Poison

In this song, Cooper sings about a girl who is bad for him, but he can't resist her charms. There is an element of masochism in the song, as Alice sings, "I want to hurt you just to hear you screaming my name." The song tied "School's Out" for Cooper's highest chart placing in the US.

Cooper wrote this song with Desmond Child, which is one of the more effective ways to produce a hit. A decade earlier, Child wrote "I Was Made For Lovin' You" with members of Kiss, which opened the door for outside writers in Rock bands. His next gig was Bon Jovi, resulting in their breakout hits "You Give Love A Bad Name" and "Livin' On A Prayer." Child, who also produced the Meat Loaf album Bat Out of Hell III, told Songfacts about writing with artists who take on characters in their acts. "It's a fine line between somebody telling the true story of their life in a song and also what their character type calls for," said Child. "It's a blending when it comes to something like that. With Alice Cooper, it's a little bit different, and Meat Loaf, also. Those are true theatrical characters. Alice Cooper, his real name is Vincent Furnier, and Meat Loaf's name is Michael Aday. They created their characters. Both of them started out the same - Alice Cooper was the name of his band and then everybody started calling him Alice Cooper. And the same thing for Meat Loaf. His band was called Meat Loaf, and then people started calling him Meat Loaf. For both of them, it evoked personalities that are so over the top, and so their music really worked theatrically."

This was Cooper's first music video to get rotation on MTV. He broke new ground in 1975 when he turned the stage show for his Welcome To My Nightmare tour into a full movie, which laid the foundation for Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video - both clips were narrated by Vincent Price. With "Poison," Cooper tapped into the MTV audience for the first time and became far more relevant to the younger generation, who got the joke when he showed up in the movie Wayne's World in 1992.