Alice Cooper Bassist Dennis Dunaway [Episode 338]

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Rock and roll Hall of Famer Dennis Dunaway basis for
the original Alice Cooper Group. He's here to talk about
the recently released new album from the Alice Cooper Group,
their first in fifty two years, called The Revenge of
Alice Cooper. He's got the stories behind the Alice Cooper classics,
I'm eighteen, schools out, billion dollar Babies and more. He
also had a memoir out in twenty fifteen. We'll talk

(00:21):
about that book and what the future holds for the
Alice Cooper Group. It's all coming up next on Booked
on Rock.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
I'm li I know Dialogue. How's a fountain? The conversation right,
that's a geyser? Interesting, interesting, as provocative for Daddy Man's
back man.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Rock and Roll. Welcome back to book Don Rock, the
podcast for those about to read and rock Americ Senich.
We're back with another chapter in the Dialogue series of
chill and Chat with authors, fellow podcasters, musicians and more.
And boy do we have a great guest today. Our
guest is rock and roll hall of famer He done Away,

(01:00):
bassist for the legendary Alice Cooper Group, who just recently
released their first studio album together in over fifty years.
I believe it's fifty two years exactly. The Revenge of
Alice Cooper. Also, his memoir titled Snake's Guillotines electric Chairs
just recently reached its tenth anniversary. Dennis, thank you so
much for being on the show. This is great.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Oh sure, Eric, it's been a while.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
It's been a while. I was just saying, before we
started recording here, a long time ago, it's probably early
two thousands, I interviewed you and Neil Smith. It was
a gig you were playing with the Bouchard brothers in Danbury, Connecticut. Yeah,
it's a while back. A gig that well, first it
was Bouchard, Dunaway and Smith, That's what it was. And

(01:45):
then and then that was Joe Bouchard, okay, and then
it changed to be Blue Coop, which was Albert Bouchard
on drums. Yep, I saw that's a recent project. Is
that project still going?

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Oh yeah, we've been going for like geez ten years
or so now, But everybody's got other irons in the
fire at the moment. But we released a DVD with
a bunch of music videos and also we added an
extra disc of what we thought would be outtakes and

(02:21):
unreleased demos, but it turned out to be another album.
So that's called When Legends Collide and you can go
to bluecoop dot com and find that cool.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
I think you can also access it through your website,
which we'll we'll get to that a little bit too.
Let's start with the album, which is fantastic. It is
classic Alice Cooper sound produced by Bob Azern. It feels
like you're in the room.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
You know that that is what it sounds like, because
that's what it was. We were in the room recording
all together, you know, Alice standing next to me and
Neil to the other side, Michael right in front of me,
so and that's how we used to records. So that's
how we wanted to do this. But normally the bass
would have maybe a couple of takes where I nailed

(03:09):
it on the bedtrack, you're really just going for the
drums and you can add everything else. But this album
is almost entirely drums and bass. As they went down
in the studio and then some of the Michael redid
a lot of his guitar parts because he had his
own amplifier at home that he can dial in exactly

(03:32):
what he wanted, and Alice rewrote some of the lyrics
and stuff in him and Bob Ezern added things. And
then this young guitar player, Jozy from Nashville, who's an
amazing artist in his own right, very glam very early seventies. Well,

(03:54):
he added a lot of guitar parts throughout the album.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah, that's cool. And you had to keep this a
secret from quite a while. I think from one of
the interviews I saw this is back in twenty twenty
one when you guys got together and started working on
this and you had to keep it under wraps for
a while. You had recorded with Alice on various tracks
throughout the recent years, but this time a full album

(04:18):
with the band. How did that all come together?

Speaker 2 (04:21):
I think? I mean there were a lot of steps.
I mean, being inducted into the Rock Hall and playing
Alice's Christmas Pudding shows to benefit for the teen centers
that him and his wife are involved in and out
in Phoenix, Arizona. We did that in twenty ten, twenty nineteen,
and we just did win a couple of weeks ago.

(04:41):
So those would bring us together in the rehearsal room
and on stage. But I think the final thing was
that Neil and Michael had been getting together out in Phoenix, Arizona,
and then when Alice was in town, he joined them
and they came up with some songs that they were
excited about. So then we decided, well, it's about time,

(05:05):
let's do it.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Yeah, it just happened from there. So it's Alice yourself, drummer,
Neil Smith, Michael Bruce on guitar. But what's so cool
is that on this album there are tracks featuring recordings
by the late great Alice Cooper group guitars Glenn Buxton,
who sadly passed in nineteen eighty seven. There are three
tracks on this album, including the lead single, Black Mamba
and what Happened to You, which those day back to

(05:29):
the early seventies.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Actually, Black Mamba was a newer tune that we kind
of made happen in the studio for this album. But
what Happened to You is a song that uses guitar
recording that I've had of Glenn Buckston for all these years,
since nineteen seventy three. And so I told Bob Bes,

(05:56):
and I said, this can be cleaned up with today's technology, right,
and he says, send it. So in the studio we
laid down a track that we thought Glenn would like
that went with the guitar riff, and we use his
actual recording on the song. And like you say, there
are other songs. There's a song called see You on

(06:17):
the Other Side, which was written by Neil started writing
it right after he heard that Glenn had passed in
ninety seven, and then and then he played what he
had for me, and then him and I finished it.
And then there's a song called what a sid which

(06:39):
is kind of a jazzy thing that I wrote as
a follow up to Blue Coop from I Mean to
Blue Turk, which was on the School's out album, a
jazzy kind of pseudo jazzy thing, and Alice rewrote my
lyrics to be about Glenn Buxton. So we have those

(07:02):
and then also we have other songs that there's a
lot of Glenn throughout this album in various ways.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
Blood on the Sun, I think that's the lyrics are
about his love of TV Guide.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
Well, yeah, Glenn collected every TV Guide, which was a
little weekly booklet you got in the old days to
tell you what was going to be on television that week,
and Glenn always had them all stacked in chronological order
on his bedroom floor, and you had to be careful
not to knock him over or you'd hear from him.

