Rocking the ballot box

Alice Cooper’s Political Makeup
By Richard Leiby
The Washington Post
Tuesday, August 24, 2004; Page C03
No more Mr. Nice Guy: Alice Cooper, a shock rocker back in the old days and now a fan of President Bush, says rock stars who’ve jumped on the John Kerry bandwagon — Sheryl Crow, Dave Matthews, James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen among them — are treasonous morons.

“To me, that’s treason. I call it treason against rock-and-roll, because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics,” the 56-year-old told the Canadian Press news service as he embarked last week on a 15-city Canadian tour.

Never one to avoid self-examination, Alice (aka Vincent Damon Furnier) added: “If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal.” (We think he meant watching C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” or maybe he meant perusing The Washington Postand The Wall Street Journal, but either way you get the idea.)

“Besides, when I read the list of people who are supporting Kerry, if I wasn’t already a Bush supporter, I would have immediately switched. Linda Ronstadt? Don Henley? Geez, that’s a good reason right there to vote for Bush.”

See also Denis Leary, No Cure For Cancer:

“Don Henley's gonna tell me how to vote? I don't f****** think so, okay? I got two words for Don Henley, Joe F****** Walsh, okay? Thanks for calling, Don. How long's your pony tail now?”

Of course, maybe Ms. Cooper/Mr. Furnier is disenchanted with the electoral process because of the selection of candidates.

As Alice himself sang in “Elected,” released as a single prior to the 1972 election (and given how that turned out, maybe Cooper wouldn’t have been a bad third-party alternative) and included on 1973’s Billion Dollar Babies LP (Cooper’s biggest seller):

I’m your top prime cut of meat, I’m your choice
I wanna be elected
A Yankee Doodle Dandy in a gold Rolls-Royce
I wanna be elected
Kids want a savior, don’t need a fake
I wanna be elected
We’re all gonna rock to the rules that I make
I wanna be elected, elected, elected
I never lied to you, I’ve always been cool
I wanna be elected, elected, elected
I gotta get the vote, and I told you about school
I wanna be elected, elected, elected

[fake Walter Winchell interjection: “Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. The candidate is taking the country by storm.”]

Hallelujah, I wanna be elected
Everyone in the United States of America
We’re gonna win this one, take the country by storm
We’re gonna be elected
You and me together, young and strong
We’re gonna be elected, elected, elected
Respected, selected, call collected
I wanna be elected, elected

Given that Cooper felt this way and restrained himself from running, one has to conclude that although some of his views might seem objectionable, he’s smarter than Ralph Nader.

Which isn't saying much.

This presidential election offers a stark choice: a rich white guy who went to Yale and belonged to Skull & Bones, or a rich white guy who went to Yale and belonged to Skull & Bones.

(And since we’re drawing parallels with the 1972 election, see also Michael O’Donoghue’s “Freedom Of Choice,” National Lampoon, Volume 1, # 29, August 1972. You’ll have to look this one up yourself — it’s not online anywhere that I could find.)

You've never been where?

Yes, the 1970s are a rich and fecund morass of pop effluvia . . . fecund like a compost heap. But recent efforts to identify the “worst ever” rock song from that decade are kind of hampered. The problem is the “rock” adjective; kind of limiting, since it pretty much demands some kind of Rocking Out passage or a Killer Riff movement or some such signature rock and/or roll moment of released tension roaring out of a Marshall stack with a mess of distortion and whatever other effects can bolster its assaultive power. A lot of the very worst pop songs aren’t really “rock” songs, nor are they rock and roll songs; they’re more like tuneless power ballads with saturation-level-high-fructose-corn-syrup-sweetening and extra bombast.

Some candidates:
1. Paradise by the Dashboard Light. Meat Loaf.
Yes, it is tempting to just list all the tracks on Bat Out Of Hell and leave it at that. But while accurate, that’s way too easy. This one song distills everything rotten about that record in one gooey, distasteful wad. Here are all the ingredients of enduring crapulence: too long, too many molto pretensioso “movements,” that stupid baseball play-by-play/seduction montage sequence two-thirds of the way through and the oh-so-clever “prayin’ for the end of time” twist at the finale. It’s like just one crappy rock song wasn’t enough; Jim Steinman had to write four and then mash them all together into one painfully swollen lump from which there was — and remains — no escape.

2. It’s Still Rock ’n’ Roll To Me. Billy Joel
Sure, everything Billy Joel ever recorded was overly calculated, labored, dishonest, faked schmaltz. But this thing is like proto coot-rock, or something. Some guy born too late and without the compositional chops to be Irving Berlin, who didn’t understand the rock idiom sufficiently to write three-chord stompers was so unsettled by “New Wave” or whatever the hell you want to call that late ’70s/early ’80s pop mutation that he wrote a cranky, dyspeptic sneer-fest about his inability to understand it. And it wasn’t even funny.

3. Lonely Boy. Andrew Gold.
Not a bad hook, I’ll grant you. But the lyrics suck what little enjoyment might result from the cheap but satisfying riffing out of the enterprise. Boy is born (on a summer’s day, 1951). His parents vow to take care of him, and do. Two years later, kid sister. Boy sulks for 16 years, until the winter of 1969 when he leaves home, screeching vituperation at his — no doubt — utterly baffled parents. Sis gets married, has child. Where exactly is the tragedy here or the trauma that would’ve made Mr. Gold such a tragically lonely boy?

4. I’ve Never Been To Me. Charlene.
The title of the song makes it look like an postally abbreviated statement: I’ve never been to Maine. The song itself makes a lot less sense than that. “I’ve been undressed by kings / And I’ve seen some things / That a woman ain’t supposed to see.” We’re never told what it is that women undressed by kings aren’t supposed to see, and I’m just as glad.

5. The Night Chicago Died. Paper Lace.
But the thing that never made any sense to me about this was the first line: “Daddy was a cop / On the east side of Chicago.” East side of Chicago? Isn’t that Lake Michigan? That ridiculous mistake almost salvages the song, because it suggests a cop from a 1930s Warner Brothers B movie dog-paddling and looking for gangsters. “Alright, O’Malley, enough of your shenanigans. Even if Capone’s running bootleg liquor across the lake, you’ll not catch him by swimming. Now dry off and go find me some racketeers.”