The track Alice Cooper called “just offensive enough to work”
There is a certain sense of humour that comes with sadness. As people are exposed to bad news, they grow slightly immunity to it. Perhaps not impunity, but a willingness to look at it through a lens that doesn’t just show the sadness of a situation. Death is like that; as we lose a loved one, the shock of their loss is initially overpowering, but eventually, whether it’s at the wake, a few months or a few years down the line, jokes creep through. We grow an inherent ability not to be constantly saddened by a sad situation. Given the amount of premature death and sorrow throughout all of music, specifically rock n roll, rockstars tend to have a very interesting sense of humour.
When you look at Alice Cooper, you might see someone coated in jewellery, black clothing, and scary makeup, but when you watch interviews with him and hear him speak, you’ll see he’s one of the most human rock stars out there. Yes, there is one half of a pair of handcuffs on his wrist, which is odd, but when you learn his wife has the key and it’s merely a symbol of how much he loves her, there becomes a relatability to the showmanship. The same comes with a song with a head-turning title like ‘My Dead Drunk Friends’, which initially sounds quite offensive but is actually an ode to some of the people he loves the most.
To understand the song, you need to go back to the Rainbow in the 1970s. Here, you’ll find the likes of Cooper, Bernie Taupin, John Lennon, Keith Moon, Harry Nilsson and Micky Dolenz, each trying to drink one another under the table. They referred to themselves as “The Hollywood Vampires”. A harmless joke at the time, but one that would eventually influence one of Alice Cooper’s musical projects.
“Doesn’t matter what band you’re in,” he said in an interview in 2015, “The Beatles, The Stones – every band was a cover band at one time. We all started in bars, and we all started by playing other people’s music. So I said, ‘Why don’t we do an album dedicated to our drinking club ‘The Hollywood Vampires’.”
Providing background on the drinking group, Cooper said, “In the early ‘70s, we used to go to the Rainbow every night; Keith Moon, Harry Nilsson, and John Lennon when he was in town, and it was just a bunch of guys who met there every night, and it was last man standing.”
Though his reincarnation of The Hollywood Vampires might have started life as a covers band, Cooper did eventually create some original material, and one song in particular was wholly dedicated to those drinking days in the ‘70s and his fellow bloodsuckers. “Everybody was at the top of their game at the time, but now there’s only three of us left,” he said. “Most of the guys, John, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison are all gone, so I said, ‘let’s do an album dedicated to all our dead drunk friends.’”
Given the issues some musicians have with alcoholism and the fact the likes of Lennon, Hendrix and Morrison passed away before their time, some might think the title of the song is too offensive, but that’s where the ability to turn sadness into humour comes in. No one knew that drinking group better than Cooper; he knew what they would find funny and what their attitude towards death was like, so who else could be in charge of poking fun at it?
He explained: “I like the title ‘All My Dead Drunk Friends’. It’s just offensive enough to work, but all those guys would have totally got it. They had the same sense of humour. If you told them you were going to do an album after they were gone called ‘All My Dead Drunk Friends’, they would have died laughing.”
Death and grief are an inevitable part of life, and when you’re surrounded by it as much as rockstars are, what else is there to do but put on some music and raise a glass to their memory? With this track, Alice Cooper does both.
