It seems preposterous to say that the guitarist who wrote Alice Cooper classics School’s Out, I’m Eighteen and Elected is underrated – that the player who lit up the unimpeachable Billion Dollar Babies does not get his dues – but consider this: when was the last time you heard Glen Buxton’s name when talking about hard-rock’s GOAT?
This discursive oversight has not gone unnoticed, and one player who has been paying attention all this time is new Alice Cooper hire, Gyasi Heus, the über-glam Les Paul-wielding hot-shot who has just made his debut on The Revenge of Alice Cooper – remarkably the first album from the Alice Cooper Band since 1973’s carnal shock-fest Muscle of Love.
Speaking to Guitar Player, Heus says Alice Cooper is underrated. Period. But everyone is sleeping on Buxton’s gifts as a guitar player who knows exactly what’s required to make the song work.
“I felt like Alice Cooper is underrated – at least to me in my world,” he says. “Man, what a great band. The riffs, the guitar playing just caught my ear much more than it ever had before.
“I think Glen is a hugely underrated guitar player; the parts are so right, and maybe that was part of the reason I had overlooked it before and not really noticed it, because it was so perfect and almost doesn’t stand out as, ‘Oh, wow, what a flashy, exciting guitar player.’”
Heus has a point. Think of those classic Cooper cuts and it’s not the solos that come to mind. It’s the jangly anarchy of the School’s Out riff, the wide-open spaces in the chord changes of I’m Eighteen.
Heus argues that guitar duos don’t get much better than Buxton and Michael Bruce – and Buxton’s guitar, that is the song’s quintessence.
“You take that away and you lose the whole song,” he continues. “And then Glen and Mike were just a perfect team.”
With the Alice Cooper Band back online, it made sense for the Godfather of Shock to reach out to long-time collaborator Bob Ezrin to produce The Revenge… Ezrin’s magic touch in the control room yielded the band a four-album hot streak that began with Love It to Death (1971) and culminated in its highest-grossing album, Billion Dollar Babies (1973).
Ezrin agrees with Heus, and he witnessed Buxton’s greatness at first hand.
“Glen was unique and different from any other guitar player I’ve ever worked with,” says Ezrin. “Sometimes he was so off the wall it was hard to know where the notes were coming from, and sometimes so spot-on that all of us would look at each other and just nod and say, ‘That’s our Glen.’”
Heus brings a similar energy to the role. Ezren says “he was full of Glen already” when they reached out to him. And Heus’s glam image is 24/7.
“When he played with the band – just two songs to see if there was chemistry there and whether the sound was reminiscent of the original Alice Cooper group,” says Ezra. “He fit right in. Early on he started playing some really cool guitar lines, and the guys were looking around going, ‘That’s kinda great!’”
And you can judge this for yourself soon. The Revenge of Alice Cooper is available to pre-order, out July 25 via earMUSIC.
