MONEY SHOTS
the stories behind the tracks, straight from the horses’ mouths
HELLO HOORAY An introductory statement of evil intent, with mock heroics spread thicker than girders.
ALICE COOPER: “Bob Ezrin brought that song in. He said: ‘You need a big opening, almost like a Broadway show.’ We tried writing a few things, but when this song came in we all said: ‘Yeah, let’s go with that.’ So what if we didn’t write it? We make our own rules.”
DENNIS DUNAWAY: “that’s Bob’s forte: big, open songs with slower tempos.”
RAPED AND FREEZIN’
Tex-Mex girl-rapes-boy tomfoolery. Christ. Well, we suppose it was the 70s. But still… Wow.
AC: “Here’s a guy trying to get a ride who gets picked up by a girl. She rapes him and takes off. He wakes up in mexico. musically it had this hillbilly, rolling Stones thing to it. It’s just a funny juxtaposition song, with great guitar.”
ELECTED
A towering epic with everything-but-thekitchen-sink, Phil Spector-style production.
DD: “This was a resurrection of an earlier song from Pretties For You called Reflected. Which was something we did in those days.”
AC: “Alice in political office? that would be my hell. I hate politics. I don’t care about taxes or any of that crap.”
BILLION DOLLAR BABIES
Scottish folk singer Donovan adds unexpected vocal menace to a romp through the Devil’s own nursery.
AC: “Donovan asked me what’s it about. I’ve no idea. A lot of people thought it was about masturbation. It could be interpreted that way. ‘Maybe your little head will come off in my hands’? Perhaps they’re right.”
NEAL SMITH: “I don’t have a writing credit on it, but without the drum part it wouldn’t have been the same. It goes back to Charlie Watts on Get Off Of My Cloud.”
UNFINISHED SWEET
We’re pretty sure this is the only rock song to ever feature a dentist’s drill solo.
AC: “We grew up on James Bond and [composer] John Barry. the guy in the song is under anaesthetic, having his tooth pulled, and has a spy dream. At one point
The Man From Uncle, I Spy and the Bond theme are playing simultaneously and they all mix in perfectly.”
DD: “the song came together relatively easily. I mean, you’d think it would have been like pulling teeth.”
NO MORE MR NICE GUY
A riff-driven rabble-rouser with ‘hit’ written all over it in enormous neon lights.
AC: “lyrically, while the rest of the world was saying, ‘Alice can’t get any more depraved’, I was saying, ‘OK, the gloves are off. I’m gonna get really nasty now.’”
GENERATION LANDSLIDE
An unusually literate indictment of the American dream that came together quickly.
AC: “the best lyrics I have ever written. I sat down and just wrote them as a flow of consciousness.”
DD: “We all had the london flu from a British tour, so we went to the Canary Islands to recuperate, and wrote this song, my favourite track on the album.”
NS: “I just started with that rolling drum beat, michael started playing some chords, then everybody else jumped in and in 15 minutes we had a song.”
SICK THINGS
A flesh-creeping sonic descent into the depths of the macabre. Business as usual, then.
AC: “Sick Things had a lot to do with Bob again. It’s a twisted sound collage, and not exactly settling at all.”
MARY ANN
A cynically sentimental paean to an apoplectic, bespectacled busybody.
AC: “this was written to infuriate mary Whitehouse. It was one of those clear shots that we had to take.”
I LOVE THE DEAD
The epic, execution-accompanying show-closer: a hymn to necrophilia. Lovely stuff.
AC: “I wanted to write a real Edgar Allan Poe song, something scary. listening to this in the dark, under the right substance abuse, can be very scary indeed.”