa was the only one that would listen to us and he listened to the songs and said ‘I don’t get it’. I said ‘Well, is that good or bad?’ and he said ‘No, that’s why I’m going to sign you, because I don’t get it’.” Their complex, off-kilter mix of psychedelia and blues, as evidenced on their first two albums, Pretties For You and Easy Action, found only a tiny audience. They did, however, discover a kinship with the Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, with whom they played shows in the US. “We were very good friends with those guys,” Cooper recalls. “I think there was some relationship between the two bands because we even had the same lightshow. “I remember Glen Buxton [Alice Cooper’s guitarist] would go into the bedroom with Syd Barrett and they both had Echoplexes, these little amps, and they would play things back and forth to each other and through the Echoplex. Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page would be sitting there playing blues licks whereas these two guys are sitting there playing electronic insanity to each other. There was some sort of camaraderie they had.” The band finally found a commercial sound thanks to producer Bob Ezrin. “We would go from strange electronic music right into a bluesy kind of thing, it didn’t make any sense at all to us either, that’s why we needed a Bob Ezrin to come along and put it all into order,” Cooper says. “It’s the same thing that George Martin did to The Beatles. Bob Ezrin came in and said ‘OK, let’s sweep this floor a little bit and get to the basis of what’s really good here’ that’s why Love It To Death ended up being really the first Alice Cooper album.” Coupling punchy rebel anthems such as I’m Eighteen with a stage show that by now included mock fights and gothic torture modes seemed a much surer recipe for success. They’d been encouraged to wear make-up and dress androgynously by the equally outrageous all-female group the GTOs. The splashy elements of the show were inspired by the singer’s love of horror films. “I didn’t know about Hershell Gordon Lewis until later, I was a very big fan of the classics,” he says. “Everybody knew about Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. We went to the movies every Saturday and watched every one of those movies and so I had no problem with those movies at all. The other ones didn’t come until the late 60s when the band didn’t have time to go to a movie, we were too busy trying to make it as a band, but I did appreciate the humour. “I’ve always thought that horror and comedy were in bed together, especially Vincent Price and a lot of the Christopher Lee movies, if you weren’t seeing the comedy in that you were missing out you were kind of missing out on the other half of that movie. I thought that horror and comedy would really work together, especially if it was backed by really good music. “I think that people really got one thing confused with us, the fact that they were so taken by the visual and the image of the band that they didn’t realise that we spent all of our time on the music. We were still up against Led Zeppelin and the Stones, we knew that you had to be a great band in order to make it, rather than a great show.” Strangely, Cooper’s father, Ether, a pastor in The Church of Jesus Christ, had no objection to the gore and mock executions in his son’s stage act. “My dad was a really good pastor, he could preach all day, but he also had a great sense of humour. He was very funny, and he liked The Beatles and the Stones and The Who, he could tell you who played bass in The Yardbirds and yet he could quote you any scripture that you wanted to hear. He said ‘Look, I have no problem with the music, I have no problem with the show, I have problems with alcohol, I have problems with drugs and I have problems with you sleeping around’. That’s what a pastor’s supposed to say, that was the moral end of it, but he said ‘Musically I don’t have any problem with it’. That was a very cool thing for a pastor to say.” By the early 1970s Alice Cooper’s sound was beginning to cross the Atlantic. A young John Lydon took to the band’s album Killer to his heart, while Cooper remembers reading that they had even made an impression on Paul McCartney: “He said the first time he heard No More Mr Nice Guy it frightened him, he didn’t understand that pop could be threatening.” Cooper also recalls David Bowie brought his band to watch Alice Cooper perform “and said ‘This is what we should do’…he was really inspired by it. Of course, he was looking at it as ‘Let’s create’, he certainly didn’t want to do what Alice Cooper was doing, he liked the idea though that the music and the theatrics and the characters could all mix in together, and that was right. So when I saw Bowie with the Spiders From Mars I went ‘Oh good, another character’ but I didn’t feel like we were at odds with each other. I just thought it was another new character – here’s Ziggy, here’s Alice.” The albums School’s Out and Billion Dollar Babies propelled Alice Cooper to the top, becoming million