School's Out

"School's Out" is a song first recorded as the title track of Alice Cooper's fifth album. It was released as the album's only single on April 26, 1972. "School's Out" was Alice Cooper's biggest international hit and it has been regarded as his signature song and reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100, number three in the Canadian RPM 100 Singles chart, number two on the Irish Singles Chart and number one on the UK Singles Chart. Inspiration and writing Cooper has said he was inspired to write the song when answering the question, "What's the greatest three minutes of your life?". Cooper said: "There's two times during the year. One is Christmas morning, when you're just getting ready to open the presents. The greed factor is right there. The next one is the last three minutes of the last day of school when you're sitting there and it's like a slow fuse burning. I said, 'If we can catch that three minutes in a song, it's going to be so big." Cooper has also said it was inspired by a line from a Bowery Boys movie. On his radio show, Nights with Alice Cooper, he joked that the main riff of the song was inspired by a song by Miles Davis. Cooper said that guitarist Glen Buxton created the song's opening riff. The lyrics of "School's Out" indicate that not only is the school year ended for summer vacation, but ended forever, and that the school itself has been literally blown up. It incorporates the childhood rhyme, "No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks" into its lyrics. It also featured children contributing some of the vocals. "Innocence" in the lyric " ... and we got no innocence" is frequently changed in concert to "intelligence" and sometimes replaced with "etiquette." The song appropriately ends with a school bell sound that fades out.