(07:36):
But so I had one of his TV guides, and
I had heard that you can't copyright a title, So
basically I went through one of his TV guides and
picked out what a bunch of titles that I thought
were really interesting, and then I went back through and
put them in an order that I thought they flowed together,

(08:00):
kind of like inspired a bit by whiter Shade of Pale,
you know, the Procol Harum song where you kind of
when you listen to the lyrics you kind of make
up your own meaning.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
So that's what Blood on the Sun is a bunch
of movie titles strung together.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
It's an epic track. And you got sole songwriting credit
on that, so you wrote the music as well.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah, I play guitar on that one too.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
That's a great track, Black Mom. But going back to
that one, that one came quickly right. That was just
you guys are jamming.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
Yeah, that was like a guitar jam that Michael had
and him and Neil had jammed on it at some
point out in Phoenix, and then when we were in
the studio, Neil said, Hey, Michael, what was that riff
that you had? And Michael started playing it and we
wrote a song.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
Kill the Flies is another one of my favorites, and
Alis sounds great on that.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
That seems to be going by YouTube views, that seems
to be a very popular track.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
Okay, not surprised that one.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
Bob Osburne was talking about Dennis, what do you think
should happen on the bass on this? And I told
him that I think that the body of the song
should be just below the belt, just lock in and
don't do anything fancy. And then I said, but I
think the middle part should go somewhere very ethereal So

(09:26):
Bob sent me a keyboard part that he had come
up with, and then I added bass to that, and
then we not only inserted that into the middle of
the song, but we also used about half of that
for the intro of the song. But that's pure Alice,
the lyrics and the vocals.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
It's a great one. The track wild One Wild Ones
goes back to the eighties and a jam with you
Alice and guitarist Caine Roberts, who was Alice's guitars back
at that time at your place in Connecticut.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
It was actually at Neil's house in Connecticut, and Alice
asked Neil and I if we wanted to help them
lay down some demos for the Constrictor album. And I
think we did about four or five songs up at
Neil's house in a couple of afternoons, and wild Ones
was one of the ones that I had written, so

(10:19):
we made a demo of that with Caine Roberts. But
we did some others The World Needs Guts. I can't
remember all of them, but we had a blast, even
though I was running a temperature where I should have
been in bed at the time.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
Oh really, music calls yeah, and the album cover is
so cool. It's the old school monster movie thing going
on there, and they got you in character.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
So Neil came up with some We were trying to
think of what we should title this album, and Neil
came up with the Revenge of and he had various
versions of that, and then Alice said, oh, yeah, I
know the perfect guy to do the cover, and it's
this guy, Graham Humphreys from Britain and if you look

(11:14):
at his website, you'll see that our album cover fits
right in with all of the horror film posters that
he's done. I think he did like not Nightmare on
Elm Street, but something like that, and then a lot
of others.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
Oh, it's great, the return album the world was afraid of. Yeah,
that's awesome. Yeah, the recording came together quickly. You talked
about that. The chemistry that you guys had is still there.
I believe you said Bob Ezrin set aside time to
record the album, and you're way ahead of the deadline.
I think songs just float out of you.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
Well, right, Bob, when this whole thing happened in in
spurts with long periods where nothing happen. So you know,
we got together in the studio, just Neil, Michael Alis
and I out in Arizona, and then we came up
with about four songs, and then nothing happened for a

(12:14):
long time because of everybody's schedules. You know, Alice is touring,
Bob's got other projects, and Neil and I so then
it almost seemed like it wasn't going to happen again,
you know, because this wasn't the first rodeo of us
attempting to put an album together over the years, but
then all of a sudden, something big would happen again

(12:37):
and we'd get all excited again. Then there'd be another
long period of where we thought, oh, it's not going
to happen. But Bob finally got us book studio time,
and at that point we had about seventy songs bouncing
around between us, and we still hadn't decided which songs
we were going to do. Definitely, we were going to

(13:00):
just go in the studio and do pre production and
decide what songs. But we started laying down tracks and
Bob had booked ten days, figuring we would get about
five tracks, and no, we were rolling along like we
did in the old days and ended up walking out
of there with a dozen songs.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
You said in one interview, there's enough songs for five albums.
So you know where I'm going. Will we get another
one from Yeah?

Speaker 2 (13:30):
No, no, no, All it takes the same thing. It's
always been the same. All it takes is a phone
call and we're all in.

Speaker 1 (13:37):
You know, Well, that's just cool. You guys have been
closed all along. I mean, the band broke up, but
it wasn't one of those things where there was a
lot of trash talking in the media or anything like that.
I mean, you guys remained pretty cool, right.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
You know, A banned his family. You know, we were
in the same car and the same hotel room, in
the same stage and everything for many years. So you know,
families all have certain things. You know that you nobody's perfect,
but you make it work. And we've all been friends.

(14:11):
I mean, Alison I became friends when he was fifteen
or sixteen and I was seventeen. So you know, we
didn't get lawyers when things started going awry, thinking that
we started as friends, just a bunch of high school
buddies that had a dream and we achieved that dream.

(14:32):
We made it to the top of the glittery rock pile,
and we didn't want to lose our friendship over it.
And also at the time, we thought, if we get
lawyers involved, that'll be the nail in the coffin for
anything ever happening. Again. We didn't know it would take
fifty two years, but that was the thinking that the end.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
There's a story that you had told in one interview
to which I love about, and when he went over
to his house and you were hanging out in his
bedroom and playing some records, playing some Stones records, and
you guys, go back that far.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
That's how I learned to play bass. When I bought
my bass, Glenn went with me. We went to Montgomery
Ward's and bought a beginner's bass, and then I went
over to Glenn's house, and I didn't even know how
to tune it, you know, I had I barely had
an idea of what bass was because my record player

(15:32):
at the time you couldn't hear bass hardly at all.
The only thing, the only time I would be notice
bass was if I heard a jukebox somewhere, you know.
But Glenn, you know, the very first thing he did,
he set me down and he had his guitar and
we sat down by the record player and he said, okay,
before we start, always remember one thing. The most important

(15:56):
thing is the feel. And then he taught me how
to tune. And then we learned through mostly Rolling Stones,
early Rolling Stones and Chuck Berry records and blues patterns,
and that's the other link to Glenn. On this album,
we have some songs that we wrote that are very

(16:18):
Glenn Buxton from that era. The kind of stuff that
he liked, including what happened to you. But yeah, so,
but you know, first of all, I had to get
Glenn out of bed because it was a weekend, and
Glenn has always been the hardest person in the world
to wake up. And so I went to his house.

(16:40):
And I didn't really know him that well yet.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
You know, he was wrote your bicycle, You got on
your bicycle, and I rode.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
My bicycle and carried my base. Yeah. Uh. And and
then I went in the and his mom said, oh,
he's down the hall there, the first door on the left,
you know, go wake him up. And I went in
Glenn's bedroom and all I saw he had ten foil.
This is Phoenix, Arizona, so to block out the sun.

(17:07):
He had ten foil over all of the window panes.
And then he's totally covered up except one foot sticking
out and TV guides all over the floor, of course
in the carcase. But I had to wake him up,
you know, And he's all I could get out of
him was go away, you know. But but I was persistent,

(17:31):
and that wasn't the that wasn't the last time I
had to wake him up.

Speaker 1 (17:36):
Oh man, Now, Alice. Did he at the time Vincent Fernier?
That was the pronunciation.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
Well, his family pronounces it Fernier, but Alice pronounces it Ferner.

