I Got a Line on You

There is a riff that walks into the room like it already owns the bar, and it has been doing that since a seventeen-year-old guitarist in Los Angeles wrote it down in 1968. “I Got a Line on You” is track five on the self-titled debut by Hollywood Vampires, the 2015 supergroup built by Alice Cooper, Johnny Depp and Joe Perry, and it is the cleanest swing on an album that otherwise deals in ghosts. Alice has said as much. When the playback rolled, the take that felt most finished to him was this one, a cover of Spirit’s only real Top 40 hit, sung by Cooper with Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction leaning in on the second voice. The guitar chairs on this particular cut are not the ones you might guess. Joe Perry sits this song out. The six-string work belongs to Joe Walsh, Johnny Depp, Tommy Henriksen and Bruce Witkin, with Abe Laboriel Jr. on drums and Kip Winger on bass. Bob Ezrin produced the whole record and sang in the stack with Farrell and Henriksen. All of the artist proceeds from the album went to MusiCares. That is the kind of detail a freeform station likes to keep on the card.

The song itself belongs to Randy California, born Randy Craig Wolfe, lead guitarist and singer of Spirit. He wrote it for the band’s second album, The Family That Plays Together, during sessions that ran from March into September of 1968. Lou Adler produced it for Ode. The single went out in October of that year with “She Smiles” on the flip, catalog ZS7-115, and took its time. College radio found it late in November. By March 15, 1969, it had climbed to number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100, and it reached number 28 in Canada a little over a week later. Billboard called the original the near definitive rock single. AllMusic later described a fabulously funky guitar riff and lyrics you could sing without a lyric sheet. The album cut runs about two minutes and thirty-seven seconds. The Hollywood Vampires version clocks in at two minutes and forty-eight. Short, sharp, and built for a request line.

Randy California’s story is the reason the Vampires reached for the song in the first place. Before Spirit, he was the kid guitarist in Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, the Greenwich Village band led by a then-unknown Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix gave him the name California so nobody would mix him up with another Randy in the group, Randy Texas, better known later as Randy Palmer. Spirit formed in Los Angeles in 1967 with Jay Ferguson, Mark Andes, John Locke and drummer Ed Cassidy, who was Randy’s stepfather and a jazz veteran old enough to have played with Art Pepper and Gerry Mulligan. The band mixed hard rock, jazz voicings and psychedelic detours, and “I Got a Line on You” was the straightest punch they ever landed. Randy died on January 2, 1997, off the coast of Molokai, Hawaii, after he went into the water to save his twelve-year-old son Quinn from a rip current. Quinn survived. Randy did not. Alice Cooper has told that story more than once, and he has called Randy one of his favorite guitar players. Doing the song was a salute, not a party trick.

The band name is older than the album. The original Hollywood Vampires were a drinking club that gathered upstairs at the Rainbow Bar and Grill on the Sunset Strip in the 1970s. Alice Cooper was a founder. The loose membership included Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon, John Lennon when he was in town, Ringo Starr, Micky Dolenz, Bernie Taupin and a rotating cast of whoever could hold the table. The joke, which was not entirely a joke, was that you had to outdrink the rest of the room to earn the name. A lot of those men did not make it out of the decade, or the one after. Cooper got sober. He kept the name. At his own shows he had long since been slipping covers of his old drinking partners into the set. The album was the logical next step, a record of songs tied to that early-seventies circle and to the heroes who came just before it, cut with friends who could actually play them. Depp and Cooper started the conversation. Perry walked into the room while they were talking and said he was in. Ezrin, who had produced Cooper’s classic records and Pink Floyd’s The Wall, took the chair.

Hollywood Vampires arrived on September 11, 2015, through Republic. It opens with a short narration from Sir Christopher Lee, recorded not long before his death, and then moves through covers and a pair of originals. The guest list is ridiculous in the best classic-rock sense: Paul McCartney on Badfinger’s “Come and Get It,” which he had written, Dave Grohl, Slash, Brian Johnson, Robby Krieger, Joe Walsh, Zak Starkey, Perry Farrell, Orianthi. “I Got a Line on You” sits between a “Whole Lotta Love” and a Doors medley of “Five to One” and “Break On Through.” Farrell shares the vocal with Cooper. Walsh, who knows a thing or two about a riff that can carry a room, is on guitar alongside Depp. The sessions ran through Studio 1480 and The Village Recorder in Los Angeles, Anarchy Studios in Los Angeles and Nashville, and Germano in New York. Three tracks were pushed out early so people could hear the band before the full album landed, and this Spirit cover was one of them.

There is a studio story Alice likes to tell. McCartney was in the building, listening back to what had been cut. The Spirit song came up. McCartney asked who was singing. Depp said it was Alice. McCartney said, “Wow.” Cooper has joked that a “wow” from Paul McCartney is something a singer can live on for years. The vocal does earn it. Cooper does not imitate Randy California. He sings the river-bed come-on in that familiar snarl, a little drier than the 1968 original, with Farrell answering and thickening the hook. The lyric is simple on purpose. Let me take you down to the river bed. Got to tell you something that will go right to your head. Then the title line, over and over, a claim and a boast. Randy wrote it as a teenager. It still sounds like a man who has already decided the room is going his way.

Cover versions have piled up since Ode pressed the single. Blackfoot turned it into a southern-rock stomp in 1979. Alice Cooper had already been playing it on the road by the late 1980s. The Jeff Healey Band cut it in the mid-1990s. Disco producer Patrick Cowley left an early-eighties version behind. None of them replace the Spirit single, and the Vampires version does not try to. It puts Walsh’s slide-aware touch and Depp’s rhythm guitar under a singer who has spent fifty years learning how to sell a two-and-a-half-minute threat. Spirit themselves returned to the song on the 1984 reunion album The Thirteenth Dream, also known as Spirit of ’84, in a long arrangement that ran past seven minutes. The Hollywood Vampires cut stays close to the single length. That is the radio instinct. Get in, state the case, get out before the riff wears out.

Hollywood Vampires did not stop with the debut. A second studio album, Rise, followed in 2019, with more originals and another round of guests. Live records have come since, including a set from the Montreux Jazz Festival. The touring lineup has shifted around the Cooper-Depp-Perry core, with Henriksen a near-constant and players such as Chris Wyse and Glen Sobel holding down the rhythm section on the road. The point of the band has stayed the same. Play the songs of the people who are not here to play them, and play a few of your own so the thing is a band and not a séance. “I Got a Line on You” fits because Randy California belongs in that company, not because he drank himself under the Rainbow, but because the music was cut short and the riff deserved another room.

If you want the long version of the station that still plays this kind of record without a clock and without a sponsor read, the place is THE ZOO, the listener-supported heir to KZEW 98 FM. The band keeps its own lair at hollywoodvampires.com, with news and tour notes posted as they happen. The official Facebook page is facebook.com/hollywoodvampires, the official Instagram is instagram.com/hollywoodvampires, and the official account on X is @hollywoodvamps. For the deep Alice Cooper archive that tracks set lists, session credits and the old drinking-club lore, the fan-run Alice Cooper eChive sits at alicecooperechive.com, and the long-running Sick Things UK fansite is at sickthingsuk.co.uk. Put the Spirit single on after this one if you have it. The riff has not aged. It just changed singers.