"How two rock legends teamed with Johnny Depp to create an album that paid tribute to Cooper's old drinking club"Alice Cooper and Joe Perry have every right to be jaded. Each has sold millions of records and chalked up hits over several decades. But their eyes still light up when they talk about the recent adventure they shared, recording with one of their childhood heroes.
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"Paul McCartney just opened up an instrument case and there's his Hofner, left-handed bass, the most famous guitar in the world," Cooper says, grinning. "We were standing around it like Indiana Jones looking at it, like it's got its own light source and our faces are melting over it."
"I asked him a question about it, and he said, 'Here it is. It's OK. Pick it up,'" the Aerosmith guitarist beams. "I actually got a chance to hold it, and it was like the Holy Grail."
"Paul says, 'It's just a piece of wood,' and starts playing it and I said, 'Holy crap!'" Cooper rejoins in his typically confident manner. "To us, that bass a symbol of how we started."
The rockers have been thinking a lot about how they got started in recent years, while they worked on the debut album by Hollywood Vampires, a supergroup they formed with Johnny Depp (yes, that Johnny Depp). Although the record contains two urgent-sounding bloodthirsty originals — three, if you count the intro, in which late horror icon Christopher Lee recites a passage from Dracula — the heart of it is a collection of gritty, hard-edged covers of songs by the trio's peers and inspirations: the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and more. McCartney happened to stop by Depp's house, where they were recording, to sing a tune he wrote for Badfinger in 1969, "Come and Get It," and the album — out September 11th — also features guest appearances by Joe Walsh, AC/DC's Brian Johnson, Dave Grohl, Slash and Perry Farrell, among many others. What they all have in common is a set of musical roots.
"We were both the same age when we started playing," the 67-year-old, perennially black-clad and surprisingly perky shock-rocker says, gesturing at Perry, who is three years his junior and looks relaxed with a loose, white scarf around his neck. The musicians are sitting on a couch overlooking Manhattan and, though it's the decidedly un-vampiric hour of 9 a.m., both are sprightly and eager to parse just how all the parts of the project fell into place. "We learned the first two Stones albums, the first two Yardbirds albums, the Kinks," the singer continues. "That's how we learned to play and then we invented Alice Cooper and you invented what Aerosmith was going to be from that. Now, when we're doing these songs, it comes pretty easy."
It also came easy for Depp, age 52, who met Cooper in 2011 on the London set of Dark Shadows, the Tim Burton–directed movie in which the actor portrayed (presciently) a vampire and Cooper played another famous fictional villain: himself. When they got to talking, they realized they had more in common than was apparent, namely a love of British Invasion bands and the blues.
The actor was slugging it out as a guitarist in bands well before making his big-screen debut in 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street. He'd gotten his first instrument at age 12, stole a chord book, dropped out of high school three years later and eventually moved from Florida to L.A. to open for Iggy Pop and the Talking Heads with a poppy new-wave group called the Kids. Video of them playing the Romantics' "What I Like About You" in 1982 exists online. When Cooper got wind that Depp was still playing, he invited him to join him at a gig at London's 100 Club, where they played "I'm Eighteen" and "School's Out."
"He comes in and he plays with us, and he knows everything," Cooper says emphatically. "No matter what people yelled out, he knew it. 'Brown Sugar?' 'Yeah, yeah.' We realized this guy could play." The actor, who was unavailable for this interview, has in the years since become much more active with music, playing gigs with Marilyn Manson, Aerosmith, Patti Smith and, most recently, Gene Simmons. And after jamming with Cooper, he invited the "Feed My Frankenstein" singer over to his house.
"We started saying, 'Let's do an album,'" he continues. "I'd never done a covers record so I said, 'I'd like to do one in honor of all our dead drunk friends, the guys that we used to drink with that are now gone.'" In the early Seventies, Cooper was a member of a loose-knit drinking club called the Hollywood Vampires that would congregate at the Sunset Strip outpost the Rainbow. "It was Harry Nilsson, John Lennon and Keith Moon and a bunch of guys," Cooper says. "I told Johnny, 'They're all dead now. Let's do an homage to them.'"
"Joe would come down and start playing, and I went, 'There's the band, right there,'" Cooper says. "We've got two guitar players that sing, now we need a drummer and a bass player, and then everybody started emerging. We just rocked it."
The original Hollywood Vampires, Cooper's cronies, took up drinking together in the early Seventies, when Cooper was flying high with hits like "School's Out" and "No More Mr. Nice Guy." His drinking buddies over the years included Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, but at the peak of the Vampires they most included Ringo Starr, the Monkees' Micky Dolenz and songwriter Bernie Taupin, along with Moon, Nilsson and occasionally Lennon. The Rainbow allowed the crew to have their own private loft, which displayed a plaque that proclaimed it "The Lair of the Hollywood Vampires." It listed Cooper, who had a legendary proclivity for imbibing alcohol at the time, as president and Moon as veep.
"The reason we went to the Rainbow every night was to see what Keith was gonna show up as," Cooper says. "He took a lot of time to go out and rent costumes. One day, he shows up and he's in full Queen of England garb." The singer pantomimes Her Royal Highness' grimace and signature dainty wave. "Two weeks later, full-out Hitler, and another night he's fully in drag as a French maid," Cooper recalls. "You're going, 'Wow, this is just another day in his life.'
"He'd wear you out," the singer continues. "If he came to your house and stayed, that week was like, 'Holy crap, I need a vacation,' because he was so intense. He'd stay at my house for two weeks, then he'd go to Harry's for two weeks and then Ringo's for two weeks. Those two weeks would be Hellzapoppin'. But he was also the coolest and funniest guy."
As for the other core members of the club, Dolenz lived next door to Cooper and was also one of the singer's golf buddies, and Taupin was the vocalist's best friend, so they would see each other almost every night. The two Beatles weren't as regular as the others, but attended frequently enough to be members, as did Nilsson. The way to join to the group, as Cooper has bragged, was to out-drink the other members. He explains, that's when he would see what kind of drunks his friends were.
"Everybody's personality changes a little bit when they drink," he says. "I was always the Dean Martin guy; I had the golden buzz, always laughing. I was never the depressed drunk. John and Harry, they would drink, and they could get after each other. If one guy said black, the other guy said white. If one guy said Democrat, the other said Republican. Pretty soon, I'm standing between them going, 'Guys, sit down.' They were the best of friends, but when they drank, they liked to get political and talk about religion and everything else that causes fights. It was funny because neither one was a fighter; they just had a belligerent streak in them every once in a while. Most of the time they were laughing."
Cooper recalls the Hollywood Vampires as having a clubhouse vibe, where only very rarely did these famous musicians talk about music. "We were in music all the time, so if you weren't making an album, you were touring," he says. "If you weren't touring, you were doing something else. So to have a night off from that, the last thing you wanted to talk about was music. You talked about cars and other people."
Photos from one gathering of the Hollywood Vampires, which took place at an Anne Murray concert in November 1973, picture Lennon, Nilsson, Cooper and Dolenz smiling like they were having the times of their lives. Today, the latter two in the photo are the last Vampires standing.