Speaker 1 (17:49):
Did he stand down right away? When did you first
you were in class together?

Speaker 2 (17:54):
Yeah, he had charisma except you. Nobody would ever in
a million years think that he would be lead singer
of a band. He was just a skinny little stick
with a big nose, you know. But he's always had
a knack for making anything sound more interesting. He would

(18:16):
enhance even I used to say, he can make opening
a can of tuna fish sound interesting, but he would
He wouldn't go and try to collect people to listen
to him. He just always be in the classroom and
then next thing you know, he'd be surrounded by people
because he'd be telling stories. And Glenn used to be

(18:39):
Glenn and I would be standing off to the side,
and Glenn used to have this thing where he'd go
after Alice would be telling a story, Glenn would go
twenty five That meant twenty five percent enhancement on the story.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
Well, Alice is a great storyteller. I just saw Reche
interview with him, and you could tell he loves to
tell stories and he tells them. He tells him as
good as anybody.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
Absolutely, and you can't you know, I've heard him all
so many times and you just never get tired of him. Yeah.
You know, I just spoke today. I spoke to our
high school art teacher, Missus Sloan, who is about to
become one hundred years old.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
And I spoke to her for the first time since
nineteen sixty seven. And you know, I told her, and
she didn't know this, that Alis and I decided to
start a band when we were in her art class
because the Beatles had just come out, and we decided

(19:49):
we wanted to start a band, and we wanted to
incorporate ideas like Salvador Dolly, surrealism and the New York
pop art scene in to a band. And that happened
in her classroom.

Speaker 1 (20:04):
Wow. One hundred yeah, how about that? Man? Yeah, all
those memories just must come back to you, just especially
when you get into the rock hall and when you're
back in the studio working together. Man, those memories are
just like right there in front of.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
You, uh yeah, and us being together recently, you know,
it always floods back, but it's but whenever we're all
in the same room together. It's it's partly about old memories,
you know, but a lot of it is just a continuation.
It's not like we have to fill in the time

(20:39):
lost or anything ever. You know, we just get in
the room and it just continues.

Speaker 1 (20:44):
That's awesome. I want to go back to Edrin because
he's such a big part of Alice Cooper history. He
produced Love It to Death and Killer Schools out Billion
Dollar Babies. What is it that makes him such a
great producer? Specifically when working with your band?

Speaker 2 (20:57):
He brought uh music theory into the picture. He got
what we were trying to do, where back then very
few people did. You know. We started a career with
people saying you can't do that. You know, we're like,
oh yeah, watch us. But Bob Ezarn saw us at

(21:21):
Max's Kansas City and New York City and he saw
the light. You know. He loved the show. He thought
this is going to be the next new thing. And
at that time we were just we had done two albums,
but we still hadn't really mastered songwriting abilities. But by

(21:44):
the time we met Bob, we had learned a lot
about how to write songs and we had also decided
exactly what we wanted the Alice Cooper character to be,
and we but before that, we knew what the character
should be, but we didn't know how to write the
songs to support that. So by the time Bob Ezern

(22:08):
came along, I had written Black Juju, and Neil had
written Hallowed Be my Name, and Michael had written Ballad
of Dwight Fry. So all of a sudden we had
learned how to do these write these songs that would
be a platform for Alice to develop the character. But

(22:29):
we still hadn't shed our inability to focus a song
without having too many extraneous parts. So we would play
a song for Bob Ezron the first day we got
together working with him in Pontiac, Michigan, at our farm there,
we would play him a song and he'd say, that's

(22:51):
not a song. That's enough parts for ten songs. Let's
so I'm eighteen was the first song we worked on.
Bob remembers that differently, but whatever. When we worked on
I'm eighteen, he said, we have to get rid of
that big, sprawling, bluesy intro. And we're all like, but

(23:11):
I like that, So Bob said no, We're going to
start with an instrumental chorus and go right into the song.
And he he whittled it down to a an AM
radio friendly for arrangement, which is why we wanted him.
We knew we needed somebody that could do that, and

(23:34):
so that's one thing his talent for helping shape what
we were trying to do. But also he had to
be baptized by the fire of Glenn Buxton's sarcasm, because
nobody walked into our sacred room. We all spent our

(23:56):
You know, when people read what we say about each
other in black and white, just looks like we're being mean,
vicious even No, that's just our high school humor. We
always put each other down, you know.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
Which is still there, right? I think you said you
still to this day are just busting each other.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
Oh yeah, I mean the other day and rehearsal I
made a mistake and Alice said, oh, Dennis, you made
another mistake. I said, only make them when I look
at Neil, you know, yeah, right, stuff like that. But
Bob Ezron came into the room, Glenn fired off a

(24:37):
few of his witty remarks, and and Bob actually made
an attempt to come back. But that's you know, making
an attempt to come back and outdo Glenn with all
anybody could do. You know, most people would just you know,
shrivel up and leave.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
Right right, you said, Glenn. Also, you couldn't just tell
him what to do. You had to be real strategic
about getting the doc.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
Glenn was a true rebel. You could not you could
not come off as an authoritative figure and not even
one sentence you had to. You know, if Glenn was
in the recording studio laying down a track, you wouldn't say, hey, Glenn,
I think you should play a major scale there. No,

(25:28):
you said you would say, Glenn, would you like a
blue light or a red light on you while you
play this? You know? That's it, that's it, Like you
drive me nervous. Glenn is like, hey, Dan, what do
you think I should play here? You know, but I
knew better than to say what notes I thought he
should play? No, I said, easy play nervous. Oh okay,

(25:53):
you know that's how you dealt with Glenn.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
Yeah, and Ezrin had that ability to work with different personalities.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Yeah, yeah, big time, Bob, you know. And also Bob
knew when to let Neil and I explore to the
point where we were even disruptive to the development of
the arrangement of the song because we were looking for
something the ultimate groove for a part, and Bob knew

(26:22):
to let us explore that and then once we would
lock in, then we would move forward. But he also knew,
learning from the great Jack Richardson, who was his mentor,
you know, that's who we actually went for it because
we wanted to get a producer that could make us

(26:44):
sound like the guess whose songs it jumped right out
of the dashboard radio, you know, in the station wagon.
But Jack always prided himself on getting a hit song
on a record, underbudget album and Bob and so therefore Bob,

(27:05):
you know, so he would let us debate what we
all thought was the best part for a particular part
of a song. Because we were all very collaborative and
we were all very passionate about what we wanted to do.
It was never personal. It's always what you think is

(27:26):
the best for this part of the song. But also
Bob knew when to bring the hammer down and say, Okay,
we're losing time here, We're going to do it this way,
move forward, and we would all do that without nobody
held a grudge ever.

