Dick Wagner.

I learned over the weekend that I lost another longstanding hero back in July besides Brett Jacobson. When I was a kid learning guitar, I used to catch the bus into the city and go to Palings Music on Pitt Street. I'd slink upstairs to the sheet music section and look at Elvis Costello and Clash and Alice Cooper songbooks. The latter were (and remain) a brilliant source of unique voicings and amazing compositions, primarily because Cooper's guitarist at the time was Dick Wagner. Wagner also happened to be a superb composer and brilliant lyricist (he wrote Cooper's 'Only Women Bleed' which Cooper only marginally altered). And it was his chords that made it to the books.
I taught myself to mnemonically remember the strange shapes that Wagner played until finally I could play most of the stuff between Welcome to my Nightmare up until about DaDa. The amount of store employees who used to come and watch this gawpy kid standing there, eyes closed and frowning furiously trying to memorise those shapes, only to have me buy nothing (I seriously couldn't afford those books hence the memory thing). Then I'd race home and play my cheapy nylon stringed guitar until they sounded vaguely like the songs.

That's all I wanted to say on it.

But if you are a budding guitarist or you're a player of some experience, or perhaps you've just hit a plateau with your technique, then I urge you to seek out those original Alice Cooper songbooks and hear and learn the magic of Dick Wager's arrangements.

I never wrote those songs.