Why was Trash such a big hit over the superior Hey Stoopid?

[A_MichaelUK]

>After the success of Trash, Alice again was very popular and had a platform to reach and speak to a lot of young people.

Reportedly around that time, Alice was getting a lot of letters from fans who were threatening to commit suicide and I think that fed into the song. Also, there were more explicit references to drugs in the original art - work for the album cover.

[alan1958]

Just a thought -

I wonder if HEY STOOPID would have had more of an impact if Alice's OWN drug-abuse problems were announced to the press to help promotion ?

I realise that this part of Alice's private life was kept under wraps until Bernie Taupin forced the issue in SUPER DUPER , but maybe Shep missed a great chance here .....


A few self- reference lyric changes to HEY STOOPID could elevate that track to the the heights of FROM THE INSIDE ..... .....

[A_MichaelUK]

>I wonder if HEY STOOPID would have had more of an impact if Alice's OWN drug-abuse problems were announced to the press to help promotion ?

Apart from the fact that that is an incredibly cynical question, I doubt that doing that would have made any difference.

[SickThings]

The duet with Ozzy also played heavy into the marketing of the single, however it was not that effective as the song was rather weak for such a great pairing.

Maybe I've just never listened hard enough in the hundreds of times I've heard that song, but I have never heard Ozzy in it. Not in any way that I said, "Oh, that's Ozzy," unlike many of the other guest appearances Ozzy has made on others' songs. I wouldn't have a clue that he performed on it if it hadn't been part of the marketing. Am I alone in never having picked out his voice?

Hunter

[A_MichaelUK]

>Am I alone in never having picked out his voice?

It is buried and hard to find (in the "You know, I know" section) but it is reportedly there.

[RemarkablyInsincere]

Maybe I've just never listened hard enough in the hundreds of times I've heard that song, but I have never heard Ozzy in it. Not in any way that I said, "Oh, that's Ozzy," unlike many of the other guest appearances Ozzy has made on others' songs. I wouldn't have a clue that he performed on it if it hadn't been part of the marketing. Am I alone in never having picked out his voice?

Hunter

You're not alone. I didn't even know he was supposed to be on that song (or didn't remember it).

[pitkin88]

not completely true. "dangerous tonight" and "might as well be on mars" were co written with child.

I was thinking more on the lines of producer. It is odd that, with the biggest success in sales in years, that he never followed up with another Child's produced album. Maybe he didn't like the direction things were going in or couldn't take the sex thing any further.

[A_MichaelUK]

>It is odd that, with the biggest success in sales in years, that he never followed up with another Child's produced album.

I wouldn't go that far - I would bet it often happens. Nile Rodgers didn't produce the album after "Let's Dance", for example.

>Maybe he didn't like the direction things were going in

I wouldn't go that far but he did want a sound that had more textures to it for the next album.

>or couldn't take the sex thing any further.

Well, Alice was primarily responsible for that.

[evil syd]

>The answer is simple.......bigger promotion.The title track itself was promoted to the hilt.

I don’t understand what you’re saying. Are you saying that the single (“Hey Stoopid”) “was promoted to the hilt”? If you are, I don’t understand what you’re referring to in your first sentence. If you're referring to "Trash", it isn't true to say "The title track itself was promoted to the hilt." as that wasn't even a single.

I meant that the song "Poison" was well promoted besides the album, I didn't make sense because I was very drunk at the time I wrote that.

[Toronto Bob]

IMO (odd that one should have to preface that) it was likely just timing. Hair metal had crested by the time Hey Stoopid and grunge was about to sweep the hard rock world.

I'm sure there are other factors too. HS as a song is more than a bit juvenile (something that has worked in Alice's favour in the past). Crappy album art and a simple matter of Trash was a very clear-cut, good, corporate rock/hair metal album.
I put Trash in the bottom third of the AC oeuvre, but admit for what it is, it's very good. HS is more of the same minus the catchy hit single of Poison. Feed My Frankenstein was successful enough but not in the same league as Poison.

