Love It to Death by Alice Cooper

Love It to Death, released on March 9, 1971, is where Alice Cooper stopped being a freak-show curiosity and became a rock and roll band that could hurt you. After two albums of loose psychedelic weirdness that nobody bought, the Phoenix gang had moved to Pontiac, Michigan, soaked up the city's hard rock, and put themselves in the hands of a young producer named Bob Ezrin, who drilled them for two months, ten to twelve hours a day, until the songs were tight as a fist.

Glen Buxton's lead guitar snarls, Michael Bruce and Dennis Dunaway lock it down, and the singer who calls himself Alice leers over the lot. "I'm Eighteen", released as a trial balloon before the album was even made, climbed to 21 and convinced Warner Bros. to let them make a whole record. It got to 35 on the Billboard 200 and eventually went platinum. On the road, the show climaxed with Alice's mock execution in an electric chair.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.