sellers, but by 1974 musical differences and the singer’s heavy drinking had taken their toll; the band split up and Cooper adopted the name for his solo act. “I was drinking at least a bottle of VO [whisky] a day,” he says of the period. “When you’re 25, 26, 27 you’re indestructible, and so I was one of those guys that never got drunk, I was sort of the Dean Martin, I was the guy that could drink and just get a golden buzz going all day but I was never falling-down drunk.” He finally realised he needed to get sober when he came off the road around 1977. “There was a point after the Welcome To My Nightmare show – that show went on for two years – and we did at one point 65 cities in 72 days and again, you’re young enough where you’re not getting sick, you’re doing the show every night, there’s no hint that you’re tired at all, you’re playing to sold-out audiences every night and you’re doing the show that’s so much fun to do, it wasn’t like a rock show, it was like a production, it was really something, but internally my body was going ‘Wait a minute’. At the end of the tour I started throwing up blood and that’s when your alarm goes off and says ‘OK, this party’s over’. The doctor said ‘I’ll give you two months before you join the other Hollywood Vampires, [Cooper’s former drinking buddies such as Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson], the other guys that are gone, so I took that pretty seriously, that’s when I got sober.” He’s subsequently become something of a wise counsel for other musicians grappling with addiction. “People call me privately and they go ‘Listen, don’t tell anybody this but I need to find a place to check into’ and I go ‘The fact that you’re calling me and telling me that you have a problem means you’re halfway home’. It’s when you get the guy that keeps denying that he has a problem. I would say ‘Listen, I’m going to tell you where a good place is, I’m going to give you the name of a doctor, take it seriously, don’t just go there to slow down, if you really want to do this, go there to stop’ and a lot of guys did which was really good, so I looked at it as an obligation. “I came out of it totally sober and it was basically a gift from God the fact that I didn’t have to go to AA, it was just gone, so I looked at it this way: God gave me another chance and said ‘Look, I don’t mind you being a rock ’n’ roller at all but also be a Christian’ and I went ‘OK, that sounds good to me’.” In place of hard drinking, golf has become his way to unwind. “I knew I had an addictive personality because everything that I did if I liked it I did it too much,” he says. “I’ve been married 43 years and I’ve never cheated on my wife. I play golf six days a week and the reason is I had to find something that was going to be an addiction, because I like being addicted but I want to be addicted to something that’s not going to kill me and golf wasn’t going to kill me. “I was a natural athlete anyway so when I started playing golf I went ‘Oh man, my fans are going to hate this because their dads play golf’. Now if you look at almost any band I can think of three guys play golf in the band because it’s one of those things when you’re on tour you forget the everyday grind. It’s a Tuesday and you’re in Wichita, Kansas and you have all day before you play a show that night at nine o’clock and you don’t drink so what are you going to do? For me, I can play golf for four hours, and then I found that my guitar player played and my bass player played and so we really look forward to it, we get out and play golf and then we get up at night and do the best stage show that we can do.” Alice Cooper plays at the First Direct Arena, Leeds, on October 7. Rise, his new album with the supergroup Hollywood Vampires, featuring Johnny Depp and Joe Perry, is out on June 21" |
The first review for the 'Rise' LP from My Global Mind "Released by: earMusic Release Date: 21st June 2019 Track List: 1. I Want My Now 2. Good People Are Hard To Find 3. Who’s Laughing Now 4. How The Glass Fell 5. The Boogieman Surprise 6. Welcome To Bushwackers (feat. Jeff Beck & John Waters) 7. The Wrong Bandage 8. You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory 9. Git From Round Me 10. Heroes 11. A Pitiful Beauty 12. New Threat 13. Mr. Spider 14. We Gotta Rise 15. People Who Died 16. Congratulations When I reviewed the Hollywood Vampires gig in London, I stated that even if it was just a glorified, rock royalty, karaoke session…at the end of the day who cares. It was an evening filled with glamour, danger and rock classics…so what was not to like? I did however, feel that I needed to hear some of the song writing talent shine through from each of these musicians and I hoped that their new offering ‘Rise’ would showcase this…and it does! ‘I Want Now’ draws us in with screaming guitars and crashing drums leading into a grooving beat of garage rock, which certainly has echoes of early 70’s Aerosmith. Complete with honky-tonk piano in the background, this certainly has an old school feel to its rock power. The whole