1972 is broadly praised as essentially the most fertile 12 months ever for rock albums, notching such classics as The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and Neil Young’s Harvest. But albums launched in 1973 and at the moment celebrating their fiftieth anniversary could also be even higher: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres, and Bruce Springsteen’s The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, amongst others. But of all of the enduring albums of ’73, essentially the most unique, audacious, and in the end entertaining have to be Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies.

If first impressions are key, then the look alone of the Billion Dollar Babies LP made it an prompt traditional. A chief artifact from the times when the music enterprise spent lavishly on sophisticated and costly album artwork, the package deal was designed like a pockets. Outside was a big gold coin with a child’s head encircled by embossed diamonds in opposition to a bright-green snakeskin-patterned background. Inside had been pop-out buying and selling playing cards and an outsized billion-dollar invoice picturing the band. The inside sleeve has lyrics on one facet and the band, wearing white, trying hilariously perplexed by their environment, petting white rabbits amongst stacks of paper cash whereas Cooper holds an toddler whose eyes are ringed by the identical black make-up design he wore onstage.

After the lengthy, wearying wrestle to succeed adopted by countless touring and boundless adulation, Alice Cooper the band was each peaking and coming aside in 1973. Having just lately launched Killer (1971) with its singles “Be My Lover” and “Under My Wheels,” and a follow-up, School’s Out (1972), whose LP got here packaged in a pair of ladies’s panties, circumstances had been ripe for these early progenitors of shock, schlock, and glam rock to vogue one lasting achievement but to be.

Guitarists Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce (who additionally performs keyboards), drummer Neal Smith, bassist Dennis Dunaway, and Vince Furnier (aka Alice Cooper) recorded BDB from August 1972 via January 1973 on the Cooper Mansion in Connecticut with a cell recording unit, in addition to in Morgan Studios, London, and The Record Plant in New York City. The engineers had been Shelly Yakus, Frank Hubach, Robin Black, Peter Flanagan, Jack Douglas, and Ed Sprigg. Guitarists Mick Mashbir, Dick Wagner, and Steve Hunter (the latter two could be distinguished in Alice Cooper’s solo profession) and keyboardist Bob Dolin supplied further help.

More than 100 variations of the unique album have been launched since 1973, with totally different mixes created for the unique 1973 quadrophonic model and, later, a 2001 multichannel 5.1 DVD video launch. The sound of the unique album, whereas laden with overdubs and results, is mostly clear and detailed with solely occasional moments when an unsure murk colours the sonic picture.

More textures and bombast than precise exhausting rock, BDB on reflection is an odd assortment of extremely polished performances. Upon nearer pay attention, piano elements are a delicate however surprisingly important a part of the preparations. Never loud or overdriven guitars, typically keening, help within the album’s high-camp zeitgeist. And the place else in pop music historical past is there a tune like “Unfinished Sweet”? Clearly composed with the band’s reside present in thoughts, it has guitar chords serving as yowls of ache, a whirring dentist drill, a James Bond–styled center part, and eventually the sound of a tooth being pulled. That’s properly adopted by considered one of riff rock’s most infectious singles, “No More Mr. Nice Guy.”

Unafraid to succeed in out of their ingredient, at producer Bob Ezrin’s suggestion, they labored up a model of “Hello Hooray,” a tune lined in 1968 by folkie Judy Collins. Bruce got here up with the riff that powers the album’s most under-rated tune, “Raped and Freezin’,” which concludes, once more at Ezrin’s suggestion, with a bouncing change of tempo and massed voices shouting “Olé” as if at a bullfight.

Band pal Reggie Vinson and guitarist Buxton wrote the melody for the title monitor, which started life as a ballad earlier than Dunaway and Bruce added beefy guitar chords, Smith added aggressive drums, and Cooper contributed lyrics. When the band was in London, Donovan, who was recording in the identical studio, was induced to sing/communicate a spooky accompanying vocal half. An early instance of using samples and a rhythm monitor that the band later admitted was modeled on The Who, “Elected,” a rewrite of “Reflected” from the 1969 album, Pretties for You, was reimagined as a topical political tune.

It closes with Cooper shouting a monologue that ends, “Personally, I do not care.”

The album’s two “horror” tunes, the eerie “Sick Things,” which pans forwards and backwards between the left and proper channels, and one other large manufacturing quantity, “I Love the Dead,” by Ezrin/Cooper—once more, each produced with a watch towards the all-important stage present—had been crucial and anticipated additions. Bruce’s ballad “Mary Ann” presages the route of Cooper’s solo profession. Finally, the principally acoustic “Generation Landslide,” with its central harmonica elements, has usually been named by surviving bandmembers and followers as the height of the group’s collective songwriting catalog.

Bassist Dunaway remembers it in his 2015 guide, Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! My Adventures in The Alice Cooper Group, as a spotlight of the BDB expertise: “We poured on the difficult Yardbirds-esque issues we might executed after we had been the Nazz [not the Rundgren band]. … I assumed it was the most effective tune on the album, and that Alice’s lyrics had been the most effective ever. Later on, Bob Dylan cited them in an interview.”

Rhino Records, Warner Music’s catalog division, says no fiftieth anniversary reissue is at the moment deliberate, however the 12 months is younger. Meanwhile, the album streams at as much as 24/96, and downloads can be found. Used LP and CD copies are plentiful and cheap, relying on situation. Original white-label promo LP copies and the 2016 restricted version LP of inexperienced, yellow, and orange marbled vinyl are expensive.

Awash in integrity and defiance, Billion Dollar Babies is a visionary snapshot of a band at its greatest.