Riding the Circle Line to Ladbroke Grove with Alice Cooper

Before Alice Cooper became the big thing and media darlings with ‘School’s Out’ their core appeal in Britain was to freaks and rockers. What you have here is a few choice cuts from before the deluge that mostly focus on the underground press, Frendz and IT in particular. Here’s what Mick Farren and Nick Kent, among others, had to say about the band who ‘act as a mirror – people see themselves through us’.

Alice Cooper’s CBS distributed Straight label UK releases

‘a rock and roll band made up of mean Hollywood drag queens who disembowl chickens and beat each other on stage, and are really the kind of band that I’d like to play in’ – Mick Farren

Greg Shaw, Jukebox Jury Creem

Greg Shaw thinks it is all about the Stooges, he wouldn’t be the last

You wanna know all about third generation rock n roll then look no further . . . . Alice with Steve Mann in Frendz

. . . some more third generation proselytising with Jamie Mandelkau in IT

“Got me so hot I could scream . . .”

‘Alice Cooper are supreme pooff rock . . .’ Mick Farren at his most lazy, touting the consensus.

John Peel, Singles: Disc and Music Echo (March 25, 1972)

‘This really is an odd group to come to terms with . . .’ – John Peel

All change and mind the gap: ‘The sight of rocking hordes of 12+ boppers at Alice Cooper’s Wembley concert would seem to prove that his efforts in the direction of bizzaro teen appeal are paying dividends’. – Mick Farren

Below, Myles Palmer, on the eve of the Wembley concert, gives a perfect summation of where things then stood . . . a worthy quote line in every paragraph, but the conclusion will do: ‘As music it’s not half bad, as showbiz it’s riveting and as trash it is absolutely incomparable’.

Dave “Boss” Goodman arrives late to the party . . . While Nick Kent gets the scoop on the Coop after Wembley (July 1972):

While America sinks in a mass debauch of drugs, sex andviolence, the Coopers just keep on getting bigger and bigger. They are the first of the third-generation rock bands to really make it big, while others like Lou Reed and the Velvets and the Stooges were perhaps too wild and dangerous to catch on The Coopers act, while it is extremely entertaining, is in reality not half as powerful as some would have us imagine.

Nick Kent is ill . . .

The final issue of Frendz (January 6, 1972) was a thin affair and was not helped by Nick Kent having missed the deadline for his copy. He got his mum to phone in his excuse . . .

Bowie had confused Doug Yule with Lou a year earlier and it seems their identities were still getting mixed up, but, you know, Transformer was still two months away from its November release, so who did know what he actually looked like?

Whatever, the front cover is a graphic delight. A new logo and the use of colour within san serif typefaces that left a now jaded Underground aesthetic behind and signalled the pop/punk age to come. Apparently it is not a Barney Bubbles concoction, but surely that is a Pennie Smith image from July’s King Sound gig?

Regardless of the legend of Nick ‘the zeitgeist-surfing dark prince of seventies rock journalism’ Kent, I find his output in 1972 endlessly fascinating as he works out a stance and discovers his voice. His attitude was already in place with his first published reviews in Frendz (March 3, 1972); his take on Quicksilver and Moby Grape is a quick shuffle through the ashes left after second generation rock ‘n’ roll had burnt out. All he finds is a lingering nostalgia for when The Grape were a ‘genuine rock ‘n’ roll band’, which is as true as anything he ever wrote.

Kent hasn’t yet figured out what the third generation would look like, but he knew Lou Reed was going to be important and that a taste for the pure sixties pop of Motown (and others) was the basis on which the new decade would turn.

. . . and who wouldn’t want to hear that Laura Nyro album after reading this.

When the next lockdown hits, and I find the motivation, I’ll post an annotated bibliography of his reviews and interviews from the year of the pin-up.

Rock Scene (May 1975)

Fallin' Again: Steve Took – Ladbroke Grove's James Taylor

Falling over (again), Frendz #17 (December 23, 1971)

Third World War interview in Friends (January 1971)

Friends #22 interview with Terry Stamp and Jim Avery: ‘this is class resentment, class rage, class anguish . . . The Third World War is a London group virulent with London resentment’. It’s Hammersmith v Knightsbridge, says Avery. Their ambition is to stir things up, they don’t expect to sell, but they do want to influence the next generation: ‘young musicians who haven’t got anywhere, and who are not even musicians, and who are going to to say “You are just saying what we want to say.”’ And all said while playing Monopoly.