Note: Easy Action: The Original Alice Cooper Band and Feed My Frankenstein: Alice Cooper, the Solo Years are simply the old Alice Cooper book, Welcome to My Nightmare: Alice Cooper at 50, busted in two and turned into black-and-white trade paperbacks, albeit updated, reformatted and re-edited, with the solo years book, naturally, getting the most updating, given that four years have passed since the original title and Alice packs a lot of living into every year. But yes, if you have the old one, you have the lion’s share of what’s in these two.

As the back cover sez… “Hello! Hooray! Let the show begin…”

Pretties for You, Easy Action, Love It to Death, Killer, School’s Out, Billion Dollar Babies, Muscle of Love… this astonishing run of albums unleashed upon an unsuspecting public within the span of five years created the legend of Alice Cooper that lives on to this day.

But we’re talking about the original Alice Cooper group here, a band called that with a lead singer also going by that name. In other words, the legend was built by Vincent “Alice Cooper” Furnier, to be sure, but also by Michael Bruce, Glen Buxton, Dennis Dunaway and “platinum god” Neal Smith.

It is all of them working together—along with producer Bob Ezrin—that created the mystique of songs like “I’m Eighteen,” “Is It My Body,” “Desperado,” “Under My Wheels,” “Be My Lover,” “Elected” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy.” And it is all of them working together—along with crack management in Shep Gordon and Joe Greenberg—that created the shock rock buzz that kept the newspapers full of indignation about this band set out to destroy human civilization.

Easy Action: The Original Alice Cooper Band tells the story in meticulous chronological detail, from the band’s early days in Phoenix as The Spiders, through being broke on the Sunset Strip, followed by a career-reviving relocation to a notorious party house on the outskirts of Pontiac, Michigan. Corroborating the improbable sequence of events is a plethora of stories from the band themselves, who explain how the original Alice Cooper group went from politely ignored pariahs in Los Angeles to international Public Enemies No. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Photographic evidence bringing to life the band’s unsettling stage show help explain the outrage, as do the album covers and 45 sleeves, not to the band’s classic magazine ads, which tended to bring out the Alice Cooper group’s sense of humour and flair for a good show biz story. Indeed, listen to the guys and their good-natured explanations behind the mayhem, and it soon becomes apparent that the ghoulish makeup around the singer’s eyes and the boa constrictor around his neck—not to mention the head-choppings, the hangings and the hard rock—were all served up in good fun. Now it’s time for you, dear reader, to join in the fun and see why Alice Cooper was, for a golden moment in time fully 50 years ago now, the most feared and revered act in all of rock ‘n’ roll.

Books will be signed by me to you unless you wave your arms wildly and tell me otherwise within like half an hour of ordering

Price including shipping:

Book will be signed to you from me, so let me know if it is a present for someone else, or you don’t want it signed.

For orders outside the US and Canada, please email me your phone number. The new rule is I can’t buy postage without it, and it goes on the postal form If you would like a PayPal invoice, please indicate what country you are in and give me the email address you use at PayPal. Or just do yer usual and direct funds to [email protected]

Or mail payment (personal check in US funds, cash, or INTERNATIONAL money order), to:

Martin Popoff
P.O. Box 65208, 358 Danforth Ave.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4K 2Z2