01 - Caught In A Dream
02 - I'm Eighteen
03 - Long Way To Go
04 - Is It My Body
05 - Black Juju
'Love It To Death' is the album that nearly didn't happen. After two flop albums no one was to eager to throw more money behind what they assumed, with some justification, would be a non-starter. Shep and the band, however, weren't about to give up. Shep managed to convince Warner Brothers to pay for the recording of four new demos with a hot shot new producer he'd found from Canada called Bob Ezrin.
Shep and the band realised that to take the next step they needed a proper producer and after a little searching they decided on Jack Richardson of Nimbus 9 Productions in Toronto, renowned at the time for his work with Canadian act 'The Guess Who'. Contact was made but Richardson simply wasn't that interested. To shut them up he sent his new boy Ezrin down to check out the band and get rid of them. It didn't work out that way. In September Ezrin flew down to New York to see the band at Max's Kansas City and saw something in the band he thought had value. He returned to Toronto to convinced his boss they were worth recording. Richardson, still not convinced, said "if you think their so great YOU record them!" and shortly after Ezrin moved in with the band at their Pontiac base to start two months of writing and rehearsing for what would become 'Love It To Death'.
By November Billboard reported the band were recording at RCA Studios in Chicago. In 'Me, Alice' Alice recalls they recorded four songs (he names 'I'm Eighteen', 'Is It My Body', 'You Drive Me Nervous' and 'Sun Arise') as demos to show Warners what they had. It does the trick and the band get the go-ahead to finish the album.
'I'm Eighteen', originally called 'I Wish I was Eighteen Again', was released as a single around the first week of February 1970 and had been slowly climbing the charts for a while before the full album was released. The single was an edited version of the original bluesy jam the band had been playing for a few months. Bob Ezrin, who on first hearing the song had originally thought the song was called 'I'm Edgy', had cut the original down to three minutes and tightened up the arrangement to produce the bands first solid hit record.
Alice Cooper shows had always been theatrical. Even back in the Phoenix days as the Spiders the band used anything they could find on stage and very early shots of them at the VIP have a guillotine visible in the background. However the 'Love It To Death' tour was where all the parts really came together. For a start Alice played the 'Alice Cooper' character throughout the show, rarely speaking to the crowd between songs and if he did he avoided the standard 'clap your hands', 'Hello Chicago' banter with the crowd. But more then that they now had the snake, the nurse (played by Neal's sister and Dennis girlfriend Cindy Smith) and, for 'Black Juju', an electric chair smoke effects and lights that flashed as Alice was executed for the crimes commited through the show. This was a big deal at the time when almost all bands just walked on stage in jeans and t-shirts.
The shows including only one song from the first two albums, 'Return Of The Spiders', and that was the encore. Everything else was jettisoned for the new record. That too was gone by the next tour. 'Love It To Death' was almost a fresh start. The band knew that with Ezrin that had found the final part f the puzzle and didn't look back. From: https://www.sickthingsuk.co.uk/01-discography/03-love-it-to-death.php
