Music Reviews

Upon inception, Alice Cooper was conceived more as a group construct, not just a moniker for one person. The name itself was intended to encompass an all-for-one band concept, but it was also concurrently adopted by lead singer Vincent Furnier, who soon enough embodied the id and ego of Alice Cooper to such a degree that he transmogrified that persona into his fully becoming one and the same. Six-plus decades later, Alice Cooper is still going strong as the king of shock-glam metal to this very day — and his rabid fanbase wouldn’t have it any other way.

How Vincent-as-Alice ultimately came to be directly informed the unapologetic, pull-no-punches raw power of the band’s best-realized album, March 1973’s Billion Dollar Babies. In essence, Cooper drew directly from the moral center of his clean-cut, pastoral 1950s upbringing.

“I was just a normal kid,” he admits. “I grew up in that sitcom world where everything was all-American, and all was okay. But there was also the side of me that saw the dark humor in everything — and the fact is, dark humor needs to be in rock & roll. That’s what directed me towards being the villain. There was a moment when I realized rock needed a Moriarty — and I loved doing it. Sometimes, you’d go back and think, ‘Why didn’t I do this? Why didn’t I do that?’ But I found that I’ve now perfected this character into a sophisticated, arrogant villain who would never swear to the audience. That would be ungentlemanly.”

Once Alice Cooper began feeding his, and our, Frankenstein on Warner Bros. wax via hit albums like November 1971’s Killer and June 1972’s School’s Out, the height of the band’s chiller-thriller powers came with the aforementioned million-selling No. 1 LP, Billion Dollar Babies. Why did Babies click so well with the masses? “We spent nine hours rehearsing the music, and one hour on the theatrics,” Cooper reveals. “Sitting there with [producer] Bob Ezrin and seeing him determine what the music needed to put it in a position for us to find out if it could play next to The Supremes and Simon & Garfunkel — that was the trick.”

I obtained my original, albeit used, gatefold vinyl copy of Babies a few years after its initial release, one with each rounded corner already slightly frayed. The gradual ringwear on that snakeskin-green cover has only gotten worse over the ensuing years, resulting in the LP being relegated to a semi-permanent shelving position after Alice graciously signed the cover for me after one of our interview sessions back in 2014. (Yes, I have indeed golfed with Alice in one of his pro-am charity tournaments, but that’s a story for another time.) I do have both Warner Bros./Rhino’s 180-gram 2010 LP on black vinyl and the subsequent 2016 LP reissue on green/yellow/orange marble swirl vinyl, but I was hoping Rhino would serve up a 50th anniversary Babies reissue similar to what they did in June 2023 with the jointly expanded, and quite fine-sounding, 180-gram 3LP sets for both Killer and School’s Out.

Looks like they essentially heeded my call since, just last week on March 8, Rhino duly recognized the 50th anniversary of Billion Dollar Babies with separate 3LP and 2CD releases. Both feature the newly remastered version of the original album along with bonus material that includes studio outtakes, single mixes, and 13 live tracks culled from Cooper’s of-era gig in Houston on April 28, 1973. Vinyl lovers take note — the gatefold cover for the 3LP edition faithfully replicates the original LP’s textured, rounded snakeskin wallet design, and it comes with the requisite $1 billion dollar bill inside. If your original BDB vinyl needs replacing/updating, you want all the extras, and you have the coin for it — its SRP is $69.98 — you can’t go wrong with this new, albeit standard-weight expanded 3LP edition. (Here's hoping November 1973’s oft-misunderstood Muscle of Love comes next.)

Entering the digital age, I obtained the 1990 Warner Bros. Redbook CD for the usual obligatory/mandatory collecting purposes. I actually spent more time listening to the 2001 2CD Warner Bros./Rhino deluxe edition, chiefly for bonus material like the gritty 1973 live take on “I’m Eighteen” and the rockabilly-tinged outtake, “Coal Black Model T.” Naturally, I gravitated even more towards the 24-bit/96kHz Dolby Digital 5.1 mix helmed by Ezrin, Gary Lux, and Ken Caillat on the 2001 Warner Archives/Rhino DVD-Audio. Favorite 5.1 moments include the rear-channel Mellotron fills from Bob Dolin on “Hello Hooray,” the enveloping percussion throughout “Elected,” and the super-clean acoustic guitar lines permeating “Generation Landslide.”

In June 2023, Warner Records/Rhino commenced a new reissue series with 24/192 updates of original 1970s quad mixes on Blu-ray under the company’s “Quadio” designation, Billion Dollar Babies included. The stacked-guitar opening to “Hello Hooray” spreads much wider and has more impact in quad than on the DVD-A, while the layered, out-front lead vocals and harmonies on “No More Mr. Nice Guy” also fare better in quad. Bottom line: Both the 4.0 and 5.1 Babies mixes have their own immersive rewards.

As we navigate yet another grueling year-long election cycle, Billion Dollar Babies is as relevant as ever. And, hey, maybe we’ll even get to bellow a welcoming, loud “Hello Hooray” together when we can all dream along to its hopefully inevitable Atmos mix.