From My Collection #6: Alice Cooper – DaDa

Welcome to another edition of From My Collection. Today, we take a deep dive into the catalog of one of rock’s most important figures, Alice Cooper. This Friday, the Coop will be releasing his twenty eighth studio album, Detroit Stories. And while I look forward to reviewing that album, today it’s all about album #15: DaDa.

Editor’s Note: In a recent conversation with Mr. Cooper, he confirmed that “Scarlet and Sheba” was indeed based on two cocktail waitresses. However, it was guitarist Dick Wagner who partook in the encounter that the song details, not Cooper himself.

The early 1980s were strange times for Mr. Vincent Furnier, better known to the general public as Alice Cooper. While the rest of his 1970s peers did their best to keep up with the heavy metal craze they started a decade earlier, Cooper took a creative 180 and went new wave. Mind you, when I say he went “new wave”, I don’t mean he started dressing goofy and relying solely on synthesizers. That menacing Alice Cooper edge remained present in both the lyrics and music. If anything, it was more intensified than on his late 70s releases. This was no coincidence.

By 1983, Alice Cooper’s drug dependency had reached an all time high. He was hitting the bottle harder than ever. Worse yet, he developed a crippling addiction to crack cocaine. This nearly killed him. In the midst of his boozed and cracked out insanity, Alice Cooper managed to write an unsung masterpiece; a musical suicide note within a meandering manifesto: DaDa. There’s only one little problem. The very man who wrote and recorded this album has zero recollection of doing so. Not only this, but he’s gone as far to say he has no idea what he was trying to communicate on here. This is where I come in. Mind you, what you’re about to read is NOT definitively what Alice Cooper was thinking at the time of writing and recording, but merely my interpretation and analysis based off research and critical listening.

According to late guitarist Dick Wagner, Cooper presented DaDa as a concept album. This wouldn’t be his first rodeo. After all, this is the man who gave us Welcome to My Nightmare and From the Inside. But while Welcome to My Nightmare was a collection of hard rock horror stories, and From the Inside a Broadway style extravaganza based on Cooper’s real life sanitarium stay, there was something darker and different about DaDa. The story centered around Sonny: a cannibal with multiple personality disorder. Each song would unveil one of his personalities. It was then up to the listener to determine which one of these personalities was the “real” Sonny. We can best guess that the “real Sonny” doesn’t exist in any of the songs, but rather in the voice of the man singing them. DaDa was a lyrical and musical reflection of Alice Cooper’s deteriorating mental state, whether he knew it or not.

The album opens with a nearly 5 minute soundscape. It’s dark and foreboding, almost as if what happens between now and the end of the album is irrelevant. No matter what happens, things aren’t gonna end well. In between the pulsating synthesizers, we hear Sonny mumbling to his therapist. He utters something about “nasty feelings” and “his son…and his daughter”. The therapist corrects Sonny, insisting he doesn’t have a daughter and Sonny agrees…or does he? In this story, the line between truth and fiction is thin.

“Enough’s Enough” introduces us to Sonny’s nameless son. Based off the lyrics, we can assume he’s a cowboy of some sorts. Or maybe that’s just a pet name given to him by his parents (“little cowboy”). Then again, maybe he’s the same type of “cowboy” that Jon Voight was in Midnight Cowboy (“Go buck and fuck and make a buck.”) Interestingly enough, I believe this is the only song in the Cooper catalog to contain use of the word “fuck”.

In “Former Lee Warmer”, we learn about Sonny’s brother mentioned in “Enough’s Enough” (“Why’d you hide your brother?”). That’s a good question. Why was Former Lee hidden? We’ve heard true life horror stories of families in the 1800s banishing a child to the attic for having a deformity. In those days, it was a mark of shame to be seen in public with such an “abomination”. Perhaps this was one of those circumstances. Sonny laments over his brother; locked away for eternity with nothing but a piano to soothe his soul.

