Speaking to Sonic Perspectives, original Alice Cooper Group drummer Neal Smith talked spoke about his solo album, POP 85/95, being politically incorrect and how Cooper’s famous track, “School’s Out”, would be too politically incorrect to release today.

SP: Speaking of politically incorrect, if “School’s Out” was written today, it would be quite controversial in this politically correct world.

Smith: “I agree 100%. I have thought about that a lot of times. The lyrics ‘School’s been blown to pieces’ is obviously a time capsule of the early ‘70s. Nobody would ever say that now. The best video of that song was on The Simpsons when they trashed the school. It’s so Alice Cooper and rock ‘n’ roll to trash everything. It’s purely theatrical; nobody wants anyone to get hurt or explode anything. It’s no different than Saturday at the movies, its entertainment. That’s what we were doing. I’m sure some places would take certain lines out of the song before playing. I would never write a song like that now. I live a few miles from Newtown, Connecticut, where the tragedy at the elementary school happened. I would never say something that could be catastrophic to a school. We were criticized for a lot of the things that we did with Alice Cooper; I could only imagine if we did it now. That’s one side of the coin; the other side is that this type of stuff will happen anyway. You are stuck between a rock and a hard place. I get emails from new and longtime fans who are school teachers, and they tell me they played that song at the end of the school year for their class. Some have even been principals and played the song through the loudspeaker. God bless them, that’s so rocking and cool. I’m humbled. All five of us wrote that song as well as ‘Elected’ and ‘I’m Eighteen’ that is why all of our names appear on the credits. We were just writing it to put on the album; we didn’t know that 45 years later, it would be played around the world. I’m glad it did, and I’m glad Alice is still out there. He would still be out there if it weren’t for the pandemic. We used to threaten a lot of people back in the day. We were politically incorrect then, and I’m sure we would be now to some degree.”

Smith will be released a new album on June 1. Neal's new retro pop album is titled POP 85/95, signifying the music style and time period in which Neal wrote these songs between 1985 and 1995. The songs and album concept are totally sexy and politically incorrect. Neal's POP 85/95 songs represent all aspects of relationships, falling in and out of love in a simpler bygone era before Coronavirus, politically correctness and the new world disorder.

With the onslaught of glam hair bands and heavily homogenized rock of the 1980's, Neal Smith, Hall of Fame drummer and founding member of the original Alice Cooper Group, was looking for a new direction for his songwriting. Inspired by another drummer, songwriter, singer Phil Collins, Neal turned from writing hard rock to a slicker, more pop rock songwriting style. In the late 1980's he took four of his new songs into the studio and recorded them. One of the songs, “Secret Eyes”, helped land a recording deal with newly formed record company called Grudge Records.

Along with Dennis Dunaway (Alice Cooper fame), Joe Bouchard (Blue Oyster Cult fame), Charlie Hune (Ted Nugent fame) and lead guitarist Jay Jesse Johnson (also known as “Triple J”), a new band called Deadringer was formed and signed by Grudge Records. Deadringer recorded an album in 1989 called Electrocution Of The Heart featuring the single “Secret Eyes”. The album and Deadringer were all short lived after Grudge Records' quick demise. After Deadringer and well into the 1990's, Neal continued writing songs with Jay Jesse Johnson (“Triple J”) in this pop rock style.

Decades later, well into the New Millennium, Neal was searching through his archives of music and found those songs that he composed and recorded with 'Triple J” between the years of 1985 and 1995. Inspired by “Triple J's” amazing lead guitar work, Neal polished the songs and brought them back to life with the help of two of his best friends, Peter Catucci (bass guitar of Killsmith) and Rick Tedesco (guitarist/engineer). Now, much to the excitement of his fans worldwide, Neal Smith's POP 85/95 is available digitally and on CD.

Says Smith: "In the 80’s and 90’s rap, hip hop, pop and even rock music was being recorded with synthesized programmed drums. I understood that this was a new wave of recording percussion. But what I did not like was many of the synthesized drum tracks were being programmed by engineers and musicians who were not even drummers. Disappointed and inspired by that fact, I began a new phase of songwriting by programming synthesized drums on my recordings. The last eight songs on my new CD POP 85/95 is a collection of songs I wrote from that era featuring synth drums I programmed myself.

Order the album here, or here.