The 50th Anniversary reissue of ALICE COOPER‘s biggest album – Billion Dollar Babies was recently released (a year late). Like the classic AC albums Killer and School’s Out (which came out last year) – this comes in a 3-LP edition (2CD), with bonus tracks, and an entire live show – All remastered, with lengthy sleeve notes inside, and other goodies! In this recent interview with drummer Neal Smith. Neal discusses these anniversary releases, the band live, the outtakes, Easy Action, and the band’s success in Canada! *Check it out and drop a note if you have the new B$Bs release.
How did these things (3LP sets) actually come about as far as who initiated the plan to get these out with the bonus material and particularly the live shows?
Well pretty much Warner Brothers puts these packages together, and the only thing that we’re involved in is, I know there’s an eight-page booklet that’s included in this Billion Dollar Babies Deluxe 50th Anniversary set, and Jaan Uhelszki. She’s an amazing writer, she used to work at Cream Magazine. So, we were all involved in those interviews, and I read the one that she did for the Killer 50th Anniversary album, she did a phenomenal job, I have a copy here, right in front of me, I haven’t opened it yet. When we did the Talk Shop Live interview – Alice, Mike Bruce, myself, and Dennis Dunaway, we opened it for the first time, and so I haven’t had a chance to read the book yet, but we were involved in that. But as far as the recordings, they did these things up from the archives, and it pretty much is… and even the photographs on the inside that are new, that a lot of people haven’t seen before, they’re in total control of it, and that’s really how it comes together. And with COVID and the way things have been slow for the last couple of years, this album should have been out last year, obviously, in 1973 to 2023, but it’s like everything else, just a little back in its release date, so that’s why it’s out now. It’s a phenomenal package, and of course, there was a version that after it was released (where) we were asked to autograph some 12 by 12 flats that were included in some of the albums, and the only unfortunate thing about the whole process is that so far – and I know they’re working on correcting it, trying to make it work, but they’re not sending the albums to Canada or internationally, to the UK or Australia, but I understand they’re trying to figure out a way to work that out, and some very creative fans do have friends in the United States that they’re sending it to, and getting it to them. But at any rate, I think it came out great. I haven’t even listened to it, but I’ve seen the list of the songs, I guess on the vinyl side number three, of course I remember that really well, it was live in Texas, in Houston, Texas on April 28th, 1973, and that was when we were shooting scenes and recording for the movie, Good to See You Again Alice Cooper, and I know it’s been released before, but apparently they’ve just totally remastered it, remixed it, and it’s supposed to sound pretty amazing, so I’m excited to listen to that.
The live recordings, so do you keep any of those yourself, or does somebody have an archive of them, or is it just Warner Brothers that would have it?
Yeah, well the movie was released I think with Penthouse Magazine, I think they were the company that released Good to See You Again Alice Cooper, so whoever has the rights to it…. Bands never end up with their own, the record label actually owns the masters to all the music, now of course this wasn’t an official album because it was a soundtrack to Good to See You Again Alice Cooper, so I’m not really quite sure who owns it, but I’m sure that Warner Brothers and Rhino Records now have the rights to it of course for this album, and there’s a lot of outtakes as well.
Were you much of a collector of that stuff as far as keeping the band stuff yourself, like keeping tapes and stuff?
I mean I have quite a few copies of all of our original albums, the only thing that was out of the normal, I have one of the acetate test pressings for ‘Elected’, which is on about a 78 size record, which is almost like a 12 inch record, and that’s the only unusual one that I have that was played – those are test pressings that they play after they mix and master the music, and other than that, like I said all the tapes are owned by the record company, the record labels.
In the day you guys never released an actual live album, so I mean it’s kind of a plus for us fans that now with each of these releases there’s pretty much a live album attached to it.
Yeah, that’s right, there were a lot of live recordings back in the day, but for some reason even the Mar y Sol Festival, which I think there were some tracks on …well probably the Killer album, and I never realized that that was being recorded, so there are some of the very… I think there was one, the Medicine Ball tour show that was in Washington D.C., there was some live recordings there too. But you have to remember our stage show was pretty crazy, and if there were microphones, I mean even the microphones that were normally there, a lot of them got trashed, so that would be a little bit of an inconvenience, and the problem with recording all the tracks, especially around the drums, if they accept too many microphones, but there always, like I said, were microphones for the sound systems in the venue or a stadium wherever we played, but it’s really amazing, you’re absolutely right, that there weren’t more live recordings of those.
