Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! My Adventures in The Alice Cooper Group finds itself, on the surface, telling a story so familiar that it’s hard to imagine any band emerging from the 1970s without tales of the clichéd triad of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. What makes this one different from so many of the others is bassist Dennis Dunaway’s gift for the written word. His recollections are sharper, crisper, and funnier than the standard fare; his viewpoint accountable, but his candor unencumbered. The Alice Cooper Group ran in circles, in some ways literally, with the likes of Jim Morrison and Frank Zappa during a time before Los Angeles had become its own cliché. It makes for some rather unexpected and pleasingly human portraits of youth and abandon in Southern California that are far more interesting than quantities of drugs and bedded women. In many instances, Dunaway’s memoire of The Alice Cooper Group is also quite sad, as bandmates succumb to the offstage demons that were as damaging as the onstage ones were entertaining. This isn’t news- nearly every successful group experienced some form of travail and tragedy during the decade- but in Dunaway’s hands it’s a more concentrated, more affecting loss than hazard of the trade.