With Alice Cooper having announced a new EP, The Breadcrumbs - with special guests including Wayne Kramer from the MC5 and Mark Farner from Grand Funk Railroad, and covers of early Bob Seger, Suzi Quatro and more - ILYOS pays tribute to the great Michigan rock scene of the late 60s and early 70s; a scene which helped the early Alice Cooper group find their sound when they moved there in 1970.
Alice Cooper the man – aka Vincent Furnier – was Detroit born and bred, but Alice Cooper the band – and it was band until 1974 or so, when Alice Cooper became a solo artist with the album Welcome to My Nightmare – formed in Phoenix, Arizona before relocating to Lose Angeles. In LA the band hooked up with Frank Zappa’s Straight Records label and released two fantastic but decidedly non-commercial albums, Pretties for You and Easy Action, neither of which bothered the charts.
Inspired by the high energy and seriously left of centre sounds coming out of Detroit and neighbouring Ann Arbor – and the much more receptive audiences there - the band relocated to the outskirts of Alice’s old hometown in 1970. A few months later they recorded the classic album Love It To Death, featuring their first hit single “I’m Eighteen”, and they were on their way.
The urban sounds of Detroit were an inspiration to Alice and his band, whose sound moved away from the bizarre psychedelia of their LA days towards a harder-edged and more blue-collar rock approach. It's those sounds that Alice pays tribute to on his forthcoming EP, which will be released in September digitally and as a limited edition 10” vinyl edition. The EP will feature two new originals and four covers, which we’ll look at now.
Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels / The Dirtbombs
Perhaps the founders of the Michigan rock scene – they were the first white guys to take on the sounds of black R&B and build a huge audience with it – Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels hit the national Top 10 in 1965 with their wild version of Little Richard's “Jenny Take A Ride”, but it was their hit 1966 medley of “Devil With A Blue Dress On”/”Good Golly Miss Molly” for which their best remembered. Later covered by Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, “Devil With A Blue Dress” is given the Cooper tribute on The Breadcrumbs (with guest from the Detroit Wheels, drummer Johnny ‘Bee’ Badanjek), in a medley with another local hit – JJ Barnes’ 1967 soul number “Chains of Love”. “Chains of Love” was covered in 2001 by revered Detroit garage-rockers (and White Stripes associates) the Dirtbombs, whose main man Mick Collins has also been announced as a guest on Alice’s new EP. We’re not sure if it’s “Chains of Love” that Mick appears on with Alice, but let’s hear the Dirtbombs’ killer version of it anyway, as well as the Detroit Wheels’ hit.
Bob Seger & The Last Heard
Another young Caucasian soul singer started making a name for himself in Michigan in the mid-60s, but it took him a lot longer to break out nationally than it did Mitch Ryder. But when he did break, he was on his way to becoming one of the most prominent artists of the 70s. Bob Seger may be thought of now as a somewhat middle of the road rocker on the back of hits like “Old Time Rock’n’Roll”, but his early stuff is raw and tough. Alice covers the great 1966 Bob Seger & The Last Heard single “East Side Story” on the new EP. Here’s Seger’s original, and, because we dig his early stuff so much, a few other early classics from the man, including an wild 1970 TV appearance (dig the crazy drum kit!) and an original version of a song that later became a favourite for Thin Lizzy, “Rosalie”.
The MC5
Working the teen clubs around the same time as Seger, the MC5 – the Motor City 5, so named, like Motown Records, in recognition of Detroit’s massive auto industry – soon ascended to national notoriety on the back of their radical politics and their revolutionary hard rock. Although the band had fallen apart by the end of 1972 , they were to become a significant influence on punk in the 70s, and on subsequent hard rockers from Kiss to Motorhead. Guitarist Wayne Kramer ended up spending a few years in prison in the 70s but has had an active and productive career since returning fulltime to music since the ‘90s, most recently leading an outfit named MC50 – which also features members of Soundgarden and Fugazi – to play the music of his old band. MC50 recently opened a few shows for Alice Cooper, which assumedly resulted in Cooper deciding to draft in Kramer to play on a version of the MC5’s great “Sister Anne”. Let’s check out the Five’s original version, plus a 1970 TC lip-sync version of “The American Ruse”.
Grand Funk Railroad
Breaking out nationally in a way that the MC5 were never able too, Grand Funk wasn’t just one of the biggest Detroit bands of the 70s, they were one of the biggest American bands, although that success never really translated outside of the US. The group was led by singer/guitarist Mark Farner, who guests on Alice’s new The Breadcrumbs EP in some yet to be announced capacity. Check out Mark is all his manly glory in this tremendous early live footage.
Suzi Quatro
Although she broke via the UK, where she'd come under the wing of songwriting and production team of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, Suzi was Detroit born and bred and cut her teeth on the local club circuit in the 60s with the all-girl outfit The Pleasure Seekers. Alice may have chosen the Pleasure Seekers’ 1966 pro-drinking tune “What A Way To Die” if he’d made this EP back in his own alcoholic days, but he's instead going with the slightly funky "You’re Mama Won’t Like Me", the title track of Suzi’s 1975 album. Alice may have first heard the tune when Suzi toured as his opener in the States in 1974. Let's have a listen to Suzi’s original, as well that beery blaster from The Pleasure Seekers
To get yourself in the mood for this new EP from Alice, we suggest you also listen to the classic Detroit-era Cooper albums, Love It To Death, Killer, School’s Out, Billion Dollar Babies and Muscle of Love.
