Welcome to My Nightmare

Welcome to My Nightmare - Alice Cooper(1975)

Hard Rock

Atlantic

Believe it or not, Alice Cooper’s heavily acclaimed Welcome to My Nightmare (1975) is his debut record. All the Alice Cooper records previous to 1975 were actually created as the band Alice Cooper, in which Vincent Furnior (Alice Cooper) was the lead singer. But in 1974 the band had taken a hiatus, and it had become clear that the chances of the band getting back together were looking slim. So, in order to stay alive musically and continue Alice Cooper’s music, Vincent had his name legally changed to Alice Cooper in order to release his further Alice Cooper material— his debut solo album— legally.

"If I can't have Alice Cooper my second choice is Max Powers."

For a lot of people, Welcome to My Nightmare is the quintessential Alice Cooper album. The music fits with the twisted, horror aspect of his performance while also retaining the fun, hard rocking proto-metal riffs that brought the band its fame. But while this album is still in the same general direction as previous Cooper material, there are a few elements that make this output noticeably different from the output of the band.  

First of all, this album has a decent brass presence; trumpets, saxophones and trombones make up a nice size of the composition.  When they come in, they seem to evoke a nice sense of sneaky grandeur, somewhat similar to the way you feel when you hear the Pink Panther theme, and also help the music have a swing-like coolness to it. With this, Welcome to My Nightmare also features a decently quiet side to it as well, and although this aspect leaves the album open to boring, generic ballads like “Only Women Bleed”, it also has the potential to be its most disturbing, such as the decently twisted song “Years Ago/Steven”.

Welcome to My Nightmare also notes Alice Coopers first foray into concept album territory. Although it is unclear, the general story of the music is that it’s around a child named Steven’s journey through a nightmare. As it goes along however, it becomes clear that this child like Steven is but a split personality of a mentally unstable misogynistic killer who swears his allegiance to the “Black Widow”. The story would eventually be continued throughout Alice Cooper’s albums, especially Last Temptation (1976), Dada (1983), Along Came a Spider (2008) and of course, the recently released sequel Welcome 2 My Nightmare (2011).

As I mentioned this album is definitely held in high regard, with Slash of Guns N’ Roses naming it the best album of all time and it doesn’t take too much to see why. Looking at some of most commonly citied favourite songs of the record (“Welcome to My Nightmare”, “Cold Ethyl”, “Devil’s Food”) these are definitely some of Alice Cooper’s best work.

But in all honesty, playing through the record start to finish is actually somewhat difficult because of how inconsistent I found most of the album. The first three tracks are great and start the bar very, very high which the album does little to hit again unfortunately. The songs that follow after “Black Widow” (“Some Folks”, “Only Women Bleed” and “Department of Youth”) are pretty lacklustre, mostly piano based songs and to be honest, are pretty boring (despite the radio success of “Only Women Bleed”). It just seems like they plod along, and considering the great, but shorter tracks before hand, leaves more to be desired. But then again the album really, really picks up on “Cold Ethyl” followed by the definitive of creepy Alice Cooper tracks, the duo song “Years Ago/Steven”.

In conclusion, despite the amount of filler, the good songs found on here are really, really bloody good. “Welcome to My Nightmare”, “Devil’s Food”, “Black Widow”, “Cold Ethyl” and “Years Ago/Steven” easily stand up to older hits like “School’s Out”, “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and “I’m 18”, and perfect a lot of the aspects of the Alice Cooper sound, even if it is in a somewhat more accessible form. Welcome to My Nightmare has become the defining album of Alice Cooper’s career and would create an archetype for rock opera/concept albums for years to come and, in my opinion, definitely deserves most of the praise it gets. Plus, Vincent Price is on here so really; this would have been hard to talk down about regardless.

8.5/10