I'm Eighteen

This song is about the feelings of a frustrated teenager, which described many of Alice Cooper's fans. Eighteen was an interesting age in America at the time, as in many states you had to be older to drink alcohol or vote, but you could be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. The group's drummer, Neal Smith, told Songfacts: "It was a song about growing up in the '60s, with lines in it like you could go to war but you couldn't vote. We had no idea it would become an anthem; we were just thinking it would be a cool song." Perhaps the politicians were listening: In 1971, the year after the song was released, the 26th Amendment passed, lowering the voting age to 18 across America.

The band ("Alice Cooper" was the name of both the lead singer and the group at the time) wrote the song in the summer of 1970 when they were living in a dorm house in Cincinnati. Their drummer, Neil Smith, told Songfacts how the song came together: "We were getting a lot of work in Ohio and Michigan; we were working and writing all the time. We had access to a club and we rehearsed there if we weren't playing a show. Mike Bruce (guitarist) had this idea for a song called 'I'm Eighteen.' At first it was almost like a Pink Floyd kind of thing. We'd always been two guitars, bass, drums and the lead singer. Michael was well versed as a keyboard player. So we got a Farfisa organ and he wrote the song on that. The intro was kind of a melodic, haunting tune that built and built."

"I'm Eighteen" was eight minutes long in it's original form. The group had an elaborate stage show with lots of gore and histrionics, so they wrote longer songs that would give them time to build a story with their visuals. An 8-minute freakout was fine for a live performance, but the group needed a hit: their first album had made #199 on the charts, and their next one didn't chart at all. They were signed to Frank Zappa's Straight Records label, but when Zappa's interest waned, the Straight's parent company, Warner, took over the band and made them produce a 4-song demo to prove their worth. They went to the producer Jack Richardson, who had worked with the Guess Who, looking for help. Richardson wanted nothing to do with them, but he dispatched a young producer working at his Nimbus 9 studios named Bob Ezrin to see the band perform. Ezrin went to New York and saw them perform this song at a club called Max's Kansas City. The band was so raw that Ezrin thought Cooper was singing "I'm Edgy," but he saw lots of potential in the group and in the song. Alice Cooper recorded their four-song demo with Ezrin at RCA Studios in Chicago, and "I'm Eighteen" was the standout track. With Ezrin at the controls, they polished the song down to 2:56. The label was impressed, the song became a hit, and Ezrin continued to work with the band, helping them craft radio-friendly rock songs without compromising their caliginous image. Neal Smith told us, "We were playing every night on stage. We knew how to get a crowd excited. We were like a pot ready to boil over. But the heat wasn't hot enough yet. We always worked with a total group effort, everybody collaborating, everybody making suggestions. But Bob became like the 6th member of the band. He was the one person who had the final word."