Johnny Depp’s Rock Supergroup: Alice Cooper and Joe Perry on Hollywood Vampires
Hollywood Vampires is a group of rock legends—with Johnny Depp on guitar—that pay tribute to their fallen hard-partying friends through rock ’n’ roll.
“We’re doing a Pink Floyd song today that I don’t know at all, ‘Welcome to the Machine,’” Alice Cooper tells me almost immediately after we say hello, with a hint of fear in his voice. “They’re doing some kind of a tribute album and they said, ‘We want you to do this song,’ and I'm thinking, ‘The timing on these lyrics is so wacky and the melody line just kind of lays there,’ and the more I listened to it the more worried I got. So this is going to be a nightmare today.”
When I tell Cooper that it took Pink Floyd friend Roy Harper to nail the vocal he’s instantly relieved. “Oh, good! Honestly that makes me feel better,” Cooper says, loosening up visibly. “Now I can walk in and feel OK. I have so little ammunition.”
Cooper is in New York with Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry to promote their new album, Hollywood Vampires, named for the legendary mid-’70s Los Angeles nightly drinking club that included Cooper, John Lennon, Keith Moon, Bernie Taupin, Harry Nilsson, and “just about anyone who was in town who could seriously drink,” according to Cooper. The album is made up of a fistful of song covers, many completely reimagined by some of the original Hollywood Vampires, as well as two original songs by Cooper that pay a more personal tribute.
By: Jeff Slate
Source: The Daily Beast
