page_title: Love It to Death
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Love It to Death / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Joey Ramone and Johnny Ramone.
context_page_description: Love It to Death is the third studio album by American rock group Alice Cooper, released in March 1971. It was the band's first commercially successful album and the first album that consolidated the band's aggressive hard-rocking sound. The album's best-known track, "I'm Eighteen", was released as a single to test the band's commercial viability before the album was recorded.
  Formed in the mid-1960s, the band took the name Alice Cooper in 1968 and became known for its outrageous theatrical live shows. The loose, psychedelic freak rock of the first two albums failed to find an audience. The band moved to Detroit in 1970 where they were influenced by the aggressive hard rock scene. A young Bob Ezrin was enlisted as producer; he encouraged the band to tighten its songwriting over two months of rehearsing ten to twelve hours a day. The single "I'm Eighteen" achieved top-forty success soon after, peaking at No. 21. This convinced Warner Bros. that Alice Cooper had the commercial potential to release an album. After its release in March 1971, Love It to Death reached No. 35 on the Billboard 200 albums chart and has since been certified platinum.
context_section_description: Love It to Death is seen as one of the foundational albums of the heavy metal sound, along with contemporary releases by Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and others. A review in British magazine Melody Maker called it "an album for the punk and pimply crowd" a few years before punk rock became a phenomenon. Pioneer punk band the Ramones found inspiration in Alice Cooper's music and Love It to Death in particular. Vocalist Joey Ramone based the group's first song, "I Don't Care", on the chords of the main riff to "I'm Eighteen". John Lydon wrote the song "Seventeen" on the Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bollocks in response to "I'm Eighteen", and is said to have auditioned for the Sex Pistols by miming to an Alice Cooper song—most frequently reported as "I'm Eighteen". Love It to Death inspired Pat Smear to pick up the guitar at age twelve; he went on to co-found the Germs, tour as second guitarist for Nirvana, and play rhythm guitar for the Foo Fighters.
  Hit Parader included Love It to Death in its heavy metal Hall of Fame in 1982, and placed the album twenty-first on its list of "Top 100 Metal Albums" in 1989. In 2012 it was ranked No. 454 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Greg Prato of AllMusic called Love It to Death "an incredibly consistent listen from beginning to end" and "the release when everything began to come together for the band". To Pete Prown and HP Newquist, the groups's theatrical arrangements help its two guitarists "[transcend] the all-too-common clichés" in their simple hard-rock riffing and soloing "that were part and parcel of early seventies rock".
  The band was pleased with the collaboration with Ezrin, and he remained their producer (with the exception of Muscle of Love, released in 1973) until Cooper's first solo album, Welcome to My Nightmare in 1975. Love It to Death launched Ezrin's own production career, which went on to include prominent albums such as Aerosmith's Get Your Wings (1974), Kiss's Destroyer (1976), and Pink Floyd‘s The Wall (1979).
  Songs from Love It to Death continued to be frequent requests long after Cooper went solo. In response, when writing material for his 1989 album Trash, Cooper and producer Desmond Child spent time listening to Love it to Death and the band's 1974 Greatest Hits album to "find that vibe and match it to" a style appropriate to the 1990s.
  Thrash metal band Anthrax included a cover of "I'm Eighteen" on its debut album Fistful of Metal in 1984. Alternative metal band the Melvins covered "Second Coming" and "Ballad of Dwight Fry" on their album Lysol in 1992. The song "Dreamin'" on the 1998 Kiss album Psycho Circus bears such a resemblance to "I'm Eighteen" that a month after the album's release Cooper's publisher filed a plagiarism suit, settled out of court in Cooper's favor. Swedish death metal band Entombed released an EP in 1999 entitled Black Juju that included a cover of "Black Juju".
  Alternative rock band Sonic Youth recorded covers of "Hallowed Be My Name" (as "Hallowed Be Thy Name") and "Is It My Body"—the latter of which is bassist Kim Gordon's favorite of her own vocal performances. Gordon used the song's title for a 1993 essay on the artist Mike Kelley, in which she described the Coopers as "anti-hippie[s] reveling in the aesthetics of the ugly". The essay appeared in 2014 in a collection by Gordon also titled Is It My Body?
caption: Joey Ramone (left) wrote the first Ramones song "I Don't Care", based on the chords to "I'm Eighteen".
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