Excellent Guide (The Illustrated Collector's Guide To Alice Cooper - Dale Sherman)

Member Name: prday

Product:	The Illustrated Collector's Guide To Alice Cooper - Dale Sherman
Date:	12/06/01 (100 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A Must Buy, Beatifully Written & Illustrated

Disadvantages: None

This is the official Alice Cooper collectors guide covering the years 1965 to 1998. Nearly every page is illustrated by photographs some of which were previously unpublished. This guide gives important background information to the rock star who has become a household name to several generations.

Starting in 1964 in a band called the Earwigs and the first Alice recording Hitch Hike to the 1998 Box Set, Life & Crimes Of Alice cooper this book carefully chronicles each stage of Alices career. It doesn't however chronicle The Brutal Planet album of 2000 so already this book is out of date. However a rerelease is rumoured to be on the horizon.

The book is split into sections including 1964 - 1974 which were the years of the Earwigs, Nazz & The Spiders and the excellent Alice Cooper Group. 1975 - 1979 chronicles the start of Alices highly successful solo career. 1980 - 1982 the lost years in which Alices work slipped due to the fact that the shock rocker had started drinking heavily again but still managed to release a few interesting records but not classic maetrial. The 1984 - 1990 come back period including the metal revival years and Alices multi platinum Trash album with the hugely successful track poison. And the 1991 - 1998 period in which a mature Alice continues to launch excellent works of art and remains a steady stalwart of rock.

Each section is the split up further into background information for each period. Each recording in this period is then broken down with notes on how each album track was concieved, track listings, recording times and places, performers on each album i.e Donavon on Billion Dollar Babies, Slash on Hey Stoopid etc. Also where appropriate problems encountered whie recording, anecdotes. Each release of every album and single is then neatly chronicled including release date and media and any limited edition versions of album. Then the tours including what happened on each tour, what bands supported Alice,
tour dates and special notes if something special happened on a tour date. The we have films and television apearances for each period. This section is really detailed well. Finally there is a section on and books or magazines appearances released during these periods. Finally at the back of the book there is a section on bootleg albums and videos some of which are now highly valuable.

The middle of the book contains sixteen pages of high quality photographs.

Summary: