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Pitched somewhere between the nagging ner-ner-ne-ner-ners of the class clown and the staccato clarion blasts of Miles Davis’s Milestones, School’s Out’s opening guitar riff is the unmistakable sound of youth gone wild. Chuck Berry’s idealised, sweet sixteen American dream skewed through the dark prism of vintage Who Shepherd’s Bush surliness.
Guitarist Glen Buxton had been playing with the riff for some time, imbuing it with the hoodlum cool that characterised his magnetic whatcha-rebelling-against? street-punk personality, so when Alice Cooper – still the name of the band, not just their singer – were looking for a signature song for an album initially envisaged as a concept work about high school, Buxton’s delinquent riff fit the bill perfectly.
"Shep [Gordon, Alice’s manager] called me and said: 'I think you need to come out here immediately, because they’ve come out with this really great riff and want to do a single called School’s Out,' producer Bob Ezrin told Classic Rock. "So I got to the rehearsal studio, and Glen had that fantastic riff. They’d not yet quite developed the 'No more pencils, no more books' section, but the riff was there and the germ for the chorus was there, and the whole thing came together in an afternoon.
"It was almost… I don’t want to say easy, nothing great is ever easy, but it was almost an out-of-body experience for everybody because it just took on a momentum and a life of its own. The ideas were flowing almost sequentially and perfectly complementarily, and it made it possible for us just to put it together and stand back and listen to it that afternoon and go: 'Oh boy, this is great. We have a record.'"
Alice had set out to capture "the greatest three minutes of your life… the last three minutes of the last day of school…" and it couldn’t fail. We’ve all been there. All dreamt of ‘no more pencils, no more books’, imagined ourselves dancing on the smoking ruins of a school that’s been mysteriously ‘blown to pieces’.
School’s Out arrived into the summer of 1972 as an irresistible force. Alice and his Coopers (Buxton, Dennis Dunaway, Michael Bruce, Neal Smith) looked exactly like everything your parents had ever warned you against: the most unsavoury characters extant. The sort of people that, in between chugs of Thunderbird, would casually obliterate your school.
Meanwhile, behind the horror of their collective public image, the band were compositional perfectionists. In the rehearsal room, they’d swap song sections around on a blackboard. Once producer Bob Ezrin had applied his studio sorcery to proceedings, classics transformed into epics.
There’s a lot to love about School’s Out. The way Dunaway and Smith’s bass and drums lock together on the choruses, pounding out a facsimile of countless feet marching toward the school gates. Buxton’s stinging guitar inserts. The choir of school children that emerge from the growing ferment like Midwich brats with serious issues, bad attitudes and axes to grind. The way they ultimately explode into joyous squeals at the sound of the final bell.
But School’s Out’s finest ingredient, its ‘Hope I die before I get old’ passport to mortality moment, comes at the end of verse two. As Alice spits ‘We can’t even think of a word that rhymes,’ literally millions of tongue-tied, hormone-pumped, inarticulate teens identify like mad. Eddie Cochran would have been proud.
"As soon as we heard it, we looked at each other and gasped, 'This is gonna be a monster," Cooper remembered. And he was right. School's Out hit the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic (topping the chart in the UK) and ranked #75 on Billboard's year-end chart.
"When we did School's Out, I knew we had just done the national anthem," Cooper later told Esquire. "I've become the Francis Scott Key of the last day of school."
Meanwhile, School's Out (the album), bolstered by the enormity of its anthemic title track, quickly became the biggest-selling album in Warners’ history and, thanks to a frenzied tabloid press virtually foaming at the mouth with a level of hyperbolic vitriol unseen since the advent of the Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper became the most newsworthy and controversial band on the planet.
