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No More Mr Nice Guy: The Inside Story of the Alice Cooper Group |  | Authors: Michael Bruce, Billy James
Publisher: SAF Publishing Ltd
Category: Book
Buy New: $99.96
as of 2/10/2010 00:19 EST details
New (3) Used (7) Collectible (1) from $99.96
Seller: smart_choice_Lady
Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 1744455
Media: Paperback
Pages: 160
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 12.6
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.4
ISBN: 0946719322
Dewey Decimal Number: 780
EAN: 9780946719327
ASIN: 0946719322
Publication Date: July 1, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"Better to remember the good days via those magnificent early records, those mid-period hits, and this likeable volume of memoirs."-Record Collector "Original guitarist Michael Bruce's book successfully attempts to buy back credit where it was never given."-Mojo Michael Bruce was guitarist and keyboard player with America's ghoulish rock vaudevillians-the Alice Cooper group. As the melody man within the group's ranks he helped to write many of their classic early seventies tracks. Hit singles like "School's Out" and "Elected" were teenage pop anthems that perfectly encapsulated the decadent spirit of the times, while the band's love for theatrics ran the gamut of mock electrocutions, hangings and guillotinings, creating a larger-than-life personality of singer Alice Cooper. No More Mr Nice Guy follows the group on a journey from Arizona garage band, through years of being "the band you loved to hate," culminating in their eventual rise to worldwide stardom. Michael Bruce opens the lid on his years with the group, revealing the truth behind the publicity stunts, the dead babies, the drinking, the executions and, of course, the rock 'n' roll.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
 Belivin The Beatnik March 5, 2004
clarissa jones (england uk)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
Michael has written a brave and adult book that will strike a chord with millions of Alice Cooper fans dismayed at the bands breakup.
Michael's opinion will not be shared by everyone but it is really about time we got a perspective from outside of the Alice Camp who rarely see beyond stary eyed hero worship at best.
The facts do not particularly favour either side. Alice Cooper split up with just one album to make. This deprived the band of some richly deserved royalties but it hardly pointed to Alice jumping ship at the first hint of commercial success. Alice himself points to a band that wanted to ditch theatrics and go more mainstream. True of Michaels solo album, but the Billion Dollar Babies BattleAxe album? and tour with its stageshow designed to rival anything Alice had done? Somehow it seemed hollow.
Michael possibly minimizes the strained relations between the band members at the height of their success. But band members Neal & Dennis were prepared to go on record as saying that current writing was overstating them# (#Bob Greene/Billion Dollar Baby).
Muscle Of Love had resulted in lawsuits which must have put pressure on the bands management. But Warners suing as it was the wrong type of product seems a gas in retrospect given the course Alice's solo career was to take.
Michael's suggestion that it was Shep Gordon who persuaded Alice to leave the band for a 50/50 split will always have some resonance just as long as rock n roll is rock n roll. All major bands have argued over this issue at some point.
Dont know for a fact, will never know for a fact and three decades later dont really want to. My judgement is just a musical one. Alice is for me rock's greatest performer he can make the most ordinary session musicians look great. But without his band he lasted for just one album before thirteen years obscurity set in. Something too many devoted Yes Men! were never concerned about.
Alice for me should have realised that it wasn't working without the band and at least offered the possibility of a reunion even if this meant splitting with his managment. Alice had every right to grow older, get married change priorities. I always had every sympathy for the pressure the original Alice caricature put on him. But what no one can expect is for rock n roll to change with them. It never changes and once the personal stuff came into Alice's music things were going to get tricky.
Michael has written a book for the grown ups and not one for those more comfy with the no drugs just booze all nice guys legend. Michael has rightly or wrongly said what most of us secretly believed. The music industry was wrong. The men in suits were wrong, unforgivably wrong. They all took their piece of Alice and weve all paid our price.
Michael Bruce I hope you live forever in Rock n Roll heaven.(Clarissa Jones)
Excellent! July 18, 2002
Richard D. Cappetto (Moodus, CT United States)
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book by Michael Bruce (Alice Cooper Band Original Guitarists) and Billy James (Ant Bee) which follows the Bands History from Arizona to Los Angeles To Michigan to Superstardom. It is well written and tells the story in an engaging way with much humor and candor. This is a MUST HAVE for any Alice Cooper fan and really any Rock Fan.
