Genre: psych
Rating: ** (2 stars)
Title: Pretties for You
Company: Straight
Catalog: STS-1051 (cover) WS-1851 (inner label)
Year: 1969
Country/State: Arizona
Grade (cover/record): VG+/VG+
Comments: gatefold sleeve, with censored cover (not shown in photo above)
Available: 1
GEMM catalog ID: 4794
Price: $45.00
Cost: $1.00
Yes, yes I'll admit that early Alice Cooper is a guilty pleasure. I'm not proud of it, but so what ...
Unlike so many bands, the internet is crowded with biographical info on this outfit, but here are the highlights.
Living in Arizona, singer Vincent Damon Furnier put together his first band, The Earwigs in the early 1960s. The group mutated into The Spiders and by 1965 they were known as The Nazz (not to be confused with Todd Rundgren's Philadelphia-based outfit). Having become aware of Rungren's outfit, in 1968 the group underwent another name change. Reportedly Furnier came up with the 'Alice Cooper' nameplate while playing with a ouija board - it's supposedly the name of a 17th century witch that Furnier himself was suppose to have been in an earlier life.
Along with the new name, the band decided the time was ripe to get out of Arizona. Relocating to Los Angeles the band hired Shep Gordon as their manager and were quickly signed to Frank Zappa's Reprise Records affiliated Straight label. Self-produced (Herb Cohen and Ian Underwood reportedly actually produced it), 1969's "Pretties for You" is one odd album. Clearly a band trying to find a niche for themselves (the GTOs reportedly dressed them up for the androgynous back cover photo), the album features a haphazard mix of psychedelic ('Levity Ball'), hard rock ('Fields of Regret') and Zappa-inspired weird experimentation ('Ten Minutes Before the Worm'). At least to my ears none of it is particularly convincing, though part of that may lie in the fact that the album was recorded in a week and the band weren't aware that their studio 'demos' would in fact comprise the final album. To give credit where due, 'Living' and 'B.B. On Mars' were actually pretty decent slices of late-1960s psychedelia. Straight also tapped 'Reflected' b/w 'Living' as a single (Straight catalog number ST-101).
Just to be clear, this has the original Straight cover, but the album itself has a Warner Brothers label and catalog number - it must have been released in 1970 when the Straight label was being closed down. They clearly didn't want to waste sleeves that had already been printed.
'Pretties for
You" track listing:
(side 1)
1.) Titanic Overture (instrumental) (Alice Cooper) - 1:12
2.) Ten Minutes Before the Worm (Alice Cooper) - 1:39
3.) Swing Low, Sweet Cherio (Mike Bruce - Glen Buxton - Alice Cooper - Dennis Dunaway - Neal Smith) - 5:42
4.) Today Mueller (Mike Bruce - Glen Buxton - Alice Cooper - Dennis Dunaway - Neal Smith) - 1:48
5.) Living (Alice Cooper) - 3:12
6.) Fields of Regret (Alice Cooper) - 5:44
(side
2)
1.) No Longer Umpire (Mike Bruce - Glen Buxton - Alice Cooper -
Dennis Dunaway - Neal Smith) - 2:02
2.) Levity Ball (Mike Bruce - Glen Buxton - Alice Cooper - Dennis Dunaway - Neal Smith) - 4:39
3.) B.B. On Mars (Mike Bruce - Glen Buxton - Alice Cooper - Dennis Dunaway - Neal Smith) - 1:17
4.) Reflected (Mike Bruce - Glen Buxton - Alice Cooper - Dennis Dunaway - Neal Smith) - 3:17
5.) Apple Bush (Alice Cooper) - 3:08
6.) Earwigs To Eternity (Alice Cooper) - 1:19
7.) Changing Arranging (Mike Bruce - Glen Buxton - Alice Cooper - Dennis Dunaway - Neal Smith) - 3:02
In case anyone cares, I found a May 2000 Goldmine interview with drummer Neal Smith where he talked a little about the album:
"I
like "Pretties For You" for its originality. When you create
music that sounds like other music that's going on at the time, it becomes
dated. On the other hand, when you do something that's different, it
has a better chance of holding up over time. Unfortunately, when we
went into the studio, we were very green, and we didn't know anything about
the recording process. Frank Zappa said he wanted the album to sound
like a car driving past a garage while a band was playing. That was his
goal, and I think he more or less achieved it. He had us set up our
amps around the drum set, so there was total leakage. We would run
down the song - setting the dials on our amps and stuff, just trying to get
a proper sound going so that we could record - and Zappa would say, "We
got a take." We would be like, "What? We didn't even play
the song
yet."
