John Lennon and Harry Nilsson gave The Hollywood Vampires a bad name
You’ve almost certainly heard of The Hollywood Vampires, that rag-tag group of merry music-makers who caused so much carnage. Less known is the institution that hosted them, the quaintly named Rainbow Bar and Grill in west Hollywood. It was in the small loft above the downtown bar that some of music’s biggest names would gather to engage in all manner of debauched activities. We’re talking about the likes of John Lennon, Harry Nilsson and Alice Cooper.
According to founder Alice Cooper, the original Hollywood Vampires was a sort of drinking club, “a last-man-standing kinda thing. You’d go over to the Rainbow Bar & Grill in Hollywood every night and there would be myself, Mickey Dolenz from The Monkees, Bernie Taupin, Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson. If John Lennon was in town, he’d always be hanging out with Harry, so he’d come by too.”
Harry and John were chalk and cheese by all accounts. “If John said white, Harry would say black; if John said Republican, Harry would say Democrat,” Cooper continued. “I was the guy in the middle, trying to referee these ridiculous arguments they would have. People started calling us the Hollywood Vampires because we’d never see daylight. We figured instead of drinking the blood of the vein, we were drinking the blood of the vine.”
For Nilsson, the mid-1970s was a dreamlike time rich in high-quality cocaine and no-strings sex. For Lennon, it was a little less utopian. The Beatles had recently parted ways, and he was in the midst of various legal battles with the band’s shady manager Allen Klein. He was also still reeling from the world’s reaction to his album with Yoko Ono, Some Time In New York City, featuring the rightly-panned track ‘Woman is the N* of The World’. To make things worse, Lennon’s relationship with Yoko was in the gutter. Ono’s response, in classic ’70s style, was to set up Lennon with their personal assistant May Pang, who was corralled by Ono into joining Lennon on a “lost weekend” of sex, spirits and sniff.
Left to his own devices, Lennon became a rather chaotic personality, taking to the Brandy Alexanders like a fish to water. This was partly the influence of Harry Nilsson, who was known for treating drinking like an Olympic sport. On March 13th, 1973, Lennon and Nilsson got loaded in the Vampire Club and decided to wander over to the Troubadour, where Lennon decided to stick a maxi-pad to his forehead, much to the bemusement of the waiting staff. When management accused him of bad bar etiquette, a fight broke out, during which Lennon somehow managed to punch a waitress in the face. A week later, Lennon and Nillson – again loaded up on cocaine and Brandy Alexanders – returned to the Troubador, where the comedy duo The Smother Brothers were performing an evening set. They sat down, got some more drinks and started heckling the band – yelling prophanities and generally disrupting the performance.
Of course, Lennon wasn’t the only British member of the Hollywood Vampires with a sordid reputation. According to Cooper, the British were always the worst offenders: “The British, for some reason, can handle alcohol far better than Americans can,” he wrote. “I was a sipper, so I could usually last a long time just sipping whiskey, but some of those guys were pounding it down pretty good, and I don’t know how they did it. I was amazed that Keith Moon could drink as much as he did and still play a show the next day!”
Lennon would later calm down somewhat, joining Yoko Ono in a programme of Primal Scream Therapy and generally attempting to humble himself to the American public. Of course, that was after he had joined Nilsson in pissing on Phil Spector’s console during the recording of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