The duet with Ozzy is almost false advertising, whereas Steven Tyler's contribution in "Only My Heart Talkin'" is undeniable. OMHT would have been right at home on Aerosmith's Get a Grip album. If Hey Stoopid was as good a lead off track as an Ozzy lead off track then the album would have been in business.

[dadascot]

IMO (odd that one should have to preface that) it was likely just timing. Hair metal had crested by the time Hey Stoopid and grunge was about to sweep the hard rock world.

I'm sure there are other factors too. HS as a song is more than a bit juvenile (something that has worked in Alice's favour in the past). Crappy album art and a simple matter of Trash was a very clear-cut, good, corporate rock/hair metal album.
I put Trash in the bottom third of the AC oeuvre, but admit for what it is, it's very good. HS is more of the same minus the catchy hit single of Poison. Feed My Frankenstein was successful enough but not in the same league as Poison.

The duet with Ozzy is almost false advertising, whereas Steven Tyler's contribution in "Only My Heart Talkin'" is undeniable. OMHT would have been right at home on Aerosmith's Get a Grip album. If Hey Stoopid was as good a lead off track as an Ozzy lead off track then the album would have been in business.

I agree with nearly every point here. Poison and Trash were right place, right time! I wouldn't put trash in my bottom three as it is very special in the Alice canon and still contains several excellent songs.

[A_MichaelUK]

>it was likely just timing. Hair metal had crested by the time Hey Stoopid and grunge was about to sweep the hard rock world.

You will probably have seen that I touched on that in an earlier post. I agree it was a factor eventually because it took a bit of time before that change came into effect and some other artists weren't as affected by it.

[Babysquid]

Hi there!
This is my first post so please be gentle.
From my own point of view the first time I heard "Poison" was my road to Damascus moment. I was a 13 year old kid off school sick watching the TV and the Poison video came on. It completely changed my life. Previously I'd never had the slightest interesting music whatsoever. By the time "Hey Stoopid" came out I'd bought all the previous albums, bootlegs, Freak Out, got into loads of other groups, and was singing in a band and starting out on guitar. When I first heard Hey Stoopid on the radio I was disappointed but not unexpectedly so, we'd had Janes Addiction and Nirvana from the states, and everybody at school was into Carter USM, Indie and Baggy, and hair metal just wasn't cool anymore. I did buy the album but I didn't really like it (except wind up toy). I didn't bother to buy another new Alice album after this which is a shame as I missed out on the Last Temptation for a long time.
One other thing I remember well is that there were a lot of other big albums being released around that time, Dire Straits, Simply Red, Micheal Jackson, U2, Guns n Roses, Nirvana etc, Bryan Adams was dominating the single charts, plus many of the 'cool' Indie bands were realising their debut or sophomore lps. Maybe Alice just got lost in the mele

[darkmenace]

I'm not wild about Trash or Hey Stoopid however some of my favorite Alice tracks are on "Hey Stoopid" and those are Dangerous Tonight (lyrics which can be taken a lot of different ways) and Might As Well Be on Mars. The fact that they were both written with Desmond Child suggests to me that Coop and Desmond could have been a fantastic writing team and I'd have loved Hey Stoopid to have been a different album all with their songs and ditching the teenage sex themes from Trash.

Someone else is welcome to add to this thought but I think Desmond was able to take Alice's basic (sometimes simplistic) songwriting style and arrange the songs in a way that allowed them to breath. They tried to turn Might As Well Be On Mars into an epic and it's much better than a 3-minute version would have been.

