In coming out of the pandemic, Alice Cooper had plenty to grapple with between getting over a case of COVID-19 in December 2020, to figuring out what direction he was going to head in with his 21st solo album. Fast-forward to the present and the 74-year-old former high school track star is back to health and flexing his respiratory system by running 2 miles a night in the Arizona heat and waxing rhapsodic about “Detroit Stories,” the aforementioned new album, which features 15 songs thematically tied to his birthplace.
Phoenix may be where Alice Cooper calls home, but the Motor City is where the die was cast for the future Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. It was the driving inspiration for this latest project.
“We were recording it right when everything was starting,” Cooper explained. “When my producer Bob Ezrin and I work on projects, they’re usually conceptual projects almost all the time, from ‘Welcome to My Nightmare’ to ‘Alice Goes to Hell.’ We do a lot of conceptual stuff and we didn’t really have one for this album. It developed on its own. We decided to do a great album of really great hard-rock songs. Then we decided we couldn’t do it in Nashville, because that’s not the right atmosphere for a hard-rock album. L.A. was not good for that, and New York was not good for that. The only place that really worked was Detroit. So we went to Detroit, and at that point, the concept started taking place. Once we were there, I said since we were in Detroit, we should start writing the songs there and make them about Detroit. Then I said we should use all Detroit players.”
Cooper and Ezrin took to the task at hand with great relish. The duo tapped fellow Detroiters like Wayne Kramer (MC5), drummer Johnny “Bee” Bedanjek, the Detroit Horns and original Alice Cooper band members Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway and Neal Smith. Song choices include an uber-catchy take on Detroit power-pop outfit Outrageous Cherry’s “Our Love Will Change The World” and a gritty version of “East Side Story,” Bob Seger’s debut single with his first band, The Last Heard. All this on top of enlisting Kramer, Bedanjek and Grand Funk Railroad’s Mark Farner to put their stamp on a thumping cover of the MC5’s “Sister Anne.” For Cooper, pulling together songs that represent a broad swath of music was as important in representing Detroit as utilizing musicians who hail from that city.
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