Muscle of Love

This 1973 album (the band’s seventh) is the last to feature the original lineup of The Alice Cooper Group. Because the band were splitting apart, there’s a palpable tension here that pushes the tunes in great ways, particularly on the self-questioning “Never Been Sold Before” where prostitution is a fame metaphor wrapped in a wonderful Stones-y hybrid of brass-tinged soul and hip-swinging rock ’n’ roll. There are classic Cooper-esque twists on great Hollywood (“Man with the Golden Gun,” with Liza Minnelli, The Pointer Sisters, and Ronnie Spector on backing vocals) and old Broadway (“Crazy Little Child”). The album also features guitarist Dick Wagner, Alice’s future partner-in-song.

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Coming off such conceptual, theatrical, sleazy hard rock records as the massively successful School's Out (1972) and Billion Dollar Babies (1973), the Alice Cooper group decided that their next release would be more along the lines of their earlier, more straightforward work (à la Love It to Death).