School’s Out / Another Brick in the Wall

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a little classroom riot called "School's Out / Another Brick in the Wall," and if you are a Zoo Freak with any memory of the last bell, this one hits the ribs in the right place. It comes off the self-titled debut by The Hollywood Vampires, the supergroup Alice Cooper, Johnny Depp, and Joe Perry put together so the dead drunk friends of the old Sunset Strip could get a proper toast instead of a sermon. The track runs a little over five minutes, released September 11, 2015, on Republic, and it is not a polite mash-up. It is Alice Cooper's own 1972 anthem welded to Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2," with Bob Ezrin back in the producer's chair for both halves of the argument. Ezrin had already built the original "School's Out" and, seven years later, the kids' chorus on Floyd's brick-wall hit. Hearing him stitch the two together is like watching the same mischief get a second diploma.

Alice takes the first verse the way he always has, that carnival bark about no choice, no flag, and girls and boys making noise because somebody found new toys. Then Brian Johnson of AC/DC walks in on the second verse, the one about no class and no principles and not even a word that rhymes, and the two of them trade the hook until the Floyd section kicks the door. Slash, Joe Perry, Johnny Depp, Tommy Henriksen, and Bruce Witkin are all stacked on guitar. Neal Smith, the original Alice Cooper drummer, is back on the kit. Dennis Dunaway, the original bassist, holds the low end. Kip Winger and Ezrin himself sit in the background vocals. That is not a session. That is a reunion with extra voltage. Loudwire reported the medley as the lead single when the album details came out, and the track list on the band's own site still lists it as "Schools Out / Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" on the 2015 record. They have kept playing it too. The live albums from Rio and Montreux both carry a version, which tells you the song never stayed in the studio.

The original "School's Out" has its own lore, and Alice has told it enough times that the lines have a shine on them. He once said the greatest three minutes of a kid's life are Christmas morning and the last three minutes of the last day of school, when the fuse is burning slow. Catch that feeling in a song, he figured, and it gets huge. Glen Buxton came up with the opening riff one night, a bratty nah-nah-nah on the guitar, and the band built the rest around it. Alice later told interviewers it was the only time he looked at Ezrin and said if this was not a hit he might as well start selling shoes. It went to number one in the UK and number seven in the States, and in a 2008 Esquire sit-down he called himself the Francis Scott Key of the last day of school. The phrase "school's out" also wandered in from the old Bowery Boys movies, where it meant wise up, not ring the bell. On the Vampires cut, Johnson sings the verse Alice used to hand to the room, and then both of them slide into Roger Waters' lines about education and thought control. Alice had already been folding a bit of "Another Brick in the Wall" into his concert version of "School's Out" for years. The album just made the marriage official.

The band that recorded it did not start in a boardroom. It started as a drinking club. Back in the early seventies, Alice and a loft full of friends held court upstairs at the Rainbow Bar and Grill on the Sunset Strip, in a room they called the Lair. John Lennon, Keith Moon, Harry Nilsson, Ringo Starr, Micky Dolenz, and a revolving cast of hellraisers would try to outdrink one another until nobody could stand. The mission statement was that simple. Alice has said the club's whole point was to drink until the floor won. Years later, sober and working on the Tim Burton film Dark Shadows in London, he told Johnny Depp about those guys and about putting a bar band together in their honor. Depp was in vampire makeup, biting his own lip while he listened. Joe Perry was staying at the house. Alice said let's do it, and Perry walked in and said he was in. Two guitar players and a singer. That was the nucleus.

From there the studio door stayed open. Robby Krieger showed up for a Doors song and played the kind of slinky guitar only he plays. Paul McCartney strolled in, sat at the piano like he had always been in the band, and offered a song he had written for Badfinger. Alice has told the story of the initiation that made McCartney a Vampire for life: a red vine dipped in guacamole, eaten whole. Sir Christopher Lee recorded the spoken introduction, "The Last Vampire," shortly before he died. The album is mostly covers of the dead friends and the early-breed Vampires who would have been at the Rainbow every night, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix included, plus two originals, "Raise the Dead" and "My Dead Drunk Friends." The debut live shows landed at the Roxy in West Hollywood in September 2015, meant as a couple of one-offs. They stuck. Cooper has since called the group the world's most expensive bar band, the kind of side project where everybody still shows up at ninety to a hundred percent once the lights go down.

What the Zoo Crew likes about this particular cut is how little it pretends. It is not a tribute in a glass case. It is the guy who wrote "School's Out," standing next to the singer from AC/DC, with Slash and Perry and Depp on the same riff, and the producer who built both school songs the first time around. The kids in the original records are grown or gone, but the feeling of that last three minutes is still in the groove. If you want the rest of the lair, the records, and the road, the band keeps house at the official Hollywood Vampires site, where the 2015 album and this medley still sit in the discography. They post on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans swap stories and show photos in The Hollywood Vampires World group. And if the bell just rang in your headphones, you are already in the right room with THE ZOO.