album is intermittent with small little spooky snippets like ‘Good People Are Hard to Find’ which has eerie echoing voices bringing a spinetingling feel to this simple vocal interlude. Whilst ‘Who’s Laughing Now’ has the thumping Rammstein tasting bassline for the intro to an ass kicking, heavy as you like, gorgeously tongue in cheek treat. LOVED THIS! It is no surprise that it was chosen for the first single from the album. ‘How the Glass Fell’ has the shadow of children’s voices alongside a harpsichord, giving us a haunting false sense of security, before Alice growls his way alongside a superbly orchestrated, humdinger of a strutting serenade in ‘Boogieman Surprise’ ‘Welcome to Bushwackers’ (feat. Jeff Beck and John Waters) is a slice of beer drinking Americana and is refreshingly different, especially for Alice, and a fine ditty it is too. With superb guitar…well that goes without saying with ALL of the talent involved. This track is fun, foot tapping and tantalising for all those that love a good dose of Talk Box! ‘The Wrong Bandage’ is an interlude of Aladdin Sane piano strains and paves the way to ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory’ which is a ballad of beauty and has the stunningly sexy vocals of Mr Joe Perry. This is really lovely, I’m not usually one for this type of track, but this is great! ‘Git from Around Me’ is deep, dark and dirty grunge and a stark contrast to the next goose-bump promising cover of David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ sang by Johnny Depp, whose voice is absolutely perfect for this track…Bowie would be proud! Still reeling from the totally amazing ‘Heroes’, ‘A Pitiful Beauty’ slips into a creepy crawling musical interlude to reveal a full-on stonking Alice Cooper speciality with ‘New Threat’. ‘Mr Spider’ offers us a kaleidoscope of creepy Pink Floyd psychedelic horror and then some. ‘We Gotta Rise’ is an answer to Alice’s ‘Elected’ and a tongue in cheek track about lies and politics, lots of material there then! This rowdy shout out to all the crap going on in the world today, hits deep in todays times. Whilst ‘People Who Have Died’ is a noisy, punk-rockabilly tribute to all those rockers that have passed away. The finale to this album is ‘Congratulations’, with its hauntingly constant rhythmic strumming and spoken vocals by the band. I can certainly feel the influence of Joe Perry much more with ‘Rise’ compared to the previous offering of their self-titled album. The boys have most definitely got into their groove and are plainly enjoying every moment they play together. I give this a kick ass, blood sucking, totally fangtastic 9 out of 10. Ratings: 9/10 Written by: Francijn Suermondt My Global Mind – Staff Writer" |
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This could be the Hollywood Vampires live album that Alice has mentioned several times in interviews which leads to the question of whether it will still be released as a stand-alone thing, whether it is will included in other territory releases or whether the only way to get it will be to buy the Japanese one The track listing is:
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EarMusic have posted a video with short previews of every track from the new Hollywood Vampires album On first listening, it doesn't seem too bad |
The Vampires appeared on The Jimmy Kimmel show yesterday (Wednesday, June 19th) 'I Want My Now' 'Heroes', with Alice on guitar! |
Amazon are delivering my Hollywood Vampires cd sometime before 9pm. I'm getting excited. :) I'm working from 6pm to 11pm so I might not hear it until tonight. New Alice Cooper album day! :clap: |
Just looked in the latest Kerrang! (Download review issue) The Vampires album gets 3 K's. Pretty average really. |
Not sure that I trust a Kerrang score. :) I should imagine that I would disagree with most Alice Cooper album review scores - for example, I actually love Lace and Whiskey and Zipper Catches Skin but not the popular Trash (bar Poison). I'll find out for myself later today, already read some people saying that it's better than the last album (Paranormal). And also that it's a massive improvement on the first Hollywood Vampires album. |
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I only mentioned it because Susan also posts reviews and scores for gigs and releases. Based on the last Vampires album i wouldn't give it time of day but what i've heard so far has been okay. Paranormal is pretty damned average as well. Welcome 2 My Nightmare i thought was excellent though. |
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It was worth buying just for the Under The Bed bonus track. :) |
Rise arrived 15 mins ago. I've got to get ready for work so won't be able to listen until tonight. However I did quickly skip through the cd out of curiosity and it seems that 4 of the 16 tracks are just 60 secs or so 'sonic doodlings'. So it appears that the album is really just 12 tracks - 9 new songs and 3 cover versions. |