Speaker 1 (27:41):
And Bob, of course you worked with Kiss as well,
and Kiss so influenced by Alice Scooper, and we just
lost as Freeley and Ace lived in Kinnetic for a
long time, did you guys cross paths a lot? Did
you know?

Speaker 2 (27:52):
He's well, yeah, you know. Neil and I went over
to Ace's house decades ago and he had just built
this brand new recording studio, but he didn't know how
to how it worked. He didn't even know how to
power it up. So we decided, okay, well there's a
drum kit there, and there's a bass ant, so let's

(28:14):
let's just jam. Neil, Ace and I. Oh, the studio
had probably it seems like it was twenty feet tall
glass bricks, and so we were jamming and really having
a blast. You know, when you jam, especially like with Neil,

(28:38):
it's there's a point where all of a sudden, it's
like you stop thinking and the song starts kind of
creating itself, and you're sort of almost you're playing, but
it's almost like you're an observer of what's happening. Ye
coming to just laying some take over, you know, and
so things were really flying along and all of a

(29:00):
sudden that glass wall of bricks, glass bricks flashed bright
and it seemed to be going with what we were playing.
And there was a lightning storm outside and this whole
wall would light up and it was It was quite

(29:20):
a memorable thing. It was like we felt like we
had gotten back from being abducted by aliens. When we finished.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
Yeah, well that would have been a cool project. Did
that cross your mind, like, Hey, maybe we should record
something with Ace, This would be cool.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
Well, we wanted to record that, but he didn't know
how to turn on the power.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
So you played that show in Phoenix recently. That was
for Alice's fundraiser concert which he puts on every year,
the Christmas Putting Concert, and he raises money for three
local teen centers there and last spring you made a
surprise appearance with Alice here in Connecticut at the Moleagan
cent Arena.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
More recently, I sat in with Alice at the arena
in Bridgeport. That was interesting too, because I told Alice,
I said, instead of having me come out for schools
out for the encore, how about if I just come
out like on the fourth song of the set and
play I'm eighteen, and then I'm gone and Chuck Gerrick

(30:26):
is back and you don't even acknowledge that I was
ever there. You know, that's the kind of abstract ideas
I like, Well, he decided that we could do that,
but then I still had to come back for schools out.
But so then I did that and we had a blast,
and then I knew Alice was going to be playing

(30:47):
down in New Jersey a few days later, and I
had forgotten about that. That My wife and I, Cindy,
was almost all the way to our friend's house that
we were going to visit, like three and a half
hours from where we live in Connecticut, and all of
a sudden, I passed this thing. It says PNC Bank Arena.

(31:09):
I go, wait a minute, Alice is there tonight. So
I texted him and he says, yeah, come on down.

Speaker 1 (31:13):
That is awesome, And so that was you know, I hunt.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
I usually hang out in Alice's bands dressing rooms just
so we can make sure we got all of our
parts straight. And then Nita has her own dressing room,
so she didn't know I was there until I walked
out on stage, and then she did like a classic
double take you know what.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
That's great. Are there plans for any shows with all
of you guys together playing some stuff from the new album?

Speaker 2 (31:46):
No, not that I know of. But you know, there
are occasions when I'm the last to know, you know,
all of a sudden, people will say, Hey, Dan, I
heard you're going to be doing this, and I go, oh, well,
I better call Alice.

Speaker 1 (32:01):
This news to me.

Speaker 2 (32:02):
Alice keeps saying we're doing another album, but he seems
to be the only one that knows about it.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
But talking with Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Dennis
Dunaway of the Alice Cooper Group. And by the way,
thank you to Chris Sutton off of Chris Sutton who
helped connect us. Chris is the author of Alice Cooper
in the nineteen seventies from Sonic Bond Books. Get that
book if you haven't. Chris is a great guy, great guy.
In July, you had announced a collection of exclusive autographed

(32:29):
items from your collection. Tell us about this and they
are still available for fans if they want, they can
go to your website.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yes, this gentleman Steve Harkins, who has been in the
music business for many years. Not only that, but he
also worked for McMillan Distributors book distributors, and knew about
my book and everything. So the Music Business Association had
an event in Nashville. This was two thousand and seven teen,

(33:00):
I think, and so Steve asked me if I wanted
to come down because they had a whole this great
old hotel and it was all musicians that had published books,
and then there was a big jam going on and
all kinds of great musicians involved. And so as it

(33:23):
turned out, it was on the same night that Alice
was or the following night from when Alice was playing
in Nashville. So then I got Steve to bring Neil
Smith and Michael Bruce in the picture, and we ended
up sitting in with Alice at his big concert at
the Arena there, and then the following night was a

(33:46):
very intimate show where with the original group with Ryan
Roxy on guitar, and we played at this book signing event,
and that was a step toward getting the band back together,
I believe, because we ended up doing touring with Alice

(34:08):
later that year. But Steve Harkins has the Rock and
Roll channel on Talk Shop Live, and it's it's kind
of like if you're a celebrity or a musician. You
can sell things there rather than being on Amazon or

(34:29):
whatever where you're competing with plumbers and everything else. So
there's the dentist donaway. All the offerings that I have, Like,
you can get a signed copy of my book with
a special loss chapter included. You can get tour books

(34:52):
from the Hollywood Bowl. These schools out are the killer
Tour book that has an actual record on the back. Ah,
things like that patches, billion Dollar Babies, iron on Patches,
the Originals.

Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:08):
Uh, and all of these things are available on there,
and then we keep adding things. We're about to add
some more goodies, but cool. Usually when we add the
rare stuff that goes immediately, you know, it's like uh
uh you know.

Speaker 1 (35:23):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (35:23):
It's great though, because Steve Harkins is such a great
guy to deal with because he does he's very fair
to musicians and he's a real deal, uh you know,
rock and roll guy. So talk Shop Live, Dennis Stoneway
rock and Roll Channel. It's easy to find.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
I'm looking at it here. Yeah, these are things you
found in your attic going through ur attic.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
Well uh yeah, yeah, most of them are in storage.
Let's put it that way. But in order for me
to go in that room, I need to tie a
rope around my waist first.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
Yeah uh and Jones yeah right, so uh.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
But but I found some new stuff that's very rare
and it's all authentic. It's real deal stuff. It's not
rep because if it is, I would tell people, of course,
but then we try to price it at a reasonable price.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
There are really good prices here. I mean anything from
twenty twenty five dollars to you know some maybe a
little more higher up, but still, I mean it's I'm
looking at all the stuff here. I mean you got
T shirts seventy three T shirt. Yeah, some great stuff
on there. So yeah, people, defin you could get You
could go to Dennis Dunaway dot com and you'll see

(36:47):
it there too.

