Songfacts®:

• Alice Cooper lives up to his billing as a shock rocker in "Cold Ethyl," a lighthearted look at necrophilia (sex with a corpse). The meaning is pretty obvious, with Cooper singing about making love to Ethyl by the light of a refrigerator. "She's cool in bed," he sings. "She ought to be... 'cause Ethyl's dead."
• The title has a two-way meaning. The way it's spelled is like ethyl alcohol, but it's used as a girl's name, which would ordinarily be spelled Ethel.
  
  The song is part of Cooper's concept album Welcome To My Nightmare, where the main character, Steven, battles alcoholism and has a series of nightmares he tries to wake from. So the song refers to both his struggle with alcohol and to a nightmare where he has a tryst with a corpse.
• Welcome To My Nightmare was Alice Cooper's first album where he was considered a solo artist and not the leader of the band Alice Cooper. Most fans didn't notice because they always thought Alice Cooper was a person, not a band.
  
  Cooper developed the concept with producer Bob Ezrin, who had been working with Alice Cooper (the band) for years, producing their classic albums School's Out (1972) and Billion Dollar Babies (1973). Ezrin wrote "Cold Ethyl" with Cooper.
• In 1979, four years after the song was released, the syndicated newspaper columnist Ann Landers, who answered questions from readers asking her advice, wrote about the song, decrying it as filth. Cooper wrote in and Landers published his letter. "I'm really sorry you found that old song of mine crude and offensive," he wrote. "The point I want to make is that the kids are not bothered by this - their parents are. The kids see the song and gruesome antics, like with the guillotine, for exactly what it is - satire, done with a sense of humor to a rock 'n' roll beat."
  
  Landers didn't back down. "You have in your group some exceptionally talented performers and you're no slouch yourself, Alice," she wrote. "I just wish you'd clean up your act."
• On Cooper's Welcome To My Nightmare tour, he used a doll to play Ethyl, romancing her on stage. The tour was also turned into a concert film narrated by Vincent Price.