Classic Rock Bottom

The final installment of Darktoberfest and aren't you glad? You're likely still frightened from last weeks romp into all thing dark and scary. This week we take the final step, or should I say plunge!!??


Listen with the lights on and with someone near by...


PLAYLIST --> http://www.podsnack.com/CA69EFD9E8C/a1p3bmi3

Alice Cooper
Billion Dollar Babies
1973

1 - Sick Things

Drummer Neal Smith has said that the album can be traced back to the song "Caught in a Dream" from the album Love It to Death. Cooper says "The whole idea behind the Billion Dollar Babies album was exploiting the idea that people do have sick perversions." Alice Cooper, who wrote the majority of the album's lyrics, cited Chuck Berry as a key influence on his writing. "Hello Hooray", the album's opening track, was written by Canadian singer/songwriter Rolf Kempf and was previously recorded by Judy Collins. The band wanted their version of the song to sound like "Alice Cooper meets Cabaret." Billion Dollar Babies was commercially more successful than Cooper's previous albums; it went to No. 1 in both the United Kingdom and United States.

Union
The Blue Room
2000

2 - Dead

Although Union features former members of both Kiss and Mötley Crüe, the music on the group's sophomore studio full-length, 2000s The Blue Room, bares little resemblance to either group. Despite neither being original members of Kiss or the Crüe, guitarist Bruce Kulick and singer John Corabi helped keep their respective bands afloat during turbulent/uncertain time periods for each act. Instead of focusing solely on good time, arena stomping rock & roll, Union runs the musical gamut on The Blue Room, as they get funky on "Dead," tread on riff-rock territory with "Who Do You Think You Are," and obviously studied the second side of Led Zeppelin III before penning "Shine." While admirable that Kulick and Corabi didn't merely rest on their laurels and create a Kiss/Crüe hybrid, there's nothing here truly as catchy or memorable as their work with their former bands.

Black Sabbath
Masters of Reality
1971

3 - Children of the Grave

Here Tony Iommi began to experiment with tuning his guitar down three half-steps to C#, producing a sound that was darker, deeper, and sludgier than anything they'd yet committed to record. (This trick was still being copied 25 years later by every metal band looking to push the limits of heaviness, from trendy nu-metallers to Swedish deathsters.) Much more than that, Master of Reality essentially created multiple metal subgenres all by itself, laying the sonic foundations for doom, stoner and sludge metal, all in the space of just over half an hour. Classic opener "Sweet Leaf" certainly ranks as a defining stoner metal song, making its drug references far more overt (and adoring) than the preceding album's "Fairies Wear Boots." The album's other signature song, "Children of the Grave," is driven by a galloping rhythm that would later pop up on a slew of Iron Maiden tunes, among many others.

AC/DC
Let There Be Rock
1977

4 - Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be

A music video for "Let There Be Rock" was filmed in July 1977 (see 1977 in music) in the Surry Hills Kirk Gallery church and featured Bon Scott, Angus Young, Malcolm Young, Phil Rudd, and Cliff Williams, who replaced Mark Evans as the band's bassist shortly after the Let There Be Rock album was released. This marked one of Williams' first public appearances with AC/DC. Scott was dressed as a priest and the rest of the band as altar boys, with Angus Young wearing a halo prop on his head. Towards the end of the video it shows Angus, and the rest of the band jamming while he goes off on the guitar. In an alternate ending of the video, the colors are morphed and the camera zooms in on the stained glass window.[1] According to an interview with the Young brothers, Bon Scott injured himself in the final jump from the podium. "Let There Be Rock" was also released as a single in 1978, with a live version of the Let There Be Rock album track "Dog Eat Dog" as the B-side, which had been recorded in concert in Glasgow on 30 April 1978. When AC/DC was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003, Scott's replacement Brian Johnson quoted the song "Let There Be Rock" in the band's acceptance speech.

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I own all of these albums but let me give a shoutout to the Union release. It was very overlooked and was a great album. If you can find it, give that one a chance.

I actually prefer their debut album over this one.  Tangerine is still one of my favorite tunes of that era...

Yeah I do too but the second one isn't bad.

Yup!  Both are must haves IMO.  Thanks for chiming in!!!

1. AC is the ultimate scary rocker, says the old KISS-fan. It's not that long ago, since I really heard all "his" early albums, and they were very good, as far as I remember. I became a "fan" at the wrong time, I think, when I started buying AC-albums around 1986, I think it was. The first "group"-albums are calssic, even though it's not music I like to listen to ALL of the time, but once in a while, it's great. This song is a bit slow, but good...and a little bit scary.

2. I remember this band. I can't say, I remember I've heard this band. Hmmmm.....even though, I feel like saying, that this is not for me, at least anymore, it's not THAT bad, as I could had feared. Kulick was imo NEVER a good guitarist!! This solo is another "whatever"-solo from his side. An okay song. I don't hate it, and it's not boring.

