The Ballad of Dwight Fry

My narcissistic love affair with my new recording equipment continues. This is a 2 AM version of Alice Cooper's 1971 Ballad of Dwight Fry. I played this song for a friend a week or two ago, and her reaction was, "I didn't know Alice Cooper wrote good songs." Yes. Alice Cooper crafted smart, quirky pop gems, and to the twelve or thirteen year-old young Tim Harris, this song was deeply meaningful. I'm not exactly sure why. I identified with it. I still do. The song is off the uniformly brilliant Love It To Death album, best known for his breakthrough hit, "I'm Eighteen." Last year I posted an amazing version of Alice's Is It My Body, also from that record, which remains one of my favorite YouTube music videos of all time.

Dwight Frye (1899-1943) was an early horror movie actor, "The Man with the Thousand-Watt Stare," who specialized in playing the mentally imbalanced. The song is written around a character he may have played. Frye can be seen in his full glory below in his 1933 The Vampire Bat.