The album reached number 21 on the Billboard 200 album chart, and the two singles “Under My Wheels” and “Be My Lover” made the Billboard Hot 100 chart. At the opposite end of 1971 from “Love It To Death” stalked Alice Cooper’s fourth album, “Killer” as an aptly titled exhibition of no-frills, highly-ratcheted and the very tightest knit mesh of a rock’n’roll straightjacket. Desperado", along with "Under My Wheels" and "Be My Lover" have appeared on different compilation albums by Cooper.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Cooper said in the liner notes of A Fistful of Alice (1997) and In the Studio with Redbeard, which spotlighted the Killer and Love It to Death (1971) albums, that the song "Desperado" was written about his friend Jim Morrison, who died the year this album was released. According to an NPR radio interview with Alice Cooper, "Desperado" was written about Robert Vaughn's character from the movie The Magnificent Seven (1960). Alice’s vocals are at their roughest and razor-gargled best on “Killer,” too: They scrawl all over “Under My Wheels” like the retardedly etched lettering on the cover and open up the proceedings with all the teenaged head rush of a highly anticipated Friday night concert just after racing directly home from school.

Maybe it was considered to be not possible to manufacture (my LP calendar did fall off after a while of use) see photo or maybe the photo content may have not been very PC for 2023. Vinyl pressings are so good these days that it's like listening to the clarity of CDs but with the warmth of analogue. The grimly fiendish manner in which Alice spits out this last word into an extended ten second roar is unlike anything I’ve ever heard emit from a human voice. Alice’s restrained vocals borrow a loose woman from Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells A Story” (“And it was.

According to an NPR radio interview with Alice Cooper, “Desperado” was written about Robert Vaughn’s character from the movie The Magnificent Seven. I would love an acoustic sounds quality level box of the first 3 LPs done AAA, but unlikely to happen.First official release of a live set by the Alice Cooper band since the 2001's release of the deluxe edition of "Billion Dollar Babies", but certainly been worth the wait. The three alternative tracks do not differ greatly from the finished articles, just a little rougher round the edges. Halo of Flies” was, according to Cooper’s liner notes in the compilation The Definitive Alice Cooper, an attempt by the band to prove that they could perform King Crimson-like progressive rock suites, and was supposedly about a SMERSH-like organisation.

Robert Christgau rated the album a B−, stating that "a taste for the base usages of hard rock rarely comes with a hit attached these days, much less 'surreal', 'theatrical', and let us not forget 'transvestite' trappings". Killer is the third-most-represented album in Alice Cooper's concert setlists behind Welcome to My Nightmare (1975) and Billion Dollar Babies (1973), accounting for 13.Tellingly, the last lyric in the song is “you never will understand” and by this point if you’re still trying to comprehend the lyrics you’re trying too hard because the point of Alice Cooper’s best albums are just to suspend disbelief and go along quietly and no one will get hurt (Except Alice, but he’s the professional here.