Love It to Death

Love It to Death is the third studio album by American rock group Alice Cooper, released in March 1971. It was the band’s first commercially successful album and the first album that consolidated their aggressive hard-rocking sound. The album has come to be seen as a foundational influence on hard rock, punk, and heavy metal.

About Love It to Death in brief

Love It to Death is the third studio album by American rock group Alice Cooper, released in March 1971. It was the band’s first commercially successful album and the first album that consolidated their aggressive hard-rocking sound. The album has come to be seen as a foundational influence on hard rock, punk, and heavy metal; several tracks have become live Alice Cooper standards and are frequently covered by other bands. The single \”I’m Eighteen\” achieved top-forty success soon after, peaking at No. 21. The original album cover featured the singer Cooper posed with his thumb protruding so it appeared to be his penis; Warner Bros. soon replaced it with a censored version. The band moved to Los Angeles and became known for its provocative, theatrical shock rock stage show. In an incident during a performance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival in 1969, Cooper threw a live chicken into the audience, who tore it to shreds. The group’s first two albums, Pretties for You and Easy Action, appeared on Frank Zappa’s Straight Records label, and failed to find an audience. In 1970, the band relocated to Detroit and found itself in the midst of a music scene populated with the hard-driving rock of the MC5, stage-diving Iggy Pop with the Stooges, and the theatricality of George Clinton’s Parliament and Funkadelic. A young Bob Ezrin was enlisted as producer; he encouraged the band to tighten its songwriting over two months of rehearsing ten to twelve hours a day.

In 1974, the Coopers continued to work together for a string of hit albums until the band’s breakup in 1974. The first single from the album, ‘Caught in a Dream’, charted at no. 94, and has since been certified platinum. The second single, “Caught In A Dream”, was released as a single to test the group’s commercial viability before the album was recorded. In 1968 the band adopted the name Alice Cooper and presented a story that it came from a 17th-century witch whose name they learned from a session with a ouija board. At some point Buxton painted circles under his eyes with cigarette ashes, and soon the rest followed with ghoulish black makeup and outlandish clothes. In the mid-1960s the band released a few singles and went through a few name changes before settling on a lineup with guitarist Glen Buxton, guitarist and keyboardist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway, and drummer Neal Smith. While at the Strawberry Fields Festival in Canada in April 1970, band manager Shep Gordon contacted producer Jack Richardson, who had produced hit singles for the Guess Who. Richardson did not want to work directly with the group but agreed on the condition that Ezrin took on the lead role. Ezrin initially turned down working with the band but changed his mind when he saw them perform at Max Max’s New York City the following October.

Related posts:

Gary Cooper Anderson Cooper Alice Cooper Gordon Cooper