School's Out

Cooper has said the song began with the question of what the greatest three minutes of your life are. His answer was the final minutes of the last day of school, like a slow fuse burning. He has also credited a line from a Bowery Boys film, in which one character tells another that school is out, and said Glen Buxton came up with the opening riff. Bob Ezrin put together the children's chorus that chimes in with the rhyme about pencils, books and teachers' dirty looks. In the lyric the school year ends for good and the school itself is blown up, and the track closes on a school bell.

Released on 26 April 1972 as the album's only single, it reached 7 on the US Hot 100, 3 in Canada, 2 in Ireland and 1 in Britain, where it stayed three weeks in August. Some radio stations banned it, and in Britain the campaigner Mary Whitehouse persuaded the BBC to ban its video. Cooper told the Guardian they could not have bought that publicity. The single is a slightly sped-up remix of the album take, without the turn-off effect at the end. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2015 and appears at 326 on Rolling Stone's 500 greatest songs list. It was used in Rock 'n' Roll High School, Dazed and Confused and Scream.

Live

It is the most-performed song in Cooper's shows. A tally of logged setlists from 1996 to 2026 finds it in 2,238 of the 2,253 that list songs. Cooper sometimes changes innocence in the lyric to intelligence, and later shows worked in part of Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2. He played it on The Muppet Show in March 1978 and at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in March 2011. Krokus covered it on their 1986 album Change of Address, and that version reached 67 on the Hot 100.