Speaker 2 (36:48):
You can absolutely. I'm about actually, I'm writing a blog
about this show that we just did a couple of
weeks ago in Phoenix, Okay, and that will be added
to Dennis Dunaway dot which my daughter and Steve Mayor
helped me with the website. But I'm all, I'm trying

(37:10):
to add lots of things to keep it that interesting.
But you can go there and find out talk shop
live you can find out Blue Coop stuff and all
of the things that I'm up to these days, which
mostly right now, it's writing songs and making demos of
songs that that I that I've started. Hundreds of songs

(37:34):
I've started and haven't made a demo. Some of them
are just in my head, you know. I want to
at least make decent demos of all of these songs.

Speaker 1 (37:43):
When do songs come to you? Is there a particular time,
time of day, time of year, all of a sudden
that it just starts to come out of you.

Speaker 2 (37:52):
It's pretty much like all day long, that's all the time. Like, yeah,
my wife will say you're writing a song, aren't you.
We'll be in the supermarket, right, I say you're writing
a song, aren't you? And I go, oh, how did
you know? And she said, because your head's bobbing up
and down. Wow, yeah it looks weird.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
Yeah, so the melodies just come to you melody?

Speaker 2 (38:15):
Yeah, Well, most songs start with just the idea, you know,
what do I want to say? But I mean, I'll
be walking the dog and all of a sudden something
will pop into my head, and then I'll come home
and I'll lay it down as fast as I can
while it's still fresh, and then I have a ton

(38:35):
of those, and then I'll go back and pick the
cream of the crop, and then I will finish them.
But I rarely finish this song totally because I usually
leave him thinking of Alice in mind that, you know.
Usually if I write a verse, then I leave room
for Alice to add his h you know, two cents

(38:59):
to it and everybody else. So but I like to
get the at least the idea of the verse and
the enthusiasm and the groove and everything, and then the chorus,
and that's basically a song. Everything else people can add
their own to it, you know, so that it becomes
a collaborative thing.

Speaker 1 (39:22):
This show focuses on rock and roll books, so can't
go without asking you about the book from twenty fifteen,
Snake Schillotines Electric Chairs, which I picked up a copy
on a Kindle. I got a kindle copy of it. Congratulations.
It's a great book. It took me ten years to
finally get around to it, but I'm glad I did.
It covers a story from your early days with the

(39:42):
guys in high school to your rise and you played
what is considered the largest indoor concert ever according to
the Guinness Book of World Records, one hundred and fifty
thousand time. Yeah, at that time, and that was in
sal Powow in nineteen seventy four. And you get into
the breakup the years following the Hall of Fame induction,
I mean, what a ride. But there's a show in

(40:04):
nineteen seventy two at the Hollywood Bowl. You devote a
chapter two talk about that night, and that's the night
you realize like, yeah, we've made it, right, I mean,
this is it right?

Speaker 2 (40:15):
You know it was. It was difficult all of a
sudden for me to say, oh, we finally made it,
because you know, we'd have we'd play to an arena
crowd and go out back and there'd be people yelling
insults at us, you know. So.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
But then well, because it was a controversial band, right,
I mean that's well.

Speaker 2 (40:37):
We liked it that way. You know, we didn't care
if you liked us or hated us, as long as
you were talking about us. But so the Hollywood Bowl, though,
I'm thinking, all right, there's no way you can play
here without having made it. Elton John was there that

(40:58):
night and he was back age raving about our outfits,
which my wife Neil Smith's sister Cindy May designs and
makes and everything. But Elton John, all he could talk
about is how great we dressed. And another thing. So
we had a camel, Cassius the camel and uh, what's

(41:23):
what's his name? The DJ from down Oh it was Jack, right,
thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
Book.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
Jack is going to come out on the camel and
introduce the show. Right, Well, the camel pooped on stage
and so backstage after the show, Shep Gordon is there
and the Union guys are there telling him he's got
to pay for a guy to shovel that up, right,

(41:51):
and Shep Gordon to give you an idea of his
New York City street savvy, you know, a proach.

Speaker 1 (42:00):
The legendary manager by the way.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
Yeah, and Joe Greenberg, Joe Greenberg, who's a good friend
to this day. Uh So Shepp is telling them we
don't want it shoveled up. This is a theatrical show
and it's a cool night, and we wanted to steam
in the stage lights and that. Meanwhile, Elton John's over

(42:25):
here raving about the costumes.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
And what were their panties being dropped from Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
We dropped paper panties and oh right, So the helicopter
flew over the Hollywood Bowl and he wasn't supposed to
do that, but we paid him and we even bailed
him out of jail.

Speaker 1 (42:45):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
But so in then, so we're looking at the Hollywood
papers the next day to see what they wrote about us, right,
And the main story was the surrounding neighborhoods of the
Hollywood Bowl, very affluent homes all had the I guess
the blades from the helicopter or the wind blew the

(43:08):
panties into their neighborhood and they were all hanging in
their trees.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
People came out of their houses. There's panties everywhere.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
Mortified by what they're seeing.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
And that was a bigger story than our show.

Speaker 1 (43:22):
Oh man. But that's the thing though, the publicity that
you would get from doing things like that. Man, it's
just you can't you can't manufacture or something like that. Man,
that stuff that does.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
It was manufactured. We calculated stuff like that all the
way back when Alison and I were in high school.
We had our band, the ear wigs that were supposed
to be from Cesspool, England, and we would make up
stories about the ear wigs, and because we were both
in journalism and on the school newspaper, we would always

(43:55):
whistle in all of these stories about the ear wigs. So,
you know, like Rolling Stones early on, they finally made
national news because they took a leak on some building
in England. Right, So we looked at it like, okay,
that's how you got to jump the shark. You can
get into a rock and roll rag, you know, any day,

(44:18):
but to make it into the to the masses, you
had to have a story that was good. Everybody does
it these days, you know, but back you know. So
you know, even the time that Cindy made clear plastic
pants for the band, and so this was I think

(44:38):
nineteen sixty eight in Hollywood, for it was Saint Patrick's Day,
and so we were going to wear clear plastic pants
and then our managers were going to call the lapd
and say get down here and arrest this band. You know. Yeah,
well we had two problems with that first ball. As

(45:00):
soon as we started playing, the pants steamed up and
you couldn't see anything. And the other problem was right
up the street, just a couple of miles where all
of the strip clubs on Sunset boulevards. So who cared
about the band?

