The classic 1973 song that turned Johnny Depp into a musician: “How fucking cool”
The fun thing about being a Hollywood A-lister, not that any of us will get to experience it, is that if you have a hobby you can pull a few strings and get to do it for real at the highest level possible with your heroes, a bit like Johnny Depp and playing the guitar.
For 14 years now, Depp, who let’s not forget is an actor, has had a rock ‘supergroup’ called the Hollywood Vampires, members of which usually encompass Alice Cooper and Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, the name of the band coming in tribute to the legendary celebrity drinking group of the 1970s that featured The Who’s Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson.
Depp has also got to feature on a host of different albums by actual proper artists, including Oasis, Shane MacGowan, Iggy Pop and Marilyn Manson, plus he released a single with Jeff Beck and performed with opera legend Andrea Bocelli, so I suppose at some point you have to acquiesce to the fact that Depp knows his way around a six-stringed instrument, and has a fair amount of talent to go with it.
If he didn’t, he probably wouldn’t get to do all this stuff, no matter how good at downing black velvets he might be, and he has indeed been a guitar player for more than 50 years, long before he found acting success in the early 1980s on films like horror classic A Nightmare on Elm Street and Oliver Stone’s Platoon.
He told Classic Rock about how he discovered the instrument as a kid in Florida, saying, “I was about 12 years old in the backseat, and we were driving down the sort of main boulevard in this little town we lived, and there was a little local concert going on in the parking lot of the grocery store. We got stuck at a stoplight, and there was a band playing.”
Depp would actually end up playing with a couple of members of the band, named Rocklin Channel, in the years to come, but at that moment, he was just impressed by the power of their set. He added, “I heard them doing [1973 Aerosmith hit], ‘Dream On’, you know, and I thought, ‘Fucking hell, that sounds really good’, and how fucking cool to just pick up a guitar and just blast, you know?”
The young teen went straight home and browbeat his mother into buying him his first guitar for around $25 plus an amp to go with it, and Depp then stole chord books from a local department store in order to start learning his new instrument.
It had such an effect that Depp actually dropped out of school in order to start bands once he was 16, having enough success that by the time he was 20, his band Rock City Angels had a record deal in Los Angeles and a debut album on Geffen Records.
That band split very quickly, however, and once Depp had become friends with up-and-coming actor Nicolas Cage, who convinced him to try his hand at movies, a career onscreen beckoned, and in fact, it was Cage who pulled some strings and managed to get him an audition for Wes Craven, who was casting for A Nightmare on Elm Street. Despite having no experience whatsoever, Depp got the gig, and the film became a global sensation.
