We 2 Welcome Your Nightmares, Alice
It’s been a little more than four years since Alice Cooper’s Welcome 2 My Nightmare was released, long enough to let his REM sleep redux nightmare soak into our collective subconscious.
The album, which came out in September 2011, is the sequel to his 1975 masterpiece of the macabre Welcome to My Nightmare. And what a sequel it is!
Cynics and close-eared critics may choose to dismiss old-time rockers like Alice as has-beens. They may say they’re long past their best-before date — especially when they produce a sequel. Naysayers can argue that the artists are just trying to cash in on the popularity of past hits.
But we’re dealing with great artists here, ones who only make music because it moves them. Artists like Ian Anderson who, a year after Cooper, released Thick as a Brick 2, the sequel to his 1972 landmark, which was unfortunately abbreviated to TAAB 2. (Technically, it was “Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson” who made the album, probably because Anderson couldn’t, or didn’t want to, claim that it was the full band without Martin Barre’s involvement and included drummer Scott Hammond and bassist David Goodier who were latter-day and sometime members of JT. This silly conceit behind the band’s name brought back reminders of the 1970's sitcom Taxi episode where the character Jim Ignatowski buys the restaurant Mario’s and re-names it Jim’s Mario’s.)
Like Anderson, Cooper is an accomplished songwriter and a great showman. No less an artist than Bob Dylan extolled his work, once telling Rolling Stone magazine that he is “an overlooked songwriter.” Salvador Dali was inspired to turn Cooper into his art.
So the guy is good. Really good. Welcome to My Nightmare was great. And Welcome 2 My Nightmare (now there’s a clever play on numbers and letters, quite in keeping with Alice’s quirky sense of humour) is, well…let’s see how really great it is, shall we?
“I Am Made of You” opens with the haunting, mesmerizing piano notes of “Steven” from Nightmare — one of the motifs that plays out throughout the album. Even with the auto-tune effects on Cooper’s vocals, a distracting and dishonest vocal trick used by too many singers these days which I blame on Cher, the song works. Its lyrics are haunting, the music builds in momentum and Steve Hunter’s guitar solo is literally music to the ears. No wonder Cooper was so enthused. (Two years ago at Caesars Windsor, I caught him live for the second time and was disappointed that he didn’t play this track. Still, the show was memorable and Cooper, who has given us such deliciously dark morsels as “I Love the Dead,” was on-target with his humour again that night; I think he only said two things the whole night, ending the show by telling us, “You’re all sick things.”)
“Caffeine,” the next track, is an amphetamine rush that’s in the tradition of “Cold Ethyl” and earns its place in the hallowed halls of rock’s great paeans to the coffee bean, alongside Humble Pie’s “Black Coffee” and, yes, Ian Anderson again with his “Calliandra Shade (the Cappucino Song).” “Caffeine” screams to a caffeine crash worthy of such climaxes as Cooper’s 1973’s “Muscle of Love.”
“The Nightmare Returns,” a 1:15-minute instrumental that reprises the “Steven” melody, is next.
Then Cooper shifts musical gears to country and hops aboard “A Runaway Train.” It’s a fun ditty that will have you tapping your cowboy spurred boots on the floor.
“Last Man on Earth” brings vaudevillian Alice back onto the stage and reminds the listener of that danceable-ditty “Some Folks” from Nightmare. I can almost see the skeletons sashay arm-in-arm with Alice again. Better yet, in my mind’s eye I can picture Tom Waits cover this one, at a slower pace and maybe with a few more random instruments thrown in: a tuba, washboard, garbage can lid and Jew’s harp maybe.
“Last Man on Earth” delivers Cooper’s trademark brand of dark humour:
“I can smoke
I can drink
I can swear
And I can stink
There ain’t no one to bother me”
“The Congregation” is a hard, straight-ahead rocker and you can imagine the audience fist-pumping to the chorus in a concert stadium. It also contains Alice’s brand of comedy when the Guide explains to the dead visitors,
“As you can see over here in the Broken Glass Chamber the boys from Wall St.
Let’s hear it for the boys! (oooh!)
And here in the Eternal Mariachi Room are the defrocked priests and telemarketers (ohhh).
