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Alice Cooper brings it home with 'Detroit Stories'
Alice Cooper was itching to rock hard. So he came home.
The Detroit native — who also made the city his early-'70s music base after rejection in L.A. — is all about his old stomping grounds on "Detroit Stories," a rollicking album with vintage rock swagger and ample love for his hometown's raw grit.
The album, recorded at Royal Oak's Rust Belt Studios before the pandemic, follows a six-track teaser EP, "Breadcrumbs," released in October 2019. Both projects, produced by longtime Cooper collaborator Bob Ezrin, feature a host of Detroit players as the musical bedrock, including MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, veteran drummer Johnny (Bee) Badanjek, secretweapon bassist Paul Randolph, Grand Funk's Mark Farner and young guitarist Garret Bielaniec.
Cooper, who turned 73 earlier this month, has never shied from touting his Detroit background: In the music world, after all, it's an instant stamp of credibility. But "Detroit Stories," his 21st album, is the Arizona resident's first full-fledged tribute to the city that helped shape him.
"When I tell other musicians I'm from Detroit, there's a different respect. Even with black musicians, they go, 'Detroit — yeah, OK!" Cooper says. "We didn't fit in L.A., we didn't fit in San Francisco, we didn't fit in New York. We only fit in Detroit because we fit in with the Stooges, the MC5, (Bob) Seger, (Ted) Nugent, Suzi Quatro. That was the first time we ever felt like this is where we belong. These bands are in your face. These bands are attitude. These bands are hard rock and they're all really, really I good."
After a string of recent albums immersing in his tried-and-true macabre side — including a "Welcome to My Nightmare" sequel in 20ll — Cooper has gone really back to the roots. "Detroit Stories" offers live-wire rock 'n' roll with a touch of Detroit soul, laced with Cooper' s flair for a cheeky wink-and-a-nod. The 15-track album features covers of four songs by Motor City artists, including the MC5, Bob Seger, the band Detroit and &mdsah; in a left-field move — the late, great power-pop group Outrageous Cherry.
Cooper and his writing partners, including Kramer and guitarist Tommy Hendriksen, also concoct their own Detroit-themed material, replete with nods to local names and places. "Drunk and in Love" finds its sodden, smitten protagonist stumbling "from Woodward Avenue to old Brush Street," while the ego-tripping title character of "Independence Dave" boasts about his girl who's "just a pearl from down in St. Clair Shore."
The anthem comes in the form of "Detroit City 2021," a new reworking of a 2003 Cooper album cut and one of four tracks repurposed from the recent "Breadcrumbs" EP. The thumping rocker comes with an arena-ready chorus, references to acts from Iggy Pop to Eminem and a bridge that lays down Cooper's Detroit rock manifesto: "Play it loud and fast / Make that guitar blast / Play it like today will be your last."
The new material emerged from a pair of weeklong recording sessions at Rust Belt in 2019 where the musicians say the mood was loose but productive. They included drummer Badanjek, who regularly opened for Cooper during his Detroit band days and has known the rocker so long he still addresses him by his birth name "Vincent."
"It was like old friends getting back together in there," says Badanjek. "We sat down and said: 'Let's get this one!'"
Though essentially complete by early last year, the album was moved to the back burner as the pandemic set in. Cooper says he busied himself writing a batch of songs at home in Arizona and already has a new album's worth of material ready to go.
"I think that you guys are going to get an avalanche of albums coming out in the next two years," he says. "Because every band, every player, has a studio at home, and everybody's recording."
He's also confident we're coming around the corner on the pandemic — and that concerts could be back sooner than some think. Cooper, who made it through a bout of COVID-19 last year and was recently vaccinated, says he's "extremely optimistic" he'll be touring again by the end of August or perhaps even earlier.
"Every band I know is like a racehorse at the starting gate right now," he says.
The new album wasn't initially conceived with a Detroit theme. Cooper says he and Ezrin had set out simply to make "a really good, hard rock album — something on the order of AC/DC, where every song is a gem."
But as the idea evolved, the Motor City came into the picture. If you're going to make a gritty hard rock album, why not go to the epicenter of that sound? And use Detroit players? And record it there live in a studio?
"All of a sudden, it was a concept," he says. "And then it became, let's write about Detroit. It's the one thing I know about. I can write characters that I've known, or characters I create that should be in Detroit, and mention places that were near and dear to me."
Setting the tone is the lead off track, a cover of Lou Reed's "Rock & Roll" by way of the band Detroit, which made the song a 1971 hit with a lineup that included Badanjek, Mitch Ryder and Steve Hunter.
"The way the Velvet Underground did it, it was sort of'70s New York heroin-chic, a throwaway thing," Cooper says. "I thought we could take that song to Detroit, put a V8 engine in it, put (guitarists) Joe Bonamassa and Steve Hunter on there, and just make it into a rock monster."
The cross-generational crew of Detroit players slipped a natural vibe into the sound, Cooper says.
"Playing with these Detroit guys, there was a certain amount of R&B, even in the hard rock. That's just in the DNA being from Detroit," he says. "I think the Motown thing does kind of seep in there, which with any other album I would have said, 'No, no, no, I don't want to hear that.'"
Raised in east Detroit before moving at age 12 to Arizona, Cooper returned to the area in 1970. His band had been struggling on the L.A. scene, but he gambled that the group's heavy sound and over-the-top live show would click with Detroit's blue-collar misfit audiences. He was right, and the group became a staple at venues such as the Eastown Theatre.
A farmhouse near Pontiac was home base for the Alice Cooper band as it woodshedded on the Detroit scene and crafted its first three Warner Bros. albums with Ezrin.
Cooper and that group's three surviving members (guitarist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neal Smith) team up on two of the new album's tracks, the latest in a reunion that began with an impromptu record-store show in 2015. The new songs &mdsh; "Social Debris" and "I Hate You" — are gleefully self-referential, embracing the group's old '70s critics with a defiant smirk.
"Detroit Stories" isn't all rock 'n' roll muscle, with two tracks in particular providing a distinct energy.
Cooper and Ezrin had been digging through music by Detroit punk bands, hoping to pluck out an obscure song and give it some spotlight. But it was Outrageous Cherry's "Our Love Will Change the World" that he ultimately couldn't shake from his head. A peppy-sounding bit of bubblegum with a subversive lyrical twist, the song hit the sweet spot for Cooper, who says he's also a fan of the "hysterically great" Detroit band Electric Six.
"It's like the children of the damned singing to our generation and saying: 'Could you please get out of the way? Because our love is going to change the world and you won't recognize it, but you'll get used to it somehow,'" he says. "It just appealed to the Alice Cooper sense of humor. I said there's always one song that doesn't belong — and that's it. But it's the most catchy song on the album."
And then there's "Hanging on by a Thread (Don't Give Up)," an anti-suicide bit of uplift. Though written before 2020, Cooper went back and tweaked the second verse to give the song a COVID-19 context.
"What I'd like to do with this song is give everybody less of the feeling of being a victim. Let's talk back to this thing; let's punch the bully in the nose. Let's tell it: 'Hey, we're the human race. We're going to be here long after you're gone,'" he says.
"I wanted to give the audience the (sense of) don't give up, we're going to win this thing. Everybody else was just so doom and gloom, you know? And I'm too positive, too optimistic for that."
(Originally published in the Entertainment+Life supplement of the Detroit Free Press, February 28, 2021)
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