Love It to Death is the third studio album by American rock band Alice Cooper, released on March 9, 1971. It was the band's first commercially successful album and the first album that consolidated the band's aggressive hard-rocking sound, instead of the psychedelic and experimental rock style of their first two albums. The album's best-known track, "I'm Eighteen", was released as a single to test the band's commercial viability before the album was recorded.
Formed in the mid-1960s, the band took the name Alice Cooper in 1968 and became known for its outrageous theatrical live shows. The loose, psychedelic freak rock of the first two albums failed to find an audience. The band moved to Pontiac, MI in 1970 where they were influenced by the aggressive hard rock scene. A young Bob Ezrin was enlisted as producer; he encouraged the band to tighten its songwriting over two months of rehearsing ten to twelve hours a day. The single "I'm Eighteen" achieved Top 40 success soon after, peaking at . This convinced Warner Bros. that Alice Cooper had the commercial potential to release an album. After its release in March 1971, Love It to Death reached on the Billboard 200 albums chart and has since been certified platinum. The album's second single, "Caught in a Dream", charted at .
The original album cover featured the singer Cooper posed with his thumb protruding so it appeared to be his penis; Warner Bros. soon replaced it with a censored version. The Love It to Death tour featured an elaborate shock rock live show: during "Ballad of Dwight Fry"—about an inmate in an insane asylum—Cooper would be dragged offstage and return in a straitjacket, and the show climaxed with Cooper's mock execution in a prop electric chair during "Black Juju". Ezrin and the Coopers continued to work together for a string of hit albums until the band's breakup in 1974. The album has come to be seen as a foundational influence on hard rock, punk, and heavy metal; several tracks have become live Alice Cooper standards and are frequently covered by other bands.
Background Detroit-born vocalist Vincent Furnier co-formed the Earwigs in the mid-1960s in Phoenix, Arizona. The band released a few singles and went through a few name changes before settling on a lineup with guitarist Glen Buxton, guitarist and keyboardist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway, and drummer Neal Smith. In 1968 the band adopted the name Alice Cooper—a name Furnier later adopted as his own—and presented a story that it came from a 17th-century witch whose name they learned from a session with a ouija board.
At some point Buxton painted circles under his eyes with cigarette ashes, and soon the rest followed with ghoulish black makeup and outlandish clothes. The band moved to Los Angeles and became known for its provocative, theatrical shock rock stage show. In an incident during a performance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival in 1969, Cooper threw a live chicken into the audience, who tore it to shreds.
The group's first three albums, Pretties for You (1969), Easy Action (1970), and Love It to Death (1971), appeared on Frank Zappa and Herb Cohen's Straight Records label; Pretties for You and Easy Action failed to find an audience. The band relocated to Detroit and found itself in the midst of a music scene populated with the hard-driving rock of the MC5, the stage-diving Iggy Pop with the Stooges, and the theatricality of George Clinton's Parliament and Funkadelic. The Alice Cooper band incorporated these influences into a tight hard-rock sound coupled with an outrageous live show.
While at the Strawberry Fields Festival in Canada in April 1970, band manager Shep Gordon contacted producer Jack Richardson, who had produced hit singles for the Guess Who. Richardson was uninterested in producing the Alice Cooper band himself, and sent the young Bob Ezrin in his place. Cooper recalled the junior producer as "a nineteen-year-old Jewish hippie" who reacted to meeting the outlandish band "as if he had just opened a surprise package and found a box full of maggots".
Ezrin initially turned down working with the band, but changed his mind when he saw them perform at Max's Kansas City in New York City the following October. Ezrin was impressed with the band's audience-participation rock-theater performance and the cult-like devotion of the band's fans, who dressed up and knew the lyrics and actions to the music, which Ezrin compared to the later cult following of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Ezrin returned to Toronto to convince Richardson to take on the band; Richardson did not want to work directly with such a group but agreed on condition that Ezrin take the lead.
Recording and production
The band and Ezrin did pre-production for the album in Pontiac, Michigan, in November and December 1970, and recorded at the RCA Mid-American Recording Center in Chicago in December. Richardson and Ezrin produced the album for Richardson's Nimbus 9 Productions, with Richardson as executive producer.
Ezrin, with his classical and folk background, attempted to have the band tighten the loosely structured songs. The band resisted at first but came to see things Ezrin's way, and ten to twelve hours a day of rehearsal resulted in a tight set of hard rock songs with little of the psychedelic freak-rock aesthetic of the first two albums. According to Cooper, Ezrin "ironed the songs out note by note, giving them coloring, personality". Ezrin rearranged "I'm Eighteen" from an eight-minute jam piece called "I Wish I Was 18 Again" to a taut three-minute rocker.
