Review Summary: An often ridiculous, perpetually head-scratching testament to just how much hack publishers can get away with and still have a release be legal.
Formative periods for bands are often an entity unto itself. The struggle of finding a musical identity while attempting to stabilise a line-up and make a name for oneself often results in a budding group's debut effort sounding, at best, atypical, and at worst, completely removed from the remainder of the band's output. Cases in point are too numerous to list, but some of the most extreme examples of this trend include Sepultura, Judas Priest, Deep Purple, and the subject of this review, Alice Cooper.
The moniker 'Alice Cooper' still referred to the band, rather than just its frontman, when Vincent Damon Fournier and pals took to the stage at the Toronto Rock'n'Roll Revival on September 13, 1969. What was, at the time, one of the largest gigs the group had played to date would, however, become infamous in more ways than one – not only did it spawn Alice Cooper's very own 'Ozzy incident' (this time involving a chicken), but it would also, unbeknownst to the group, serve as the base for one of the most widely re-issued bootlegs in the history of rock'n'roll.
Sold to an independent third party shortly after the gig – therefore avoiding full-on bootleg status and instead earning the euphemistic designation of 'unlicensed' - this recording consists of some 20 minutes or so of the group's performance on the night, roughly recorded and suffering from warping and tape delay at several points. None of this, however, appeared to matter to said third party, which proceeded to label the songs with mistifying, wildly off-the-mark names and sell it to any number of fly-by-night bargain bin 'labels', which in turn proceeded to release it roughly a dozen million times, under a variety of different names, most commonly
Nobody Likes Me, Nobody Likes Alice, Science Fiction and
Freak Out Song.
Regardless of cover, label or song order, however, all of these releases contain the exact same tracks (sometimes 'beefed up' with a lazy cut-and-paste 'medley' at the end), from the exact same source tape, with the exact same fictitious song names and credits. Or rather,
most of the songs have made-up names and credits. Two of the eight tracks on the original tape (
Ain't It Just Like a Woman and
Goin' To The River) boast all of the correct information, except for one key element –
they are not by Alice Cooper at all.
Yes, in typical careless bootlegger fashion, whoever got their hands on the original mix-tape either did not notice there were already two songs on there, or decided to use said two songs to beef up what was an exceedingly short duration. As a result, Canadian recording artist Ronnie Hawkins – who has absolutely no relation to Vincent Fournier or anyone else in his band – was subjected to the ignominy of seeing himself mislabeled as Alice Cooper, and his songs as compositions by The Alice Cooper Group, in countless bargain bin releases for decades to come. Some editions, like the one in review here, even muster up an extra layer of hilarity by having the intro to the actual show – proclaiming
'the ninth wonder of the world, Alice Cooper!' – tacked onto the start of a track that is definitely not recorded live, and definitely not performed by Alice Cooper!
And yet anyone listening to these tracks would be hard-pressed to believe they were by the same group as all the rest of the album, so wildly do their proto-rock'n'roll sound, squeaky-clean production and chorus-centric songwriting differ from the cacophonous anarchy that makes up the other six songs. Hawkins is a competent vocalist, the musicians backing him do a good job, and the songs themselves are quite good, if a little on the short side; however, Zappaesque acid-rock this is definitely not, and one has to wonder just how many people were fooled by the mislabeling.
But what of the
actual Alice Cooper Group tracks? Well, while at first glance they appear to be almost negligible – the main selling point of the bootleg is the sheer zaniness of its creation process – a deeper dive into the history of the Group shows otherwise. In fact, of the six (or rather,
five) tracks present here, only two were commercially available at the time –
No Longer Umpire (here named
Painting a Picture) and
Fields of Regret (labelled here as
Science Fiction), both from the band's debut album,
Pretties for You. Of the rest, one would feature in the upcoming sophomore effort,
Easy Action (
Lay Down and Die, Goodbye, here split into two parts, respectively labelled
An Instrumental and
Written Home to Mother) and the remaining two – deep cuts from pre-ACG outfits Spiders and The Nazz – would not be available until decades later, and then only in 'B-sides and rarities' type releases. As such, this bootleg did at one point hold some value, as the only way to hear these songs outside of a live context; if only they had been presented with appropriate packaging and a better sound quality...
Even still, listening to them in this format is better than not at all, especially since, warts and all, the music contained here is genuinely good acid/psych rock. Fournier and company excel at their declared goal of turning each song into a mind-bending, anti-commercial orgy of barely cohesive noise without ever losing grip on their structure, and even manage to deliver at least one obvious standout, in the correctly named (!)
Nobody Likes Me, a demented call-and-response litany set to a polka background which would make their idol and mentor Frank Zappa proud. Elsewhere,
Don't Blow Your Mind (or rather,
Freak Out Song) and
Fields of Regret also manage to hold their own (though never reaching the heights of
Nobody Likes Me) with the latter in particular coming the closest to a traditional song structure, and therefore being a good point of entry for newcomers to this album. As for
Lay Down and Die, Goodbye, the split into two parts lets it down, as it ends up feeling bitty and hardly ever has time to breathe.
Even still, once one gets over the rough live sound and ridiculousness of their surroundings, these
are songs worth spending time with – though ideally in the much more dignified and restored versions contained in the first and only official release of the Toronto concert,
Nobody Likes Us, issued in 2012 by Applebush. As for this version of the tape, and its multitude of cash-grab re-namings and re-releases, it is not so much a record as an experience, serving as both a rite-of-passage curio for anyone interested in rock music bootlegs, and as an often ridiculous and perpetually head-scratching testament to just how much hack publishers can get away with and still have a release be legal. And from that standpoint – if not from a strictly musical one – it is nothing short of essential.
Recommended Tracks
Goin' To The River (Ronnie Hawkins)
Nobody Likes Me
Science Fiction (aka Fields of Regret)
