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''Love It to Death'' is the third album by the American rock band Alice Cooper, released in March 1971. It was the band's first commercially successful album, and is considered to be where the band first consolidated its aggressive hard-rocking sound. The album's best-known track, "I'm Eighteen", was released as a single to test the band's commercial viability before the album was recorded. Formed in the mid-1960s, the band took the name Alice Cooper in 1968 and became known for its outrageous theatrical live shows. The loose, psychedelic freak rock of its first two albums failed to find an audience. The band moved to Detroit in 1970 and was influenced by the aggressive hard rock scene there. A young Bob Ezrin was enlisted as producer and spent two months rehearsing ten to twelve hours a day as he encouraged the band to tighten its songwriting. Soon after, the single "I'm Eighteen" achieved top-forty success, peaking at number 21. This convinced Warner Bros. that Alice Cooper had the commercial potential to release an album. After its release in March 1971 ''Love It to Death'' reached number 35 on the ''Billboard'' 200 albums chart and has since been certified platinum. The album's second single, "Caught in a Dream", charted at number 94. The original album cover featured Cooper posed with his thumb protruding so it appeared to be his penis; Warner Bros. soon replaced it with a censored version. The Love It to Death tour featured an elaborate shock rock live show: during "Ballad of Dwight Fry"—about an inmate in an insane asylum—Cooper would be dragged offstage and return in a straitjacket, and the show climaxed with Cooper's mock execution in a prop electric chair during "Black Juju". Ezrin and the Coopers continued to work together for a string of hit albums until the band's breakup in 1974. The album has come to be seen as a foundational influence on hard rock, punk, and heavy metal; several tracks have become live Alice Cooper standards and are frequently covered by other bands. ==Background== Detroit-born vocalist Vincent Furnier co-formed the Earwigs in the mid-1960s in Phoenix, Arizona, with guitarist Glen Buxton, guitarist and keyboardist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway, and drummer Neal Smith. The band released a few singles in 1967 after a name change to the Spiders. In 1968 the band adopted the name Alice Cooper—a name Furnier later adopted for his own—and presented the story that it came from a 17th-century witch whose name they learned from a session with a ouija board. At some point Buxton painted circles under his eyes with cigarette ashes, and soon the rest followed with ghoulish black makeup and outlandish clothes. The band moved to Los Angeles and became known for its provocative, theatrical shock rock stage show. In a headline-grabbing incident during a performance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival in 1969, Cooper threw a live chicken into the audience, and it was torn to shreds. The group's first two albums, ''Pretties for You'' (1969) and ''Easy Action'' (1970), appeared on Frank Zappa's Straight Records label, and failed to find an audience. The band relocated to Detroit and found itself in the midst of a rock scene populated with the hard-driving rock of the MC5, the stage-diving Iggy Pop with the Stooges, and the theatricality of George Clinton's Parliament and Funkadelic. The Alice Cooper band went on to incorporate these influences, resulting in a tight, hard-rock sound coupled with an outrageous live show. While at the Strawberry Fields Festival in Canada in April 1970, band manager Shep Gordon contacted producer Jack Richardson, who had produced hit singles for the Guess Who. Richardson was uninterested in producing the Alice Cooper band himself, and sent nineteen-year-old Bob Ezrin in his place. Cooper recalled the young junior producer as "a nineteen-year-old Jewish hippie" who reacted to meeting the outlandish band "as if he had just opened a surprise package and found a box full of maggots". Ezrin initially turned down working with the band, but had a change of heart when he saw them live at Max's Kansas City in New York City the following October. Ezrin was impressed with the band's audience-participation rock-theater performance and the cult-like devotion of the band's fans, who dressed up and knew the lyrics and actions to the music, which Ezrin compared to the later cult following of ''The Rocky Horror Picture Show''. Ezrin returned to Toronto to convince Richardson to take on the band; Richardson did not want to work directly with such a group but agreed on condition that Ezrin took the lead. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Love It to Death」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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