Alice Cooper - Trash
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Yesterday’s post made me revisit Alice Cooper’s Trash (Epic, 1989) for the first time in over 15 years. It was the first tape I ever bought for the sole purpose of shocking my mother with the cover. (It worked. I also remember feeling that the inside artwork in Appetite for Destruction had crossed some sort of line.) Funny how tastes change – in retrospect, this record seems hardly edgy at all. Basically, it’s ’80s cock rock tinged with Cooper’s trademark camp horror, sort of a hair metal version of King Diamond.
Two things stand about this record, though. First are the awful, awful lyrics, which I can’t imagine anyone singing with a straight face. “Pull my trigger / I get bigger / Then I’m lots of fun / I’m your gun”??? This makes Licensed to Ill look like Ulysses. Second is the fact that Trash was an album by committee. The songwriting co-credits are numerous – Joan Jett on “House of Fire” (which had an incredibly hot video, at least to 12 year-old me), Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora, and Diane Warren on “Bed of Nails,” which surprises me because she’s a woman, yet is responsible for lines like “I’ll lay you down and when all else fails / I’ll drive you like a hammer on a bed of nails.” Maybe it’s the songwriting equivalent of a Harlequin romance novel.
Other than Cooper himself, the main party to blame/credit for Trash is Desmond Child, who co-wrote 9 of the album’s 10 songs. Maybe that’s why they have so many tricky moves that only professional songwriters can do. “House of Fire” is essentially one continuous gearshift key change. The chorus of “Bed of Nails” sounds like that of Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name,” which makes sense, since he co-wrote that hit, as well as a gazillion others. Look at his discography – it’s jaw-dropping. The guy did some of Aerosmith’s and Bon Jovi’s biggest hits, KISS’ “I Was Made for Lovin’ You,” Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” and Sisqó’s “Thong Song”? Pure genius.
