Alice Cooper
Memorial Auditorium
Buffalo, NY
November 12, 1987

Taper: }{eywood
Lineage: Master cassette (TDK SA90) > Adobe Audition (NR, EQ, stereo simualting, limiting, track indexing) > TLH (SBE fix, flac 8)

Well here we have the second worst sounding tape I ever made (The honor of worst goes to Fight at Blind Mellon's). But at least there's an interesting story behind it. My future ex-wife was pretty good at getting backstage at concerts. She and her sister were both pretty hot teenage girls from New Zealand, and besides being hot the accent seemed to influence a lot of people around bands. In this case the sister knew someone that worked at 107.7 The Bear and was let in on the information that Alice Cooper and Kane Roberts, his guitarist at the time, were going to be at the station doing promo recordings the night before the show. So off we all went to The Bear, and the employee let us sneak in to the station and meet Alice. The manager that was with him was not to happy that we did this and was being a dick to us, but Alice was the greatest guy, even allowing us all to escort him back to his hotel room a short distance from the station. At this point he wanted to provide us with backstage passes for the following night's show, but the dickhead manager wouldn't cough them up.
The next night we all went to the concert, which I recorded with one of those crappy desktop Panasonic tape recorders with the speaker above the tape player. Not a machine meant to record loud music with, hence the distortion and tonal neutrality. It was a last minute decision to try to bootleg the show, and that was all I had available that was portable (and concealable). After the show we all snuck around in the Aud and somehow (I really have no idea how we did this, but we repeated the same move with Motley Crue) we all ended up in the bus garage underneath the venue. We soon found our way to the spot where the meet & greet with Alice was going on. The people with the passes were gathered with the stuff they wanted autographed, but Alice had yet to arrive. The security people were about to remove us because we had no passes, but then Alice made his appearance. He told them to let us through because he knew us from the night before, and then he yelled at his manager for not giving us the passes in the first place.
When our place in line finally got to him I realized I was woefully unprepared and had nothing to get autographed, so I had him sign my jean jacket, the back of which was painted with and acrylic reproduction of Gerald Scarfe's screaming head painting from The Wall. This didn't faze Alice. He said "Pink Floyd, huh? Well we have the same record label," and then proceeded to sign above the painting. (This started a trend of me having the jacket signed by rock stars, among them Eric Carr, Bruce Kulick and Gene Simmons of KISS, Mickey Dee of King Diamond, Steve Clark and Phil Collen of Def Leppard, David Gilmour and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, Zakk Wylde, the guitarists from Tesla, Joe Belladonna from Anthrax and a few others). Then I remembered that I had one thing made of paper on me...the index card from the tape I taped the show with. So I pulled out this tape and told Alice that I just bootlegged the show. He was amused and signed the tape and the card, telling me that I now owned the only authorized Alice Cooper bootleg.
So here it is: the world's only official Alice Cooper bootleg, recognized and authorized by Alice himself, in all its ultra-shitty quality. If only I had planned this better and used a real recorder, gotten a decent recording, I could be really proud of this. But I didn't, and I've avoided transferring it to digital until now because it was just too crappy to bother. But since no one else taped this show I now decided it was time to digitize it for the future.

01 Intro
02 Teenage Frankenstein
03 No More Mr. Nice Guy
04 Billion Dollar Babies
05 Is It My Body
06 Eighteen
07 Go To Hell
08 Prince Of Darkness
09 Chop Chop Chop
10 Gail
11 Roses On White Lace
12 Only Women Bleed
13 Devil's Food
14 Black Widow
15 Dead Babies
16 Killer
17 School's Out (with solos for all band members)
18 Freedom
19 Under My Wheels

note: The opening act for this was former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley's new group Frehley's Comet, which I also taped and will post separately