Alice Cooper – Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits (1974): I invited an old friend from high school who should have been my girlfriend for a Woodstock-style outdoor concert in my freshman year at North Carolina State University in 1970, called All-Campus Weekend, where Alice Cooper was the headlining act. Then, many, many years later, Alice Cooper was performing on October 13, 2018 at the Beau Rivage while Peggy and I were staying there to celebrate our 15th anniversary. The concert was scheduled for the night of our anniversary, and we actually rode down in the elevator with Alice Cooper to our anniversary dinner, although I didn’t realize it at first. Alice Cooper the band was one of the original shock-rockers and had a highly theatrical live show. Alice Cooper the man has regularly appeared on talk shows and game shows as an ordinary guy; in its own way, that is as startling as his heavily made-up persona when he is performing in concert. This retrospective album consists of crowd-pleasers that are all credited to the Alice Cooper band; Alice Cooper’s solo career officially started in 1975. Alice Cooper’s first hit song, the teenage angst anthem “I’m Eighteen” came out in November 1970, when I was 19½; but that was close enough for it to become an instant favorite of mine. Other Alice Cooper hits I learned about from my sister Julie’s 45’s that include “Teenage Lament ’74” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy”; all are on this album along with plenty more. As one of the most left-field albums ever, squeaky clean Pat Boone came up with an album of hard rock cover songs that included “No More Mr. Nice Guy”, entitled In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy (1997). Around the time of its release, Alice Cooper appeared with Pat Boone at the 1997 American Music Awards to present the Favorite Heavy Metal/Hard Rock Artist award to Metallica, where Boone came out in a striking leather outfit and dark glasses. In real life, both Pat Boone and Alice Cooper are conservative Republicans.