Speaker 1 (45:13):
Yeah? Yeah, well was that Frank Zappa was was part
of the story. It was the story in Canada with
the chickens.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
No, Frank wasn't there.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
It wasn't he the one that was telling me. I
think he told Alice though he's like, Alice, don't correct it, man,
this is perfect. It's gonna make headlines because right, yeah,
it was a misunderstanding.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
About well, okay, there's different there's different versions of that story.
But but but Alice. But the truth is Alice really
did think that chicken would just fly. Yeah, he's not
a farm guy, you know, I you know, I knew,
but uh, you know, the stories got pretty exaggerated, I

(45:56):
think because I have seen footage of from somebody that
was right near where the chicken landed in the audience,
and you know, it wasn't ripped apart by a bunch
of paraplegics in the front row, and all kinds of
wild stories that came around, but it certainly put us
on the map, and we didn't really know it because

(46:18):
at that time we were putting so many crazy things
into the show that we figured some of them are
going to flop, but if anything, but at least people
are going to walk around talking about what they saw
and everybody's going to have a different interpretation. And we
also like to change it up. So we thought, okay,

(46:39):
we want somebody to go and tell their friends, oh,
you got to see this band because they did this,
this and this, and when their friends get there, we
do that and that totally different. Right. So now after
the Toronto show, it also was exaggerated because we would
take the pillows from the holiday Inn and a fire extinguisher.

(47:04):
Alice would rip the pillow open and Michael would spray
the feathers to Kingdom come. I mean they'd hang in
the air for an hour, still all of them settled,
and so Alice tosses a chicken and then there's feathers everywhere.
So that helped the illusion that the sport that chicken

(47:26):
had perished. But then everywhere we went we didn't even
get it for a while. I think the world caught
onto that that it was a reputation before we did,
because we go to a show I think it was
in Boston and these kids had rubber chickens and they're
going chicken, chicken and chicken. We're going, what are they
talking about? You know?

Speaker 1 (47:50):
The book Down Rock podcast is part of the Boneless
Podcasting network. If you're a fan of classic rock and
classic film like I am, go to Boneless dot lovable
dot app to find over twenty great shows there. That's
Boneless dot lovable dot app. Or just go to booked
on rock dot com. Click on the logo, it'll take
it right to the Boneless podcasting network. It is what

(48:11):
you want to be listen with, confidence, the showmanship, the
shock value. And then you combine that with these songs
that are just bonafide now classics like I'm eighteen. That's
a song and you write about how that becomes the
most requested song in the history of KLW, which is
in Windsor, Ontario, and that station helped to establish the

(48:34):
band in the Detroit Windsor market. Was released in I
think on this month in nineteen seventy and you say
they played it every fifth song. It was the heaviest
rotation outside of the Beatles. And it's a song that
really stood out to Bob Ezrin when he saw you
guys play live. He thought it was I'm edgy, right,

(48:54):
but talk about how that song came together.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
You know, I'm Edgie isn't bad. It would have worked, yeah,
But the reason it was I'm eighteen is because this
song came from a jam that Michael had, like, you know,
the chords, and when we would do a sound check
at a you know, tiny club or whatever, we would
just jam on that and then we would each of

(49:20):
us would come up to the microphone and do a
funny verse. We'd just make stuff up, but it was
just to warm up. And then at one point the
band was at Warner Brothers and we were talking to
one of the A and R guys and we saw
this chart on the wall, and we're saying, so, wait
a minute, who's the what age is the biggest record

(49:42):
buying age? And he said, hands down, eighteen years old
because most of them are still living at home, they
don't have to pay rent, and they've got money in
their pockets. So so we said, okay, well we can
relate to that because we all met when we were
in high school, and so the idea of making it

(50:06):
about an eighteen year old started coming together. You know.
So now when we would do a sound check, we
would come up with lyrics that we thought would fit
that concept. Now, of course, Alice polished it and really
brought it home. And Rosalie Trombley worked at c KLW.

(50:27):
They called her the girl with the Golden Ear. I
think I think there was even songs written about her. Yeah,
Bob Seger I believe wrote it. But anyway, so Rosalie
Trombley is the one that started playing it. Now. I

(50:48):
hadn't seen her for years, decades after the whole thing
happened because KLEW was right across the river from Detroit.
But since they were Canada, they didn't have the restrictions
on the power of their transmitter, so they could blast
the entire Midwest of America and Canada like Wolfman Jack

(51:12):
did out of Mexico when he started. But so now
years later, I'm in a bar in a hotel, late
at night in Phoenix, Arizona. It was an event the
town of Phoenix was giving an award to Alice and
his wife for community service. But now it's late at

(51:34):
night and everything's closed, and I'm hungry, and I'm in
the bar trying to figure out what I can get
to eat. And this guy comes over and says are
you Dennis don Away and said yeah. I said, my
mom is Rosalie Trombley. I said what, and he said,
she's over here. She wants to know if you want
to have a drink. Sure, you know, so Rosalie as

(51:54):
he's giant martinis, So I have one of those. And
I said, okay, I finally got to talk to you.
And I said, so, how did this come about. What
made you think that I'm eighteen was a hit? She said,
the lyrics, She said, before it even got to the chorus,
I knew it was a hit. And then she said

(52:16):
she started playing it and about day three, all of
the other disc jockeys came into her booth while she
was on the air and said, wait, you know, we
don't think you should be playing this because this band
is the Chicken Killers and all of that. And she

(52:39):
said the timing could not have been more perfect. Every
phone was ringing off the hook with requests for I'm
eighteen and when they saw that, they said, oh, okay,
go ahead and play it. I told Rosalie that that
was us calling.

Speaker 1 (52:56):
Well, I mean it connected with teenagers, just like Schools
Out from seventy two, another timeless classic, and it just
it connects with that that age group. But again, it's
a timeless classic and you can listen to it now
and you just it's it's still just it holds up
so well. And you say in the book that this
is the first time you all felt like, yeah, this

(53:16):
is a single and the music you had worked out,
but you wanted to perfect the lyrics and you hit
a snag on that final line of verse two.

Speaker 2 (53:27):
Well, Schools Out was written for the same reason because
we didn't really have a hit as big as eighteen
off of the Killer album. We had Under My Wheels,
which did pretty good. Be My Lover did pretty good,
but it didn't reach that level, and we thought, wait
a minute, we didn't target that same age group. So
that's why we wrote. Schools Out was one of those

(53:50):
songs that almost felt like a gift from the creative gods.
It kind of just felt. We all went to high
school in the same town during the same year, so
it was a no brainer for us. But so this
is the song that we all felt, Okay, this is
a hit, and Bob Ezron got us all together in

(54:11):
a room and he had a legal pad and a pencil, said, okay,
let's lock in these lyrics because this is a hit.
And so the whole band went through line for line
and we got everything, but you're right, there was one
line that we just kept. The more we tried, the
dumber it got kind of a thing. And so Bob said, Okay,

(54:32):
we're bogging down. Let's continue and finish the song and
come back to this. And when we came back to it,
we were still bogged down. And finally I said, hey,
wait a minute, we're the kids at the back of
the class. We can't even think of a word that rhymes.
And you know, Neil's going, yeah, well, no, you know whatever,
and Bob then the light bulb goes on over everybody said, yeah,

(54:56):
that's it.

