Remember the Coop

Those who know me know I'm a long time Alice Cooper fan. Those who don't know me are probably not reading this. Having recently completed his entertaining autobiography Alice Cooper, Golf Monster I decided to fill a gap in my CD collection by purchasing Lace And Whiskey, my record of the same album being stored in an undisclosed location for future generations.

His first solo outing, the groundbreaking Welcome To My Nightmare is, well, groundbreaking. 1976's Alice Cooper Goes to Hell is also quite good, an easy 9 out of ten with some outstanding songs. In 1978 he came out with the creepy From The Inside which had a couple -o- weak songs but was mostly loads of fun, being based on his time in detox before detox was trendy, an 8 on the Hoff-o-Meter. But between those, in 1977, was Lace and Whiskey.

My memories of the album were that it was, um, not all that good. There have been times when an album I didn't cotton to in my youthful days appealed to the older, more mature, more gray me (Mark Heard, anyone?) so I hoped that perhaps this might be the case. Nope. The few songs that I remember, "Hot Tonight", "You and Me", and "I Never Wrote Those Songs" are still solid. But the rest have got to make you wonder what the man was thinking.