Band:	Alice Cooper
Album:	Pretties For You
Style:	Hard rock
Release date:	1969
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. Titanic Overture
02. Ten Minutes Before The Worm
03. Sing Low, Sweet Cheerio
04. Today Mueller
05. Living
06. Fields Of Regret
07. No Longer Empire
08. Levity Ball
09. B.B. On Mars
10. Reflected
11. Apple Bush
12. Earwigs To Eternity
13. Changing Arranging

Alice Cooper has worn many hats in its years as a band and his years as a man, but the very first hat they ever wore together they wore upside-down.

Pretties For You now seems a quaint introduction in retrospect, an often formless dip into psychedelia that is primarily explained by an evident adoration of The Beatles. This is, in fact, one of the very few albums on this website to have been released while The Beatles were still in existence, which is typically a fact I use as a marker of age (as if to say, “wow, these guys were around back when music was invented”), but in this case, knowing of that overlap is directly relevant to any analysis of this album. In 1969, Alice Cooper was a band of kids trying to write psychedelic odysseys in two- and three-minute pop rock songs whose most appreciable qualities were usually the vocal layers and harmonies immediately redolent of Lennon and McCartney; the buzzing garage rock jaunt “Living”, the busy alley stomp of “Fields Of Regret”, and the syncopated swing of “Apple Bush” all bear obvious debts to the songwriting styles of the Fab Four, with naively sweet melodies and simple digressions.

This is really the defining element of Pretties For You: it sounds like a band that sounds like The Beatles. It lacks maturity and, more than that, a sense of identity, especially in contrast to the Alice Cooper of just two short years later. The moments that stand out most are those that reveal something of that future oeuvre.

Those glimpses, while rare, are noticeable. “10 Minutes Before The Worm” is a prescient title, however figuratively, as it makes for a prophetic pair with “Swing Low Sweet Cheerio”: the cacophonous riffs, piquant bass, and ominous toms crammed into the lackadaisical shuffles foreshadow “Halo Of Flies”, “Black Juju”, and other horror-packed classics of subsequent masterpieces. “Changing Arranging” is strikingly loud at its outset, almost overplayed in a spirit of disruption that School’s Out and Billion Dollar Babies would envision – and speaking of which, there’s an early version of “Elected”, here known as “Reflected” (yes, they did just pick a word that rhymes and rewrite the song). “Today Mueller” and “Fields Of Regret” meander through freakish, funhouse-like disjuncture that wouldn’t feel out of place on Killer or Love It To Death given some more revision and substance.

These are still mere moments, however: Pretties For You on the whole is a tattered bouquet, an inchoate collection of nonlinear assertions launched before they could be hammered into shape. The vocals especially are strange, unrecognizable as they usually are: Alice the man, then still known as frontman Vince Furnier, sings in stereo or harmony most of the time, an approach that would follow into the classic material but eventually fall away for considerable stretches of his career. His delivery is clean and conscious of his voice’s musicality, absent the trademark snarl, and the album’s vocal style approaches Uriah Heep more than what we would today recognize as Alice Cooper. While there’s no argument in the world to be made that Furnier did not perfect the Alice Cooper sound with the villainous rasp that emerged later, Pretties For You does treat his voice in a singularly instrumental way compared to the vast majority of his career, so it’s at least intriguing for that reason. But Pretties For You lacks the darkness, the humor, the writing, and the energy of classic Alice: it’s clearly an experiment, and only occasionally worthy of recognition beyond that.

There’s no chance that anyone is stumbling upon this album ignorant of Alice Cooper’s later career. Likely no one is visiting it at all except to establish a sense of context: most of these songs are too messy and unfinished to stand on their own four beats, and the production (where there is any) does not readily accommodate the attempts at delicate melodic arrangement. While that doesn’t alleviate all the guilt that I feel in treating this mixed-up debut as if it were merely jobbing for Killer, it’s obvious that at this point in time Alice Cooper was following the changes on the air rather than any innate inspiration. Pretties For You is worth one listen for history’s sake, maybe one listen for its own – but this is a first album that brings with it all the uncertainty and amateurish aimlessness that that often implies.