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Pretties For You may have been flawed, but it had sufficient legs to take it into the US album chart. The only reason Pretties For You sounds as good as it does – which isn’t that good – was because of him.”
Anyway, Ian Underwood came to our rescue.
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So we were like: ‘What are we gonna do?’ We didn’t know how to work any of the equipment. Herbie Cohen decided to produce the record, showed up and proceeded to fall asleep on the couch. "Then Frank got sick and didn’t show up for the second day.
We were still warming up when he said: ‘Okay, we’ve got about half the album.’ We basically went in and he said: ‘Start playing, we’re gonna record it.’ We didn’t even realise what was happening. Dunaway: “By the time Frank agreed to put us on his label, his manager had already told him: ‘We can’t afford to do this.’” Slicing expenses to the bone, the band’s Pretties For You debut album was recorded in just two nights, working “from midnight to sun-up”. An impressed Zappa immediately signed them to a three-album deal.īut all was not strictly as it seemed. Tiny Tim was really popular in LA at the time, and everybody kept calling Alice Tiny Tim, so we decided to change his hair colour.”Īs the band’s notoriety spread, an audition was arranged with freak kingpin Frank Zappa, with a view to signing to his Straight Records label, for which they famously arrived 12 hours early at 7am. Miss Christine ratted Alice’s hair and dyed it blond, though. When we got to LA we asked the GTOs: ‘Where’s the thrift stores?’ They showed us, but didn’t style us. “But we used to shop in the women’s section of the thrift stores back in Phoenix. “Everybody says they did our look,” says Dunaway. The GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), an all-female band of Frank Zappa associates, befriended the Coopers. Their downstairs neighbours were Rushton Moreve of Steppenwolf and his aptly named girlfriend Animal Huxley (novelist Aldous Huxley’s ‘wild’ granddaughter, who wasn’t averse to smashing guitars when roused). Their regular Cheetah Club performances soon found favour with local scenester Vito and his ever-present harem of young girls. While San Francisco was the centre of the blissed-out hippie scene, LA’s counter-culture was defined by significantly more militant freaks, and the Coopers recognised kindred spirits. With Smith in place, the band – and vocalist Vince – adopted the name Alice Cooper, and acclimatised their lifestyle to that of the burgeoning Los Angeles freak scene. “It wasn’t pre-planned, it just happened.” “John quit, Neal was there,” says Dunaway. As destiny would have it, while Smith was visiting Dunaway in LA, John Speer announced that he was leaving. Meanwhile in Berkeley, another Phoenix band, the Holy Grail, were similarly trying to break into California, but their drummer, Neal Smith, was becoming disillusioned at the extent of his bandmates’ drug use. The band moved, somewhat incautiously, into the Chambers Brothers’ old place in Watts (“ the only white guys in the neighbourhood”), before finally settling in the decidedly more sedate Topanga Canyon.
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