Dennis Dunaway – Uber Rock Interview Exclusive
Written by Russ P
Sunday, 23 August 2015 04:00
I first started listening to Alice Cooper back in the late 70s. Although a solo artist at that point it quickly became clear, as I started buying up his back catalogue, that Alice Cooper was in fact a group. And what a band! – having recorded much of Alice’s classic back catalogue – songs that commonly make up over half of Alice’s setlist to this day. And, as with all fans, I started to question and wonder why Alice and the band parted ways and why oh why – hadn’t they ever got back together?
Little did I know back then that one day I’d be fiddling around with something called Skype, about to put some of my questions to original band member and iconic bass player Dennis Dunaway.
You’ve appeared!
Rough and woolly. I woke up this morning just in time to do interviews. I haven’t even had coffee yet.
I really enjoyed reading ‘Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs!, My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Group’. I think that readers will be rewarded with a lot of new details about the Alice Cooper group. The book isn’t so much about rock and roll excess as story of creativity and inspiration. Would you agree with that?
Yes. Absolutely. It’s about some wide-eyed high school kids that got a creative idea in our heads and we pursued it through thick and thin until we clawed our way to the top of the glittery rock pile.
I found it particularly interesting to learn how ‘Fields Of Regret’ was a pivotal song in the creation of the Alice Cooper character. And throughout the book you give credit where it’s due – to friends and crew. Was it important for you to redress the balance in telling the story?
Well basically I wanted to have people come for the ride along with the Alice Cooper group as things fell into place. So therefore of course giving credit to everyone that I could even though, unfortunately, the size of the book didn’t allow me to mention everybody that deserved to be mentioned…but of course I wanted to show the dynamics, the chemistry and the even the friction of a group which I think are important parts. So I tried to talk about my faults, my deficiencies as well as my pluses – and the same with everybody else. I just wanted it to be a fair assessment of what happened.
I think that comes across very well and, as I was reading the book, as I was even thinking that if a film was ever made about the Alice Cooper group then your book should be the reference text to go to.
Oh good, just what I need, another project right now. [much laughter]
What came across in the book was how fleeting the recording process is for a band. The sessions for the first three albums seemed especially brief. I find it a little sad that as a band you may get the raw end of the deal while the fans get the better deal – the fans are left with albums that last for decades and mean something to them while the album for the musician is over all too quickly and they’re back out onto the road. What do you think?
Well, yes, there’s truth to that but being in the rock ‘n’ roll business, especially in those days, it had different levels of expertise that you had to accomplish – songwriting is one thing, playing live is one thing, recording is another thing, promotion is another – all those things are separate talents that have to be mastered in order to do what we did. But let’s face it, when it really boils down to: hearing your song on the radio for the first time is incredible but also getting up in front of a live crowd is what it’s all about.
In the chapter ‘Killer On The Loose’ you mention “The big conundrum of rock ‘n’ roll prosperity”. Was there ever a time when the money rolled in?
Well, unfortunately we came along at a time before bands took any kind of staging and lighting on the road therefore the ticket prices were low…extremely low by today’s standards – but they were also low even by a touring rock show standard because we had to sink everything back into the show in order to take three semis full of staging and lighting on the road. Bands didn’t do that – you could make money if you didn’t do that – but we did that.
In terms of royalties your name is included on some huge Alice Cooper numbers that still get airplay today: ‘School’s Out’, ‘I’m Eighteen’, ‘Generation Landslide’, ‘Under My Wheels’, ‘Dead Babies’, ‘Elected’. Do you see anything from those these days?
Yes, there are still definitely royalty checks even though it seems common worldwide these days for people to just take artist’s music for free and also a lot of the companies that do expose your songs to the public – they pay such tiny royalties compared to what used to be. It’s much different than it used to be, artists are trying to sell a product that people don’t pay for.
You mention the artwork to ‘Muscle Of Love’ in the book and how some retailers sent it back because they thought that it was damaged. Well, I bought the album in a little town called Risca in South Wales and I thought that carton was flood damaged because the record shop that I bought it from had been flooded. But I didn’t take it back. I kept it. What do you think of that?
Oh well that proves the point. It was two-fold. Number one; a lot of record stores thought that the stain was real. They didn’t know it was intentional. So they shipped it back and that killed the momentum of that album alone. Just that one thing was enough to pull all the wind out of our sails. I think one of the other reasons is because the box was so thick records stores that didn’t have large floor space couldn’t fit three or four other albums in the space that that box took up in the record bins so that was another reason – they didn’t want to have several boxes taking up that much space. So we had those problems plus we were trying to follow the outstanding success of the ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ album which went to number one in England and the United States simultaneously. So it was a hard act to follow to begin with and then those logistical things…and we paid extra money to get that stain on those boxes! – we thought that it was nothing short of genius. [laughs]
Incidentally I play ‘Muscle Of Love’ far, far more often than ‘School’s Out’. I really like it. It’s as much a classic album as the preceding ones. Am in a minority here?