Thank you MIKE BRUCE!!!!!! December 7, 2001
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
A great book that goes right to the heart of The Alice cooper band. I only wish that it was longer. Good content indeed!
Lovely photos and info throughout! If you are a fan of the early AC, READ THIS BOOK! It is essential!
 Better Songwriter Than Memoirist - But The Story's Good September 16, 2001
BluesDuke (Huntington Beach, California)
23 out of 25 found this review helpful
Maybe Michael Bruce should have hired a ghost writer. But don't hold it against him. Until a better writer happens along, this will probably have to be the definitive account of Alice Cooper's early life---as in, when the name indicated a band first and foremost, even if the lead singer decided to adopt the name as his own stage name, too---if only because it comes from the man who was probably the real most valuable player in the band.
Though they began as a gang of rabble-and-rollers who also had a sense of the absurd which veered between the surreal and the downright insane (you have to hear their very first album, the Frank Zappa-produced "Pretties For You," to understand), it didn't take long before Alice Cooper began shaping into a slashing band with hooks to burn---the maturity which began on their second album ("Easy Action") and all but exploded on their third ("Love It To Death"). They may have been a rather watered-down and cartooned-up version of the Stooges' genuine teenage-wasteland angst, but there was no escaping the quick grip of songs like "Eighteen," "Under My Wheels," "Be My Lover," "Caught In A Dream," "School's Out," "You Drive Me Nervous," "Dead Babies," "Gutter Cat Vs. The Jets," "No More Mr. Nice Guy," and "Billion Dollar Baby." And it was predominantly Michael Bruce---who was actually the better musician between the band's two guitarists, though fellow guitarist Glen Buxton usually earned the raves for the spiky lead guitar work even when he didn't play it (which, beginning with the impossibly best-selling "Billion Dollar Babies," was damn near all the time; the stories abounded about the band using unseen guitarists to cover for Buxton while Bruce actually switched between lead and rhythm guitar onstage)---who provided the hooks and the overall balanced structure that made the songs workable even without the stage act whose shock value, in hindsight, wore off into self-parody rather quickly.
It probably should have surprised no one that the overworked Alice Cooper five delivered something less than their front line with 1974's "Muscle of Love." But what happened next proves somewhat tawdry---announcing a temporary hiatus for the band, on the pretext of regrouping and refreshing, Cooper the singer cut a well-received solo album ("Welcome To My Nightmare") with most of the band he swiped from Lou Reed (the famed "Rock and Roll Animal" group, spearhead by twin guitar slingers Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner)...and then some solo concerts with a few new variations on his old stage tricks...then another solo album...a few hit singles (especially 1977's surprisingly masterful and haunting ballad, "You And Me")...another couple of solo albums, including a live album at least a third of which was stuff from the old band. Meanwhile, the old band twisted in the wind and figured out the hard way that Alice Cooper the singer had no intention of ever reuniting Alice Cooper the band. (Almost a year and a half later, while Cooper was riding his slowly swelling solo success, the band gave interviews in which they assured one and all that yes, they were only on temporary vacation and they were just waiting for Alice to pass the word it was time to rock again.)
The band was fool enough to try it on their own for awhile (minus Buxton, apparently), changing the name to Billion Dollar Babies, and cutting an album which had plenty missing beginning with the foolishness of their new name. From there, they drifted apart to various ventures none of which came even close to their old glory, and practically the whole world forgot Alice Cooper was born as a band.
As all but the musical director of that band, Bruce has all the reason in the world to be bitter over their shabby treatment. He may not be David Niven as a show business memoirist, but given his limitations as a prose writer he's telling a story fans of the 1970s (remember: Alice Cooper the band was the hottest act in American show business from 1971-73) and of Alice Cooper will want to know, and if you get past his stylistic flaws as a writer you'll be surprised at how well he keeps the bitterness down to a dull roar and still has a stubborn pride (as he should) in what he did accomplish.
No More Mr.Nice guy is a book for any Alice fan! August 27, 2001
Chris Kiebzak (Usa)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
No More Mr.Nice Guy is a Great book!It is written by Alice Cooper's First Guitarest Mike Bruce! The book tells the story on alot of the albums and tours that Mike was in with Alice! Also the book talks abot some of Mikes other bands! Worth the Money totley! This book is for Any Alice or Mike Bruce fan!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
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