1975 was easily one of my favourite years for music. Actually, for many things. I was both fourteen and fifteen in ’75, and come September, I would be starting high school.
But even before school started, it had already been a busy year. We’d all been horrified by Jaws - the very first summer blockbuster movie ever. We screamed, we cringed under our seats, we held on to each other for dear life! Some of us couldn’t go back into the water...even if that water was a freshwater inland lake, thousands of miles from the nearest shark.
All through ’75, I was in love with a cult movie called Phantom Of The Paradise, and I rallied to Al Pacino’s cause in Dog Day Afternoon. I cried when I saw the big screen explode with the flames of The Hindenburg. I was in a little over my head with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but it was great, high-heeled fun.
On TV, there was M*A*S*H, Baretta, The Jeffersons, and - come the Fall - a funny, controversial new show called Saturday Night Live. I never knew what George Carlin looked like until 1975.
Babysitting on Friday Night meant being able to watch The Tonight Show and then Midnight Special if the family had cable TV. Extra lucky if they had colour - we only had black and white. Peter Frampton, The Bee Gees, Helen Reddy, and yes...even KISS.
Day by day, I was corrupting my innocence with fear, kink, experimentation, and excess. In a word, art.
Were you there? Do you remember?
Some of the albums that came out that year were:
Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd
Physical Graffiti - Led Zeppelin
Blood On The Tracks - Bob Dylan
Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy - Elton John
Have You Never Been Mellow - Olivia Newton John
Young Americans - David Bowie
Tubular Bells - Mike Oldfield
Sheer Heart Attack - Queen
Welcome To My Nightmare - Alice Cooper
Tommy - The Who
One Of These Nights - The Eagles
Venus and Mars - Wings
Born To Run - Bruce Springsteen
Best Of - Engelbert Humperdinck
Best Of - Tom Jones
What a great variety of styles and sounds, yes? Even Elvis released an album that year. In fact, 1975’s “Today” was his last studio album ever.
Toward the end of the year, disco had started to rear its sequined, polyester head, and the beat was starting to seize control from the ideas, the lyrics of rock‘n’roll. It became a time for dancing. The age of the listener becoming a character in an audio journey was coming to an end. Okay, so we all started to dan--
Wait a minute. Welcome To My Nightmare? Alice Cooper?
Well, okay, since it’s Halloween and all.
"Welcome To My Nightmare" was one of those great overblown concept albums that grabbed unsuspecting teenagers by the throats in 1975. After “Muscle of Love” in 1973, the band, Alice Cooper, disbanded, but the man who retained the character’s name went on to unleash "Welcome to My Nightmare" as his first solo album.
The new band consisted of:
Alice Cooper - Vocals
Steve Hunter - Electric and Acoustic Guitar
Gerry Yons - Guitar
Dick Wagner - Electric and Acoustic Guitar, Vocals
Bob Ezrin - Synthesizer, Keyboards, Fender Rhodes, Vocals
Josef Chirowski - Synthesizer, Keyboards, Vocals, Clavinet, Fender Rhodes
David Ezrin - Vocals
Gary Lyons - Vocals
Michael Sherman - Vocals
Pentti Glan - Drums
Johnny Badanjek - Drums
Prakash John - Bass
Tony Levin - Bass
Vincent Price - Guest Vocals
The track listing was:
Welcome to My Nightmare
Devil's Food
The Black Widow
Some Folks
Only Women Bleed
Department of Youth
Cold Ethyl
Years Ago
Steven
The Awakening
Escape
Once over the initial fear of the intense imagery of the first listen-to, I spent a lot of time trying to decipher this album. It was theatre, it was cabaret, it was pretty bloody scary.
Ostensibly, it was the story of Steven and a night spent in the terrors of his sleeping hours. Steven's head was filled with black widow spiders, monsters and demons, insanity, murder, Vincent Price (shriek), the numbness of alcohol, and of course, the all encompassing angst of the average teen.
Alice had always been a pro at zeroing in on teenage feelings. "School’s Out" and "Eighteen" are prime examples of this. But with "Welcome to My Nightmare", Alice had made a point of digging a hole into our heads to see what really lurked inside. We deal with each other every day, but which among us could be a “Steven” with a headful of horrors? Alice had found the button, and he smashed down on it with a sledge hammer.
But as I listened, I always wondered if the message was as cut-and-dry as the album seemed to project. Did Steven simply dream he had committed murder, or did he get drunk, do something he shouldn’t have, and then pass out? To me, at fourteen/fifteen, it didn’t matter what Alice was trying to say. This was my time to learn and explore. In those moments, what Alice wanted to say was irrelevant; I was learning to interpret abstract concept music on my own, and if I decided to take the story to places of my own doing, so be it.
Musically speaking, "Welcome to My Nightmare" has some of the best basslines in rock. In typical ’70s style, it’s all dark, heavy, roaring thunder.
The title track is devilishly clever, both scary and theatrical at once. Of course, this is Alice’s style - a blood soaked tuxedo with top hat and tails.
Half way through Devil’s Food, we are treated to Vincent Price and a creepy bassline that leads into Black Widow - a killer track with another dark bassline to match. There’s something about Price’s presentation that gives us goose bumps as we imagine the Black Widow herself!
Tracks 8, 9, and 10 (Years Ago, Steven, and The Awakening) combine to create (even to this day) the most horrifying musical story I have ever heard. Is Steven dreaming or is he possessed to do evil by the forces in his own mind?
Whether you subscribe to Alice’s own interpretation of the story or feel free to let your mind wander to other places, the beauty of this album is that - to the young minds of the day - it was very influential, both as an adventure in diving head first into bombastic, no-holds-barred artistic exploration, and as a real fear-fest of primal emotions.
If you’ve never heard "Welcome to My Nightmare", tonight would be a good night. Get yourself a copy from your fave download store and then turn down the lights...maybe curl up by the midnight Halloween fire...and if you’re really brave, make sure you’re alone.
...but then again, with Alice in your head, you’ll always have company.
BWAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!
Happy Halloween from Thunder Row!!!
© 2011 - CL Seamus for Thunder Row
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