Both Buxton and Bruce used Gibson SG guitars and tended to double up, playing similar parts with subtle differences in phrasing and tone. Dunaway often played a moving counter-melody bass part, rather than following the typical rock strategy of holding to the chord's root.
Zappa and Herb Cohen sold Straight Records to Warner Bros. in 1970 for $50,000. That November the group released a single of "I'm Eighteen" backed with "Is It My Body"; and Warner Bros. agreed to allow the group to proceed with an album if the single sold well. The band posed as fans and made hundreds of calls to radio stations to request the song, and Gordon is said to have paid others a dollar per radio request. Soon the song was on the airwaves across the US—even on mainstream AM radio—and peaked at on the charts. The success of the single convinced Warner to contract Richardson to produce Love It to Death.
Ezrin was intent on developing a cohesive sound for the album, and his earnestness was a source of humor for the band. At a time when the Beatles had a reputation that made them seem beyond criticism, the Alice Cooper band intended "Second Coming" as a jab at the recently released track "The Long and Winding Road" with Phil Spector's elaborate production—the hyperbolic acclaim it received struck the band as if it were the Second Coming of a master composer on the order of Beethoven—as well as Ezrin's attempts to bring such production values to Alice Cooper's music. Ezrin did not realize the joke was largely at his expense. When recording the "I wanna get out of here" sequence of "Ballad of Dwight Fry", Ezrin had Cooper lie on the floor surrounded by a cage of metal chairs to create an element of realism to the singer's frantic screams. "Black Juju" was the only track recorded live in the studio. "I'm Eighteen" was a sixteen-track recording at 15 IPS; other tracks were recorded at 30 IPS.
Music and lyrics A dark, aggressive song whose distorted guitar riff is in E minor scale, "I'm Eighteen" was the band's first to hit global audience. In raspy vocals against arpeggiated guitar backing, the lyrics describe the existential anguish of being at the cusp of adulthood, decrying in each verse being "in the middle" of something, such as "life" or "doubt". The chorus switches to a series of power chords building from A, the vocals proclaiming: "I'm eighteen / And I don't know what I want ... I gotta get out of this place / I'll go runnin' in outer space". The song turns around at the conclusion with an embrace of those things that had caused such anguish: "I'm eighteen and I like it!"
"I'm Eighteen" comes between two straight-ahead rockers: "Long Way to Go" and album opener "Caught in a Dream". Both follow simple hard-rock , trading heavy riffing with guitar fills and solos. The album title derives from lyrics in "Long Way to Go". "Caught in a Dream" was the album's second single and features irreverent, tongue-in-cheek lyrics such as "I need everything the world owes me / I tell that to myself and I agree". The first side closes with "Black Juju" by bassist Dunaway, a lengthy track in the vein of the Doors, and Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive"—both bands Alice Cooper earlier had opened for—with an organ part derived from Pink Floyd's "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun". The band named the song after a stray dog in Pontiac.
"Is It My Body", the B-side to the "I'm Eighteen" single, opens the second side of the album. The verses pose the questions: "What have I got? / That makes you want to love me? / Is it my body?"—and declare in the chorus: "Have you got the time to find out / Who I really am?" "Hallowed Be My Name" follows with lyrics such as "Screaming at mothers / Cursing the Bible". "Second Coming" continues on the theme of religion: "... have no other gods before me / I'm the light / The devil's getting smarter all the time" The track developed from one of Cooper's lyrical fragments—"Time is getting closer / I read it on a poster"—and is set to a delicate piano by Ezrin.
"Ballad of Dwight Fry" is a dramatic piece about the inmate of a mental asylum. It opens with a young girl's voice asking if her "Daddy" will "ever come home", against a childlike piano backdrop. The song shifts to acoustic guitar and Cooper singing presumably in the persona of the girl's father, at first in a wavering almost-whisper. His voice builds with his persona's increasing instability, eventually shouting in the heavy, guitar-backed chorus: "See my only mind explode / Since I've gone away". After the second chorus there is a softer, creepy keyboard break written by Bruce but played by Ezrin, and when the vocals reappear they repeat "I wanna get out of here", at first tentative and imploring, before climaxing in the character's total mental breakdown and a return to the chorus. The song's main character is named for Dwight Frye, an actor Hollywood media dubbed "the man with the thousand-watt stare" who portrayed Renfield, the lunatic slave of the titular vampire in the 1931 film Dracula starring Bela Lugosi, and Fritz, Dr. Frankenstein's assistant in the 1931 film Frankenstein.
The album closes with a cover of "Sun Arise" by Australian entertainer Rolf Harris. The upbeat pop song had been a show-opener for the band throughout 1970, and contrasts with the darkness of the rest of the album.
Release and critical reception
"I'm Eighteen" was the band's first top 40 in the US, a success that led to a recording deal with Warner Bros. Records. It spent eight weeks on the US charts, peaking at . In Canada it broke the top ten, peaking at .