Alice Cooper The Life Album Art

This tribute has most of the right ingredients: fancy packaging, excellent liner notes by Sex Pistol John Lydon), and 84 tracks licensed from 21 albums spanning 1965 to 1998. The opening disc begins with four rare Yardbirds-influenced garage-band singles from the Spiders and the Nazz--the bands that geeky Vince Furnier and his pals Michael Bruce, Glen Buxton, and Dennis Dunaway formed in Phoenix, Arizona. The band's subsequent L.A. years are chronicled via nine tracks from their first three albums. Suddenly, in the tracks from Killer such as "Under My Wheels" and "Dead Babies," the grandiose Cooper sound is there in all its mock macabre glory. The downside to this set is that the group's 1971-74 heyday gets short shrift. Surely there's a slew of unreleased outtakes and alternates from Killer, School's Out, and Billion Dollar Babies? By 1974's Muscle of Love, the creative juices had run dry. When he sacked his original band following that album's release, his fate was sealed. While his first solo album, Welcome to My Nightmare, has a number of high points, the band chemistry was missed. The last two discs chronicle his slide into self-referential hell. Connect-the-dots hard-rock workouts such as "Hey Stoopid" and "Feed My Frankenstein" couldn't hold the panties that came wrapped around the original School's Out record. A decently complete career survey--albeit one that's light on the classic period--this box is ideal for newcomers to the Cooper legacy or for those who want just a taste of shock rock in their collection. --Robert Baird