[While Heaven Wept]

Hi there!
This is my first post so please be gentle.
From my own point of view the first time I heard "Poison" was my road to Damascus moment. I was a 13 year old kid off school sick watching the TV and the Poison video came on. It completely changed my life. Previously I'd never had the slightest interesting music whatsoever. By the time "Hey Stoopid" came out I'd bought all the previous albums, bootlegs, Freak Out, got into loads of other groups, and was singing in a band and starting out on guitar. When I first heard Hey Stoopid on the radio I was disappointed but not unexpectedly so, we'd had Janes Addiction and Nirvana from the states, and everybody at school was into Carter USM, Indie and Baggy, and hair metal just wasn't cool anymore. I did buy the album but I didn't really like it (except wind up toy). I didn't bother to buy another new Alice album after this which is a shame as I missed out on the Last Temptation for a long time.
One other thing I remember well is that there were a lot of other big albums being released around that time, Dire Straits, Simply Red, Micheal Jackson, U2, Guns n Roses, Nirvana etc, Bryan Adams was dominating the single charts, plus many of the 'cool' Indie bands were realising their debut or sophomore lps. Maybe Alice just got lost in the mele

Good post and I can relate to alot of that. I remember my school friends being into Carter USM (I even got dragged along to one of their gigs in Bristol at the time which was quite funny). Hey Stoopid is a pretty decent album, but you're absolutely right.... it was the wrong album for that time. Heavy metal/Hair metal/whatever you want to call it, became old hat almost overnight in the early 90s. The likes of Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and even REM to some extent... they all made metal seem really rather ridiculous as opposed to this apparently 'serious' brand of rock that they ushered in.

Guns N Roses also had that 'edge' that the likes of Motley Crue, WASP etc had lost. They were more raw, more dangerous and in many ways, simply better than what the rest of the scene were doing. As the 90s dragged on, we (in Britain atleast) had the whole britpop phenomenom with the likes of Blur, Oasis, Supergrass, Pulp, Mansus, Menswear, CAST, Bluetones, Shed Seven.... an endless supply of mostly dull, poorly executed drivel. There was simply no room for metal in those days unless you were the perennials like Maiden, Metallica etc.

And then came nu-metal.......

[A_MichaelUK]

>Someone else is welcome to add to this thought but I think Desmond was able to take Alice's basic (sometimes simplistic) songwriting style and arrange the songs in a way that allowed them to breath.

Although I understand your point, I don't think it's particularly fair in this case because my understanding is that Dick Wagner was the original writer of that song. Also, Alice (possibly because he isn't a musician) isn't a song - writer in the conventional sense (although he almost always comes up with his own melodies) but he is very good at adding to and subtracting from other people's ideas. It just shows how important it is that he has the right collaborator (whether it's a writer or producer) that can allow him to get what he hears in his head onto the finished recording.

[mr.barlow]

I'm not wild about Trash or Hey Stoopid however some of my favorite Alice tracks are on "Hey Stoopid" and those are Dangerous Tonight (lyrics which can be taken a lot of different ways) and Might As Well Be on Mars. The fact that they were both written with Desmond Child suggests to me that Coop and Desmond could have been a fantastic writing team and I'd have loved Hey Stoopid to have been a different album all with their songs and ditching the teenage sex themes from Trash.

Someone else is welcome to add to this thought but I think Desmond was able to take Alice's basic (sometimes simplistic) songwriting style and arrange the songs in a way that allowed them to breath. They tried to turn Might As Well Be On Mars into an epic and it's much better than a 3-minute version would have been.

I'm quite sure that "Might As Well Be On Mars" was a song written mainly by Dick Wagner. I think it was a song written not for Hey Stoopid but prior to that and submitted for Trash. I'm guessing that Alice either added or changed lyrics to the original Wagner penned song. Also, I'm guessing that Desmond Child is given credit for possibly helping with the arrangement and making minor changes--or stricly for financial gains as is sometimes the case with contracts with producers (he was the producer on Trash). Remember--just because someone's name appears on the writing credits does not mean they actualy had anything to do with the writing of the song. Remember--it was Dick Wagner--that wrote "I Love The Dead" and it is credited to the original band (as they bought the song outright). For example--Ozzy Osbourne is credited as a songwriter on nearly every song he ever released and it's no big secret that Ozzy has had nothing to do with the writing of nearly ALL of his songs--even going back to Sabbath. Geezer wrote quite bit of the lyrics back then and Bob Daisley wrote the lyrics to almost every great Ozzy solo song. Ozzy also had nothing to do with the composition of the music--yet he gets credit on each song.