You are in a minority but you’re in a solid minority. I mean there’s a lot of people that love that album. I am very proud of that album. The one thing that I think is missing is Glen Buxton. He wasn’t performing as reliably as he once had and therefore, rather than bringing him into the studio and find out whether or not it was a ‘good day’ or a ‘bad day’, it just got to the point where he was uninvited. And that fiery guitar playing that he was able to add to the mix was incredibly important. And that’s the one thing that I think would’ve really tied that album together and shoved it up to the next level.
In the book you mention the widespread belief that the reason the original Alice Cooper group went their separate ways was because the band didn’t want to do theatrics anymore. I was under that misapprehension until I read your book. Was this a harmless misconception or do you think that it did harm in any way?
It did major harm. I mean…we couldn’t believe it…it seemed like decades went by where not one person asked me about it. I also talked to the other band members and nobody ever asked us our opinion of what happened. Everybody just automatically believed that we left the band because we refused to do theatrics. Meanwhile we were sinking tonnes of our own pocket money into this gigantic show called Battle Axe that was, as we believed, going to be the next Alice Cooper album. We were pretty much the last to know that Alice wasn’t going to participate on that.
Your first two albums ‘Easy Action’ and ‘Pretties For You’ were pretty hard for fans to get into if all they were familiar with were the later albums when the Alice Cooper group were at their peak. So I can imagine how surprised you were when Michael J. Fox told you: “I know all the guitar parts on ‘Pretties For You'”.
Absolutely! [laughs]
Have there been any further surprises? Have you heard any bands doing covers of the very early Alice Cooper material?
Absolutely. It’s just like you are with ‘Muscle Of Love’ – both of those albums have people that come up to me and say it’s their favourite all-time Alice Cooper album. I have my calendar right here with a bazillion things written on it…coming up on November 8th in Brooklyn, New York a band, led by a guy named Nick Didkovsky, are going to play live the ‘Pretties For You’ album from beginning to end.
That’s brilliant!
Yeah. Maybe I should get Michael J. Fox to go down there. [laughs]
Listening to The Spiders “Don’t Blow My Mind” even back then at the very end of that song it sounds like the beginnings of your signature ‘cascading bass lines’ epitomised in the outros to ‘Elected’ and ‘Muscle Of Love’. They remind me of the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of a walking bass line in jazz. I imagine you heard the potential early on and honed it?
Well, most of that was inspired by the style of Paul Samwell-Smith of The Yardbirds. You know we love The Yardbirds. In fact in 1966 when The Yardbirds came to Phoenix, Arizona and played at the club where our band – pre-Alice Cooper – The Spiders – we were really big garage band in southwest America. And The Yardbirds came to town and they were new to us but they were so influential that we opened for them by playing all Yardbirds songs [laughs]. And we thought it was a compliment. We were really young, we didn’t know…but Jeff Beck claims that he still remembers that to this day. They were flying into the desert town of Phoenix, Arizona – they’d never even seen a cactus before – it was over 100° – and they’re thinking: “nobody’s going to have a clue who we are” and then the opening band does all their songs before they go on. [laughs]
I love the rhythmic invention between you and Neal Smith. Even though early on you wanted to make the bass a standout instrument in the group, are you sometimes surprised when you look back how well you achieved that?
I play in a very unorthodox style – I started out with a bass that had a very short scale neck – and I found it easy to learn how to play without using my pinky finger on my fretting hand. Therefore I always had it stuck in my head that I was working with a handicap – cause I rarely use my pinky finger to this day. And so there was sort of a drive in me feeling that I needed to compensate for that. I was always pushing to do something that had never been done before. By the way I should know the name of that guy that coined that term ‘cascading bass lines’ because I love it. [laughs]
Basically what I got from Paul Samwell-Smith is that the bass can do anything – it doesn’t have to just fall into the root pocket to be a viable instrument. Now all this stuff went hand-in-hand with Neal Smith. You know we worked on every part together. And we tried a million ideas for every part of every song. And he would be barrelling along on one idea and I’d be out in outer space looking for another idea and then, if either of us hit on anything, then all of a sudden it would come together. And I could always tell when we were zeroing in on the right feel because it always started to feel like a locomotive coming through the room.
Where did the inspiration for the rhythmic and melodic kind of chordal playing stem from? I’m thinking specifically of those great bass parts in ‘Dead Babies’,’Gutter Cat Vs. The Jets’ which have your iconic playing bass in a starring role?
I didn’t look at it as a starring role, I just looked at it as…I wasn’t afraid to play up the neck. ‘Dead Babies’ for instance – that came from two songs that were going to fall by the wayside. One had a great verse and the other song had a great chorus so I wanted, rather than just throw both of those songs out, to move forward like we always did. I wanted to take the best of each song and combine them. The band wanted to move forward: “Those songs didn’t work out”. But I wrote this bass part to tie the verse and the chorus together.
