Writers: Alice Cooper and Dick Wagner
Producer: Bob Ezrin
Recorded: Fall 1974 in New York City
Released: February 1975
| Players: | Alice Cooper — vocals Dick Wagner — guitar, vocals Steve Hunter — guitar Prakash John — bass Whitey Glan — drums Jozef Chirowski — keyboards, vocals Bob Ezrin — keyboards, vocals |
| Album: | Welcome To My Nightmare (Atlantic, 1975) |
The most successful single from the Welcome To My Nightmare project, "Only Women Bleed" hit Number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100.
A rare gentle number in the Alice Cooper repertoire, "Only Women Bleed" took fans and others aback when it was released. Cooper remembers that "Before we released the Nightmare album, one of the guys from the record company went around and played this song for people, asking them to guess who was singing. No one guessed it was Alice Cooper of all people. Some of them did think it was James Taylor, though. It turned out to be our most covered song, including a version by Tina Turner (that's too cool)."
Producer Bob Ezrin says that "Only Women Bleed" was a conscious attempt to do something different that would fly in the face of Cooper's hard rocking image. He calls the song "Something that we were not supposed to be able to do with Alice Cooper… a ballad. And even in doing something this essentially romantic, because it was Alice Cooper, we had to find the twist."
Because of the song title's reference to menstruation, the initial versions of the single listed it as "Only Women." Ezrin recalls that "The record company was really scared of it and of its title. It turned out to be a huge hit and was quite career-expanding for Alice."
Welcome To My Nightmare was Cooper's first effort after disbanding his original group in the early part of 1974.
Welcome To My Nightmare hit Number Five on the Billboard 200 and sold more than a million copies. The album reached Number 19 on the U.K. chart.
The album was released on Atlantic Records while Cooper was in the process of negotiating a new deal with his longtime home, Warner Brothers.
Welcome To My Nightmare was accompanied by Cooper's most elaborate stage production ever, a spectacle financed by Cooper and his manager, Shep Gordon, which was preserved on a home video and, now, DVD version of the concert.
Cooper met his wife on the Nightmare tour, as she was a dancer in the stage production. They live in Phoenix, Arizona, with their three children.