It was a Short, Bumpy Ride
It Was a Short, Bumby Ride
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ShareZipper Catches Skin gets dicey immediately, Cooper so devoid of good ideas he’s reduced to singing about Zorro, of all things, as “Zorro’s Ascent” is crammed with awkward Spanish influences, idiotic sound effects, and cringe-worthy lyrics (“Before I don the mask I Don Diego”). The tepid ballad “I Am the Future” is every bit a failed attempt at new wave as “Clones” was a success, while the psychodrama of “Tag, You’re It” shows promise, but at less than three minutes it feels far too underdeveloped. “Adaptable (Anything For You)” is even worse: as if the self-parodical arrangement isn’t bad enough, Cooper drags out some of the most head-slappingly awful lines he’s ever written including the horribly dated verse, ” Now, you ain’t no Hepburn / And I ain’t no Fonda / But if you were drownin’ / In Golden Ponda / Mouth to mouth / I’d resuscitate with you.”
As absurd as all of the tracks on Zipper Catches Skin are, we actually get a handful that, quite oddly, have a way of growing on us. Not coincidentally, all are co-written by Dick Wagner, who returned to Cooper’s fold after an extended absence. “Make That Money (Scrooge’s Song)” is no “Billion Dollar Babies”, but it carries itself with an effectively ominous swagger. As the title clearly indicates, “No Baloney, Homosapiens” is complete lunacy, but Wagner brings enough good Mick Ronson-esque riffs and solos to keep the song listenable.
Things get even sillier on the fantastically titled closer “I’m Alive (That Was the Day My Dead Pet Returned to Save My Life)”, the ludicrousness of Cooper’s story at the very least preventing us from turning off the album before it finishes. The sole bonus track on the reissue, the contagious 1982 UK-only single “For Britain Only” is actually better than any of the album’s tracks, making it a very welcome addition on an intriguing but very sloppy album.
DaDa (1983), on the other hand, is a glorious mess. Not so much critically panned as practically ignored by the music media when it first came out, what has been written about it in the metal and hard rock press has not been kind. Esteemed metal writer Martin Popoff fails to see any redeeming value in the album, declaring it, “a crock… a pile of dreadful, keyboard pop that never would have made it to market in a million years without Alice’s good name to force it in our faces. Ol’ Vincent is proving himself a losing proposition of a suppository opportunist on a scale more tragic than David Bowie, Iggy, or Neil Young.” (”The Collector’s Guide to Heavy Metal: Volume 2: The Eighties, by Martin Popoff”, Collector’s Guide Publishing, Inc., 2005) When viewed without the blinders of stubborn rockist ideology, however, DaDa turns out to be a fascinating mélange of music, lyrics, and visual art.
Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (partial)
The title makes it abundantly clear what Cooper’s intentions are. Clearly taking inspiration from the Dadaist movement of the early 20th century, the album bucks whatever trends there were in 1983, an “anti-art” for that time, a brazen rejection of rock music’s formula and aesthetics. In addition, DaDa‘s cover art is a clever mock-up of Salvador Dali’s 1940 painting Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire, with Cooper’s visage used on the two figures that make up the painting’s optical illusion. Dali’s influence cannot be underestimated, either, as he and Cooper were mutual admirers. As Cooper stated in a 2008 interview, “[Dali] saw our show totally different. He saw our show as surrealistic. He saw the show as like one of his paintings. He saw crutches, he saw garbage cans, he saw snakes. He saw all the stuff that was in his paintings. He related it to a surrealistic painting of his, which wasn’t that far wrong because we were all art students and we worshipped Salvador Dali.” (“ABC TV interview”, June 20, 2005)
Musically, DaDa benefits hugely from the input of not only Wagner, but especially the return of Cooper’s longtime producer/collaborator Bob Ezrin as well. It’s obvious that Wagner and Ezrin are shouldering a lot of the load on this record, but somehow, miraculously, they keep things as cohesive as possible. In fact, the brilliant opening spoken word piece “Dada” is all Ezrin’s doing, as creepy a track as Cooper has ever put out, as ambient synths (which will remind many of Burzum’s own electronic material some 13 years later) underscore a rather disturbing exchange between a psychiatrist and his patient: “My son, yeah well, he took care of me. He took care of me for a long, he still takes care of me. And she takes good, and she takes care of me. She takes, she takes good care of me. He takes care of me.”
The sinister, lurching “Enough’s Enough” follows immediately, Cooper depicting a very disturbing father-son relationship, the flamboyant “Scarlet and Sheba” combines Middle Eastern influences, rock opera, and sadomasochistic themes, while “Fresh Blood”, despite its blaring horn synth, effectively revisits a tried and true Cooper theme, as well as bowling us over with some surprisingly good lines (“No one calls and no one visits / We’re like a couplet out of Desolation Row”).
The album is also rife with sardonic humor, whether it’s the Bad Santa-esque romp “No Man’s Land”, the groan-inducing wordplay of “Dyslexia”, and the dripping sarcasm of “I Love America”. On this particular record, though, the darkness always wins out over the light, reflected by DaDa‘s two strongest cuts. Featuring some wonderfully ornate keyboard melodies (reminiscent of themes from The Exorcist and Halloween), “Former Lee Warmer” is driven by Cooper’s most macabre vocal work in years, every bit as disturbing an epic as “The Ballad of Dwight Fry” and “Steven”.
“Former Lee Warmer”
The final track “Pass the Gun Around”, is even bleaker, the tale of alcoholism by far the most personal-sounding Alice Cooper track during this three album stretch, as over a beautiful, lush arrangement (including a great guitar solo) he croons lines that make it seem like he’s hit an all-time low: “I’ve had so many blackout nights before I don’t think I can take this anymore…Throw me in the local river, let me float away.”
Perhaps “Pass the Gun Around” was indeed Cooper’s moment of clarity. As it turned out, he would head into rehab after the recording of DaDa, his career on hiatus as he learned to live a quieter, sober life in Arizona. He’d return soon enough, though, his appearance on Twisted Sister’s 1985 single “Be Chrool to Your Sceul” and his wonderfully exuberant comeback album Constrictor the following year introducing the king of shock rock to an entire new generation, and eventually reviving a career many people had long considered dead.
His remarkable post-comeback run of ten studio albums makes it easy to forget just how low Cooper had sunk right before his life and art were resurrected, but as maligned as they are, Special Forces, Zipper Catches Skin, and DaDa form a crucial bridge between two very different eras in his discography, and while incredibly bumpy, that short ride, even when revisited today, is never for a second dull.
Zipper Catches Skin TV spot, 1982
