What was the first way Cooper's execution was faked?
"Caught in a Dream" was released as a single backed with "Hallowed Be My Name" on April 27, 1971; it peaked in the US at No. 94.  The group supported the album with extensive touring.  "Ballad of Dwight Fry" was a dramatized set piece in the live show, featuring an actress dressed as a nurse who dragged Cooper offstage and brought him back on straitjacketed in time for the second verse's "Sleepin' don't come very easy / In a strait white vest".  At the song's climax, Cooper would break free of the straitjacket and hurl it into the audience.  The Love It to Death tour of 1971 featured an electric chair in the earliest staged executions of the singer.  These executions were to become an attraction of the band's shows, which became progressively more flamboyant; the shows in the Billion Dollar Babies tour of 1973 concluded with Cooper's execution by prop guillotine.  The Love It to Death tour grossed so much the band bought a forty-two room mansion from Ann-Margret in Greenwich, Connecticut, which was to be its home base for the next few years.The album garnered mixed reviews.  Billboard called the album "artfully absurd third-generation rock" and the group "the first stars of future rock".  John Mendelsohn gave the album a favorable review in Rolling Stone, writing that it "represents at least a modest oasis in the desert of dreary blue-jeaned aloofness served up in concert by most American rock-and-rollers". However, referring to "Black Juju" he also said that "the one bummer on this album is so loud a bummer that it may threaten to neutralize the ingratiating effect" of the other tracks.  Robert Christgau wrote in The Village Voice, "The singles ('Caught in a Dream' and 'I'm Eighteen') are fantastic, but the album is freighted with post-psychedelic garbage, the kind of thing that's done better by the heavy metal kids down the block."The band saw its popularity rise over the next several albums.  Killer followed in November 1971 and reached No. 21 on the US charts, and the band finally topped those charts in 1973 with its sixth album, Billion Dollar Babies.  Unreleased demos of Love It to Death have circulated among fans; highlights include outtakes of "Ballad of Dwight Fry" with alternative lyrics, and early versions of "You Drive Me Nervous", which did not have an official release until it appeared on Killer.
electric chair