My Dead Drunk Friends

Raise a glass, Zoo Freaks, because the closer on the Hollywood Vampires' self-titled 2015 debut is not a polite memorial plaque. "My Dead Drunk Friends" is a bar-room anthem with dirt under its nails, written so the ghosts upstairs at the Rainbow could hear their own joke coming back at them. Alice Cooper, Johnny Depp, Bob Ezrin, Bruce Witkin and Tommy Henriksen put their names on it, and producer Bob Ezrin is the one who pushed the title into the room. Cooper has said he liked it because it was just offensive enough to work. The men it names would have gotten the gag. If somebody had told Keith Moon, Harry Nilsson or John Lennon that an album was coming after they were gone called something like All My Dead Drunk Friends, Cooper figured they would have died laughing. That is the whole temperature of the track. Grief with a shot glass, not a eulogy with a string section.

The original Hollywood Vampires were never a band. They were a drinking club that met in the loft of the Rainbow Bar and Grill on the Sunset Strip in the early 1970s, a room the regulars called the Lair. Cooper was the president. Publicist Bob Brown kept the books. The membership list reads like a lost chapter of rock history: Bernie Taupin, Micky Dolenz, Ringo Starr when he was in town, Keith Moon, Harry Nilsson, John Lennon on his lost-weekend stretch in Los Angeles, and whoever else could still stand. The rules were simple and stupid in the way only famous men in their prime can be stupid. Last man standing. Cooper has described those sessions as a bunch of guys at the top of their game, meeting over and over, trying to outlast one another. A plaque went up. Baseball shirts with a big red V got ordered. There was even a softball team that played charity games against cops, firemen and, by one account from Dolenz, a formidable women's squad out in the Valley. The baseball side was Cooper's idea too. The drinking side is what the song remembers.

By the time the record existed, most of that room was gone. Hendrix and Morrison never made the loft, but Cooper has called them early-breed Vampires. They would have been there. Lennon, Moon, Nilsson, and a long roll of others were not coming back. Cooper, who got sober and stayed that way, has been plain about the double edge. The song toasts the crew, the wives, the widows, the ones they came home to and the ones they had to hide, and then it admits the road and the immortality myth did not hold. Standing in a tavern full of ghosts, the singer raises a glass, tosses it back, and cannot quite remember why, so he orders another for the brothers who drank until they died. Ezrin heard a lonely saloon song in the Sinatra vein, the kind of number where the bartender is the only witness. Cooper wanted that loneliness to tip into a pirate drinking song, all fight and laugh and last call. He wanted the album to land on humor, not a funeral march. On the finished record the track runs about four and a half minutes, track fourteen, lead vocal from Cooper, guitars from Depp, keys and extra guitar from Henriksen, bass and more guitar from Witkin. Joe Perry, the third Vampire, is all over the album, though the studio credits put his lead and rhythm work on other cuts. The feel is ensemble and a little ragged on purpose, the way a room sounds when the professionals have gone home and the regulars are still arguing with the jukebox.

The album around it is a covers record with two originals holding the frame. "Raise the Dead" opens the story. "My Dead Drunk Friends" closes it. In between, the band plays the lore: The Who for Moon, Spirit, the Doors, Lennon, T. Rex, the Small Faces, Alice Cooper's own "School's Out" smashed into Pink Floyd, and a run of bonus cuts that includes another Who song and Arthur Lee's "Seven and Seven Is." Christopher Lee, in one of the last things he ever recorded, reads from Bram Stoker before "Raise the Dead," which put Cooper in the odd position of having used both Vincent Price and Christopher Lee on records. The guest list is ridiculous in the best classic-rock way. Paul McCartney, Joe Walsh, Dave Grohl, Slash, Brian Johnson, Robby Krieger, Orianthi, Perry Farrell, Zak Starkey. Depp has told the story of cutting a track live and watching Cooper and Perry, two men who do not star-strike easily, mouth to each other that Paul McCartney was actually in the room. Republic Records put the album out on September 11, 2015. The point, Cooper told interviewers, was not to let those songs die on oldies radio. Take the AM-era cuts, add another gear of guitar, and play them like the creatures under the floor were coming up for air.

The band itself started as a conversation, not a business plan. Cooper and Depp met on the London set of Dark Shadows. Cooper already knew Depp had come out of Kentucky as a guitar player before the acting took over, and Depp had been sitting in with people for years. Joe Perry, whose leads had been in Depp's head since he was a kid, completed the triangle. They bonded on British Invasion, blues, and the records that used to rattle the Rainbow jukebox. The name was Cooper's on purpose. He had been slipping Vampire covers into his own shows for years. Doing a whole album under that banner let him dedicate the project to the club without pretending the club had been harmless. He has said the three of them, like a lot of players from that era, hit the fork in the road where you live or you don't. The record is the ones who lived playing the ones who didn't, and admitting the luck in that sentence.

A few bits of trivia belong in the liner. The working title Cooper kept quoting was "All My Dead Drunk Friends," a half-step ruder than the one that made the sleeve. On stage the band has rolled the song out with a montage of stills, Hendrix and Lemmy among them, so the toast has faces. The writers' split on the label credits runs Depp, Cooper, Ezrin, Witkin and Henriksen, which tells you the track was built in the room, not mailed in. And the softball-team chapter is easy to miss: the Vampires were not only a loft full of brown liquor. They were also a sandlot outfit in Hollywood weirdos' shirts, losing to the fire department and calling it a win. Cooper still talks about the song as a toast and a warning in the same breath. The humor is the point. The body count is the point. Both can sit in one chorus.

If the Rainbow loft still had a jukebox, this is the cut the last man standing would punch. You can follow the band at the official lair, hollywoodvampires.com, on Facebook at facebook.com/hollywoodvampires, on Instagram at instagram.com/hollywoodvampires, and on X at @hollywoodvamps. For the deep Alice Cooper file, the long-running fan archive SickthingsUK keeps the Vampire history and the tour paper at sickthingsuk.co.uk. And when you want the song the way freeform album rock was meant to be heard, commercial-free and in the company of the records that raised it, you are already in the right room at THE ZOO.