Pretties For You 1969 Album

Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper did everything a band wouldn't do to make it big in the late 1960's - for starters, they woke Frank Zappa at 7 in the morning for an audition because he told them to show up at "7 o'clock" - in return, Zappa signed them to his record label and produced their debut record. Well, sort of. The story goes, Frank left his brother to mind the store, and when he returned later that day, the band told him they had finished the album. Frank's brother simply recorded them rehearsing. Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica is nowadays often held up as the gold standard of improvisational rock music, but in reality, Alice Cooper beat him to the punch, by creating one of the most crude, ugly, and jarringly un-psychedelic psychedelic records ever made. That is not to say it's a must-hear - certainly, the band would far eclipse this flawed-diamond document - but all of the base ideas which eventually gave rise to the ultimate Alice Cooper legend are here, in spades.