Album Guide

"I feel I'm at the cutting edge of the sword. This is such a hot-sounding record. As much as I love all my records, I don't ever want Alice Cooper to live in the past. Alice is as vital now as he ever was."

That's ALICE COOPER talking about ALICE COOPER and his new album, HEY STOOPID — the long-awaited follow-up to Alice's worldwide multi-platinum Epic debut Trash and its international Top Ten single "Poison." Now, in 1991, Alice strikes again with one killer cut after another recorded with a supporting cast of some of the heaviest hitters in rock today.

That's saying something, given the massive success of Trash, "Poison," the "Alice Cooper Trashes The World" tour, and Alice's two home videos: the live-in-concert ...Trashes The World and the video clips compilation Video Trash.

"I wanted this record to sound even bigger," says Alice. "We had to have the right producer, someone very sonic, and Peter Collins was brilliant. We had to have the right songs, and I wrote with a whole bunch of different people. The whole power of an album is in the songwriting. The song has to be constructed correctly before you go in to record, because if you spend too much time working on it in the studio, it'll lose its spontaneity."

HEY STOOPID combines an intense rock and roll energy with an irreverent attitude of pure summer fun. "I kept this album on a street level, with a sense of humor," explains Alice. "Summertime is when you can be as stoopid as possible. The rest of the year you're supposed to work hard, go to school, be responsible, and color inside the lines."

Regarding the title song — the album's first single and video — Alice says: "A friend can call a friend 'stoopid.' If someone was killing himself, I'd say 'Hey, stoopid, what are you trying to do? They win, you lose!' But I'd never point a finger and do the whole lecture thing."

For this track, Alice recruited fellow outlaws Slash (of Guns 'N Roses) and Ozzy Osbourne "because I thought it would be ironic to have on this song some of the guys who've been out there on the edge."

And that's just the beginning. There's a blazing shootout between guitar greats Steve Vai and Joe Satriani (the first time they've ever appeared on the same tune together) on "Feed My Frankenstein," a song co-written with Zodiac Mindwarp that also features bassist Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue.

Speaking of Motley Crue, Sixx and Crue guitarist Mick Mars co-wrote "Die·For You" with Alice and Jim Vallance, and Mars' guitar work is featured on the track. "Might As Well Be On Mars" was written by Alice with his Trash co-writer/producer Desmond Child and long-time Cooper collaborator Dick Wagner. Other future Alice Cooper classics on HEY STOOPID include "Love's A Loaded Gun," "Little By Little," "Burning Our Bed," and "Snakebite." The latter features the rattling of three live rattlesnakes brought into the studio to perform percussion overdubs.

The Alice Cooper legacy includes literally inventing the theatrical rock stage show with a series of outrageous and innovative tours, and such landmark recordings as "School's Out," "I'm 18," "Billion Dollar Babies," "Under My Wheels," and "Elected" — all before Alice Cooper delivered Trash into the '9Os.

HEY STOOPID can proudly claim a place in that pantheon. "I want this album to stand up as an Alice Cooper classic," says Alice. "You have to do a lot of things right to make a record this good, and we did. I want people to look back and pick this as their favorite Alice Cooper record, the best ever."