The Alice Cooper song John Lennon wanted Paul McCartney to sing
The entire story of John Lennon and Paul McCartney is like looking at two sides of the same coin.
Both of them knew what the people wanted whenever they made Beatles songs, but even when they were at their most experimental, Lennon will forever be known as the revolutionary, while Macca was the one who was singing whimsical ditties every single time one of their new records came out. That’s not what history shows, though, and Lennon was convinced that his partner could churn out a great rock and roll tune whenever he felt like it.
You have to remember that McCartney was the one who was able to scream to the high heavens whenever they had the chance to play in their early years. Yes, he was the one who was incorporating showtunes into their repertoire like ‘A Taste of Honey’, but there was no one else in the band who could have been able to sing ‘Long Tall Sally’ with the same kind of gusto that he could whenever they started performing.
And it’s not like McCartney ever forgot about those rock and roll numbers when he first started his new band, Wings. There were several songs in his catalogue where he could kick out the jams, and beyond having tunes like ‘Hi Hi Hi’ and ‘Junior’s Farm’ in his arsenal whenever he wanted to, he even managed to outdo Lennon at his own game when playing that fantastic guitar line at the beginning of ‘Let Me Roll It’.
But even if Lennon was a bit more mellow by the time he started working on Walls and Bridges, he was still keeping his ears open for the right lick to turn into a song. ‘What You Got’ is one of the best vocal performances of his solo career as he cries out in pain for Yoko Ono, but a lot of that might have come from him visiting some of the biggest names in the world at the time, like Alice Cooper.
Cooper was already one of the kings of shock rock, but when working with Bob Ezrin, he wasn’t too shabby when it came to finding great hooks, either. The biggest songs of his career were coming out around that time, and while Billion Dollar Babies had a stage show that sent a lot of parents running scared by showing him mutilating baby dolls, ‘Elected’ was the kind of song so good that Lennon wished that his old band had penned it.
When Cooper used to hang out with Lennon back in the day, the former Beatle admitted that McCartney should have been singing that song, saying, “When ‘Elected’ came out, that to him was like a great poke in the eye to all politics. He came to listen to the record at the office in New York, and he kept bringing people in, like, ‘You’ve gotta hear this record!’ One time he’s walking out and I’m walking in. ‘Hey John, how are you doing?’ ‘Hey Alice! Great record.’ Then he says: ‘Paul would have done it better.’ And I went: ‘Well, of course he would – he’s Paul McCartney!’ The fact that he loved the record was a big deal.”
Which is strange, because when you look at the way that the song is constructed, it almost feels closer to a Who song than anything else. Cooper was always a fan of everything the Fab Four ever did, but when you look at the way that the melody weaves throughout the chorus, it’s not that hard to see McCartney thumping away on his bass and leading Denny Laine through this kind of tune, either.
So while Cooper is a bit more hard-edged than what The Beatles ever did, it’s songs like this that make him worthy of an inclusion alongside the greatest bands in the world. He was more than a little bit grotesque when he started out, but no one could ever take away that ear for hooks, especially when it was co-signed by one of the greatest melodists of all time.
