Good to See You Again, Alice Cooper
April 2006 Reviewed by: Joseph Taylor Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

For a brief period in the early ‘70s, Alice Cooper and his eponymous band were among the best-selling bands in the country. They were also an enormously popular and controversial concert draw -- their 1973 tour broke attendance records established the previous year by the Rolling Stones. Cooper never took himself too seriously, and he must have guessed the band might have a brief shelf life. They released five LPs between 1971 and 1973. Two of those records, Love It to Death and Killer (both from 1971), were very good rock‘n’roll, but things began to thin out quickly after that. By 1974, the band was gone and Cooper had moved on to a solo career.

Good to See You Again, Alice Cooper catches the band in concert during their 1973 tour in support of Billion Dollar Babies. A high-speed film of the road crew constructing the band’s stage illustrates the enormous, Vegas-style proportions of Alice Cooper’s show. They blended the melodic feel of Broadway show tunes with rock‘n’roll and presented their music with Grand Guignol effects (including fake blood, a guillotine, and a boa constrictor draped over the singer’s shoulders). Kiss, Marilyn Manson, and any number of other bands owe at least some of their rock‘n’roll performance practices to Alice Cooper.

Although they were known for their prodigious beer consumption, Alice Cooper was remarkably tight in concert. Cooper’s voice was never memorable, but he had two great guitar players, Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce, a strong bassist in Dennis Dunaway, and a versatile drummer, Neal Smith. If you want to hear them clearly, avoid the thin-sounding 5.1 mix on this DVD. The two-channel mix has much more presence and detail.

You will also want to take a pass on the narrative that frames the film -- something about a German film director who gets upset because Alice ruins his masterpiece and… but really, it’s just too awful. Even pot-addled midnight moviegoers must have grown impatient with it, which would account for the film’s limited release. Luckily, the bonus features allow you to watch the concert footage alone. Most of what happened onstage at Alice Cooper’s shows seems silly and harmless by today’s standards, but it drove parents and televangelists nuts in the ‘70s. I cannot recall a more terribly shot concert film, though. The film stock is grainy, the lighting is crummy, and the director seems to have no idea where to aim the camera.

All the great Alice Cooper tunes ("I’m Eighteen," "Under My Wheels," "Billion Dollar Babies") are here, and the two-channel sound is good enough to make you wish they would release a CD-only version of the concert. That would be more merciful. Perhaps somewhere there is a better film of Alice Cooper in concert. It might even make me forget this one.

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