There were some, I actually have a cassette of one of our last shows that we did, the Billion Dollar Babies show at the Madison Square Garden in New York, after the original spring and summer tour, 1973, I have a cassette that is actually flipped over, I think through unfinished suite and is recorded on the other side, and it’s actually a great version, even though it’s just a mix of the board, so there are a few things that were around at the time, and again, that was just recorded by the sound engineers, so they would have a record of the sound and listen to it if they need to make some corrections or what have you, so there were very, very few things that were recorded for us, and that’s unfortunate, but like you say, it’s a great thing for the fans that there’s some live recordings on it. And they’ve been updated, because I gotta tell you, when we did the Houston, I think it was Dallas, or when things were done at the Houston in Texas in April of 73 there was a mobile unit, of course, that came to the Coliseum wherever we recorded that, and I was one of the first people in the band to go backstage and listen to the tracks, and boy did they sound like shit (haha), and I speak basically of the drums, and they were just raw coming off the session and live, but there’s so much they can do to make them sound great, and apparently, what I have heard of some of those tracks, even that have been released prior to this, they did a phenomenal job in getting the sound quality back, however they did it, and again, that’s a great thing, because that’s all I really care about when I hear these, because I know the energy’s going to be there, and it makes it sound more like what we’re used to hearing while we’re live on stage.
I was listening to the Billion Dollar Babies show, the live show earlier, and every time I hear like ’18’, it sounds very not stuck by the book, like obviously Alice adlibs some of the lyrics and all sorts of things. It sounds very spontaneous, so I’m curious, how much difference and changes and spontaneity went into your shows, as opposed to keeping everything exactly to the word and to the minute?
You have to remember that we started as a live band, we were getting standing ovations from our crazy finale, with the songs that we were doing off of Pretties For You, Easy Action, and these big shows like Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, and we did an awful lot live. So even in Vancouver, the big festival that was in the late 60s – early 70s, that we had played, and we could get standing ovations, and we didn’t have hit songs, but we wrote our songs for a live show. And recording an album is one thing, and playing songs in a live show is a totally other thing, and you have to remember that ‘I’m 18’ started off as an eight-minute song that we did live, back in the late 60s, before Bob Ezrin, with Nimbus Nine out of Toronto. Bob Ezrin produced it and cut it down to a three minute single, so we would take the dynamic of that, even when we played in the UK in 2017, and did five shows, the original band came out with Alice and did five shows over there – we changed, we actually made ‘I’m 18′ the opener of the set that we did, but it was elongated and a lot more dramatic for live, and we look at live totally different than in the studio, in the studio you’re trying to make a concise statement with one song, there can be album cuts of course, but still try to keep them between three minutes, three and a half minutes long, but you have the occasional really long album songs too, but live we really stretch everything out, almost every song we’ve ever done, to accommodate the fact that we just don’t go up there and play ’18’ for three minutes, even thinking about that just doesn’t make any sense to me, we knew how to use, and Michael Bruce was brilliant at this (and still is), of taking a song with the dynamics and changes and building it to a crescendo, and then boom, then we start the beginning of I’m 18, like a minute, minute and a half intro, so yes, we did change them, and that’s why it’s great to have some of these live songs. And we were also doing a lot of theatrics with the songs, so we needed more time to do the theatrics on stage, I always say that at the time we had costume changes, sometimes we would play tapes of the music, like we did Night On Bald Mountain when we were doing the, on the Billion Dollar Babies tour, when we went into what we call the dark part of the set, when there was, we all changed clothes into black from white outfits, and then we did ‘Sick Things’, ‘I Love the Dead’, and we did ‘Dead Babies’, so that was the dark side of the band live, and it has to be dramatic, we need time to, it’s very, it’s like Broadway, songs on Broadway are, you’ve gotta fit the theatrics in, and it’s all timing, and we did the same thing with our acts, so that’s why it’s great to have some of these songs that were actually recorded and now available for the fans to listen to.
There is a couple outtakes obviously that have been heard before, like ‘Slick Black Limousine’ and ‘Coal Model T’, were you guys much of a band that did extra stuff in the studio, or did you just do what was going to be on the album and that was it?
No, we would do the album and that was it, and there’s very, I mean that’s where there’s outtakes, I mean of course were in there, we did a lot of takes of songs, and all we were looking for was originally, I mean it was a whole different way to record that, the only instrument that had to be played correctly all the way through from the beginning to end on all seven or eight albums that we did, were the drums, everything else could be overdubbed and put out, but the drums had to be perfect from the beginning to end before we had an actual take, so that was a big part of it, and we spent a lot of time in pre-production outside of the studio, unlike other bands that would run up humongous bills in the studio while they’re writing the album, while they’re writing the song, and recording songs, we did all of our pre-production work out of the studio – Love It To Death and Killer at the Farm in Pontiac, Michigan, Bob Ezrin will come down, and then when we did School’s Out and Billion Dollar Babies, he came to our home and the mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, so we didn’t really do any extra songs, we went in the studio for ‘Slick Black Limousine’, and (I think) ‘Nobody Likes Me’, and those were the only two extra songs that we ever did, but they weren’t done in a session, they were done by themselves, intentionally as an extra to be available, whatever the hell we wanted to use it for at the time, but I think ‘Slick Black Limousine’, ‘Coal Black Model T’, whatever, there were two versions of it, and that was a progression, because sometimes we were, I mean Alice was always changing lyrics to songs, and that’s why even when we weren’t on stage live, Alice would ad lib and do different lyrics, lyrics also change as we did play things live, so that’s, to answer your question, no we did not, we went in to do six, seven, eight songs on the album, that’s what we did.
