Easy listening medley of Hawkwind, T-Rex and Alice Cooper by The James Last Orchestra, 1973

I could hear this playing in the other side of the house on my wife’s computer. “It isn’t?”

Oh, but IT IS: Mr. Dante Fontana of Mod Cinema has posted this clip of fab German bandleader James Last and his Orchestra performing an indescribably great medley of Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine,” “Children Of The Revolution” by T-Rex and Alice Cooper’s anthem to juvenile delinquency, “Schools’ Out.”

How lucky are we that this clip exists in the world: The James fucking Last Orchestra playing a decidedly UN-IRONIC (but truly incredible) big band version of Hawkwind’s greatest hit in 1973??? I mean, for that alone, sign me up, but throw in T-Rex and Alice Cooper covers in this style, too? That’s a party. A voodoo party.

Read on...

ANT-BEE: A taster for an interview later in the week..

I was scheduled to interview Billy from Ant-Bee this evening, but it has been postponed until later in the week. This is probably a good thing, because my copy of his fabbo new album 'Electronic Church Music' only arrived about half an hour ago, and now I have enough time to gen up on him properly. In the meantime, here is a link to recent feature on him:

His albums are barely known this side of the Atlantic - and they don't sell shed-loads over there either - and yet they are stuffed with brain fryingly psychedelic wonders and feature guest slots by the likes of Don Preston and Bunk Gardner (The Mothers Of Invention), Michael Bruce (Alice Cooper Group, Jan Akkerman (Focus), Peter Banks (Yes) Zoot Horn Rollo and Rockette Morton (Captain Beefheart's Magic Band), Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth (Gong) and numerous other famous names. So just how did the unasuming Billy 'Ant-Bee' James find himself in such illustrious company and did he, we wonder, come from a musical family background?

Read on...

http://www.totalmusicmagazine.com/interviews/Ant_Bee.htm

Billy pictured with Daevid Allen and Michael Bruce of the Alice Cooper group)

BOOK REVIEWS: Blondie and Alice Cooper (and how the two bands are linked by Michael Des Barres)

Welcome to My Nightmare: The Alice Cooper Story
by Dave Thompson Publisher: Omnibus Press (13 Jun 2012)
Language English
ISBN-10: 1780382324
ISBN-13: 978-1780382326

Blondie: Parallel Lives by Dick Porter and Kris Needs
Language English
ISBN-10: 1780381298
ISBN-13: 978-1780381299

Those jolly nice people at Omnibus Books have started sending me all sorts of things to review. I have been an avid reader of rock music biographies ever since I discovered the cut and paste works of George Tremlett back in the mid-1970s; I have read hundreds if not thousands and reviewed dozens of them. However, until now, most of the books I have read or books I have reviewed have something in common; they have all been about bands or artists that particularly interested me. Now, for the first time, I am being confronted with well-written and well-presented books, some of which are about bands that don’t really interest me at all. However, reading and commenting on them is an interesting intellectual exercise.

The two artists I am dealing with today are both artists whom I vaguely like, and indeed have vaguely liked since the 1970s. I remember the frisson of horrified delight which accompanied Alice Cooper’s advent in the UK with `Schools Out` in the summer of 1972.

I remember how all the dashing young punks in my social peer group had the hots for Debbie Harry and how `Sunday Girl` and `Heart of Glass` were the soundtrack of much of 1979.

But I don’t think I’ve ever consciously gone out and bought a brand new record of either of them. I had a copy of 'Billion Dollar Babies' that came from a car boot sale, and my ex-wife had a copy of 'Parallel Lines'.

But both of these acts have something more important in common than the fact that I never actually bought one of their records. But when I say something in common, I actually mean something almost diametrically opposite in their history. Blondie started off as the alter-ego of Deborah Harry who constructed a post-modern alternative identity based around a Warholesque version of the famous newspaper strip cartoon. It was only later on that the name became used for the whole group rather than just for its eponymous peroxide-bleached singer.

On the other hand a garage band from Phoenix, Arizona called The Nazz (after a song by The Yardbirds, and – I believe – Lord Buckley’s name for our Lord and Saviour) moved to Los Angeles, hooked up with Frank Zappa, and – claiming to be channelling the name of a long-dead witch – changed THEIR name to ‘Alice Cooper’. It was only some years later that Vincent Furnier the singer adopted the name for himself, and eventually sacked the band.