Speaker 1 (54:57):
And Gwen's riff, as you say, late enough to march
through time with the best rock rifts ever created. And
he had such a unique style and so much so
that nobody has been able to replicate that unique scream.
Talk about Glenn as a guitarist.

Speaker 2 (55:13):
Well that's his personality. He was a true rebel, and
that riff is his fiery rebellion. I mean, we were thinking, okay,
we want schools out when that school bell rings the
final time, when now you're out of school. We felt okay,

(55:35):
we wanted to be fiery, rebellious, mostly because of Glenn
and because he had that guitar riff, and we want
it to be. Neil and I decided we want it
to be militant, almost we're getting out of school. So
Neil came up with like the bolero kind of a
beat for the choruses, and I supported that with a

(55:57):
very percussive sound. And then when we got to the
no more Pencils, No More Books, we wanted that section
to sound like little kids on the playground, So all
of a sudden, the bass goes up to being did
you know? So? Uh? It just everything just fell into
place on that song like that. And you know, I

(56:18):
used to say, if I know what a hit single is,
ninety percent of what's on the radio wouldn't be there,
but that one I did. It just it just felt right,
And it's in the Grammy Hall of Fame now.

Speaker 1 (56:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah it is. It's it's a classic. It's
you know, it's one of those two you get around
to September each year and you'll you hear the song
and commercials and it's just it's just always going to
be there.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
The other thing about that is, you know, uh, it
doesn't it appeals to you no matter what age you are,
if you've been in school, you can relate to it.
And therefore, you know, we will do these things like
audit graph conventions and all of that. And it's not

(57:05):
just the parents bringing their kids to meet us and
the kids looking like they'd rather be somewhere else. But
because of schools out there'll be the kids bringing their
parents to meet us.

Speaker 1 (57:15):
Yes, that's awesome.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
Features and teachers like I told her. Talk to our
high school teacher today and I told her as far
as schools that, no more teachers thing disregard that. You know,
we love you. This is Sloan.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
Hey, guys, we'll get back to the show, but first
I want to tell you about an exclusive deal for
booked on rock listeners get fifteen percent off any purchase
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(57:55):
glory dot com make sure to use the promo code.
Booked on Rock. Also find a link in this episode
show notes, or just go to booked on rock dot
com and click on my deals. The success of the
School's Out album meant that you were selling out arenas
now and that was during the time that you and
the band came up with the idea for the Billion
Dollar Babies album. Talk about the mansion that you recorded

(58:16):
that album. Then you had mics set up everywhere, including
the bathrooms.

Speaker 2 (58:20):
That's right. It had a big selarium that didn't had
very few plants in it. It was marble floors with
all glass, so it made a great natural echo chamber
that most recording studios would die for. We had, yeah,
microphones in the bathroom. You had to be careful if

(58:41):
you went in there to make sure the mics were
shut off out in the truck that was sitting in
the driveway with producers and stuff, which there were times
when the mics were not shut off.

Speaker 1 (58:52):
And but but that was here in Connecticut, right, Greenwich, Connecticut.

Speaker 2 (58:59):
Is Connecticut, And that house had belonged to Warner Baxter
from forty second Street, the actor Yep, yeah, his ex
wife lived in that house. In fact, I have right
here on my wall a portrait of Warner Baxter that
was in that house when we moved in.

Speaker 1 (59:18):
Oh that's cool.

Speaker 2 (59:20):
Yeah, Old Greenwich it was. I mean, the ballroom was
big enough to put the entire billion dollar Baby stage
erected in that ballroom and still have. The ceiling was
like painted like the Sistine Chapel, sort of a mural
way up there. It had a fireplace that you could

(59:42):
park a Volkswagen Beetle in easily. And at one end
of the room there was what looked like giant windows
with no glass in the panes, and then a wall
that was about four or five feet tall. And that's
so the orchestra could be sitting in there and you

(01:00:04):
could hear the music through the windows, but the people
wouldn't have to look at the band, the musicians or
the musicians couldn't see who was there. They couldn't tell
the tales, I guess, but yeah, it was. It was grand. Therefore,
you know, our environment, you know, Pretties for you was

(01:00:24):
glitzy like Hollywood, you know, and Love It to Death
was gritty like Detroit, you know. And now we lived
in this very affluent house, and so the theme billion
Dollar Babies was a natural.

Speaker 1 (01:00:41):
And that song. Glenn brought that in as a ballad.
He and guitarist Rock and Reggie Vincent wrote the music
and then you you said, you know what, this needs
some muscle, some dynamite underneath it. Yeah, story behind that one.

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
Rock and Reggie is a great song writer. His song
sound a lot like Roy Orbison, you know, beautiful ballads.
And so we had decided a rehearsal, okay, we we
want to call the album Billion Dollar Babies. And then
we decided, well, let's also have a title song. You know,

(01:01:21):
Schools Out album had Schools Out, but usually we didn't
have a title song, but we decided we want to
have a title song. So then the next morning, Glenn
and Rock and Reggie came down and we kept playing
this beautiful ballad over and over, and finally I said,
you know, if this is going to be the title song,
we got to light some dynamite under it, you know.

(01:01:42):
And I jumped up off my stool and everybody's looking
at me like what do you got, you know, and
I didn't have anything, so but I didn't know that
I wanted it to be aggressive, so I went da
da da, d and so then I started developing. Okay, Michael,

(01:02:03):
what's the next chord? So then I made the bass
line go down there and then had the it followed
through the chords. And then at that point Bob Ezron said, okay, Dennis,
you show that bass part to the guitar players, and
Alison and I are going to go and Neil are
gonna go play pool for a while and then we'll

(01:02:23):
come back. And when they came back, then Neil came
up with the drum part. You know, Alice always says,
we wrote it around Neil's drum part, but Neil's amazing
signature drum part came after the bass part. But another song,

(01:02:43):
generation Landslide, that was written around Neil's trump part.

Speaker 1 (01:02:47):
That's a great song.

Speaker 2 (01:02:50):
Thanks. We wrote that in the Canary Islands.

Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
Really, what is that feeling like? Can you even describe
when a song comes together like that? When you all
come together create something like that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):
Well, that's what's that's what keeps you coming back. That's
like hitting the hole in one you know, and okay,
in the pond or the woods sometimes, but that when
when music works, uh, it's it's uh, it's very satisfying
as a musician.

Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
Yeah, man, it's just a natural high, you know it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:24):
It's a natural thing and it and also so now
this is in the creation of a song, a band
has to learn how to write a song, how to
how to work together collaboratively. That's what we did, which
that that worked well for us rather than somebody coming

(01:03:45):
in with the song and we all learn the parts.
That happens sometimes. But music is ever interesting because it
comes at all different ways. You know. You can you
can look at a newspaper, or you can be walking
down the street and see something happen and all of

(01:04:05):
a sudden click, there it goes and you're off and running.
But you also have to learn your craft because you
can't rely on those inspired moments. You know, there are
songwriters that will only write when they're inspired, so they'll
wait and have dry spells. And then there are songwriters
that say, write a song every day and sometimes when

(01:04:29):
you're not inspired, that will inspire it. But you have
to learn your craft to be able to write a
good song without the inspiration being the guiding light. But
then the ones that are the inspiration is what guides you.
That's the hole in one that keeps you coming back.

