Billion Dollar Babies
(reissue, 1973) RHINO
8/10
SUPPORTING the old trope that you must suffer for your art, Alice Cooper got an opus out of a toothache. On “Unfinished Sweet”, the deranged heart of the band’s sixth studio album, , frontman Vincent Furnier sings some lowdown dental blues, describing the pain like a “Saint Vitus dance on my molars tonight” and wincing at the paranoid hallucinations prompted by the laughing gas. The rest of the band are just as committed to the ludicrous concept, with Glen Buxton duetting with a dental drill before colliding head-on with a surf-rock/spy-theme breakdown. At no point does dentistry become a metaphor
