When Johnny Depp dropped acid at a record company and vanished out of a window
Aside from the obvious financial disparity, there are several indicators that famous Hollywood actors are not like us everyday folk.
They appear to exist using a different set of rules, not bothering to check whether they fit with the rest of society, not particularly caring what other people think, and occasionally testing the boundaries of mortality. All of that, it is fair to say, can apply to Mr Johnny Depp.
For several decades he has been a notorious bon viveur; a hard-drinking, liver of life to the full, rock music turned up to eleven Hollywood Vampire; an appreciator of fine women, wine and possibly the odd substance classed with a grade higher than B.
Of course, while it all makes for some great stories, it has more recently got him into a great deal of trouble, most notoriously due to his separation from the equally feisty Amber Heard, which ended up in a very public court case and accusations that ranged from bedtime defecation to death threats. It was not so much a divorce as a live dual-immolation in front of the world’s social media.
But many years ago, in the 1990s, before Depp essentially morphed into a slightly more audible version of Keith Richards, he was merely one of the most famous and lusted-after actors in the world. He had a string of huge movies including Cry-baby, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Donnie Brasco and Edward Scissorhands and was constantly in the tabloids due to his ‘bad boy’ persona – the modern chain-smoking, drug-taking equivalent of James Dean.
In 1993, Depp appeared in a music video for The Lemonheads’ single ‘It’s a shame about Ray’; which gave him an opportunity to hang out with his friend, the lead singer Evan Dando. It’s important to remember just how big a deal The Lemonheads were at that point in time. While their star has faded somewhat over the last 30 years, their cover of the Simon and Garfunkel classic ‘Mrs Robinson’ had put them firmly in the global spotlight, and Evan Dando himself was known as something of a celebrity heartthrob, dating the likes of Courtney Love for a spell.
The duo became known as something of a party pairing around then, something that’s summed up by an apocryphal tale from an A&R man of the day, Tim Sommer, who worked at The Lemonheads’ label Atlantic Records in Los Angeles.
He recalls Dando and Depp appearing in his office on Sunset Boulevard one afternoon, acting like guilty schoolboys and murmuring something about being ‘on a trip’. As he recalls: “At this moment, he (Dando) and Johnny were giggling, slumping into their seats, wearing Cheshire Cat smiles, nodding gently to the music, and occasionally raising eyes, marble-blue and pinned, to stare at me, at which point they would break out laughing.”
Fairly new to his job, Sommer wasn’t sure quite how to handle the unfolding situation: a genuine Hollywood A-lister and the singer of the label’s hottest new band were both high on acid in front of him without saying much at all. To his relief, the pair disappeared again after around twenty minutes, leaving him to consider the rest of his workday.
That was until he heard clattering from scaffolding outside the building, high above Los Angeles. As Sommer explains: “The odd noise sounded like horses thumping down a track, or like people charging into a general admission concert when the door opened.”
“Whumpa-whumpa-thwump-thump, Whumpa-whumpa-thwump-thump, and the sound was getting closer,” Sommer added. “And that’s when I looked up and saw Evan Dando and Johnny Depp, their brains allegedly scattered, smothered, and covered by who knows what, running around the 8th floor of the building, on the outside.”
The drug-addled twosome had found a way out of the window and out onto the temporary work platforms and were busy doing laps of the exterior, laughing wildly as they went. Fully expecting to get into a huge amount of trouble if two of the most famous people in town plummeted to their deaths having just been to see him, Sommer did the most sensible thing – he grabbed his coat and fled the office to his car, driving home as fast as possible.
Fortunately Dando and Depp survived, but as Sommer wrote: “Only a day or two later, once I confirmed that both Johnny and Evan would continue to walk the wide, rapid, and Koyaanisqatsi-perfect streets of Los Angeles in a definitively un-splattered manner, did I begin to tell some close friends, ‘Something very strange happened to me the other night…’”
