ALICE COOPER Says THE BEATLES 'Absolutely' Would Have Reunited If JOHN LENNON Had Lived

During a recent appearance on QFM96's "Torg & Elliott" radio show, legendary rocker Alice Cooper, whose 1970s "Hollywood Vampires" celebrity drinking club included THE BEATLES members Ringo Starr and John Lennon, was asked if he thinks THE BEATLES would have reunited at some point for at least one concert had Lennon not been murdered back in 1980. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Absolutely. Here's the thing about them. When they were after each other's throats, when it came to the breakup and all that stuff, if anybody in the 'Vampires' back in those days — that was our drinking club — if anybody said anything bad about Paul [McCartney], John would take a swing at you. Because that was his best friend. If anybody said anything about John to Paul, Paul was not like that, but Paul would walk out of the room; he'd just walk out. Because you are not allowed to talk about their best friends. They were best friends no matter what was going on in the whole thing. One went one way and one went the other. I think John wanted to be more political; Paul was not into that that much. John was always trying to get me into politics, and I said, 'John, you're trying to save the world. I'm just trying to entertain them.'"

Back in 2017, Alice told NME that THE BEATLES was one of his biggest influences. Cooper added that he heard "She Loves You" as a child, saying it was "the first song by THE BEATLES I ever heard and it literally changed something in my brain. It inspired what Alice Cooper became."

In 2020, Alice included "Meet The Beatles! in his list of top albums of all time, telling Rolling Stone magazine: "It was the first one that totally knocked me out because I'd never heard anything like that before. We were listening to the BEACH BOYS and the FOUR SEASONS, and all of a sudden, here's this band coming along with all this hair and Beatle boots and these suits, and they were singing these songs that you could hear them one time, and you knew them."

He continued: "I've always said this, and people might disagree with me, but it's easier to write something like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' than it is to write something like 'I Want To Hold Your Hand'. I'm still pretty sure they're aliens. I don't think they're from this planet."

This past June, McCartney announced that he had employed AI technology on an unreleased BEATLES demo from the 1970s, telling BBC Radio 4's "Today" program that AI had been used to "extricate" Lennon's voice from a cassette recording of the demo. The track is widely believed to be a 1978 Lennon composition titled "Now And Then". The song was included on a cassette labelled "For Paul" that Lennon had recorded shortly before his death in 1980.

Photo credit: Jenny Risher