Welcome to My Nightmare

Editors’ Notes By the time Alice Cooper recorded his last band album (1974’s Muscle of Love), the group's trash rock was starting to choke on garage fumes. So for his debut solo album the next year, Alice staged a kind of musical production as big as his million-selling budgets would allow, pulling in top session players and collaborators, including producer Bob Ezrin, guitarists Dick Wagner (who filled in on previous Alice Cooper albums) and Steve Hunter (Lou Reed), and even horror movie doyen Vincent Price. The album inspired a TV special, a world tour, a concert film and, eventually, a 2011 sequel. Based on a kid’s nightmare and doused in satire, the songs shift painlessly from themes of cannibalism (“Devil’s Food”) and necrophilia (“Cold Ethyl”) to a beautiful cigarette-and-alcohol elegy to lonely women (“Only Women Bleed,” which hit No. 12 on the Billboard singles chart) and good old-fashioned teen anthems of growing pains (“Department of Youth”) and departing (“Escape,” cowritten by Kim Fowley). The classical-minded Ezrin pulled musical strings here so the songs are as dynamic and orchestrated as they are funny and, even, scary.