Description

Alice Cooper recorded live during the Flush The Fashion Tour 1980 a tour which was a mess. There were lots of changes (dates and/or venues) and some cancelations. Add to that some existing tour itinerates are provably wrong and there is a lot of incorrect date info on the net. In 1978 Cooper had been famously institutionalised in an attempt to conquer his alcoholism, which at its height was rumoured to exceed two cases of Budweiser and a bottle of whiskey a day. Although relatively sober upon his release, he soon developed a cocaine addiction, leading to a series of blackout albums – a collection of albums which he had little to no recollection of recording. The first and most celebrated of these was 1980 s Flush The Fashion. Produced by Roy Thomas Baker, who had worked on Queens Sheer Heart Attack and A Night At The Opera, the album signalled a major stylistic shift for Alice Cooper; from the trashy hard rock of his earlier years to an edgier, new wave sound. Although this alienated many fans at first, it soon came to be considered one of Cooper s most overlooked gems, and became his best performing album in three years. The lead single Clones (Were All) peaked on the Billboard chart at No. 40, and has remained a part of Coopers live shows ever since. The recording featured here was taken from the first date of the Flush The Fashion tour on 4th June 1980 at El Pasos County Coliseum. The show was recorded and broadcast on Supergroups In Concert by Westwood One. However the broadcast is only partially from El Paso with many of the tracks simply being lifted from ‘The Alice Cooper Show’ album. Many songs including Clones , Guilty , Pain and Dance Yourself To Death were performed here for the first time in front of a live audience. This makes this album a must as its very interesting to have a record of this period but at the same time its a shame that the record station decided to put in several tracks from “The Alice Cooper Show” album from a couple of years earlier and inserted between the El Paso tracks to flesh it out. In the case of I Love The Dead that has been horribly butchered into a very strange edit that clearly wasn’t as it was performed in 1977/78.

Track list:
1. Instrumental
2. Grim Facts
3. Go To Hell
4. Guilty
5. Pain
6. Talk Talk
7. I’m Eighteen
8. Gutter Cats Vs. The Jets
9. Clones (Were All)
10. Nuclear Infected
11. Billion Dollar Babies/I Love The Dead
12. Instrumental Jam
13. Dance Yourself To Death
14. Only Women Bleed
15. Road Rats
16. Sick Things
17. Is It My Body
18. Devils Food/Black Widow
19. Elected
20. Schools Out