After just one listen, I'd probably award somewhere around 4/5 to the new Hollywood Vampires album. btw The cd cover looks much better in real life as it uses gold print. But it's always a bit odd with immediate scores, I'd have to listen again to properly judge - my opinion might well change. The current stand-out tracks seem to be Who's Laughing Now, People Who Died and Congratulations. Currently undecided if I prefer Paranormal or Rise but as long as it's not another Along Came A Spider (seriously, what the hell happened there??), I'm quite pleased. :) I've got some professionally shot for television YouTube Hollywood Vampire gigs stored on my PS3's hard drive and I think I'll rewatch the most recent one on Sunday afternoon whilst my wife is at work (they haven't been officially released so please don't ban me for advocating piracy!). |
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Thst's nice, I must say! Quote:
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Zipper Catches Skin: November 4th, 1982 - Dave Dickson - No number rating, but: "...I suspect Vincent Furnier has lost all control over the monster that is Alice, and, unleashed, the creature appears to be floundering aimlessly without much idea how to use his freedom. A return to 'The Inside', Vincent, would probably do you and Alice the world of good." Da Da: December 15th, 1983 - Neil Jeffries - No number rating, but "...With further spinning, this could well become a latter day A.C. classic because 'Da Da' already sounds better than anything he's done in yonks. Thank goodness for Alice!!!" Raise Your Fist And Yell: October 17th, 1987 - Chris Welsh - 4/5 "Dealing more directly with the music, one finds this is a powerful piece of work that Alice rightly considers to be his best in years. Certainly the guitar work by Kane Roberts is packed with string grinding power, and Alice summons every ounce of bile and ire as he soap boxes about 'Give The Radio Back' and threatens 'You're in my way' on 'Step On You'. 'Hello my little pretty, don't we look yeuk!' he slobbers on 'Not That Kind Of Love'." The Life And Crimes: May 8th, 1999 - 4/5 "but, let's face it, this box set lark is purely for the ardent fan. Nobody's realistically going to fork out a fistful of tenners for an introduction to an artist they don't know - they're gonna a buy a greatest hits album from the bargain bin. And when you get down to assessing the actual music, the rarities/demos content here could be shoved onto a single CD, which is something of a disappointment." Brutal Planet: June 17th, 2000 - Steve Beebee - 2/5 "These plodding, self-parodying rockers crawl Manson's shadow and are supposedly 'linked' around one theme: that the world is sometimes unpleasant. Not exactly a revelation. The production is glossy enough, but only the sample-infected 'Blow Me A Kiss' - co-written with old Cooper and Kiss cohort Bob Ezrin - exceeds the average. Sadly, the type of mechanical animals Alice Cooper has been left with are the ones with flat batteries." The Eyes Of Alice Cooper: September 27th, 2003 - Paul Travers - 4/5 "There's no 'Under My Wheels' on here, but 'Man of the Year' and 'What do you want from me' come close and, as the band rip through this funny, raw and sneering collection it soon becomes clear that this is the best AC album in years." As for the Vampires, I stand by my comments from a few years ago when the project was first announced. In my opinion, they are no more than a gimmick band consisting of one TRUE legend (Alice), one rock hero (Joe [be honest tho, how well known is he outside of Aerosmith?]) and one failed actor (Johnny [I would suggest he hasn't made a good film since 'The Corpse Bride' in 2005]). I will probably get the 'Rise' album at some point, but I'm willing to wait until it ends up being sold cheap in a charity shop! |
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If we are being petty like that you could also say Alice hasn't made any decent music since Poison - how well known are his songs since then outside of Alice's fan base? You can't have one rule for Perry and one for Alice. |
Depp is a great actor and a fantastic musician, I like Hollywood Vampires personally and it’s because of him and Joe Perry, for me it’s Alice Cooper who’s the weakest link in that band |
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What I do think is that he made some great films up until 'The Corpse Bride' ('Cry-Baby', 'Edward Scissorhands', 'Ed Wood', 'Sleepy Hollow', 'From Hell', 'Curse Of The Black Pearl') and some really awful films after it ('Alice In Wonderland', 'The Lone Ranger', 'Into The Woods', 'Mordecai', 'Alice Through The Looking Glass') Maybe 'failed actor' was being too harsh, but in my opinion he's certainly made some bad movie decisions over the years |
I certainly don't want to sound out of order but I would suggest that it's a mistake for a big fan to wait for Alice's 29th studio album to turn up in a charity shop. It's certainly superior to 'Pretties For You', the non-Poison 'Trash' music and the non-Vengeance Is Mine 'Along Came A Spider' music. I don't personally see a Cooper collaboration with Joe Perry, Tommy Henriksen and Johnny Depp as a bad thing. This is a fun album imo and well worth checking out. |
