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.
Read more about this topic: Michael Owen Bruce
Famous quotes containing the words billion, dollar and/or babies:
“Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production—only to produce a race of bed-wetters!”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The loosening, for some people, of rigid role definitions for men and women has shown that dads can be great at calming babies—if they take the time and make the effort to learn how. It’s that time and effort that not only teaches the dad how to calm the babies, but also turns him into a parent, just as the time and effort the mother puts into the babies turns her into a parent.”
—Pamela Patrick Novotny (20th century)