Alice Cooper

From The Inside
Warner Bros, 1978

Alice Cooper had his first hit single in 1971 with the song 'I'm Eighteen'. By the middle of the decade he had released six albums, most of which broke the top ten, and become the first artist to make more money on a tour than The Rolling Stones. Only one of Cooper's personas is remembered now, but during his peak he ran through wardrobe changes as fast as recording studios. Muscle Of Love told the story of a naive boy from the country moving to New York and becoming a prostitute, Welcome To My Nightmare was a concept album that mixed imagery of suburban America with that of night terrors and murder, while Lace And Whiskey was inspired by pulp crime novels and Frank Sinatra.

As Cooper's fame skyrocketed, so did his drinking habit. By 1976 he had begun appearing intoxicated on stage and was, according to those on tour with him, regularly throwing up blood. At the end of his 1977 North American tour, Cooper voluntarily admitted himself to a sanatorium in New York to be treated for alcoholism. The experience formed the basis of his next record, a concept album called From The Inside. Each track tells the story of a different inmate, beginning with Cooper himself: "I got lost on the road somewhere/ Was it Texas or was it Canada?/ Drinking whiskey in the morning light... I never dreamed I would wind up on the losing end."

But, for once, Cooper isn't the focal point of this album. More interesting are the other asylum inmates whose stories range between bizarre and heart-breaking – a rich girl from Beverly Hills who "lost it", a priest who hates himself for lusting after a nurse ("to check my pulse she gotta hold my hand/ I blow the fuse on the encephalogram") and a down-on-his luck gambler. The very saddest story on the record is perhaps the least expected – not the man who wonders what his wife will think of him when he returns home, or the patient who wants to die locked in a padded room where he can't kill himself, but the inmate whose thoughts are, in contrast, rather normal. The song is called 'For Veronica's Sake', and it is about a man who knows that the pound is going to put his dog to sleep because he's been taken away.