Alice Cooper – Good To See You Again, Alice Cooper

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impulse buy

Eagle Vision
Produced by Herb Margolis

The original 1973 concert film recorded on the Billion Dollar Babies Tour, scrapped in favour of an alternate version for screening in select cinemas in 1974, then shown for a very limited time a few years later in it’s original form, was available to own and is something Cooper fans have been wanting for the last thirty years. Was it worth the wait?

On the face of it, the original filmmakers committed the first cardinal sin of music video making. The same sin committed by the makers of Ozzy Osbourne‘s Live & Loud, Deep Purple‘s Come Hell Or High Water and Black Sabbath‘s The Last Supper. By now many of you will know to what I am referring. For the uninitiated, I am of course referring to the inter-mixing of live concert footage with interview/backstage footage. Interrupting the flow of a concert with other stuff is unforgivable and every video/DVD that makes this mistake is almost unwatchable.

The footage between songs is very silly, poorly acted story line segments about the filmmaker being driven to a nervous breakdown by the antics of the band while trying to make this film and chasing them after they ruined his vision. The scenes switch between a psychiatrists office and flashbacks to the band doing stupid things (ditching their bicycles to hi-jack an elephant, for example). It’s barely possible to watch through once, let alone ever again.

In the version released to cinemas in 1974 all story line segments were replaced with old movie and archive newsreel footage. The radio spots for this version can be heard as the background audio on the various menu screens on the DVD. The original version with the story line was briefly shown a few years later in select cinemas before disappearing completely, never even released on home video during the VHS boom of the 1980s.

Eagle Vision, however, have rectified this problem. The original film is presented here in its complete and unedited form for the first time. But as we all know, DVDs allow for “chapter points” to be added; in the same way as a CD is split into tracks that can be independently selected, so can a DVD. Therefore, with the complete film split into chapters, Eagle have been able to provide a “Concert Only” bonus option, which only plays the live songs from the shows recording in Dallas, TX on April 28, 1973 and Houston, TX on April 29.

This comes as a great relief, as a quick scan through the complete film will show you that the non-concert footage is dire. The concert footage, however, is excellent. It appears to have stood the test of time remarkably well (after all, it’s now thirty-two years old) and a bit of digital restoration has done wonders. The picture is clear, the sound is excellent (here’s hoping for a live CD version in the future) and the band’s performance is likewise very good. Alice’s outfit is ridiculous, but I think we could all have expected that. Thirteen songs from the shows are featured, including the evergreen classics School’s Out, I’m Eighteen and Under My Wheels as well as plenty of new tracks from the then current album Billion Dollar Babies. All of the stage tricks we all know and love are present, like the guillotine and the snake, making the concert part a joy to watch (if a little disjointed).

The other bonus features don’t amount to much more than items of curious interest. The original trailer for the film, a deleted scene (cowboys and indians with plastic weapons in an airport? No wonder it was deleted) and an uncut edit of Unfinished Sweet from one of the concerts are nice additions and probably the most interesting for fans. None of it will stand much rewatching, though.

Generally speaking, if you’re an Alice Cooper fan (people who are fans exclusively of the Poison-era don’t count, much like fans of I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing don’t count as Aerosmith fans) you’re going to want this in your collection. 1970s Alice Cooper band live footage is very hard to come by in any kind of watchable quality, and at the budget price of this DVD it’s well worth picking up a copy just to watch the excellent concert part. Consider the story line parts as bonus material. A curio, like KISS Meets The Phantom of the Park, that gives you a bit of an insight into what the Cooper band were up to at that stage in their career.

“ excellent concert part ”

Tracklist: Hello, Hooray / Billion Dollar Babies / Elected / I’m Eighteen / Raped And Freezin’ / No More Mr. Nice Guy / My Stars / Unfinished Sweet / Sick Things / Dead Babies / I Love The Dead / School’s Out / Under My Wheels
Bonus Features: The Lady Is A Tramp studio performance / Unfinished Sweet (uncut edit) / Audio Commentary by Alice Cooper / Deleted Scene and Outtakes / Original Theatrical Trailer and Radio Spots / Poster Gallery With Original Promotional Material / Band Biographies / Easter Eggs

Written by Andy Lye
More: Hard Rock, Live DVDs, Alice Cooper