Alice Cooper - Neal Smith's Billion Dollar Babies 1973 Tour Premier Mirror Ball Drum Set....

Description

As a founding member of the original Alice Cooper group, drummer extraordinaire Neal Smith is an integral thread to the fabric of Rock & Roll. Along with his cohorts - bassist Dennis Dunaway, guitarists Michael Bruce and the late Glen Buxton, and larger-than-life vocalist Alice Cooper - Smith helped to invent, innovate, and define a new style of shocking, theatrical Rock. Birthed from garage-Rock act the Spiders, the Alice Cooper group began in the realm of Psychedelic weirdness, releasing the albums Pretties for You and Easy Action in 1969 and 1970, respectively. To match their musical freak-outs, the group donned the weirdest clothes they could find, and when they couldn't, Smith's sister Cindy Smith fashioned out-there threads for the boys. On 1971's Love it to Death, the group shed many of their Psychedelic and Progressive trappings for a more streamlined Hard Rock sound that was more direct in some ways, while upping the weird-factor in others. The band incorporated ghoulish, shocking elements - such as blood, snakes, faux-executions, and Cooper's ghastly, trademark makeup - into their stage show, and wrote a song here or there centering on explicitly horrific subject matter. Subsequent albums, Killer (1971), School's Out (1972), Billion Dollar Babies (1973), and Muscle of Love (1974), were all massive successes that continued the group's innovative mixture of glam and gore, and introduced the term Shock Rock to the world's youth, cementing their place in the history of pop culture. Every bit as important as Alice Cooper's image, was their musicianship. They were all incredibly adept, perhaps none more so than percussive machine Neal Smith, whose drumming is an incredible mixture of fluidity, flair, and precision. Smith and his former bandmates now sit alongside exalted Rock royalty Elvis, the Beatles and the Stones, as on March 14, 2011, they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Before there was Goth, Glam, Punk, or Heavy Metal, there was Alice Cooper. Here we present amazing memorabilia from the group's historic rise, never before offered to the public anywhere.