The night Pink Floyd dosed Alice Cooper: “I fell off the stage”
From the mind-expanding age of psychedelic rock to the bright colours and innovation of the new wave, Alice Cooper has witnessed colossal changes in rock and roll over the course of his long and illustrious career. Throughout it all, the shock rock pioneer seemed to have an innate ability to identify future stars and, in a lot of cases, help them on their path to musical greatness. Although this quality was more obvious during Cooper’s 1970s heyday, it stretches all the way back to his early days, spent in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles was a vibrant hub of hippie activity during the 1960s and, although now best-known for his hard rock and glam stylings, Cooper was certainly involved in this new age of counterculture. Like any true music obsessive, the songwriter would soak up inspiration and influences everywhere he looked, often inviting the musicians he loved to stay with him if they toured the West Coast. In particular, Cooper and his gang had a particular adoration for a young band from England, who went by the name Pink Floyd.
Nowadays, Pink Floyd is one of those names that has completely eclipsed the rock music sphere, forever cementing them in mainstream pop culture. Back in the 1960s, however, the young group were still a fairly underground outfit, most concerned with consuming as many mind-expanding psychedelic substances as humanly possible. This aim was reflected on their groundbreaking debut album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, which exposed many music fans to psychedelic rock for the very first time.
Cooper was among those fans captivated by Pink Floyd’s debut album and their visionary leader, Syd Barrett. So, when Floyd made a trip over to the American West Coast, ground zero for psychedelic rock, it was Cooper who took them under his wing. “We had a house in Los Angeles,” Cooper later recalled. “So, the Floyd came into town, ran out of money – like everyone else does in L.A. – and ended up staying in our house.”
Floyd’s frontman seemed a particular point of fascination for Cooper, who recalled, “Syd Barrett was just so out there. I’d get up in the morning and go into the kitchen, and Syd would be sitting there with a box of cornflakes in front of him. He’d be watching that box of cornflakes the way I would watch television.” Adding, “We didn’t find out until later that he was half-high, half-insane. That’s a very bad combination.”
It’s unclear exactly how long Pink Floyd were holed up in Cooper’s L.A. house – it seems unlikely that either party remembers the exact timeframe – but it did not take long before the mind-expanding power of Barrett and Floyd began to take hold on the American songwriter. “We had an audition at Gazarri’s, and Pink Floyd said they’d come down with us. They made brownies. They were totally laced, of course.”
Attempting to perform for the bookers of a Sunset Strip nightclub while on edibles does not sound like an enjoyable task. “I was halfway through the show, and all of a sudden I was… oooooh… errrrrr… the world went that way,” Cooper recalled. “I fell off the stage, like, three times. We got the job, though. We were so whacked out that the guys at Gazarri’s said: ‘Okay, we’ll hire you.’”
Whether or not Floyd’s brownie-based stunt helped or hindered Cooper’s band, it only seemed to increase the songwriter’s respect for the British psychedelic leaders. Of course, the two artists soon went their separate directions, with Cooper pursuing shock rock and Floyd reaching for something more experimental with records like The Dark Side of the Moon, Cooper’s gig at Gazarri’s might never have happened with the drug-fueled influence of Barrett and the gang.