“No Man’s Land” is a prime example of classic Cooper camp. In a matter of seconds, we’re transported from the menacing confines of the old Victorian mansion envisioned in “Former Lee Warmer” to a “mall in Atlanta”. The lyrics to this song are almost identical to the premise of Bad Santa which wouldn’t be released for another 20 years. I wonder if Billy Bob Thornton is a Cooper fan. We’re then treated to perhaps the most straightforward track on DaDa, “Dyslexia”. Something is wrong with Sonny and he knows it. He describes his struggles to the tune of a whiteboy reggae flavored beat.

If side A documented Sonny’s “rise” (if you could call it that), side B chronicles Sonny’s downfall, beginning with one of the finest tracks in the Cooper catalog, “Scarlet and Sheba”. On the surface, this song tells the allegedly true story of Cooper’s sordid encounter with two cocktail waitresses. What began as these two young ladies serving the strung out rockstar drinks turned into them serving equal parts pain and pleasure in a BDSM fueled threesome. If we’re to assume this is true, it would contradict Cooper’s claim that he “never cheated” on his wife of 45 years, Sheryl Goddard. Perhaps it’s merely lustful fantasy, just as “Nurse Rozetta” was on From the Inside. There’s an even larger theory that in some bizarre way, “Scarlet and Sheba” serves as a juxtaposition between Christianity (“Scarlet”) and Islam (“Sheba”), but I’m not even going to try and entertain that thought.

“I Love America” is not Cooper’s first song about America and it certainly wouldn’t be his last. If you think about it, one couldn’t exist without the other. I mean, I guess there could’ve been an America without Alice Cooper. It’s just hard to imagine this country without the cultural impact of this black eyed sultan of shock. On this song, Sonny assumes the persona of a patriotic redneck who loves the things that make America great. Among these are: “Velveeta slapped on Wonder Bread”, “chicken Kentucky Fried”, “the bomb, hot dogs and mustard”, etc. You get the idea.

“Fresh Blood” brings us to the present day, introducing us to “the real Sonny”. After stints as a deadbeat dad, befuddled brother, bad Santa, dyslexic, gimp, and redneck patriot, Sonny settles on being a lurking cannibal. As the lyrics demonstrate, Sonny has no set type (“Showgirls, businessmen in suits in the midnight rain. If they walk alone they are never seen again.”) If you’re breathing, you’re a walking target for this sick psychopath. Interestingly enough, there’s reason to believe this tale of bloodlust and perversion takes place in none other than my hometown of Chicago…

“In the paper, seems a florist
Found in Lincoln Park, died of some anemia
No one raped her, poor Doloris
Just detained her and drained her on the spot”

Lincoln Park is a prominent neighborhood on the north side of town. Furthermore, Cooper had a property here in the 1980s because his wife’s family was based in Chicago.

The story ends with the cathartic “Pass the Gun Around”. By now the jig is up. Sonny’s mental illness and reprehensible acts have pushed him to the edge. He sits wasting away in a hotel room, drinking shots of vodka before delivering one final shot: a bullet to the head. The song abruptly ends with the same bizarre bodily noises that opened the album and the coo of a baby: “Da da”.

The story of Sonny is only half of DaDa. Its accompanying soundtrack is equally important. Overall, the album is a 50/50 mix of new wave and hard rock, with occasional elements of rock opera thrown in. Some tracks lean more on the new wave side (“Dyslexia”, “Fresh Blood”), while others lean more on the hard rock side (“No Man’s Land”, “Scarlet and Sheba”). No matter the case, there is one thing that all these songs have in common. They’re very uncomfortable to the ear. DaDa is ugly and abrasive and deranged and twisted…yet there’s something about it that pulls me in over and over again.

If you’ve never listened to DaDa before, do yourself a favor. Before doing so, take everything you thought you knew about Alice Cooper and throw it out the window: “School’s Out”, “Poison”, “I’m Eighteen”, etc. Once you’ve done that, turn off the lights, close your eyes, and hold on tightly to your sanity. You’re gonna need it to digest this one.