Richardson and Ezrin produced the album for Richardson's Nimbus 9 Productions, with Richardson as executive producer. Ezrin, with his classical and folk background, attempted to have the band tighten the loosely structured songs. 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. According to Cooper, Ezrin "ironed the songs out note by note, giving them coloring, personality". Ezrin rearranged "I'm Eighteen" from an eight-minute jam piece called "I Wish I Was 18 Again" to a taut three-minute rocker. Both Buxton and Bruce used Gibson SG guitars and tended to double up, playing similar parts with subtle differences in phrasing and tone. Dunaway often played a moving counter-melody bass part, rather than following the typical rock strategy of holding to the chord's root. Zappa had sold Straight Records to Warner Bros. in 1970 for $50,000. That November the group released a single of "I'm Eighteen" backed with "Is It My Body"; and Warner Bros. agreed to allow the group to proceed with an album if the single sold well. The band posed as fans and made hundreds of calls to radio stations to request the song, and Gordon is said to have paid others a dollar per radio request. Soon the song was on the airwaves across the US—even on mainstream AM radio—and peaked at on the charts. The success of the single convinced Warner to contract Richardson to produce Love It to Death. Ezrin was intent on developing a cohesive sound for the album, and his earnestness was a source of humor for the band. 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. Ezrin did not realize the joke was largely at his expense. 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