Muscle of Love
| Muscle of Love | ||||
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| Studio album by Alice Cooper | ||||
| Released | November 20, 1973 | |||
| Recorded | 1973 at Sunset Sound, Hollywood; Record Plant, New York and The Cooper Mansion, Greenwich, Connecticut | |||
| Genre | Hard rock, glam rock, art rock | |||
| Length | 39:31 | |||
| Label | Warner Bros. | |||
| Producer | Jack Richardson, Jack Douglas | |||
| Alice Cooper chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |
  link
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| Rolling Stone | (mixed) [1] |
| Robert Christgau | (C) link |
Muscle of Love is the seventh studio album by Alice Cooper, released in 1973. It is the final studio album recorded by the original Alice Cooper band.
Cooper stated in an interview at the time of recording that the album marked a return to a basic rock sound. “It’s not complicated in any sense and there’s not a lot of theatricality on it. It’s very basic rock and roll throughout.” Cooper further explained, “Billion Dollar Babies was a studio effort all the way. So was School's Out. It was just so clean that after a few times of hearing it myself, it had no mystery to it. I really wanted this one to have more guts to it. More balls.”
Muscle of Love is the first Alice Cooper album without Bob Ezrin as producer since the pre-stardom Easy Action. The explanation given at the time was that Ezrin was recovering from illness. However, bassist Dennis Dunaway revealed in a 2011 interview that the band split with the producer during an acrimonious rehearsal in which guitarist Michael Bruce stood up to Ezrin and refused to change the arrangement of “Woman Machine”.Jack Richardson and Jack Douglas stepped in to share co-production duties.
Dunaway recalled the album sessions as being very difficult. “The problems on that album were that we could tell that everything was being pulled out from underneath us. As hard as we tried to get it back to where it once was, we had that sinking feeling going on. We wanted to rekindle what the band was about but there was just too much exhaustion by then.”
In a contemporary interview with Circus magazine, Cooper said that a loose concept of “urban sex habits” developed during the album's recording. The title of “Big Apple Dreamin’ (Hippo)’ refers to the Hippopotamus club of New York City which the band used to frequent. "Never Been Sold Before" is the retort of a prostitute to the man she is supporting, and the title track is, according to Cooper, about “sexual awakenings”. “It’s about the kid who just learned how to masturbate, and what all those dirty books his father used to hide are all about.” “Woman Machine” is a science fiction-themed song dating back to the band’s early years and is, as Cooper explained, "basically a chauvinistic song. It’s about a female robot, like Julie Newmar was on that TV program with Bob Cummings. If we had women robots, they could do anything, even sexual things, just by changing their tubes."
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