Billion Dollar Babies is less of a recording more of a monument to rock decadence. Scale, inception, packaging all unsurpassed, only secondarily is BDB one of the finest rock albums ever made.
Here in Britain the inner sleeve cornered every tabloid paper, Leo Abse MP, and Mary Whitehouse contrived to effectively stop the band from touring. Tour or no tour it went to number 1 and more worryingly for the rock mainstream dislodged Dark Side Of The Moon from the topping the charts.
So to the music. "Elected" with its megaphone vocal is the first to hook followed by the sparkling "Billion Dollar Babies", a rock'n'roll tango with our very own attic dancing transvestial villainesss exeling herself.
Spellbinding tracks set standards of their own. The magical" No More Mr Nice Guy", a debtor to the Who's "Substitute" told of the flak Alice's parents were receiving in America.
Donovan's acoustic contribution bolsters "Generation Landslide", and "Sick Things" is well________sick! Crying monstress laments loss of human toys. Feeling wronged she resigns herself to a fate of live concrete burial. Cheerful stuff lads.
"Mary Ann2 is a blissful throwback to days of greater innocence as well as a smart but silly piano ballad. "I Love The Dead" is a the corpedelicious farewell.
Where could they go from here? Nowhere they didn't want. There MUSIC WAS NOW OF LEGEND.
Actually they hit the road on the biggest tour in history for the time. The live disc is pure contraband. It manages to reflect the fact that in 1973 this was the one band everyone with any imagination or sense of daring wanted to see.
Live The Alice Cooper Band are much more r&b than on record they reworked their songs for their performances. "Sick Things"benefits most whilst "Dead Babies" loses out. The audience are almost religious in their manner, you can almost smell the inscence. Alice has a voice like hoarse thunder and his rapport with his crowd is masterly.
The show depends on its decapitational climax.
America! A country where even revolutionaries are conservative. Alice Cooper are the closest thing to revolutionaries she will ever see. Fear the blade? He's only worried about his manicured nails. The crowd rise as one man, then gasp as one man, the head is raised for inspection. The King Is Dead Long Live The Queen. Queen Alice! M A G N I F I C E N T