Now you’re up to, well three of these repackaged (albums) now, is there a plan to go back and possibly do Love to Death, or Muscle of Love?
Right now, I have not heard any plans to do that, that could change, but I know that they (Warner Brothers) were especially interested in Killer, School’s Out, and Billion Dollar Babies – three of our biggest albums. Although Muscle of Love is still, from my standpoint of playing it, and loving the album, I mean, the song ‘Muscle of Love’ is still one of my favorite songs, and we did it on the UK tour, and that’s a killer when we play it live on stage., And Love to Death of course was our breakthrough album, so I don’t know, you never know, I mean, these are all the 50th anniversary, I don’t know, maybe they’ll do a 55th anniversary, I hope I’m around for the 100th, but I doubt it, but I’m just happy that they have done these three.
Yeah, I just think it being the first in that series that kind of kicked off things, I wanted to ask briefly about Easy Action, because it didn’t dawn on me until recently that that album sold worse than Pretties For You, that didn’t even chart.
Yeah, Pretties For You I think broke on it 199 or 198 on the Top 200 album by Billboard, and Easy Action I don’t believe even got on the charts.
Is there anything memorable about Easy Action for you, like I look at a song like ‘Shoe Salesman’ and I wonder if anybody ever played that on the radio.
Well, I mean, the production of course was a little bit better, and anything we ever recorded we thought was gonna be a hit album, and we had David Briggs I guess who you know who worked with Neil Young, and so, but he was just hired, it wasn’t somebody that we searched for and really wanted him to record the album. I don’t even know how David Briggs got involved in producing the album, but obviously if you’re doing Neil Young in one session and Alice Cooper in the other, he really didn’t give a rat’s ass about our music.
Matter of fact, on the song ‘Lay Down And Die, Goodbye,’ he said “Oh well we’ll put on this psychedelic shit now.” So you know, he wasn’t enthusiastic or cared about it from the standpoint of it was just a gig for him to get through, record it, get it down, and get on with his life. So from that standpoint there was not chemistry in the production of it, although there was still some great music, great songs, we did them live, I mean I think ‘Return Of The Spiders’ is one of the songs to me that stands out other than ‘Lay Down And Die Goodbye’, but there was ‘Beautiful Flyaway’, I think Michael sang that song and played it on the album as well. But it was, you know there were some standout pieces that were, as our writing was changing from Pretties For You, but as always I agree 100% of the guys in the band have said that Pretties For You and Easy Action were just an extension of the band and Nazz, and as we became more Alice Cooper, the name Alice Cooper, the image Alice Cooper, what we were all about, even though we were, there were some signs of it in Pretties For You and Easy Action – ‘Fields Of Regret’, ‘Lay Down And Die Goodbye’, like I mentioned, you know the darker side of Alice Cooper didn’t really come out until along with the new songwriting, everybody was writing it a little more commercially, myself included and Dennis and Michael, the three of us that wrote most of the music to the songs, and then of course with the help of the amazing Bob Ezrin coming in and just solidifying those songs and making them happen.
But again, Easy Action was a great album, it was my idea to stand backwards because I had the longest hair in the band for the album cover, and so every band has a front picture of it. We always try to do something different obviously as any fan knows for our album covers, but with that one, I said let’s just turn around and Zappa liked the idea and so we went with that one. But you know, it certainly was produced by, like I said, the Pretties For You, it’s a stepping stone to Love It To Death, but it was good to have it, it didn’t. Commercially I think it sold probably about half as many copies as Pretties For You across the whole country, but it certainly was even establishing our reputation and the name Alice Cooper deeper in the underground world of rock and roll in North America.
Well, like I said, I like ‘Shoe Salesman’ and I love the packaging on that album, those black and white pictures on the inside, the gatefold…
Oh, on Easy Action, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The packaging was great and we always, even on Pretties For You, we always wanted the double gatefold, that was, without a question, that was what the band wanted. Obviously, the record companies always wanted to do a single sleeve, but we wanted the gatefold and it also was good, as you say, to build the image of the band with more photos of the band.
