Alice Cooper reflects on the making of ‘Killer’ album
“Love it to Death” made Alice Cooper famous, largely driven by the breakthrough single “I’m Eighteen.”
Arriving nine months later, “Killer” was the followthrough that made it clear that Cooper and the band that shared his name for seven albums were just getting started.
“People listened to ‘Love it to Death’ and they said, ‘Oh, my gosh, Alice Cooper’s got a sound now,”’ Cooper says.
“And ‘Killer’ took the sound to the next step. Like it should. Every band should get better and better and better. Then, of course, after ‘Killer’ came ‘School’s Out’ and ‘Billion Dollar Babies,’ which really kind of skyrocketed us up.”
The definitions of the ‘Alice Cooper sound’
To Cooper’s ears, “Killer” and “Love it to Death,” both released in 1971, remain the “two real definitions of the Alice Cooper sound.”
Both albums were recorded mostly live.
“I always liked recording as live as you could in the studio because the band was very tight,” Cooper says.
And live recording helped them keep up with the pace required by their newfound fame while touring more than ever.
“You were doing albums as quickly as you could, because (David) Bowie was doing two a year” Cooper says.
“And so was T. Rex. All the bands you were competing with were doing two albums a year. And you’d better keep up.”
The origins of the Alice Cooper band
The road to “Killer” started in the Cortez High School cafetorium in Phoenix, where in 1964, the singer made his first onstage appearance with the Earwigs, singing Beatles parodies alongside future bassist Dennis Dunaway and guitarist Glen Buxton.
The Earwigs had become the Spiders and recruited North High’s Michael Bruce to play guitar by 1966, when they scored a big regional hit with the swaggering “Don’t Blow Your Mind.”
They’d moved to California as the Nazz by 1967, when Neal Smith completed the picture on drums a year before one final name change set the stage for Alice Cooper to release a debut titled “Pretties for You” on Frank Zappa’s Straight Records.
Neither “Pretties for You” nor second album “Easy Action” hinted at the world domination in their future.
The band found its producer in Bob Ezrin
But that future changed the day they met Bob Ezrin, who helped them find the breakthrough single hidden in the sprawling “I’m Eighteen.”
“We were kinda rip and tear,” Cooper says. “Bob was the one that would take that and shape it to the point where as soon as you heard it, you went, ‘Oh yeah!‘”
Now all they needed was a second album that could live up to the promise of their breakthrough.
“You can get a hit album,” Cooper says. “A lot of people have hit albums. Then here comes the second album. Can you hit it out of the park with that one?”
And Ezrin made sure they worked every bit as hard on album tracks.
“Bob never let us do filler,” Cooper says. “He said ‘If we put this on the album, it’s got to be as good as what we think the single is.’ So that was the beginning of us really learning how to write for radio and at the same time not lose Alice Cooper.”
As much as they deferred to Ezrin’s judgement when it came to song arrangements, there were times when they resisted if it didn’t strike them as what Alice Cooper should be doing.
“The very first time we heard him say, ‘Let’s put horns on ‘Under My Wheels,’ we all kind of went ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. We don’t use horns,’” Cooper says. So Ezrin recorded the part and let them hear it. “We looked at each other and went, ‘Oh, my gosh, that sounds great,” Cooper says, with a laugh.
“We didn’t want to be a horn band. We didn’t want to be a keyboard band. But when we heard the record, we’d have to look at each other and go, ‘OK, we were wrong.’”
50 years later, ‘Killers’ is still ‘pure Alice’
Looking back on it 50 years later, Cooper says he looks at that whole album as “pure Alice.”
It captured the kind of rock band they wanted to be while making it clear that they intended to defy whatever expectations you were bringing to the table.
“People loved that we actually colored outside the lines,” Cooper says.
“Johnny Rotten said ‘Killer’ was the greatest rock album ever made. We were sitting there going, ‘Yeah, it’s a great record. It’s gonna get better.’ But for people to classify that as the best rock album they had ever heard, it’s nice to hear that.”