Middle Age Lament '15

When do you stop buying the latest record from one of your favourite artists? I'm wondering if there's a helpful checklist or flow chart that I can follow to determine when it really is time to call it a day, remember the good times and have an amicable parting of the ways.

The question has been prompted by the news that Alice Cooper is about to release a covers album of songs by his peers from the 60s and 70s. Honestly, I don't like the sound of it. Covers albums tend to be the ignored stepchildren of artists' discographies, so why should this one be any different? To make things worse, it's got "special guests". Uh-oh.

The problem is that Alice and I go back a long way, about 30 years in fact. A long time that, one which has seen 5 Prime Ministers, 8 World Cups, 5 US Presidents and 256 Spurs managers. I've been listening to Alice longer than the guy from Smokie was living next door to him.

I must have over 30 Alice Cooper records. I've definitely got all the studio albums, this despite the fact that he's only made two really good ones since the 1970s: 1983's "Da Da" and 2003's "The Eyes of Alice Cooper". Having said that, there are surprisingly few clunkers in the catalogue: 1987's "Raise Your Fist and Yell" definitely qualifies: a shrill, Heavy Metal album which manages to contain music even worse than both its title and cover, while 2001's "Dragontown" and 2008's "Along Came a Spider" aren't much fun either. On the whole though, he's managed to keep going by constructing a discography using competent mediocrity as the primary raw material. And I've kept buying them.

Believe it or not, the music is worse than the cover.

 

But recently he's been testing my patience, with live album after live album recorded with the same band playing the same songs. I've stopped buying them and I really think I should do the same with the studio albums as well. At heart I realise that this is an internal struggle: do I let my irrational record collector side override my logical, decision-making side? Now, I've broken ties before; I've never felt any compulsion to own a Black Sabbath record that doesn't have Ozzy or Dio on it, and I gave up with Queen after "Made in Heaven". It feels like it's time to say goodbye here too.

What about you? I can't be alone here. How many long time Simple Minds fans found themselves in HMV staring at the cover of "Street Fighting Years" and thinking "Do I really need this?" John Peel stopped playing T. Rex records after realising that if "Hot Love" and "Get it On" had been recorded by other artists he wouldn't have been playing them. Ever changed your Facebook status with an artist?

Heavy Metal T-Shirt Confessions

In the comments section of the last post about Kerrang! T-Shirts we got to talking about band T-Shirts that we used to own. With that in mind, I reckon it's time to come clean about the ones I had, and I encourage you to do the same. Think of this post as a place where you can stand up among friends, say your name and then tell everyone that you used to have a Scorpions baseball shirt.

1. Rainbow and Black Sabbath
The first piece of clothing merchandise I owned actually wasn't a T-Shirt; it was a scarf similar to the one in the picture, which I bought at Rainbow's concert at the Ingliston Exhibition Centre in 1981, the first concert I attended. Unfortunately when I wore it to school everybody thought it was a Multi-Coloured Swap Shop scarf. To be fair, it doesn't look very rock & roll, does it? I also bought a bright red sweatshirt with the artwork of the Rainbow Rising album (this was before black had consolidated itself as the colour of choice for rock T-Shirts). Despite this looking even less metal than the scarf it was actually stolen from our washing line.

On the same trip I bought (from Ingliston Sunday market) a Mob Rules T-Shirt (with the tour dates on the back).

This was more like it! A real bona fide Metal shirt! Looking back with mature eyes, it's a pretty unpleasant T-Shirt for a 12 year-old boy to be wandering about it, but perhaps that was the attraction.

2. The Marillion Period
The early 80s were when bands really started to wake up to the idea of making money by selling "official" merchandise. Two bands who were at the forefront of this were Iron Maiden and Marillion. Both were signed to EMI and had album artwork that they could transfer to T-Shirts. I was going through my Marillion phase at the time and had a grey T-Shirt with the Punch & Judy single sleeve as well as the Garden Party one below.

In its own way it was even more ugly than the Sabbath T-Shirt. At the time I was discovering Prog and like many other 14 year olds I thought that The Wall was a work of staggering genius. So while others were going around with "Frankie Say Relax" T-Shirts I had the one below:

3. Alice Cooper Raise Your Fist & Yell Tour T-Shirt
As the 80s went on I lost touch with Metal. I never really got into Thrash and as for Hair Metal... Well I'd rather have worn a Frankie Say Relax T-Shirt. So the last one I bought would have been the Alice Cooper shirt I bought when I saw him at the Edinburgh Playhouse in 1987 or so, when he was touring the Raise Your Fist & Yell album with a guitarist that looked like Rambo.

Pretty ugly, eh? Mind you, it's nowhere near as repulsive as Raise Your Fist & Yell.

And that concludes my relationship with Rock T-Shirts. Except that it doesn't of course, I've started buying them again in the last few years, and have a liking for faux-vintage shirts for tours that I was far too young to have seen at the time (so I have a Kiss Cobo Hall 1975 shirt, despite the fact that in 1975 I was 5 years old and hadn't traveled further than Aberdeen). In the Metal: A Headbanger's Journey film, Bruce Dickinson speculates that metal fans have managed to preserve their inner 15 year-old into their adult selves. I think he's onto something, and I'm sure my Black Sabbath Vol 4 T-Shirt would agree.

Remember the Coop

They've just released some mini LP CD editions of Alice Cooper's 70s back catalogue in Japan. They've also been digitally rejiggered (something that has been long overdue for these albums) and the ones I have sound great. But the reason I'm posting about them is that I've never seen CD reissues with such incredible attention to detail as these.

The picture above is the package for the School's Out album. Everything is there, from the folding out desk sleeve, to the tracklisting insert and even (and they're gilding the lily here) a set of mini nonwoven panties to mimic the notorious ones they used on the original vinyl one.

The Muscle of Love one is even more impressive. The cardboard sleeve is an uncanny replica of the one used for the vinyl album, and the inner sleeves are all present and accounted for. Note as well, how they have the correct versions of the Warner Label on the respective CDs. These guys haven't missed a trick.

Of course this just reminds you how much thought and expense went into the packaging on those albums when they first came out. Whether it was 1972 calenders, desks, billion dollar notes or LP sleeves as lunatic asylums, these records have some of the more memorable packaging of the time, and let's be honest, they probably contributed significantly to the band's success. Which in some ways is a shame because those albums didn't really need that much help. The four records that the band made with Bob Ezrin (Love it to Death, Killer, School's Out and Billion Dollar Babies) are all strong albums, especially the last one, which is stuffed to the gills with hits. Though to be fair, others, such as the patchy Muscle of Love needed all the help they could get.

If you know the albums, you'll know that - the odd bit of overproduction aside - they've aged pretty well. Killer in particular sounds as fresh as paint. In fact, it's a bit puzzling why the band isn't regarded more highly: they were undoubtedly influential - the group photo on the cover of the School's Out single (below) was the template for just about every band that hung out on Sunset Strip during the 80s. Come to think of it, maybe that's the problem.