But the two bands have something else in common, and here, my current occupation as scribbler to the stars of Gonzo Multimedia, also gets dragged into the equation. Because the thing that they have in common is a man who has recently signed with Gonzo, and with whom I am working quite closely; Michael des Barres.

Michael was once (and for a couple of days last month, was again) the lead singer with a gloriously trashy glam band called Silverhead, and the bass player from Silverhead was another Englishman called Nigel Harrison, and he took over the post as bass player in Blondie from somebody else I know.

It’s always strange when you read a biography of people that you vaguely know.

Okay, most of the people in this very workmanlike biography of Blondie wouldn’t know me from Adam (okay they probably would, Adam is the naked one with the fig leaf). However, I do vaguely know Gary Lachman, who played in Blondie for many years under the nom de guerre of Gary Valentine, and now writes on esoterica for Fortean Times amongst other things.

During several of my recent conversations with Michael des Barres he had waxed lyrical over the drumming prowess of Clem Burke and it has to be said that Michael not only went to school with Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience he knows his drumming. He likens Burke to the late, great Keith Moon, as do the authors of this book. I have to admit that this is something that wouldn’t have occurred to me listening to the record, but I trust Michael’s judgement implicitly.

But what has Michael des Barres got to do with Alice Cooper? Well it’s actually his ex-wife, and close friend, Miss Pamela of the GTOs. She was apparently the person who first introduced the Alice Cooper band to her label boss, Frank Zappa, and if it hadn’t been for her, none of this would have happened, because Zappa was the only record company mogul in Los Angeles, perverse enough to sign a band that everybody else hated and wouldn’t have touched with a proverbial bargepole. Michael and Pamela are responsible for so many of the little synergies throughout rock ‘n’ roll of the last 30 or 40 years, and I confidently expect to find a whole string more of them over the next few months.
But what about the books? Are they any good? The answer is yes of course they are. They are both perfectly competently written, edited and spell-checked, and designed. Of the two, the Alice Cooper one I found more entertaining and engaging, possibly because it was more emotive about a time of my life that was quite special to me. Whereas I was desperately miserable and drunk throughout much of the late 70s and early 80s, and it is not a time that I particularly want to re-visit in literary form. I also preferred the Alice Cooper book because – frankly – I like more of his songs, whereas ‘One Thing or Another’, ‘Heart of Glass’, and ‘Sunday Girl’ great songs as they are, don’t really have enough impetus to propel me through a 300-page manuscript.

However both books suffer from what is a common syndrome throughout rock music publishing; the early days of the band when they are struggling artists in New York City, or drunken acolytes of Frank Zappa causing outrage in Los Angeles are perforce far more interesting than the later days. I have always thought that the sign of the best rock music biographies are when they find something interesting to say about the latter days of the artists concerned rather than just their formative years.

Okay Chris Stein became seriously ill, and Alice took up golf, but the latter day albums are treated far more cursorily than the ones released during their heyday. I think that this is a pity, and wish that it could have been otherwise.
Both artists end up going full circle and reforming to some approximation of their original line-up. As far as the Alice Cooper band reunion was concerned, this was particularly welcome, but the descriptions of both artistes and their most recent output have inspired me to check out their most recent recordings, which can only be a good thing. So yes, I guess you can say that both these biographies are a success!

Michael Bruce and Alice Cooper!

Michael Bruce as many will tell you was one of the original members of the Alice Cooper group. Michael co wrote many of the huge hits enjoyed by the band including School’s Out, No More Mr Nice Guy and Billion Dollar babies to name just a few. The original band split in 1974 and Michael recorded his own solo album entitled In My Own Way before reforming with Neal Smith and Dennis Dunnaway in the Billion Dollar Babies who released one album in 1977 entitled Battleaxe in.

Since then Michael has toured regularly and released solo albums. It was announced in late 2010 that The Alice Cooper group would be inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of fame in 2011 and it is also hinted that the original band may reform for some live dates.

