Pretties

This extensive collection gathers together four volumes of demos, live performances, interviews, and other ephemeral material from the earliest phases of Detroit shock-glam legends Alice Cooper, and even traces their roots before the band as most know it came to be. The collection begins with the stompy garage psych number "No Price Tag" from Vincent Furnier's pre-AC 1966 band Spiders. Early demos from 1969's Pretties for You album follow, as do radio spots and raw live recordings from the earliest eras of the band, including an 11-minute organ-drone version of "I'm Eighteen," introduced as "a brand-new song" and sounding more like some bastardized take on the Doors than the three-minute confused coming-of-age rocker that wound up on 1971's Love It to Death album.

Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier, February 4, 1948)[1] is an American singer, songwriter, and actor whose career spans over 50 years. With a raspy voice and a stage show that features numerous props, including pyrotechnics, guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, reptiles, baby dolls, and dueling swords, Cooper is considered by music journalists and peers to be "The Godfather of Shock Rock"…

After a few years of outdoing the Rolling Stones at their own game, Messrs. May and Co., clearly affected by their love of swinging London nightlife and all that went with it, injected their primal R&B roots with added spice (as Mike Stax, "numero uno Los Pretty Things fan," points out in his excellent liner notes). "Can't Stand the Pain" (from the 1965 Get The Picture album) has "a remarkably effective mood with a sense of a dreamy disembodiment that foreshadows what was yet to come with the arrival of psychedelia." By April 1966, B-side "LSD," yet another controversial shot in the Pretty Things' canon, helped pioneer the "freakbeat" sound, whilst the media's attacks on the Pretties slack, druggy values were foremost to the changing times - in fact, the record was a play on words about the English economy and not a celebration of the merits of LSD usage…

Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier; February 4, 1948) is an American singer, songwriter, and actor whose career spans over fifty years. With his distinctive raspy voice and a stage show that features guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, deadly snakes, baby dolls, and dueling swords, Cooper is considered by music journalists and peers alike to be "The Godfather of Shock Rock". He has drawn equally from horror films, vaudeville, and garage rock to pioneer a macabre and theatrical brand of rock designed to shock people…