We had a rule that served us well – nobody could throw out an idea until you gave it a heart-felt try. So the band had to try everybody’s ideas for every part of every song – and a lot of times that was time-consuming because we’d have five ideas – but anyway I got them to play that idea and it worked out. And then it turned into one of the highlights of our stage show because Alice would chop up the baby doll on stage.
There was scant mention in your book of the post-Alice Cooper Billion Dollar Babies group and the ‘Battle Axe’ album that you recorded. For some reason I was expecting a chapter on that part of your life. Why didn’t you write about that?
I wrote about everything. It’s just what would fit into a book that would be affordable by fans – which was my main intention.
Your wife Cindy made the band’s stage outfits. Do you have an extensive collection of stage memorabilia?
I do. Cindy still has almost all of the original costumes and she designed them from the very beginning. ‘Pretties For You’ – we have her outfits – all the album covers except maybe the sailor suits from ‘Muscle Of Love’ although she did the stage versions of the sailor suits. The ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ shoot by David Bailey – where we’re all wearing white satin suits – Cindy stayed up all night in a little room in London sewing to make those in time for the early morning shoot. She finally collapsed and fell sleep and handed us the costumes and unfortunately she couldn’t even make it to the photo shoot. But yes, we’ve been married for 41 years – I married the drummer’s sister [laughs] which isn’t easy. Actually our 41st anniversary is this month.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
Last year I saw the film ‘Super Duper Alice Cooper’ which was showing on the big screen of a local cinema here. I wasn’t especially looking forward to it since I thought that it was going to be the same old stories retold. But one thing that did pleasantly surprise me was that the film largely concentrated on the original Alice Cooper group period. Did this come as a pleasant surprise to you too?
Banger Films out of Toronto made that film and I really liked the team and they had done an award-winning documentary about Rush and another award-winning documentary about Iron Maiden and so I did expect them to live up to their reputation which was being able to dig up the truth. Sam Dunn had some VH1 show about metal – ‘Metal Evolution’ – and he is noted for getting all of the facts out of everybody and putting it together in the proper consecutive order and everything. So I actually expected more of an overall perspective from them but I think what happened is that the style that they did for the film required so much work for the visuals that it got to a point where it would’ve cost them more than they could possibly have made back for a documentary of that style. I loved the visual style.
I had done a two hour interview in New York City. They interviewed my wife for two hours and they interviewed Neal for two hours. They had interviewed everybody, I was one of the last that they interviewed, and they said finally we’re talking to somebody that seems to say things that ties everything else together. And I said: “Well, great.” And they asked me if I would do more interviews. Well I ended up going up to Toronto several times doing a total of eight hours of interviews and I talked about how the group was an equal collaboration between five people. And I talked about Michael Bruce and I talked about Glen Buxton and I talked about my wife’s involvement. Then for the film to come out and kind of focus on me [laughs] and Alice and not even mention Michael Bruce or my wife was very surprising. Cindy and I saw it for the first time on the big screen at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. Alice was there, Neal was there, Cindy and I were there with the film crew – we were sitting right next to them – and when they gave the GTOs credit for the Alice Cooper look and didn’t mention Michael we were squirming. But I do like the film. I think it captures the energy of the Alice Cooper group – especially the early group – so I do recommend it.
Considering how far back your friendship with Vince goes. Over the years was there any talk of you rejoining his band as the bass player without the rest of the original band?
No. Never. It seems like not a day has gone by that a hundred people don’t ask me that. But after the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011 Alice was doing interviews talking about a five city tour that the original band members were going to do…surviving members…you know Buxton died in 1997. And he was all excited about it and so were we. And then, all of a sudden, it just went quiet for reasons that I don’t know.
But, you know, we’re still friends. I’m going to see Alice next week. Neal and I are friends, Michael Bruce joined me just recently at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who hosted a book signing event and we played at that. So we’re all friends. Everybody in the original group will be in Dallas, Texas on October 6th. Michael and Neal are going to join me and we’re going to play at this big giant record store there and do a book event. Alice will be in town opening for Motley Crue so we’ll see what happens there. Also Neal and I play on Alice’s upcoming album ‘Hollywood Vampires’. So we get together and have a lot of laughs like we always did. Even at the worst of times we always had fun socially together.
Which is your favourite Alice Cooper album? That you weren’t involved in.
I’d have to say ‘Welcome To My Nightmare’.
Apart from your early influences like The Yardbirds and your contemporaries like the Doors – are there any bands that you have become addicted to?
I love Icelandic bands. I love Sigur Rós and I love this really strong heavy band called Dimma. Their guitar player Ingo Geirdal is just amazing – the whole band is amazing but he’s one of the best guitar players that I’ve heard in a long, long time.
Well Dennis, it’s been really good to talk to you, good luck with the book.
Thank you so much.
It was a pleasure to talk to Dennis Dunaway, being a lifelong Alice Cooper fan. The man himself was as warm and magnanimous as the writing in his excellent new book about the early years of the Alice Cooper group. ‘Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs!: My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Group’ is out now.
