Michael Owen Bruce - Billion Dollar Babies

Billion Dollar Babies

'Billion Dollar Babies' was the name of the band founded in 1976 by Michael Bruce, Mike Marconi, Dennis Dunaway, Bob Dolin, and Neal Smith after they split from Alice Cooper in 1974. Bruce's solo album (In My Own Way) had been sold to Polydor in Germany. Polydor did a very limited test pressing and decided to shelve it without release. Originally, 'Billion Dollar Babies' started out in the hope that Alice would return and Battleaxe would be the new record from the Alice Cooper Group. As history will show, that wasn't the outcome. Everyone decided to proceed without Alice. Time Magazine featured the group in a brief but hopeful write-up in 1977. There had been a fantastic and very theatrical stage show planned in which Bruce and Marconi would battle each other in the fashion of gladiators. In spite of the positive start, the band was embroiled in a legal suit over the use of the name. The tour was quite brief, as well (The very imaginative stage show was far too costly, as it would turn out.) Their only release was 1977's Battleaxe. Unfortunately, the Battleaxe record lost any momentum it had when it was recalled for mastering problems which caused the turntable needle to skip. Bruce, Dunaway and Smith had also invested a large sum of their own money in the project. Jack Douglas, who had worked on Muscle of Love with Jack Richardson, was hired to fix the mastering problem. With so many problems weighing them down, the group disbanded.