Happy 40th: Alice Cooper, THE ALICE COOPER SHOW

40 years ago this month, Alice Cooper released the live album which documented a performance – well, technically two performances – from his 1977 “King of the Silver Screen” tour of America.

Recorded at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas on August 19 and 20, 1977, THE ALICE COOPER SHOW arrived on the heels of Cooper’s LACE AND WHISKEY album, although you’d barely know it from the set list, which features only one song from that particular LP. (Thankfully, it’s the one that most people know: “You and Me.”) For the most part, it comes closer to feeling like a best-of album, due to the inclusion of such classic tracks as “Under My Wheels,” “I’m Eighteen,” “Only Women Bleed,” “Billion Dollar Babies,” and “School’s Out.”

The lineup of Cooper’s band featured guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, bassist Prakash John, keyboardist Fred Mandel, and drummer Whitey Glan, but the performance that ultimately drives the album the most is that of the audience, the members of which are clearly loving every minute of it. Cooper himself was not nearly as enamored of the performance, apparently, as he knew he wasn’t at the top of his game, but the album nonetheless made it onto the charts, if only in the lower reaches of the Billboard 200.