Author: BD Joyce
- Artist: Alice Cooper
- Album: Easy Action
- Year of Release: 1970
- Country: USA
- Label: Bizarre / Straight
- Format: Jewelcase CD
- Catalogue Number: 8122 79927 0
In the days before the marketing of albums was extensively planned, with the release date selected to maximise the impact of a record in a crowded marketplace, and an extensive touring cycle designed to wring every last drop of value out of a new set of songs, it wasn’t unusual for productive writers to release records within months of each other, each one hanging on to the coattails of the last. Easy Action, Alice Cooper’s second album, was released only 9 months after the interesting, but inconsequential, Pretties For You, to another collective shrug of the shoulders, and a general lack of acclaim and commercial success. Indeed, had it not been for the stratospheric success that the band (and post-1975 the man) enjoyed, thanks to the stellar run of albums that immediately followed this one, it is unlikely that anybody would be writing about it 50 years after its release, the album contributing, as it does, very little to the canon of rock ‘n’ roll. If the band’s output from Love It To Death onwards is a substantial tree trunk, with numerous bands and careers sprouting from it, inspired by the sound and striking image of Alice Cooper, Easy Action is but a small branch, connected to the trunk, but stunted, and growing no new life itself.
None of which is to say that the music is not enjoyable in and of itself, but simply that with the benefit of five decades of distance, we can see that Easy Action has cast no real shadow, it is but a translucent totem, bending, if not breaking in the wind. Viewed with that same distance, however, the importance of the album to the band’s career is clear. Easy Action is the slightly rickety rope bridge between the Syd Barrett worship and clumsy psychedelia of the band’s initial attempts at songwriting, and the lean, lithe hard rock that they would hitherto adopt wholesale, although the brief journey from the crumbling promontory that they are reluctantly vacating on their way to the continent that they would shortly conquer does at least, however transiently, offers some glorious views. The same bridge also contains a handful of rotting planks to be avoided on the route across, lest they give way and send the band and listener hurtling towards the abyss, but the thrill of imminent danger at least lends the album a frisson of excitement that is more fully developed on Alice Cooper’s next release, and arguably enhances the enjoyment of what is again a somewhat uneven and incoherent album.
The rather unbalanced nature of the album is perfectly encapsulated by the first three tracks, all enjoyable shorn of their context on this particular record, but so different in tonality and feel that the listener would be hard-pushed to identify Alice Cooper as the artist for all of them. Such heterogeneity doesn’t automatically have to been seen as a negative attribute of an album – The Beatles self-titled ‘White Album’ is perhaps the best example of successfully blending virtually the entire gamut of popular music to that point into a single release, but where The Beatles unerring ability to bend sub-genres to their will ensures that tracks with as little in common as ‘Piggies’ and ‘Dear Prudence’ somehow all retain a common thread which ties them all together, this is not the case with Easy Action, the huge stylistic jumps from track to track feeling unavoidably jarring and uncomfortable. One suspects that this is because the band are still in search of their true voice, and indeed, once they locate this, they are able to demonstrate how adept they become at replicating The Beatles’ trick on Billion Dollar Babies, which feels totally coherent, not just despite, but because of its variety.
So although the piano-led shuffle of ‘Mr. & Misdemeanor’, the breezy West Coast latin-inflected rock of ‘Shoe Salesman’ and the Beefheartian psychedelia of ‘Still No Air’ fail, perhaps unsurprisingly, in spite of their not inconsiderable charms, to hang together, there are a number of facets to Easy Action that form a lasting connection to the band’s later career. Firstly, the band’s predilection for Broadway musicals comes to the fore, most specifically Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s magisterial West Side Story. Inspired by the ‘us against the world’ gang mentality, Alice Cooper will return to the soundtrack that so inspired them on School’s Out‘s ‘Gutter Cat Vs. The Jets’, but at this point in their career, their devotion is shown by the naming of the album itself, a direct quote from the film version of West Side Story, while the aforementioned ‘Still No Air’ injects a finger-clicking interlude into the jittery tension of the rambling acid-rock, throwing out yet more quotes from the film. Although the cinematic scope and dramatic dynamics of the music itself are clearly huge influences on the band, it is no coincidence, given their attachment to Broadway, that Alice Cooper (the band, and then the man) would become known for their theatricality, from the make-up and gaudy stage-clothes of the early days, to the highly-choreographed set pieces of Cooper’s arena-filling show that endure to this day.