Well, I’m hoping there’s going to be more in the series. Is there any update on you guys doing anything with Alice as far as what’s going on there? Might be released?
Well, like I always say, you know, for the past almost 20 years now since the Hall of Fame, well not 20 years, since the year before the Hall of Fame, about 15 years now, we’ve always, well, since the band broke up we always share songs between each other. I mean, I’ve been coming out to Arizona since the early 90s and bring music with me, Alice and I get together, we play golf, hang out, and I hear what he’s doing, I’m always playing songs that I played for him and some of them ended up on the DeadRinger album in the late 80s and some of those songs ended up in different projects that Dennis and I have worked on over time.
And so, we’ve done that and it got even more productive and actually saw the light of day with the songs on Welcome 2 My Nightmare (the Sequel) and Paranormal and Detroit Stories, where ‘Social Debris’ was a song that Alice and I, that I actually started working on, that he and I started working on in 2016, a few years before Detroit Stories, and then we finished the song and it became one of the most played songs off of Detroit Stories, so we’ve been doing it for a long time. Dennis and Alice always create songs, Michael is out here, I’m in Arizona right now. And I come here for the winter, and it gives us an opportunity to write.
We’ve recorded, what, about eight or nine songs on those albums and we’ve done a couple of other recordings, so maybe someday we’ll have enough songs to put an album together, but right now we’re just working on the re-release of the 50th anniversary Billion Dollar Babies album and we’re always talking about doing more live shows, but we did the one in the UK, so we’re always thankful for that. We’re thankful for the chance that we’ve got, the original band, to play on Alice’s solo albums and get back together, just get that chemistry going again, because it’s always great. So we’ll keep our fingers crossed that one of these days we’ll have eight, nine, ten songs for an album and we’ll see what happens.
Well, hopefully there’ll be more. Like I said, I love, I think my favorite out of all those is that ‘Genuine American Girl’ from Paranormal I thought that was good.
Yeah, that was a song that I had written too. Yeah, that’s a great song. I mean, Bob Ezrin, again, did such an amazing job with the drums on that, all the instruments just sound fantastic. So that’s a great song, yeah, I agree with you 100%.
To me that was the standout song and it sounded like it could have easily fitted in that early Alice Cooper repertoire.
Yeah, yeah…
Lastly, everybody else has written a book. Are you planning on putting anything out of your own?
Well, I’ve been working on a book actually, it’s slowed down about the last ten years for me. I started it around 2000, 2001, and I’m up to about Love It To Death now.
But I’ve been traveling so much and then I retired from the real estate business and working on my Killsmith project. And to find out the updates on everything, my website – which is http://www.nealsmithrocks.com , and don’t forget I spell my name correctly – not like Neil Young (lol). I spell it N-E-A-L, so nealsmithrocks.com always has all my updated information on what’s going on.
And one of these days, I mean, I’m working on it, it’s just, when I come out to Arizona for the winter, I think ‘ Ah I’m gonna have plenty of time’. Then all of a sudden, I’ve been here three months and I’ve been so busy with the release of this. There’s always something busy going on with recording and like I say, I’m always working on my Killsmith projects as well.
I’m working on my next Killsmith album Hard In A Rock Place, which will be out later this year in 2024. So, I’m always keeping busy and when it comes out, believe me, everybody will know about it, but I am working on it. It’s a slow process, but I just, and everybody tells the stories a little bit differently.
And I’m coming from, obviously, a drummer’s perspective and it’s, the stories are out there. I mean, it’s amazing. We’re the band that should have never made it.
It’s kind of the whole thing, but there was an audience for a band like us. It was a huge audience, and we were like the kids that were shunned in school and all of a sudden, when they were younger, they just had no path. And even the emails to this day – 50 years after the band, people are just saying that that ‘You guys, you guys opened up a whole world for me that I never do realize in rock and roll’.
And many times, many cases, kids saying that we actually saved their lives. So I can understand that, but that’s what the internet, I think that’s the only thing I like about the internet is the fact that you hear all these stories that otherwise we would have never known about.
Thanks Neal, this has been great!
And my greetings to all the fans in Canada because Canada, from the first time we stepped on Canadian soil and played at the shows, especially at Varsity Stadium in Toronto, we were always treated like superstars. And Canada got it right away. and I don’t know why, but I’m very, very thankful.
I can’t tell you how, you know, I speak for the whole band, how grateful we were. And then to get Bob Ezrin, another Canadian, a huge person that also understood the band and was behind us 1000%. So, Canada and the fans mean a lot to me and to us and making Alice Cooper come alive and be successful. And we all are indebted to the Canadians up there. So, we love it… To death.
LINKS:
Billion Dollar Babies ("Trillion Dollar" Deluxe Edition) (3LP)
Outsider Rock 