Alice Cooper Goes To Hell
A loose sequel to “Welcome To My Nightmare” Alice’s takes Steven as they pack a lunch down to Hell. Released in 1976 the height of Disco Fever, Alice’s albums were the only refuge I had from the glitter ball, leisure suits, wide collars, and The Bee Gees. Although this may not be an actual sequel to “Welcome To My Nightmare” as it does bring in the character Steven but this time it’s a bedtime story Alice is reading to him. There is no spiders, cold ethyl or curator. It’s basically only Alice and the Devil himself. The clever thing that Alice did in this record was to incorporate Disco into his album. How he did this was whenever Alice had any reference to Hell, Disco music would play so to speak Hell was a Disco Inferno.

Produced by Bob Ezrin with most of the major musicians from “Welcome To My Nightmare” and then some. This was another well thought out album and I would say even tighter as a conceptual record. It has more of a beginning and end as “Welcome To My Nightmare” seemed to just jump around randomly in the middle of the record but still a ground breaking album.

What was interesting to find out is Alice wanted to use someone famous for the voice of the Devil. Especially on “I’m The Coolest” which he intended on using Henry Winkler who played Fonzie on Happy Days TV series. Winkler turned it down since he was trying to stay away from being typecast which was a loss cause. So Alice ended up playing both parts on the record.

Alice came with another ballad and hit “I Never Cry” that was just as good as “Only Women Bleed” but maybe the only song that doesn’t fit the theme of the album.
This may be another underrated lyrical album as well. Alice’s writing on these tracks are very visual and you can picture the journey as the songs play on. One of my favorite songs is “Wish You Were Here” and it’s basically because of the drumming at the end of the song by Alan Schwartzberg. Also Jim Gordon played drums on 3 of the 11 tracks.

The only song that isn’t an original is “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” from 1918 but was popular song by Judy Garland years later. The supposed theme of the record was that Alice was stuck in Hell and the only way out was to sing a song the Devil doesn’t like to hear. Obviously it was a song I didn’t care to hear as well. That could be Alice’s black humor coming through again showing how campy it sounds as he sings with an almost Al Jolson voice near the end.

It’s very interesting album that I don’t play as much but when I do I think “Hey this isn’t bad once you put it on”. Unfortunately Alice never toured to promote this album. Alice became sick and was diagnosed with Anemia. He took pretty much a whole year off which he later continued on with recording his next album “Lace And Whiskey”.

Artwork: I know Alice was ill by the end of this album but I never understood why they didn’t put much into the artwork since the Welcome To My Nightmare did very well in sales. The cover picture of Alice is an old photo taken from the vinyl sleeve of “Billion Dollar Babies” it’s the one where Alice is holding the crying baby. They just blew it up and painted his face a sinister green. The back which includes track list and credits shows Alice dressed in all black as he descends the white staircase down into a orange fiery glow.

The vinyl sleeve includes lyrics and on side 1 has “A Bedtime Story” which is told to Steven.
Side 2 includes the rest of the lyrics and an ending of the story to Steven. Also has a small pic at the bottom right corner of an alligator chomping on a nude person on a lake. The bottom part of this side gives the track list with names of the musicians and instruments they played on each song.