band tended to agree. I didn’t. I thought we hadn’t even done half the things that we could do, and now we had the budget to do them. But now that we were making so much money, the rest of the guys weren’t so keen with the idea of me taking everything and putting it back into the show. So I took all the money I, and [manager] Shep [Gordon], had in the world and put it into the production of Welcome to My Nightmare, my first solo project.” Taking Ezrin with him – the man who is credited with giving birth to the Alice Cooper Group’s definitive
sound on 1971’s Love it to Death – Cooper concocted a story about a child named Steven who was unable to wake from a nightmare. “The beauty of it was that anything can happen in a nightmare,” says Cooper, reminiscing about the writing
process. “The entire album depended on two songs, specifically ‘Steven’ and ‘Welcome to My Nightmare.’ Once we got those two down, everything just kind of connected up because it was part of the nightmare. I think if you took ten people and put them in a room and had them listen to Welcome to My Nightmare and then told them to write down what the story was about, they would give you ten different stories. That’s exactly what I wanted because, to me, that’s what art is supposed to do. It’s supposed to provoke and make you use your imagination. If you took Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento and Wes Craven and asked them to make a movie out of it, you would get three different movies, because they would all visualize it differently.” In keeping with this non-linear approach, the songs offered one musical twist after another. Opening with
the disco-fed title track (now a Halloween staple), side one of the album dove into some serious hard rock with “Devil’s Food” and “The Black Widow,” followed by the vaudevillian “Some Folks” and “Only Women Bleed,” the first of many successful Cooper rock ballads – also one of his biggest hits of all time. But Welcome to My Nightmare took a legitimately frightening turn on side two, with a trilogy of terror – “Years Ago,” “Steven” and “The Awakening” – that included the use of creepy child voices and dripping blood sound effects that can still inspire actual nightmares. Since the band wouldn’t be joining Cooper on his journey to the netherworld, new recruits were necessary. Guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner from Lou Reed’s backing band were brought in to drive home the sound that was being orchestrated by Ezrin. The duo’s bombastic twin guitar noodling marked a major departure from the darker, grittier work of previous six-stringers Bruce and Buxton, but was perhaps more fitting for what was, to some extent, a rock opera. Oh, and let’s not forget the album’s guest star, the legend himself, Vincent Price, whose bizarre and humorous tribute to the arachnids between “Devil’s Food” and “Black Widow” remains an unforgettable moment in the Cooper canon. This horror titan two-in-one probably led to more than a few nerdgasms out there in monster-kid land, and also had a noted impact on future shock rock icon Rob Zombie. Surprisingly, the creative outburst behind Welcome to My Nightmare was
in large part sparked by practical business matters. Technically, the original Alice Cooper Group was still under contract to Warner Bros., but a loophole allowed Cooper himself to escape if he were doing a “soundtrack.” As a result, Welcome to My Nightmare was followed by a TV special simply called The Nightmare, essentially an extended music video for the entire record, starring Cooper as Steven and Price as the Spirit of the Night- mare. The album was also considered a soundtrack for the upcom- ing tour, an indication of how visual and theatrical it would be. It was all a gamble but one that paid off. Welcome to My Nightmare became one of Cooper’s most successful albums, and the one that would both launch and define his solo ca- reer. The Steven character became forever linked to his
legacy, popping up repeatedly on future releases. “Whenever people ask who Steven is, I tell them that he is
the six-year-old that lives in all of us,” explains Cooper. “He’s full of curiosity, in some ways fearless, in some ways scared of everything. There’s a certain amount of innocence in him while he is on this adventure by himself.” Almost four decades later, the idea to do a sequel emerged
when Cooper approached Ezrin, with whom he had recently collaborated on a few re-recorded hits for the Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock video game, about the aforementioned Night Shift. Much of it had already been written when Ezrin reminded him of what they had accomplished 35 years ago. Perhaps a sign of things to come, Cooper’s last three albums – The Eyes of Alice Cooper (2003), Dirty
Diamonds (2005) and Along Came a Spider (2008) – can be described as a return to the classic garage sound of the original band. Just as in 1975, Cooper and Ezrin believed it was time to up the ante with a more theatrical concept. The result: Welcome 2 My Nightmare (out Sep- tember 16 in North America and October 17 in the UK on Ezrin’s own Bigger Picture label). “I think any time you get Bob Ezrin and I together, we bring out the worst in each other,”
says Cooper with a laugh. “Our dark senses of humour merge and we come up with a lot of good songs. We just thought, ‘Okay, what would Alice’s nightmare be 30 years on? Would
Recurring Nightmare: Alice Cooper during a live show on the 1975 Welcome to My Nightmare tour, and (opposite) striking a Nosferatu-like pose in 2011.
Photo © Bob Gruen
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