Might As Well Be on Mars is one of the best songs ever recorded by Alice and the late great Dick Wagner deserves the credit for writing this masterpiece. Dick Wagner wrote some of the greatest and best Alice Cooper material.

The Desmond Child songs are what they are--hair metal fluff--that he was well known for writing and producing and from which he made millions of dollars. He should be given credit for helping Alice get back to the very top with Trash. BUT--Desmond Child should NEVER be compared to Dick Wagner. Dick Wagner was a musical genius and an incredibly gifted songwriter who's songs are timeless. Desmond Child wrote juvenile pop rock songs that had the shelf life of 5 years.

The reason the best song on Hey Stoopid is "Might As Well Be On Mars is because it was a Dick Wagner song. The reason Hey Stoopid is way better than Trash is that the songs were NOT written by Desmond Child.

[Rhapsody of Fire]

I'm not wild about Trash or Hey Stoopid however some of my favorite Alice tracks are on "Hey Stoopid" and those are Dangerous Tonight (lyrics which can be taken a lot of different ways) and Might As Well Be on Mars. The fact that they were both written with Desmond Child suggests to me that Coop and Desmond could have been a fantastic writing team and I'd have loved Hey Stoopid to have been a different album all with their songs and ditching the teenage sex themes from Trash.

Someone else is welcome to add to this thought but I think Desmond was able to take Alice's basic (sometimes simplistic) songwriting style and arrange the songs in a way that allowed them to breath. They tried to turn Might As Well Be On Mars into an epic and it's much better than a 3-minute version would have been.

I'm quite sure that "Might As Well Be On Mars" was a song written mainly by Dick Wagner. I think it was a song written not for Hey Stoopid but prior to that and submitted for Trash. I'm guessing that Alice either added or changed lyrics to the original Wagner penned song. Also, I'm guessing that Desmond Child is given credit for possibly helping with the arrangement and making minor changes--or stricly for financial gains as is sometimes the case with contracts with producers (he was the producer on Trash). Remember--just because someone's name appears on the writing credits does not mean they actualy had anything to do with the writing of the song. Remember--it was Dick Wagner--that wrote "I Love The Dead" and it is credited to the original band (as they bought the song outright). For example--Ozzy Osbourne is credited as a songwriter on nearly every song he ever released and it's no big secret that Ozzy has had nothing to do with the writing of nearly ALL of his songs--even going back to Sabbath. Geezer wrote quite bit of the lyrics back then and Bob Daisley wrote the lyrics to almost every great Ozzy solo song. Ozzy also had nothing to do with the composition of the music--yet he gets credit on each song.

Might As Well Be on Mars is one of the best songs ever recorded by Alice and the late great Dick Wagner deserves the credit for writing this masterpiece. Dick Wagner wrote some of the greatest and best Alice Cooper material.

The Desmond Child songs are what they are--hair metal fluff--that he was well known for writing and producing and from which he made millions of dollars. He should be given credit for helping Alice get back to the very top with Trash. BUT--Desmond Child should NEVER be compared to Dick Wagner. Dick Wagner was a musical genius and an incredibly gifted songwriter who's songs are timeless. Desmond Child wrote juvenile pop rock songs that had the shelf life of 5 years. The reason the best song on Hey Stoopid is "Might As Well Be On Mars is because it was a Dick Wagner song. The reason Hey Stoopid is way better than Trash is that the songs were NOT written by Desmond Child.

Poison had the shelf life of 5 years? Still the most popular song of Alice, today.

[mr.barlow]

I'm not wild about Trash or Hey Stoopid however some of my favorite Alice tracks are on "Hey Stoopid" and those are Dangerous Tonight (lyrics which can be taken a lot of different ways) and Might As Well Be on Mars. The fact that they were both written with Desmond Child suggests to me that Coop and Desmond could have been a fantastic writing team and I'd have loved Hey Stoopid to have been a different album all with their songs and ditching the teenage sex themes from Trash.

