Alice Cooper: "Welcome to My Nightmare"

They played this Thursday night on the local classic rock station. They've got a thing they do called "The Classic Rock Album at Midnight", in which they give the listener a break from all the commercials usually so pervasive and play an album in it's entirety. Most of the time it 's something banal (Foghat, Ted Nugent) or a record you already have memorized ("Led Zeppelin IV", "The Wall"). But last week, with Halloween midway through, they played some "scary" themed albums, and you can't do that without at least one Alice Cooper album.

Now. personally I would have chosen "Killer" or "Love It To Death", but I guess I can see why they picked the one they did, with the "Nightmare" motif already embedded in the title.

"Welcome to My Nightmare" is not one I listen to all that much anymore. I'm sure I spent plenty of time with it back in it's day, but anymore I prefer the harder edge rockin' Billion Dollar Babies-backed songs to the more ornately theatrical Bob Ezrin produced extravaganzas. Those epic conceptual pieces grew tedious and musically deficient before too long, but maybe Alice was just so happy to finally be solo that his enthusiasm transferred to this one, which really is quite good.

My favorite tracks here have always been "Devil's Food" and the "Steven" trilogy. "The Black Widow" still sounds great, and Cold Ethyl" is funny. There's only one song that I don't like. "Some Folks" is the kind of Vaudeville crap that has always grated on my nerves. Even so, it's kind of cool to hear him do his "crazy man rant" at the end, which he hasn't really done since "The Ballad of Dwight Frye".

"Welcome to My Nightmare" will probably never be one of my all-time favorite Coop albums, but it's a good 'un and it sure sounded good on the trip from OKC to my home (since I don't have a CD player in that car).