Alice Cooper has recently recalled some “disturbing” behaviour by Johnny Rotten, pre-Sex Pistols days during a radio interview.
As reported by Ultimate Guitar, during the interview on 95.5 KLOS, Cooper reflected on the “early days”, in particular the ’60s as well as his breakthrough moment in 1971, ‘I’m Eighteen’ from the album Love It to Death.
The interviewer asked Cooper, “The whole connection of the song ‘I’m Eighteen’ to punk rock and Johnny Rotten’s love of you, and in fact, when he auditioned for the Sex Pistols, the song that he sang was ‘Eighteen.’ Talk to me about that.”
Cooper began, “You know, he told me that before the Sex Pistols, he used to be busking down at the subway down there with Sid Vicious and a couple of guys, but they weren’t doing the Irish pub songs or English pub songs, they were doing ‘I Love the Dead’ and things like that.”
“So you can imagine how disturbing that might have been. But that was, you know, that song, ‘I’m Eighteen,’ was just one of those songs that we wanted to be America’s Yardbirds – that’s what we wanted to be.”
“Bob Ezrin says, ‘What you’re missing is the fact that the simplicity of a song is what makes it powerful.’ He kept saying, ‘Dumb it down, dumb it down, get it dumber,’ to the point where it was just finally,” with Cooper then humming the melody.
He continued, “And then when you heard it on the radio, it sounded powerful, and it said ‘I’m 18, I’m chaotic, I can’t do this, I can’t do that,’ and then the hook on it was, ‘I’m 18 and I like it, I love it.'”
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“So the guy’s going, ‘I love the chaos in my life, I love being 18, I love being irresponsible,’ and that was the hook.”
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Watch Alice Cooper perform ‘School’s Out’.