Speaker 1 (01:04:50):
Do you start thinking like Ezrin when all the things
that he did early on, you start thinking about, like,
I have too much here, let's cut this down. You
start to think about that you learn from him.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
Right, Absolutely, Bob Ezron was the teacher, but as opposed
to some classes you know where you're not interested. Bob
Ezren is the teacher that knows what you want to learn.
And we were like sponges. I mean, we we soaked
it all in and we apply it to this day. Absolutely.

(01:05:22):
We worked with some of the greatest people. Jack Douglas,
Jack Richardson, oversaw Love It to Death and Killer, all
of these great people. You know, that's the other thing.
Working with people that you know what their specialty is
allows you to focus more on what your specialty is.

(01:05:47):
And that's why I say, sometimes I write a song,
but I don't totally finish it because I know somebody
else is going to be able to do that to
my liking. And you know, it's also the the sum
is greater than the all of the parts. You know,
I have an idea, and I have an idea for

(01:06:07):
a song, and then Neil might say, wait a minute, Den,
why don't you why don't you change the beat to
be like this or whatever you know, and all of
a sudden bingo, Yeah, that's it.

Speaker 1 (01:06:21):
Find the bookdown rock website at booked on rock dot com.
There you can find all the back episodes of the show,
the latest episode in video and audio, links to all
of the platforms where you can listen to the podcast,
plus all the social media platforms were on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok,
and x. Also check out the Booked on rockblog. Find
your local independent bookstore, find out all the latest hot

(01:06:45):
rock book releases, and before you go, check out the
booked on Rock online store. Pick up some Booked on
Rock merch. It's all at booked on rock dot com.
The final chapter of the book covers the twenty eleven
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. Since then, there
have been the occasional reunions, and now we have this
amazing new album that came out July with the original band.

(01:07:07):
I was going to ask if you thought about adding
chapters for an updated edition, but I know that your wife,
Cindy may really be the answer to that question, because
she's working on something that it might be it might
be considered like a sequel to your book.

Speaker 2 (01:07:22):
Cindy kept daily diaries. Not only that, but she has
all of the letters that her and Neil wrote home
to their mother, telling her what was going on every
step of the way.

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
And for those who may not know, she's been with
the band from Severty Much.

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
Nineteen sixty seven, since before we did Pretties for You. Yep, yeah, yeah,
Cindy was here when we were writing the songs for
Pretties for You. She got a job and helped feed
us and designed our our look and was basically our therapist.

Speaker 1 (01:08:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:02):
Whatever whatever the band needed, it was a team and
we all worked together. We had the roadies, we had
the management, we had. Everything was all for this vision
that we shared and we were driven to achieve it
and there was there was no roadblock that we We

(01:08:23):
never would throw in the towel ever, you know, even
when the band took a roll three van full of
band members, full of all of our equipment, even a
washing machine in the back, and we rolled three times
across the San Bernardino Freeway coming into La and the
nine o'clock in the morning rush hour, and our equipment

(01:08:49):
was destroyed and we didn't have money to buy more equipment.
So but did we throw in the towel. No, we
figured it out. And you know, that's like Frank Sappa
used to say, if you stay together long enough, you'll
make it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:05):
And Cindy kept the diary, daily diary of the events.
So okay, so this what they.

Speaker 2 (01:09:11):
Could do some of it for blackmail materializity.

Speaker 1 (01:09:14):
Right, So what's what's the prediction of when's it coming out?

Speaker 2 (01:09:21):
I will know I'm I am letting her do her
own thing, and if she wants any two cents for me,
then then she'll ask and I'll give it to her.
But uh, but I will say, uh, from what little
I have read of it, there's a lot of surprises.
There's there's things that we had totally forgotten about her.

(01:09:44):
Her included where she looks at her diary and all said, hey,
wait a minute, oh wow, I forgot all about that.
And not only that, but it's from a completely different
perspective because she wasn't in the rehearsal room necessarily, but
she could see this overall picture of what was developing

(01:10:04):
and when she would do the costumes, you know, we
would decide, okay, we're thinking we should maybe do this
kind of a concept. Then she would sit down with
each band member and then talk about, well, what what
would you like this to be? And then she would
have suggestions, and then it would always be a deadline

(01:10:27):
of like tomorrow morning. You know, we need five outfits
by tomorrow morning.

Speaker 1 (01:10:31):
No pressure.

Speaker 2 (01:10:32):
Yeah, and also we don't have any money for material
or anything. And she would miraculously create all of this stuff.
And so I'm looking forward to it coming out because
because it is a whole different, whole, different view of

(01:10:58):
everything that happened.

Speaker 1 (01:10:59):
Well, that's look forward to. And people can find out
the latest news at Dennis Stunaway dot com, the official website.
You're also on Facebook and Instagram. Yeah, people can find
you there too. Do you keep people up to data
on what's happening as well?

Speaker 2 (01:11:13):
But mostly Facebook. I have two pages on Facebook, but
it's me, so if somebody messages sends me a message there,
I don't have somebody else operating it and pretending they're me.

Speaker 1 (01:11:28):
Dennis, thank you so much for doing this. I'm so
glad we were able to make this happen. And again
thanks to Chris Sutton for setting this up. And it
was great talking to you man, so many great stories
and I you know, you're welcome to come back on
Sidney when she gets that book out. You got a
place to plug it right.

Speaker 2 (01:11:45):
Here, definitely. You know you might want to talk to
Mike A Boy Allen too. He was our very first
roadie and he has a book out. That's great.

Speaker 1 (01:11:55):
I'd love to have you.

Speaker 2 (01:11:56):
Yeah, living and touring with Alice Cooper and other stories
and it's it's very very entertaining and humorous. But you'd
love to have a lot the very early days.

Speaker 1 (01:12:10):
Yeah, oh hey, we can. We can work on that
off the air, we can.

Speaker 2 (01:12:18):
But yeah, as soon as Sidney's book is ready, we'll
be talking to you. Eric.

Speaker 1 (01:12:22):
Awesome, Thanks Dennis, all right, bye, Brighte.

Speaker 2 (01:12:33):
Well, no, that was an adventure.

Speaker 1 (01:12:36):
I was quite assure you put onto the Well, let
me just close this conversation by saying you are one
unique individual.

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Alice Cooper Bassist Dennis Dunaway [Episode 338]

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