It might seem a bit far-fetched, but Alice Cooper took most of his musical knowledge from The Beatles. While the legendary shock rocker certainly had his fair share of visual inspirations, including the likes of Arthur Brown and Screaming’ Jay Hawkins, it was the Fab Four who taught him how to write and sing. Specifically, Cooper would cite The Beatles’ songwriting as not only a major inspiration to him, but as the best of all time.
“When you think of great songwriting, nobody was better,” Cooper told Classic Rock in 2014. “McCartney and Lennon just did such great songs. When I think of The Beatles, I always think of early Beatles. Take any song, and it’s like the perfect three-minute song, and I think anyone in the world would love to have written any one of them. ‘She Loves You’ is a good rock song.”
The gap between ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I’m Eighteen’ is pretty wide, but not as wide as you might think. Cooper knew his way around a good melody, but he also knew something that The Beatles knew – it’s all about being memorable. The actual content of a song isn’t nearly as important as the effect it has on the listener when they hear it. Cooper cited another classic Beatles song for teaching him that lesson: ‘Come Together’.
“Sometimes you get a song that doesn’t mean anything,” he continued, “and you sit there and you go: ‘Oh, okay, they’re not trying to say anything.’ Look at ‘Come Together’. I spoke to John Lennon about it, and he said the funny thing about that song, people are basing their lives on some of the songs he wrote. He was just trying to make things rhyme,” Cooper claimed. “‘Come Together’, he says, was just total nonsense. Yet people were taking it apart and going: ‘Oh, this is important to my life!’ Well, okay…”
Cooper is one of the rare people in the world who can name-drop John Lennon without coming off badly. Cooper and Lennon were genuine friends, even if their friendship came during their own respective dark periods. The pair were drinking buddies who were central to forming the Hollywood Vampires club during the mid-1970s. Other famous hell-raisers from the club included Lennon’s buddy Harry Nilsson, destructive king Keith Moon, and Lennon’s former bandmate turned brief professional alcoholic, Ringo Starr.
Cooper was the ringleader of the Hollywood Vampires, holding court and forcing new members to outdrink him to gain a place in the club. That was nearly impossible to do, but Lennon sure had a ball trying his best. Lennon was fond of Cooper’s boundary-pushing style, something that he complimented Cooper on whenever the pair met.
“In the prime of Alice Cooper, we were getting all this publicity, and I think John understood and really did like the idea that we were so controversial, that we were banned and that we couldn’t care less what Mary Whitehouse said,” Cooper said. “And he liked the songs. When ‘Elected’ came out, that to him was like a great poke in the eye to all politics.”