Classic Rock
“Maryann Cotton’s Chester Rose” comes out on 30 October through Deko Entertainment. Twelve songs, written by Alice Cooper, Dick Wagner and Maryann Cotton, tell the story of a rock star who turns into a serial killer.
Cooper and Wagner conceived it years ago as a theatrical concept album in the spirit of “Welcome To My Nightmare”, meant for both record and television, and from the start they imagined a younger voice carrying it. Wagner found Cotton, took him under his wing and introduced him to Cooper; the Danish singer left Copenhagen and moved to Los Angeles to work on it. Pre-production was done and several versions were developed, but the album was never recorded: Wagner died on 30 July 2014, aged 71, shortly before the project was due to enter the studio.
Cotton went back to it two years ago. He reopened the original Pro Tools sessions and restored Wagner’s riffs and solos, cleaning them up and mixing them again. Steve Hunter, the other half of Cooper’s seventies guitar partnership, worked across the whole record, and Tommy Henriksen, of the Hollywood Vampires, played rhythm and lead guitar. It is the last released recording on which Hunter and Wagner both play.
The first single, “Thief Of Hearts”, is out now, with Wagner and Henriksen on guitars. “‘Thief Of Hearts’ was one of the first songs Dick Wagner and Alice Cooper had written for the concept, and one of the very first songs Dick ever played for me,” Cotton says. “I wanted to stay as true as possible to Alice’s original vocal lines and phrasing from the original version that was presented to me. I remember hearing the song for the first time and being completely blown away. As a lifelong Alice Cooper fan, it immediately took me back to somewhere between 1975 and 1977.”
The running order ends with “Blood Lust” and “The Funeral Song”.
Text by Enric Vilaplana