Retroworld, the reissue division Floating World Records have just released a double CD Anthology entitled Be Your Lover that contains a disc of the sessions for his solo album, In My Own Way, and a disc of fifteen rare live and studio cuts, including his own takes on the aforementioned Alice Cooper classics.
The album is available to order directly from the Gonzo Website
Here is an exclusive Interview that Michael did around the original reissue of In My Own Way in February 2002.

INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL BRUCE :
FEBRUARY 2002

Following the recording of Muscle of Love and what turned out to be the final tour by the original Alice Cooper Group; time was set aside for Michael Bruce, Neil Smith and Alice Cooper to record solo projects. Neil recorded an album entitled Platinum God, Alice recorded Welcome to My Nightmare and Michael recorded the album entitled In My Own Way. Following these solo projects, the band was meant to reconvene and record the next Alice Cooper album.

As history has shown, things didn’t quite turn out like that and Michael’s album didn’t even get a release. However, In My Own Way and the subsequent Billion Dollar Babies album Battleaxe were more intertwined than you might originally have thought…This is the story: read on.

Jon Kirkman: The last Alice Cooper album that had preceded the In My Own Way album was Muscle of Love, right?

Michael Bruce: Yes. I had moved out of the Cooper mansion at the Galici Estate and got my own place and Mick Mashbir and Bob Dolin had moved in with me as a matter of fact we did some of the rehearsals for Muscle of Love there in my studio. And we started working on… just tunes that were different. I knew they weren’t going to be Alice Cooper tunes, tunes like King of America.

JK: Some of the songs on the album do sound as though they could have been Alice Cooper songs, which I guess is understandable.

MB: Yeah, well you just have the nine tracks for the original album and the out-takes which are also coming out. I think there are some really good songs on there. You know it’s stuff I wrote that I would work up with the band and later would become Cooper songs, so my intention was an ongoing thing. Again, between Alice seeing dollar signs maybe and Shep and the powers that be with Glen’s problem, it just wasn’t going to happen and I found refuge as an artiste in my music! (Laughs)

JK: This album then was initially written as a complete project. There was nothing written originally for the Cooper Group.

MB: No, this was just songs I had written. Once I’d written Rock Rolls On – that’s what I originally wanted to call the album at first – but then I moved to Tahoe and the tentative working title was Sunburst and Mick, Bob and I worked with Curly Smith, the drummer for Jo Jo Gunne and John Barbata from LA, then we went to San Francisco and did a little thing with the drummer who worked with Paul McCartney, Denny Seiwell. Then I flew back to New York and I finally ended up meeting with Gene Cornish and Dino Danelli. It’s funny, I had played with them at some shows in Arizona when The Rascals had toured with Eric Burdon and The Animals in the sixties and we opened for them and I loved Dino’s drumming. I thought he was just too much – he was the only guy that I could remember who knew how to use a hi-hat. So we kind of hit it off and I played them the stuff and we started going through the material and we looked around for some additional material and we chose Friday On My Mind, which The Easybeats had recorded and So Far So Good from the Slade in Flame album. And then started recording at the Record Plant and the rest is history, as it were.

JK: Talking about the production for a minute, Gene Cornish and Dino Danelli were obviously members of The Rascals, which might have seemed an odd choice for producers of this album. How did you come to hook up with them for this project?

MB: Well, Shep Gordon had set up a meeting with Hank Medress who produced Tony Orlando and Dawn, and I was kinda like….Tony Orlando and Dawn?!? Anyway, he didn’t want to handle it personally, so he said he knew Gene and Dino and they were looking for different projects to do. So he linked us up and that’s how that came about. It was a kind of interesting thing. Shep was still my manager then. I was knocking around in LA and one of our roadies asked if I’d seen Alice’s new show and he took me to the secret sound stage at Warner Brothers, where Alice was rehearsing Nightmare. And when I saw it, I said “Oh my God, there’s the band but I’m not in it!” And that’s when it became apparent that what I thought was “a solo project and following that get back into the Cooper thing”, was just going to be “my unemployment”.

JK: Was it difficult for you then to get into the solo thing, as opposed to a group project?

