More Alice Cooper

More Rock Classics

• A vintage Warner Bros. Palm Trees pressing with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
• It’s the impossibly rare copy that’s this lively, solid and rich… drop the needle on the title track and you’ll see what we mean
• This copy is proof that finding the right balance of fullness and clarity on this album may not be easy but it can be done
• Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these Classic Rock records – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
• 4 1/2 stars: “Song for song, Billion Dollar Babies is probably the original Alice Cooper group’s finest and strongest… It remains one of rock’s all-time, quintessential classics.”

Billion Dollar Babies can sound big and powerful, but not many copies bring the sound to life the way this one does. For once you can hear a big room around the instruments; the bass is tight and well-defined, and there’s plenty of tubey richness.

This was also one of the copies that managed to get real three-dimensional space in the soundfield, bringing Alice up front, with the rest of the band arrayed behind him from wall to wall.

This vintage Warner Bros. pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of Billion Dollar Babies Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1973
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

What We’re Listening For On Billion Dollar Babies

• Less grit — Smoother and sweeter sound, something that is not easy to come by on Billion Dollar Babies.
• A bigger presentation — More size, more space, more room for all the instruments and voices to occupy. The bigger the speakers you have to play this record, the better.
• More bass and tighter bass — This is fundamentally a pure rock record. It needs weight down low to rock the way Shelly Yakus and Robin Black wanted it to.
• Present, breathy vocals — A veiled midrange is the rule, not the exception.
• Good top-end extension to reproduce the harmonics of the instruments and details of the recording including the studio ambiance.
• Last but not least, balance — All the elements from top to bottom should be heard in harmony with each other.

Take our word for it, assuming you haven’t played a pile of these yourself, balance is not that easy to find. Our best copies will have it though, of that there is no doubt.

The average copy of this album is dark, murky, recessed, compressed, thick and congested. There are a lot of green label Warner Bros. records from the ’70s that sound like that, one might even call it their “house sound.”

When you play the later pressings, it’s obvious that they’ve gone overboard in cleaning up the murk, leaving a sound that is lean, flat and modern — in other words, “unmusical.”

Finding the right balance of fullness and clarity, especially on this album, may not be easy, but it can be done. This copy is proof!

Best Practices

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the others do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces those passages.

The process is simple enough. First you go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

Hello Hooray
Raped and Freezin’
Elected
Billion Dollar Babies
Unfinished Sweet

Side Two

No More Mr. Nice Guy
Generation Landslide
Sick Things
Mary Ann
I Love the Dead

AMG 4 1/2 Star Rave Review

Song for song, Billion Dollar Babies is probably the original Alice Cooper group’s finest and strongest. Such tracks as “Hello Hooray,” the lethal stomp of the title track, the defiant “Elected” (a rewrite of an earlier song, “Reflected”), and the poison-laced pop candy of “No More Mr. Nice Guy” remain among Cooper’s greatest achievements…

Not only is Billion Dollar Babies one of Cooper’s very best; it remains one of rock’s all-time, quintessential classics.