I'm Eighteen

It came out in November 1970, billed on the label as Eighteen, backed with Is It My Body, and reached 21 in the US and 7 in Canada. Its success convinced Warner Bros. the band could make an album. Band members posed as fans and phoned hundreds of radio stations to request it, and Shep Gordon is said to have paid others a dollar a request. It began as an eight-minute jam that Ezrin cut to three minutes, and he misheard the chorus at first as I'm Edgy. It was recorded on sixteen tracks at RCA's Mid-American Recording Center in Chicago. Ezrin captured Cooper's rasp with a Shure SM57 and heavy compression.

The lyric is about being in the middle of childhood and adulthood, and it turns at the end to embrace that anguish: I'm eighteen and I like it. Joey Ramone based the Ramones' first song on its riff, John Lydon is said to have auditioned for the Sex Pistols by miming to an Alice Cooper song, most often reported as this one, and his Seventeen was written in response. Cooper's publisher sued over Kiss's Dreamin' in 1998 and the case settled in Cooper's favor. Rolling Stone ranked it among its 500 greatest songs, at 482 in 2004 and 487 in 2010.

Live

On the German television show Beat-Club in 1972, Cooper extended the intro by declaring he was not twenty-one, then twenty-two, and on up to twenty-five. It appears in 2,184 of the 2,253 logged setlists from 1996 to 2026 that list songs, and the four surviving original members played it with School's Out at their Hall of Fame induction in 2011.