Michael Bruce “has always been kind of the riffmeister of the band, and a really good pop writer,” says frequent Alice Cooper producer Bob Ezrin. “He was very much the sort of prime motivator of the pop stuff we did with the original Alice Cooper group.”
And nowhere was that more true than the 1973 single “No More Mr. Nice Guy.”
The third single from the band’s Billion Dollar Babies album was also its third highest-charting effort, reaching number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 behind only “School’s Out” (number seven) and “I’m Eighteen” (number 21). It also helped power the album to the top of the Billboard 200 chart for the first and only time in Cooper’s career.
Cooper, who wrote the song’s lyrics, says he saw its potential immediately.
“It had all these open areas in it,” he explains, singing the tune’s Rolling Stones–like opening electric guitar riff. “It was a great hook. And a song like that — you try to make it as simple as possible.
“We didn’t want to give up being Alice Cooper, but at the same time, that was probably the most pop song we ever did — that and ‘Be My Lover.’ And both of those are Michael Bruce songs.”
Bruce, the group’s lead guitarist and primary music writer during the ’70s, tells Guitar Player that “No More Mr. Nice Guy” had actually been around for awhile before it was tapped for Billion Dollar Babies. “I had written it after Love It to Death and before Killer (both in 1971), and then Schools Out (1972),” he recalls. “I kept pushing and bringing the song up, but it didn’t fit. It was too pop.
“By the time Billion Dollar Babies came around, it fit. It was perfect for that album.”
Well, almost perfect. Bruce had originally written it from the perspective of a guy whose girlfriend uses him for a doormat.
“The original lyrics went, ‘I used to be such a sweet sweet thing, but that was just a burn / I used to break my back just to kiss her ass, got nothing in return,’” Bruce says.
“So I gave the song to Alice and he changed it — made it about himself and the press.”
By then Cooper’s increasingly shocking stage show had begun to alarm parents and led the BBC to ban the video for “School’s Out.” With Cooper’s rewrite, “No More Mr. Nice Guy” became an anthem to nonconformity while providing a back story to Alice’s outlandish behavior.
“Everybody was like, ‘You’re a weird boy — playing with snakes, cutting up babies,’” Bruce recalls. “His mother used to say, ‘What are you doing out there? You should be a good Christian boy!’
“So he wrote it about him being converted to No More Mr. Nice Guy.”
Bruce says he wasn’t pleased about the song’s revision initially. “I was kinda like, ‘Why don’t you do it the way it is?’ But I got over it.”
As for the song’s riff, there was no specific impetus for it.
“I was just playing, trying stuff,” he says. “It’s an A chord but it’s played in the fifth position, and it’s melodic. It starts to carry the melody as it descends down the scale — that’s the best way I can describe it.”
Cooper has kept “No More Mr. Nice Guy” a staple of his concert sets over the years. He says he received new insights to the song when the Who’s Roger Daltrey — joined by Slash, Alice in Chains’ bassist Mike Inez, guitarist Bob Kulick, drummer Carmine Appice and others — covered it for the Humanary Stew: A Tribute to Alice Cooper album in 1999.
“Roger said, ‘That song just felt so easy and natural to sing’ And I said, ‘Well, it should. It’s ‘Substitute!'” Cooper recalls, referring to the Who’s 1966 U.K. hit single.
“And Roger went, ‘Oh yeah, that’s why it feels so natural.'”
Cooper says hearing Daltrey sing “No More Mr. Nice Guy” was a revelation.
“I never realized how close it was to ‘Substitute’ before,” he explains. “It just has that same exact feel. When you listen to the Who, most of their stuff was pop songs — hard pop, not your normal pop songs, but still pop.”
Billion Dollar Babies was, until now, the penultimate album by the original Alice Cooper Band, which split up after 1973’s Muscle of Love. Cooper, Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neil Smith have regrouped for a new album, The Revenge of Alice Cooperdue out July 25, with the late Glen Buxton represented on one of the new songs as well as a bonus track, “Return of the Spiders 2025,” an upgraded remix of a track from the group’s second album, 1970’s Easy Action.
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