Someone else is welcome to add to this thought but I think Desmond was able to take Alice's basic (sometimes simplistic) songwriting style and arrange the songs in a way that allowed them to breath. They tried to turn Might As Well Be On Mars into an epic and it's much better than a 3-minute version would have been.

I'm quite sure that "Might As Well Be On Mars" was a song written mainly by Dick Wagner. I think it was a song written not for Hey Stoopid but prior to that and submitted for Trash. I'm guessing that Alice either added or changed lyrics to the original Wagner penned song. Also, I'm guessing that Desmond Child is given credit for possibly helping with the arrangement and making minor changes--or stricly for financial gains as is sometimes the case with contracts with producers (he was the producer on Trash). Remember--just because someone's name appears on the writing credits does not mean they actualy had anything to do with the writing of the song. Remember--it was Dick Wagner--that wrote "I Love The Dead" and it is credited to the original band (as they bought the song outright). For example--Ozzy Osbourne is credited as a songwriter on nearly every song he ever released and it's no big secret that Ozzy has had nothing to do with the writing of nearly ALL of his songs--even going back to Sabbath. Geezer wrote quite bit of the lyrics back then and Bob Daisley wrote the lyrics to almost every great Ozzy solo song. Ozzy also had nothing to do with the composition of the music--yet he gets credit on each song.

Might As Well Be on Mars is one of the best songs ever recorded by Alice and the late great Dick Wagner deserves the credit for writing this masterpiece. Dick Wagner wrote some of the greatest and best Alice Cooper material.

The Desmond Child songs are what they are--hair metal fluff--that he was well known for writing and producing and from which he made millions of dollars. He should be given credit for helping Alice get back to the very top with Trash. BUT--Desmond Child should NEVER be compared to Dick Wagner. Dick Wagner was a musical genius and an incredibly gifted songwriter who's songs are timeless. Desmond Child wrote juvenile pop rock songs that had the shelf life of 5 years. The reason the best song on Hey Stoopid is "Might As Well Be On Mars is because it was a Dick Wagner song. The reason Hey Stoopid is way better than Trash is that the songs were NOT written by Desmond Child.

Poison had the shelf life of 5 years? Still the most popular song of Alice, today.

I would think that "School's Out" or "I'm Eighteen" would be the most popular Alice songs overall. Poison although popular with the fans who discovered Alice in his hair metal years still sounds very dated. I'm not saying it is a bad song--it is by far the best song on Trash but it is what it is--a lightweight hair metal song crafted directly for with the intent of appealing to a specific demographic to give Alice the best chance at chart success in that era.

Trash is corporate rock at it's best (or worst--depending how you look at it). An album carefully contrived, created and marketed to get Alice the quickest way back to the top of the charts. Desmond Child was THE hitmaker of that era and the king of hair metal fluff. The collaboration was a success and the album a smash hit--the plan worked beautifully.

Again--"Poison" does not even close to touching any of the hits written by the original band--or anything ever written by Dick Wagner. Even in the live set list it has always stood out as a song that never really fits. I understand Alice plays it live as it was one of his biggest hits but it doesn't mesh with his overall body of work. Same goes for House Of Fire (a song that is just dreadfully awful). The songs from Constrictor worked live as their overall structure led them to be given a harder edge arrangement. The songs from Trash are lightweight pop songs from an awful period in rock n roll. When you hear them live in a setlist that has great songs like Billion $ Babies, Dwight Frye, Only Women Bleed, etc they then really stand out as very dated and inferior songs.

[Mr.Bluelegs]

I was happy that Alice had a huge hit with the album, but disappointed with most of it. It even sounds worse now. A desperate attempt to sound "current" & generate hits. Never cared much for "Poison", too. Liked the title track and "Maniac" but not much else. Hey Stoopid was a huge improvement.