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The final line of her review reads - Quote:
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For her sake, I hope she's not a Harry Potter fan. |
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Sensationalism from The Daily Mail "Alice Cooper has DEATH PACT with his wife as he 'couldn't live without her' EXCLUSIVE: Rocker Alice Cooper says 'The Lord is our glue' and has kept him and his wife Sheryl Goddard together and in love for 43 years Shock rock king Alice Cooper made an art of terrifying audiences during his Seventies heyday.With a lot of the article being taken out of context, Alice has released the following statement: "Sheryl and I do NOT have a death pact, we have a LIFE pact. We love life so much. What I said was that because we're almost always together, at home and on the road, that if something did happen to either of us, we'd most likely be together at the time. But neither of us has a suicide pact. We have a life pact. And, besides, I'm booked through 2028, so..." |
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC633i46LFs |
July 25th, 1969 - 50 years ago today, the debut album from The Alice Cooper Group, entitled 'Pretties For You', was released on Frank Zappa's 'Straight' label While it's not a great album, it's not as bad as many people claim. It's a sign of it's time, and the influences of Zappa and (psychedelic) Pink Floyd is obvious. But this is a band who are still finding their feet and there are some good songs on offer - 'Reflected', which would later be reworked as 'Elected' from the 'Billion Dollar Babies' album, and 'Levity Ball' which is as catchy as anything and an indication of things to come The finished record was effectively a demo. In his first autobiography, 'Me Alice', Alice describes the making of the album. Paraphrasing things: The band looked forward to recording their first album under the guidance of Zappa, someone they admired a great deal, but it didn't turn out quite the way they expected. Zappa was apparently barely present during the short sessions, instead leaving the actual production work to Ian Underwood, a member of Zappa's band. The band proceeded to run through the songs ready for the actual recording when Zappa reputably appeared declaring the sessions done and that the album would be ready in a week! Members of the band pointed out that there were mistakes that needed to be repaired but Zappa's just said "don't worry, we'll fix it in the mix', and that was pretty much the last they heard from him!Upon it's release, one review descibed the album as "...a tragic waste of plastic....". Nasty maybe, but without it (and follow-up album 'Easy Action') we would never have had the likes of 'Love It To Death', 'Killer' and 'Billion Dollar Babies' Of course the album didn't sell that well, but it sold more then the '50 copies to friends and family' that is sometimes suggested. It peaked at #194 on the Billboard chart listing for August 2nd 1969, almost certainly due to the Zappa connection |
Alice Cooper - Wicked Young Man A two disc box set that comprises the albums Brutal Planet and Dragontown is on Music Magpie for £2.09 Two excellent heavy Alice albums, bargain really. https://store.musicmagpie.co.uk/prod...cked-young-man One in stock at time of posting. |
'Brutal Planet' as also been re-released under the titles 'Pick Up The Bones' and 'Shock Rock: The Early Days' https://www.sickthingsuk.co.uk/03-co...ilations37.jpg https://www.sickthingsuk.co.uk/03-co...ilations26.jpg although neither one contains the Japanese bonus track 'Can't Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me' or the extra tracks on the 'tour edition' release: It's The Little Things (live) Wicked Young Man (live) Poison (live) My Generation (live) Total Rock Documentary (radio show) |
I've got the Clowns Will Eat Me track. But on a UK reissue of Dragontown. Anyway as I've just posted elsewhere, the more I listen to Rise, the more I like it. Have now played it several times since release (that certainly didn't happen with Paranormal). I now think it's the best Alice record since The Eyes of Alice Cooper (which I loved). |
Alice has just started the 'Ol' Black Eyes Is Back' tour, with a show at the Grand Theater at Foxwoods, Mashantucket, Connecticut with a show on July 4th, 2019 From what I am led to believe, this is the setlist:
No doubt the songs played will change over the coming weeks, but I'm disappointed there's no 'Welcome To My Nightmare', 'Only Women Bleed', 'Cold Ethyl' or 'Dwight Frye' but 'Roses On White Lace' and 'Teenage Frankenstein'...IF this list is true!!! No word on any theatrics as yet, but we are being promised a new FrankenAlice monster and the stage set is supposedly based around a castle design. A basic idea can be seen from a short clip of 'Feed My Frankenstein' which has been uploaded to YouTube |
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