And, of course, in the Fiery Pit of Boiling Death, the lawyers, pimps and mimes (ahhh).”
In Cooper’s hell, Marcel Marceau never stood a chance.
“I’ll Bite Your Face Off” is Alice at his bitchin’ best, a reminder of the kind of girl he sang about in “Devil’s Brew/The Black Widow.” The kind you would not dare bring home to mother.
What can you say about the next track, “Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever”? After a thoroughly weird Wizard of Oz castle guards chant-like opening, we hear Alice putting on his best Weird Al Yankovic and boogying to a goofy disco beat. This being Alice, of course, it cannot last and the song shifts into a searing, soaring, rock-shredding monster of a song as John 5 (who played with Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson and David Lee Roth) demolishes disco with his lead guitar solo. It’s fun reminder of the 1970s when rock DJs set bonfire to disco albums.
In “Ghouls Gone Wild,” Alice gets back to dancing. Not in a disco way of course! — in the street, through the fire and on your grave.
Nightmare introduced the world to a softer, more balladic side of Alice Cooper with the classic “Only Women Bleed.” He carried that successful formula in followup albums, stringing together several hit rock ballads.
Nightmare 2 continues that tradition with the lovely “Something to Remember Me By.” Alice is thinking about his mortality, perhaps, in reminding his love that
“I may be gone tomorrow
But I’m here with you tonight
I’ll be holding you
Till mornin’ light.”
Think of “When Hell Comes Home” as sweet justice for the guy who made his woman bleed — and abused his child. Here, the child awaits Daddy and promises to give him “a big surprise.”
“What Baby Wants” pairs Alice with Ke$ha and it’s a bitchin’ duo indeed.
“I got a pretty face,” she says.
“Yeah but, I seen what’s hiding underneath.”
“You like my pretty mouth.”
“But you got razor blades instead of teeth.”
Yes, Baby makes the Black Widow look like a furry caterpillar.
It’s here that the album comes to a brilliant conclusion.
The penultimate track “I Gotta Get Out of Here” opens with the ominous tolling of a church bell and switches happily to a Traveling Wilburys-like rhythm where Alice ties together all the elements of his nightmare. He summarizes each track, again with dark humour — “I danced at a disco where the bodies all fell/ Piled up to the sky what a sulfurous smell” — and reminds us of his experience with the Evil One: “Spent the night with the devil, she was such a bad guy.” I can guarantee that this is the only rock and roll song you’ll ever hear that uses the word “iniquitous.”
In the tradition of “Give The Kid a Break,” a track from the Nightmare followup album Alice Cooper Goes to Hell, “I Gotta Get Out of Here” introduces a chorus of know-it-alls who shock Alice with the truth about his nightmare:
“They say: isn’t the message
Clear to you yet? Sonny, what part of DEAD don’t you get?
“Ah, excuse me?” Alice asks, and the exchange continues:
“What part of dead don’t you get?”
“Whoah, whoah, whoah, whoa…wait a minute!”
“What part of dead don’t you get?”
“I’m sorry, are you talking to me?”
“What part of dead don’t you get?”
“Hey, hey I signed on for a nightmare!”
“What part of dead don’t you get?”
“Really? I mean, that’s a little drastic, don’t you think?”
“What part of dead don’t you get?”
“I don’t..he..he..hey…whoah!”
“What part of dead don’t you get?”
“I get it…but I don’t get it.”
“What part of dead don’t you get?”
“I’m sinking here! He-llo!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
After all that fun, the nightmare concludes with “The Underture,” an instrumental that brings back special guitarist, the late Dick Wagner, who also played on Nightmare. This is a rock operatic thing of beauty as Alice weaves together themes from Nightmare including the horns and strings of the anthemic “Welcome to My Nightmare,” the slow orchestral waltz of “Years Ago” and, of course, “Steven,” with the sequel into a satisfying whole.
As his second Nightmare comes to an end, you can’t help but want Alice to pull another sequel from his bag of nightmares with his followup album. Anyone ready for Alice Cooper Goes 2 Hell?
Claudio D’Andrea has been a journalist for 30 years, writing and editing for newspapers, magazine and online publications. You can read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter.
