'School's Out' Has Been Out For 50 Years- How Do You Rank It Among The Alice Cooper Group Albums?

I disagree. I got that album when it was released
and the cover was cool, to a then-11 year old.
Side 1 is iffy, but side 2 is quite enjoyable. I still like the album, 35 years later.

 

Seems like you and I touched on this in another thread. School's Out is my favorite AC album, so we're poles apart on this. I love production and School's Out has plenty of it. Other than this album, my favorites are the previous four. The first two are psychedelic, ala Syd Barrett, and I find that appealing. Love It To Death and Killer are also psychedelic but with better hooks and punchier, so that's appealing too.

Billion Dollar Babies is my least liked of them all, too commercial. There was a slight improvement with Muscle Of Love, but that would be second weakest. Both seem to be aimed at the radio.

 

Well, I’ve never actually heard the album. I just think the cover and title are lame. “Raise Your Fist And Tell” — is that an order, a request, a suggestion, a hope, an inevitability? Whatever it is, it doesn’t roll off the tongue. A friend of mine used to refer to the album as Raise Your Fist And Yak.

 

“School’s Out” was my first Cooper album, and I love it more each time I listen. To death, one might say…

 

Although Killer is my favorite (and the most progressive Alice Cooper album), IMO, School's Out is a brilliant concept album, impeccably produced by Bob Ezrin. It's an aural movie of the whole schoolboy culture of misbehaving in school, getting in trouble, cheating on tests, hating every minute of it, living like a hoodlum in a street gang after school hours, and then missing it all when it's time to graduate. The Kinks' Schoolboys In Disgrace is also a fave of mine, and covers the same basic thematic territory. I like to compare and contrast the two. (School's Out definitely has the better cover art of the 2 albums.)

 

I don’t buy albums for the cover or title. I buy them for the artist and music, within.

 

Well whatever happens, take life extremely seriously, overtly literal, and don’t have a sense of humor.

 

1. Love it to Death
2. Killer
3. School's Out
Nothing beats those first two albums.

 

My 3 favorites from that album, as well as amongst my faves out of his catalog, well chosen.
As for the album, certainly amongst my top 3. A good period for that band.

 

The first 4 bars of “School’s Out”—-is there a more thrilling intro in the history of rock? I don’t think that’s hyperbole. IMO, anyway. Up there with “I Saw Her Standing There”, “Like A Rolling Stone”, you name it.

Alice Cooper, the Rodney Dangerfield of rock and roll.

 

Yes, that intro/riff is instantly recognizable.

Ahh, but Alice gets respect

 

Thanks for saying pretty much exactly what I was going to.

 

Has anyone mentioned the rumored Special Edition of School’s Out? Supposed to come out in 2023. Here’s hoping for this album in 5.1.

 

Special editions for Killer and School's Out are completed and have been gathering dust for quite some time.

 

That's Raise Your Fist And Yell, not Tell

 

School's Out was the first Alice Cooper album I bought (1972 when I was 11 years old), so that colors my opinion. I still love all of it!

As far as the ranking :

1) Killer - 5 stars
2) Love It To Death - 5 stars
3) Billion Dollar Babies - 4 stars
4) School's Out - 4 stars
5) Pretties For You - 3.5 stars
6) Easy Action - 3 stars
7) Muscle Of Love - 2 stars

 

Obviously -- that's a typo.

 

This this why I love this album. I also love all the band albums before this and after, that includes Pretties and Easy. I really can’t rate one of the band albums over another, it’s like making a parent pick what child they like, I can’t do it, they all kick ass!

 

Yeah, that'd be my list too, except I'd swap out 'Easy Action' and 'Muscle Of Love"...Never got into 'Easy Action' for some reason. I'll have to give it another spin, soon. "Pretties" is underrated.

 

Perhaps maybe they’re polishing up the 5.1’s before releasing these SE’s? One can only hope.

 

Love it to death...so much I have three different pressings. Billion Dollar Babies gets the most play at my house. I think Muscle Of Love is unfairly maligned. Love It To Death and Killer are tied for third. Easy Action and Pretties For You are interesting listens.

 

One of the fun things about the forum is when you begin to hear a sort of consensus that you don't agree with yourself. In the case of AC's early albums, it seems to me that most people here rate Killer as being the exceptional album from the original line up. This is a little surprising to me, as I have a different opinion. Killer is a very good album, but then all the original line-ups albums are great. I can't see any light between Love it to Death and Killer. Schools Out is the dirty, gritty, jazz inflected slice of back alley rock that neither of those other albums can match, but overall isn't better or worse.

Billion Dollar Babies was the album that truly broke the band, and for good reason. It takes the raw rock and rock from early albums, some of the darkness, and ramps up the melodies to a high degree. It's a refined album where the band finally found their top level. What we didn't know at the time was the Buxton was ;pretty much gone by this point, but that aside it truly is the fullest realization of what these initial albums are all about, imo.

Muscle of Love suffers critically for a couple of reasons. First, it followed Billion Dollar Babies. That was always going to be a hard act to follow, yet comparatively, it's a huge success. Mind, all the darkness is gone - there's no I Love the Dead or Dead Babies on MOL! Add on to that, MOL was released in the same year as Billion Dollar Babies - end of Feb for Billion, and end November for MOL - this give it an air of "outtakes", I think.

Of course, the band was constantly on tour at the time, adding in two or three songs from each album as they went.

I'm with you - everything from Pretties for You through Muscle of Love is stellar, and I'd not leave any of them out. I struggle to separate them. I don't think Killer especially distinguishes itself, nor so I think it was their most progressive record. The title track and Halo of Flies - especially the latter - is wildly creative, but along with that are a host of straight blues-inflected tracks. Which is not a knock on it!

 

It is a good one, so that's 3 i like

 

A good album of its day..shocking then.

 

From the Japanese Mini-Sleeve version.