Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, Varsity Stadium, Toronto, Canada, 9-13-1969, Part 5: Alice Cooper

Here's the fifth album from the 1969 Toronto Rock and Roll Revival. This time, it's the band Alice Cooper. 

(Note that initially that was the name of the band as a whole, but over time it became the name of the lead singer as well. In this write-up, I use both meanings, depending on the context.)

This performance has been bootlegged for many years. But boy, was the common bootleg a hot mess! Apparently, the bootlegger decided that the concert was too short at only 20 minutes. So two songs were added ("Ain't That Just Like a Woman" and "Goin' to the River") that were not Alice Cooper at all. The actual performer for those is Ronnie Hawkins, and they were recorded in 1964. I guess the bootlegger's idea was to pick something so obscure that people wouldn't recognize the source, but the voice and musical style was totally different. To add insult to injury, all the song titles on the bootleg were misnamed. For instance, the first song "No Longer Umpire" was called "Painting a Picture." Probably, the bootlegger didn't know the titles and just made (bad) guesses. But this persisted for decades, as this performance kept getting re-released in the "grey market" under different titles and different packaging.

Needless to say, I've gotten rid of the Ronnie Hawkins songs, and I'm using the real song titles. 

Alice Cooper got to be a famous band later, but it's important to keep in mind that was later. The band's debut album, "Pretties for You," was released in June 1969, just a few months prior to this festival. It didn't sell well, barely scraping into the bottom of the Top 200 albums chart. (200, mind you, not 100.) In 1971, the band would connect with producer Bob Ezrin who would drastically change their sound, resulting in a million-selling album that year, and quite a few more after that. But at this point, Alice Cooper was little known, much like other bands at the festival that have largely been forgotten since, such as Milkwood, Nucleus, or Whiskey Howl.

It seems the reason the band's set took place relatively late in the festival was because they were also the backing band for 1950s rock star Gene Vincent, and they did their set right after his set. One would think that wouldn't have been a good match, but the band members actually grew up listening to 1950s stars like Vincent, and were big fans of him. 

In the excellent 2022 documentary movie about this festival, "REVIVAL69: The Concert That Rocked the World," the band's lead singer Alice Cooper said, "Backing up Gene Vincent was a very cool thing, really kind of a feather in our cap. Nobody had ever asked us to back them up before. And we were a pretty good rock and roll band, so we said 'sure.' You know, 'Be-Bob-a-Lula,' 'Woman Love,' all those songs. That would be a privilege to us."

It's unfortunate that I don't have any songs from Vincent's set to post. However, you can see him singing brief part of songs documentary mentioned above. I was able to record a section from that documentary where Vincent was introducing the members of the Alice Cooper band during his set. That's the first track here. Sadly, Vincent would die of heart failure in 1971, less than two years after this concert.

The performance by Alice Cooper was more performance art than a musical performance per se. I highly recommend you watch the documentary mentioned above, especially for the scenes from their set. They're showing doing all kinds of strange things. For instance, Cooper is seeing wildly waving a broom above it his head. Then at another point, he's simply carrying around a carved out watermelon. Then there's a scene of two band members viciously fighting each other while rolling around on the stage floor. 

Cooper said in the documentary, "We were always the underdog, so when we get on the stage, you're never gonna forget this show, musically and visually. We were just sort of this thing that existed that nobody could define, some sort of dark, hard rock vaudeville.We were an affront to everybody. We were the future."

He added, "At the end of the show was a feather pillow that got sprayed across the stage and blew the feathers up, 'cos it gave a beautiful effect on the lights. Feathers everywhere, it looked like a snowstorm, and then you hit it with CO2 and it even becomes more of a snowstorm. So the Doors were over here, and John [Lennon] and Yoko [Ono] were over here [at the side of the stage], and they were like, 'Yeah!' They're seeing this as art. It was truly art."

Someone connected to the band brought a live chicken in a pillowcase to the stage, surprising Cooper with it. Cooper explained in the documentary, "And the next thing you know, there's a chicken on stage. It seemed in the mayhem that it had feathers and wings, it should fly. I picked up the chicken, I figured I'd throw this in the audience. I figured, "Well, I'll throw this in the audience, and somebody will catch it, take it home, and it'll be a pet and they'll call it 'Alice.' [But it turns out] chickens don't fly as much as they plummet. Of course, the next day in the paper it said, 'Alice Cooper Kills Chicken.'"

That, in turn, quickly morphed into a story that Cooper had bitten off the head of a chicken. Rumors of that would follow their career for decades. But also, their wild performance got them a lot of attention and exposure at the time. It was their big break. It also was a template for their concerts once they became big "shock rock" stars in the early 1970s. Cooper said, "Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, that show in particular, was what launched us."

This album is 21 minutes long. 

01 talk by Gene Vincent (Alice Cooper)
02 No Longer Umpire (Alice Cooper)
03 Lay Down and Die, Goodbye (Alice Cooper)
04 Don't Blow Your Mind (Alice Cooper)
05 Freak Out (Alice Cooper)
06 Fields of Regret (Alice Cooper)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/y5bzRxG2

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/4T42AiQgdfPf5pK/file

The cover photo needs some explanation. Since the chicken throwing incident is so notorious, I wanted to have that for the cover. I watched the footage of the chicken throwing in one of the documentaries about this festival, and took a screenshot of the moment where the chicken is most visible. It's the white blog in the middle of the image. I didn't use Krea AI to improve the image, because that would probably only mess things up, due to all the feathers in the air and such.