3. AWESOME riff!!!! And awesome drums!!!!! One of my favorite BS-songs!!! I've seen BS playing this live (sadly minus Bill Ward).

4. Another one of alltimes very, very best bands. As you are able to see on "My page", both BS and AC/DC are among my favorite Top 5 bands of alltime!! But only the classic versions of both bands, and these two songs appear on two very, very classic albums. AWESOME riff!! Bon Scott is AWESOME!!!

Do any of these songs scare me, though? Nope. 

Well......

I guess the first song is scary, at least more scary than anything on the previous lists.

But then comes Union and the scariness is gone. It's kinda funky, and funk isn't scary even if it's kinda funky. 

Black Sabbath gets the scariness going again but AC/DC is having too much fun so all the scariness is gone again.

This is not Disney-type scares, though. I'll give this a PG for scariness, most of that PG has to do with the song titles. 

Nice set of songs but it doesn't get me prepared for Halloween. Not like I would be doing anything anyway but it would have been nice to have been in the mood, you know?

Due to this playlist, I'm handing out boxes of raisins this year. If they ask why, I'll tell them to blame Scott.

No candy.

RAISINS.

I should've worded this a bit different, instead of "dark and scary" I should've said "dark and/or scary" since some of these sins are darker in nature but certainly not scary. Oh well, it was fun.

And I hate raisins....

Sick Things - I'd say this song is a bit scary.  All of the stuff going on in the background at one point adds to that feel.  Of course, the horns aren't particularly scary.  You'd think I would have been a big AC fan when I was growing up, but I was never exposed to him.  And I never did seek him out.  I like him now.  I've gone back and bought several of his albums, including this one.

Union - I don't have this album, but I do have the debut.  Of course, I just bought it in the last year or two.  And I bought it because of Kulick, not Corabi.  That being said, since the Dead Daisies release this year, I have grown an affinity for Corabi.  This has a killer riff.  I don't think it's scary, but the title certainly fits the theme here.

BS - It's funny to read the text for this one.  It's one hundred percent right on.  Especially the remarks about today's doom metal and the "galloping" rhythms later used by Iron Maiden.  Again, not overly scary, but scarier than the last track.  But I don't think it's just "scary" that you are going for.  It's more of a feel of fright, and I think this song has it.

AC/DC - I do have this album.  It's not one of those I grew up listening to, so I don't know the ins and outs of the album. But I do like it.  What can you say about this band?  It's the only band that has never altered it's sound or image one bit and they are still very popular.  Again, I think it's more of a feel or a theme in the song title than a matter of the song being scary.  But it's typical AC/DC, and it rocks.

Let's see, if I ranked these songs, my ranking would be:

1. Dead (4)

2. Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be (3)

3. Children Of The Grave (2)

4. Sick Things (1)

The rankings in parentheses are for their level of evilness.  Nice feature for the month of October Scott.  I enjoyed it.

I am an Alice Cooper diehard and have always been. I have seen live numerous times, met him twice, own every album, etc. But Sick Things has never been one of my favorite Alice tracks. The Billion Dollar Babies album went to Number One on the charts and is a great album, but it also was a very commercial album compared to the Alice albums that came before it at that time. "I Love the Dead" off that album I think is a better song. 

If you want to hear a good Alice Halloween like song in more recent years, everyone should check out "This House is Haunted" from the Eyes of Alice Cooper album.

My favorite Alice Cooper has always been From The Inside, I love that album top to bottom.  My introduction to Cooper was Welcome To My Nightmare, specifically the track Steven - for whatever reason my friends older brother thought that was a cool track and played it often.  I love both albums to this day.

Because of FTI I purchased Flush The Fashion at the time it was released.  That album has aged better than at the time it was released (though Clones was and still remains a cool tune to me) and then Special Forces and that's where I got lost...

What other recommendations would you make?

Yeah the early 80's albums, Flush the Fashion, Special Forces, Zipper Catches Skin, and Dada have some really weird stuff on them. Growing up I thought that was Alice's weakest period but as I got older I have grown to love those albums. I really like the Dada album.

As far as Alice recommendations you can't go wrong with everything from Love it To Death thru Billion Dollar Babies. I have always loved the From the Inside album as well so you have one of my favorites.

After that, my recommendations would be The Last Temptation (kind of got a classic Alice feel but also modern for it's time), Brutal Planet which is Alice's heaviest albums but the lyrics are tremendous on that one, and I really like The Eyes of Alice Cooper and Dirty Diamonds. Both are a little more mellow than a lot of his more recent stuff but they have a garage rock sound.

I also really liked the Hey Stoopid album from the early 90's. It is a hair metal sounding album but I have always enjoyed that one as well.

I really like Brutal Planet too.

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