‘Killer’ video of Alice Cooper on the Fourth of July, 1971

06.29.2017
09:29 am
Topics:
Music
U.S.A.!!!
Tags:
Alice Cooper

Enjambment as marketing technique: ‘Love It to Death’ ad in Creem, 1971 (via SickthingsUK)

The greatest achievement of American democracy was Alice Cooper’s perfect Warner Bros. debut, Love It to Death. (As Bill Maher says “I don’t know this for a fact, I just know that it’s true.) Fittingly, a few months after the LP’s release, the group celebrated 195 years of U.S. independence from the hated English crown by playing Love It to Death at the Sunshine Inn in Asbury Park, New Jersey, a musket ball’s bounce from Monmouth Battlefield. Or playing most of it, anyway—it’s hard to know, because the video of the show cuts out during the seventh number, “Black Juju.”

It’s primitive, black and white, 1971 video, to be sure, but this upload sounds and looks way better than the quavery zillionth-generation copies of the “Stone Pony show” I’d seen before. (Tape traders misidentified the venue as the Stone Pony, as I understand from the timeline at The Original Glen Buxton, which confirms this date and location.) You can watch it for pleasure, even, and while cutting off the end of “Black Juju” is a fucking scandal, AC’s outstanding (and intact) TV performance of that number on Barry Richards’ Turn On will comfort you in your time of loss.

Independence Day, Asbury Park. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Could the Boss have been in the crowd at the Sunshine Inn that night, raising a glass to Lady Liberty? Wearing a tricorne in place of his usual knit hat, say? Soaking up stage blood with torn scraps of bunting for his memory book? Getting shithouse drunk at the bar with his arm around the neck of a police horse? No. It looks like the Boss was busy with his own show a few blocks away at the Student Prince, “above Thom McAn Shoes,” as the ad says.

“I Love America” would have been perfect for the occasion. Too bad Alice hadn’t written it yet.