MB: No, not at all. I started out in the sixties when I first started playing as a folk singer, doing stuff like, Michael Row the Boat Ashore, and all those Peter Paul and Mary, Dylan and all that. I had a band called the Other Brothers – not the Smothers Brothers (laughs) – but the Other Brothers. We had two guitars and a washtub bass. So I started off doing Hootenannies and being a folk singer. And then The Beatles came out and I got an electric guitar and the rest is history. So I kind of learnt to write songs from The Beatles, and I wrote, wrote, wrote and kind of where it went depended on who I was working with and who was producing. So I never had a problem, I was just writing and what was I going to do with all this extra stuff?

JK: Well, the album must have come out sometime in 1975 then?

MN: No, the album never came out. That’s kind of an interesting story. What happened was, as I’ve said, I see Alice’s Welcome To My Nightmare concept show and I’m just doing my humble little ol’ album and I realised the band wasn’t going to get back together. I went over to Alice’s and I played him my album and he played me his mega production of Nightmare, and Shep got me a deal with Polydor in Germany for $30,000 on the condition it would be released on signing an American deal. So Shep and I went to A&M and when I look back, the timing was just not good, because they had Frampton Comes Alive, Captain and Tenille, Herb Alpert, The Tubes, you know, they just didn’t need little ol’ me. So things are starting to move ahead with Alice and I’m starting to feel like the indentured servant.

JK: But at this time, Shep Gordon was still your manager?

MB: Yeah, still my manager. So I had the Polydor deal, but I had to get an American deal or Polydor aren’t going to release it. So one day Neil called me up and said “Hey Michael, what do you think about rehearsing and getting the band back together?” So I Said “I’m feeling kind of stalled out here and at the crossroads, not knowing which way to go.” So I went up to Connecticut and started playing with Neil and Dennis and they’re jamming with this guy Michael Marconi, who Neil had been writing with, and I just loved him, he was a great little guitar player. So I said, “Hey, let’s get a keyboard player, let’s get Bob Dolin.” So Bob was still in the Connecticut area, he came over and the next thing you know, we’re writing all this stuff for the next Cooper album, which we realised, was going to be the last album, like a farewell album. As a matter of fact, it got a little dicey there. We threatened an injunction against Nightmare and that’s when Alice said he’d do one more album with us. So we were working on that album and after the Nightmare thing, Shep calls us and said, “Alice doesn’t want to work with you.” So now we had this choice of: go ahead with what we’re doing, or sue. And us being the sweet, lovable nice guys we are (laughs), we just put our heads down and went for it - decided we were going to do Billion Dollar Babies and the album became Battleaxe.

JK: Ultimately, Polydor released the Battleaxe album, and yet they didn’t release your solo album?

MB: Well, this was Polydor in New York – the other deal was with Polydor in Germany.

JK: Record company politics seem to become very tangled and involved.

MB: Well, I spoke to Leo Fenn, who was our manager, and the plan was after the Billion Dollar Babies thing had taken off, we would get Polydor Germany to release my album later. Because it was just sitting there, waiting for an American deal. So we concentrated on the Billion Dollar Babies thing. We got a budget and I think we really did a great job. However, we weren’t thinking five steps ahead. We were dealing with Concerts West, who were going to break the band, were only going to tour us in 5,000 seaters. We were going to sell out and. Showco was going to do the sound.

JK: The Billion Dollar Babies show was a big show, very much in the Cooper tradition, wasn’t it?

MB: Yes, very much. The Battleaxe - sort of Rollerball, sci-fi, mega death, gladiator thing. Which I think would be perfect for right now. Alice should do it; it would be a great reunion vehicle.

JK: With the greatest respect, the Billion Dollar Babies show ground to a halt - after only 3 or 4 gigs wasn’t it?

MB: Let me explain what happened. The Concerts West whole tour was premised on the album going into the charts at 160 with a bullet, to get the promoters interested. Well, we shipped 60,000 albums; we had regional breakouts in Cashbox, Record World and Billboard. We had hit picks on the radio and we were on our way. What happened was there were two guys at Polydor who were responsible for reporting the chart action and record sales and evidently one of them got fired and the other one quit, the week our record was to report. So instead of 160 with a bullet, we came out at 199 with an anchor! (Laughs) And it was a downward spiral from then on - we could not regain momentum. We just couldn’t pull it together. We got rid of Leo Fenn; Sid Bernstein became involved, our lawyers tried to get another deal with Polydor but they wouldn’t do it. We also had problems with the record skipping because it wasn’t cut right. But that was the end of Billion Dollar Babies. We warmed up in Flint Michigan then we played The Silver Dome at Pontiac, and headlined in Chicago with UFO at the Aragon Ballroom. The show was great, everybody loved it, but the record was just not happening because of the various problems.

