A young Bob Ezrin was enlisted as producer; he encouraged the band to tighten its songwriting over two months of rehearsing ten to twelve hours a day.

The original album cover featured the singer Cooper posed with his thumb protruding so it appeared to be his penis; Warner Bros. soon replaced it with a censored version.

The album has come to be seen as a foundational influence on hard rock, punk, and heavy metal; several tracks have become live Alice Cooper standards and are frequently covered by other bands.

[7] At some point Buxton painted circles under his eyes with cigarette ashes, and soon the rest followed with ghoulish black makeup and outlandish clothes.

[8] In an incident during a performance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival in 1969, Cooper threw a live chicken into the audience, who tore it to shreds.

The band relocated to Detroit and found itself in the midst of a music scene populated with the hard-driving rock of the MC5, the stage-diving Iggy Pop with the Stooges, and the theatricality of George Clinton's Parliament and Funkadelic.

The Alice Cooper band incorporated these influences into a tight hard-rock sound coupled with an outrageous live show.

Cooper recalled the junior producer as "a nineteen-year-old Jewish hippie" who reacted to meeting the outlandish band "as if he had just opened a surprise package and found a box full of maggots".

The band resisted at first but came to see things Ezrin's way, and ten to twelve hours a day of rehearsal resulted in a tight set of hard rock songs with little of the psychedelic freak-rock aesthetic of the first two albums.

[14] Both Buxton and Bruce used Gibson SG guitars[15] and tended to double up, playing similar parts with subtle differences in phrasing and tone.

[16] Dunaway often played a moving counter-melody bass part, rather than following the typical rock strategy of holding to the chord's root.

[22] At a time when the Beatles had a reputation that made them seem beyond criticism, the Alice Cooper band intended "Second Coming" as a jab at the recently released track "The Long and Winding Road" with Phil Spector's elaborate production—the hyperbolic acclaim it received struck the band as if it were the Second Coming of a master composer on the order of Beethoven—as well as Ezrin's attempts to bring such production values to Alice Cooper's music.

[23] When recording the "I wanna get out of here" sequence of "Ballad of Dwight Fry", Ezrin had Cooper lie on the floor surrounded by a cage of metal chairs to create an element of realism to the singer's frantic screams.

[17] A dark, aggressive song whose distorted guitar riff is in E minor scale, "I'm Eighteen" was the band's first to hit global audience.

In raspy vocals against arpeggiated guitar backing, the lyrics describe the existential anguish of being at the cusp of adulthood, decrying in each verse being "in the middle" of something, such as "life" or "doubt".

[44] The original cover shows the long-haired band members in dresses and makeup, and Cooper holding a cape around himself with his thumb sticking out to give the illusion of an exposed penis.

"Ballad of Dwight Fry" was a dramatized set piece in the live show, featuring an actress dressed as a nurse[f] 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".

[46] The Love It to Death tour grossed so much the band bought a forty-two room mansion from actress Ann-Margret in Greenwich, Connecticut, which was to be its home base for the next few years.

Nevertheless, Love It to Death's strong concert representation is almost entirely due to three songs—"I'm Eighteen", "Is It My Body" and "Ballad of Dwight Fry"—which have each seen over a thousand performances.

[47] 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".

[48] 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.

[50] 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.

[30] Love It to Death is seen as one of the foundational albums of the heavy metal sound, along with contemporary releases by Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and others.

[60] Greg Prato of AllMusic called Love It to Death "an incredibly consistent listen from beginning to end" and "the release when everything began to come together for the band".

[34] To Pete Prown and HP Newquist, the groups's theatrical arrangements help its two guitarists "[transcend] the all-too-common clichés" in their simple hard-rock riffing and soloing "that were part and parcel of early seventies rock".

[26] The band was pleased with the collaboration with Ezrin, and he remained their producer (with the exception of Muscle of Love, released in 1973) until Cooper's first solo album, Welcome to My Nightmare in 1975.

[13] Love It to Death launched Ezrin's own production career, which went on to include prominent albums such as Aerosmith's Get Your Wings (1974), Kiss's Destroyer (1976), and Pink Floyd's The Wall (1979).

[69] Gordon used the song's title for a 1993 essay on the artist Mike Kelley, in which she described the Coopers as "anti-hippie[s] reveling in the aesthetics of the ugly".