It’s well known by now that the surviving members of Alice Cooper are collaborating on a new record together. Bassist Dennis Dunaway, guitarist Michael Bruce, and drummer Neal Smith have joined Alice Cooper in the band’s upcoming studio record, and it seems as if the band’s reunion doesn’t feel much like a reunion, and more like they never separated.
“It didn’t feel like we missed a beat,” Alice Cooper explained to Matt Bingham at Michigan-based Z93 rock radio station, “And I forgot how funny the band was. I forgot how funny Dennis (Dunaway) and Neal (Smith) and Mike (Bruce) were. And every song we just got along on everything. There was no argument about any song.”
It’s been over 50 years since the band has worked on material together as a unit: “When we disbanded in ’74, that was not like a divorce; that was a separation,” Cooper elaborated, telling Z93 that (transcribed via Blabbermouth), “We all stayed in touch with each other. Everybody did their own music.”
And because of the nature of the band’s relationships over the years, it’s hard to picture why they would have gone their separate ways in the first place. But, Cooper offers a bit of insight, saying that “one of the reasons why we did disband, I think, in ’74 was the fact that we were exhausted, and we really couldn’t put the band back together without Glen (Buxton). I mean, he was so much a part of the heart and soul of this band.”
And while Alice Cooper pursued his own solo career, the band still found ways to be involved. So much so, that “they played on two or three of the songs,” on “the last four Alice Cooper albums.”
“So, I finally just said, ‘Why don’t we just do an album?'” Cooper recollects – “And Bob Ezrin,” the band’s longtime producer said, “‘I’ll do it.’ He did all the original ones with us.”
And once the plan had been hatched to write as the original Alice Cooper, the band was unstoppable: “It felt like no time had gone past us… We didn’t try to make it sound like the ’70s, we didn’t try to make it sound like anything – it was just exactly what would’ve happened in 1975.”
But, the idea to write together didn’t come without careful consideration of their late guitar player, Buxton – “The whole album is dedicated to Glen (Buxton).”
Beyond just dedicated to the guitarist, it actually features several of his guitar solos. Dennis Dunaway had rehearsal tapes stashed away that contained those guitar solos. “One of the luxuries we had was Dennis Dunaway never throws anything away,” Cooper recollected, “He had tapes from us when we were the SPIDERS in high school. And so he had a lot of Glen Buxton stuff that was on that tape. And we took a couple of the Glen Buxton guitar solos and then wrote songs around those solos just so we could have Glen on the album.”
The band hadn’t even heard the tapes when Dunaway mentioned that he had “‘a whole bunch of Glen Buxton just on rehearsal tapes and on demos and stuff.'” And when Ezrin asked for the tapes, he was able to save several of them, “And so the stuff that we salvaged off that, that’s when we wrote the song around that bit.”
The upcoming record, The Revenge of Alice Cooper, is due out on July 25th – which you can preorder here – and is truly the closest we will ever get to a full Alice Cooper reunification in the studio.
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