Moving away from the theatre, Easy Action also features several tracks that bring us, for the first time, the Alice Cooper voice that becomes the Alice Cooper voice from Love It To Death onwards. Still not confident enough to completely discard the Syd Barrett imitations wholesale, or the Lennon and McCartney harmonies that pepper the album, ‘Mr. & Misdemeanour’ does provide a glimpse behind the curtain at least, Cooper’s raw lasciviousness pre-figuring the leering style that he is now known for, still melodic and at times unexpectedly affecting, but his and his alone. We hear the same on the superb ‘Return Of The Spiders’, the track on the album that most signposts the way to the sound that they will soon popularise, but elsewhere, the band’s inveterate inclination to experiment, and utilise other voices as if they were running through options for wearing their hair, sees Cooper adopting an understated and even camp tone on the slightly bizarre ‘Beautiful Flyaway’. This curious song sounds not unlike an outtake from Sparks’ Kimono My House, a sound utterly natural for the Mael Brothers, but ill-fitting for Alice Cooper, even if, as ever, their knack of creating a catchy melody out of the most unpromising components ensures that the song is certainly not forgettable.
Despite the odd miss-step though, much more so than previous album Pretties For You, the best songs are both a huge step forward in terms of both pure quality, and also in terms of the band’s slightly circuitous voyage of discovery that ultimately resulted in them locating the sound that had been waiting for them to arrive. The first indication that something more interesting is within the band’s grasp is the fantastic ‘Below Your Means’. Although Alice Cooper’s vestigial tendency to lapse into aimless psychedelia means that the final minutes of the track travel rather too near to dreary ‘jam’ territory, it is not enough to undo the work of the rest of the song, which seamlessly combines a latin-inflected take on mid-period Beatles, with a heart-wrenchingly delicate slide guitar line, opening out into the kind of spindly lead work that Tom Verlaine based the entirety of Marquee Moon around, all floating on a thrusting garage rock groove. Clearly realising they were on to something, ‘Return Of The Spiders’ takes a similarly pulsating garage sound, but ratchets up the aggression and excitement. Thematically a nod to one of the band’s previous incarnations, The Spiders, the track is pivotal not just to Easy Action, but to the rest of Alice Cooper’s career. Having upped sticks from Phoenix to Los Angeles, in search of the patronage and record deal that they did indeed secure, by the release of their second album, the band had become disillusioned with life in the city of angels, and were on the verge of a fateful move north-east to Detroit. That city may be little more than a post-industrial wasteland these days, but in 1970 it was busy acting as a crucible for the invention of punk by The Stooges and the MC5, a good half a decade before The Damned released New Rose. Paradoxically, by looking backwards to pre-Alice Cooper days, the band in fact found their way forwards. Their electrifying take on 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, shot through with the kind of reckless nihilism that was the inevitable result of the 1970s bleak riposte to the hippie dream, makes it clear that a stripped back sound heavy on groove, but light on the kind of whimsy endemic to Easy Action and its predecessor, was absolutely where Alice Cooper’s talents lay. Although this facet of their sound failed to re-appear on this album, mere months later, they would mine this sound for gold on Love It To Death, and a legend would be born, only a little overdue.
Easy Action is a better record than Pretties For You. It repeats some of the same mistakes, and although the most egregious homages to early Pink Floyd have mostly been excised, what is left is still a mediocre hodgepodge, which covers a lot of ground, but without staying in any one place for long enough to truly establish a home. All of which is perfectly acceptable when everything falls into place, as it quite often does, and coincides with the nascent songwriting ability of a band that clearly have great potential. Too often though, the band’s impact is stymied by Alice Cooper’s almost self-sabotaging inability to play to their obvious strengths, not to mention the slightly contrived nature of some of the more freakish moments, even if they are less self-consciously off the wall than elements of the previous record. The high points of the album are worth discovering though, and although it would be an exaggeration to suggest that Easy Action is an underrated triumph, it is not outlandish to suggest that it is under-appreciated, and very much worth seeking out, assuming the listener is already familiar with Alice Cooper’s more obviously essential output.
Score: 64%
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