JK: And with that happening, obviously, the In My Own Way album sank even further to the bottom of the pile.

MB: Yeah, well I probably would have had more luck with that but at that time; Neil, Dennis and I financed the Battleaxe tour. Each of us probably spent about $75,000 of our own money, and I just went home to Tahoe to decide which form of ritual suicide I would take (laughs), and I kinda just melted into the woodwork, and that was pretty much it. The album never came out. They did press the jacket and we got a box of them at one time, but it never officially came out. Then - move forward in time – I was approached by One Way Records and they were supposed to re-master it and release it on CD. But I think they just put the tapes on and turned on the machine, because it came out all bassy and no level. It sounded awful, and they, of course, didn’t sell any because it sounded like mud. So this version after all this time is going to be wonderful, because there’s lot of great music on it and its recorded very well. A lot of people came down while we were recording it – Mickey Dolenz came down with Alice, Timothy B Schmidt from Poco, before he was in The Eagles, Gerry Beckley from American, Mylon LeFevre ….. I met George Martin there, Neil Young, Tony and Hunt Sales from Todd Rundgren’s band, I mean just on and on. Keith Moon came down and played and he go so drunk we couldn’t’ use his drum track – it was after two bottles of brandy!

JK: But that wasn’t unusual for Keith.

MB: No, but Dino wanted to keep it quiet, because we didn’t use his drum track, out of respect for Keith. But it’s funny, I walked into the studio and I said, “Guys, why do you have so much delay on the drums?” He was in time, but two or three beats behind and Dino said “That’s two bottles of Napoleon brandy, we’re not doing anything.” I couldn’t believe it (laughs).

JK: Well, the album is finally coming out as a double CD with a lot of bonus tracks. I know some of the songs are demos but are the others songs that were discarded at the time?

MB: Two of the songs were used, but I had a lot of material to choose from. Some of the songs that are on the album have different titles like there’s a song called Life Will Be Our Music and on the album it appears as If The Sky Should Fall. In My Own Way appears as a bonus track with totally different lyrics, but the same tune plus there’s tracks that I wrote that I never even used.

JK: Are you happy that it is now finally going to be released?

MB: The analogy that I can make is… it’s like being down in Mexico and you get real sick and you have to use the bathroom so bad… and you’re so happy when you’re finally relieved! (Laughs) What I mean is, this has been a long time coming, I’m glad it’s going to be out because when it did come out on CD it didn’t come out properly and it sounded bad. This is going to sound great and there is going to be so much more on there than the original album and I can now clear my table or agenda.

JK: In terms of Alice Cooper fans, it’s the missing piece of the jigsaw that comes between Muscle of Love and Battleaxe.

MB: Yeah, this is what I was doing when Alice was putting together Welcome To My Nightmare, and Neil was doing Platinum God.

JK: Now that it is coming out, I believe you have a new project on the way, which will consist of new material, but you’re also going to re-record some Cooper stuff as well.

MB: Yeah, it’s going to be a double album, tentatively titled The Dark Side of Love. One CD will be all new material and the other CD will be – as I affectionately call it – A Fistful of Bruceski – as opposed to Fistful of Alice. Me and my band are going to record the songs the way I hear them and the way I perform them and we hope to do two or three off each album. I’ve got a killer version – it’s called 18 Blues. It’s kind of Rocky Mountain Way and I’m 18 come together, that’s incredible. I’m still kicking around which songs I’m going to do. I’m going to try and hit some of the songs that haven’t been done for a while, like I’m not going to do School’s Out. But I though about Hallowed Be Thy Name, Perhaps as One, Luney Tune and maybe Halo of Flies with the original lyrics, and No More Mr Guy with the original lyrics. It will be very interesting for Cooper fans they’ll hear different things and different lyrics – it will be a lot of fun.

© Jon Kirkman2002 and 2011.

Buy the Michael Bruce CD Be Your Lover directly from the Gonzo Website
http://www.gonzomultimedia.co.uk/product_details/15223/Michael_Bruce-Anthology.html