Artist: Alice Cooper
Album: Trash
I actually purchased this album at the same time as Richie Sambora’s Stranger In This Town. (There’s a Random Song pick for Rosie too.) This was the one that I listened to on the drive home that day. I initially bought this album for no better reason than that I had discovered the video for Poison on the internet and loved the song. Since I was already ordering Stranger, I just tacked Trash onto the order as well.
I can understand why the purists among Alice’s fans don’t like this album. It sounds like hair metal. (Well, actually, it sounds like it was produced and heavily co-written by Desmond Child, which it was.) However, it was a perfect fit for pop radio in its day. And it also explains why I was instantly attracted to the songs from this album.
That first day, driving home in the car, something about Hell Is Living Without You stood out in particular. It sounded an awful lot like a Bon Jovi song. I initially just wrote it off to recognizing Child’s writing style as a common influence. It wasn’t until I got it home and actually checked all the songwriter credits that I discovered that Jon and Richie actually were co-writers on the song as well.
If you listen closely to the song, you can hear a lot of the same lyrical qualities that Jon and Richie bring to their power ballads. They have a singular ability to create emotionally powerful lyrics while at the same time delivering solid rock in a tidy, radio-friendly form. Alice Cooper’s influence on the songwriting is also a powerful presence, bringing a darker, more menacing tone than is present in Bon Jovi’s work. (Only Alice could take what is fundamentally an intense, beautiful love song and make it feel menacing. It’s his gift.)
The unfortunate thing about this is that this is a really under-appreciated song. (It doesn’t get played anywhere, not even on the Boneyard on XM.) The album was disowned by Alice’s hardcore fans because it represented too drastic a shift in sound. If this song had been released by Bon Jovi, this song has all of the makings of a hit (at least in my opinion). It would certainly fit in right alongside all the rest of Bon Jovi’s power ballads.
This is still one of my favorite songs of all time. I still stop whatever I’m doing when I hear it come up on the stereo and sing along, with hand gestures. I have a weakness for all the bombast of big power ballads, and Hell Is Living Without You delivers on all counts. Plus, the extra bit of a dark edge that Alice brings to it makes it deliciously different from every other power ballad that I’ve ever heard.
I’d love to hear Richie perform this song, but seeing as how they reverted right back to doing I’ll Be There For You instead of These Days, the chances of hearing something like this performed is nonexistent.