From the opening bass riff of “Gutter Cats vs. The Jets” to his imaginative bass playing on songs like “Black JuJu” and “Blue Turk”, Dennis Dunaway to this day is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated bass players of all time. As an original member of Alice Cooper, Dunaway was one of the ones responsible for such classics as, “I’m Eighteen”, “Is It My Body”, “Schools Out”, “Under My Wheels”, and “Elected” just to name a few.
It’s not every day that I get to talk to a living legend so when the opportunity presented itself to me to speak with Dennis, you can bet your ass I jumped at the chance. Dennis was an absolute blast to talk to and I loved hearing so many cool little stories that I never knew or heard before. We talked about his awesome book, ” SNAKES! GUILLOTINES! ELECTRIC CHAIRS! My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Group”, we talked about the stories behind some of the classic songs that he had a hand in writing, and we even talked about the seldom talked about “Battle Axe” album and stage show. It was truly an honor to speak with Dennis and I hope you all will enjoy the living hell out of this interview.
Dennis, thank you so much for taking the time out to talk to me today. It really is an honor.
That’s so cool of you to say that, Don. Thank you. Whatever questions you have, just shoot!
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Back in the Alice Cooper days, you didn’t get to do many, if any, interviews. You’re making up for lost time these days huh?
Yes, I am. There were so many years where, after the group’s pre-mature demise, that everybody kept repeating all of these reasons why the band broke up that weren’t true. Nobody asked any of us in the band but they kept repeating that we refused to do the theatrics and stuff which was very frustrating. Also, I let this go for many years but, I think it was in Circus magazine or something, they said I was born in 1948 so you know that when somebody says something, other newspapers put that on their file for future reference. For decades, everybody always said I was born in 1948 and I thought, ok, I’ll surprise them by revealing in my book that I was born in 1946 [laughs]. All of the sudden, everyone scrambled and it seems to have been corrected everywhere these days [laughs].
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Well at least they complimented you and made you younger!
Yeah, well there are plenty of entertainers that would think that two years difference wasn’t enough [laughs].
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What is one question you get asked so much that it’s hard for you to not roll your eyes back into your head when you hear it?
Well, I think the one that’s the most frustrating is, “Why don’t you guys get back together with Alice?” It’s like they think it’s my decision not to [laughs]. I never left the group as far as I’m concerned. That’s still my living room on stage and other people are bringing in their interior decorator in my house [laughs]. That was very frustrating because it never was up to us. We never left the band. All we need is a phone call and we’re there. That’s how it’s always been. For all these years, we haven’t got back together that often. We did in 2015 and it was great. Whenever Alice gives us that signal, we’re there.
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So to touch on that, what do think it is that is keeping this from actually being a thing? It can’t be a quality thing because that reunion you did at Good Records was awesome.
Thanks, Don. You know, that was with no rehearsal. People tend to compare us to Alice’s current musicians who I think are all great musicians and great people. People compare our playing abilities to theirs but they’re up there playing every night and we get together with no rehearsal and people compare us [laughs]. I’m like, “Wait a minute. Give us one week!” That was a blast.
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How did that reunion come about? It was pretty unexpected!
That was this guy, Chris Penn who has Good Records in Dallas. It’s a wonderful record store. He wanted to do a book event for my book, “Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs!”. He decorated the whole store to be the theme of my book cover which has a picture of the Alice Cooper group with a pair of pink panties on the front. He repainted the store so that all of the trim and doorways was pink. He then built electric chairs, one for me, one for Neil (Smith; drummer), one for Michael (Bruce; guitarist), and one for a popular DJ in Dallas who interviewed us. We did the book event and we talked to people and signed books.
I was told that Alice was going to be doing a show with Motley Crue the following night and he was coming to down a day early. I couldn’t even tell Michael Bruce but I could tell Neil because he can keep a secret [laughs]. Michael Bruce, I couldn’t even tell him until the day of. He says to me, “You want me to sing 7 songs. I hope my voice holds out because I haven’t been singing as much.” I said, “Don’t worry about it, we’re going to do “Caught in a Dream” with you, Neil, and I and then start “Be My Lover” and Alice is going to come out of a secret door behind the stage. That’s what we did and you know, we had so much fun. It was no frills and it was just us playing and having a lot of fun. I got a text from my daughter in NYC and she said, “Dad, I don’t know what you’re up to the but the internet is lit up!” [laughs]
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I loved seeing that reunion. I mean, in all honesty, that IS Alice Cooper to me. My first Alice Cooper album was the Greatest Hits album which my dad bought for me in like 1986 or so. That album paved the way for me to go back and really get to know and love those classic ACB albums.
That’s common, Don. The greatest hits album is the introduction for most people to a group that they haven’t quite decided to spring to buy an album. Love It To Death became a hit because “I’m Eighteen” became a hit. Back then we were putting out two albums a year which meant that the band was developing two stage shows a year to go with each album. By the time people heard “I’m Eighteen” and had decided that they liked us enough to buy the album, Killer came out. Greatest Hits went platinum fast. Love It to Death became platinum after all the other albums did. We were putting out albums so fast that people were moving forward instead of going back and buying Love it To Death. People bought Killer, and then School’s Out and kept moving forward.
Those classic ACB albums had so much chemistry and magic to them and even as great as Welcome to My Nightmare was, it didn’t have that chemistry. When you heard that album yourself, what did you think of it?
Well, I was too busy being devastated that I wasn’t in the band anymore to really enjoy it. I think it’s an amazing album. I really like Steve Hunter and I thought it was the best album that Alice had put out for many years after that. I know what you’re talking about. When I dig out my favorite, classic albums, whether it be the Rolling Stones or whatever, I can pile up 10 albums and pretty much every one of those albums sounds like a band in a room playing. On Love it to Death and Killer, it really was a band playing and whatever enhancements we used weren’t overpowering as opposed to the Phil Spector type of sound where the producer wants people to say, “Oh, what great production!” rather than, “Oh, what a great band!” [laughs]
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You know how the older you get, the more you tend to listen to music differently. The older I got, the less I found myself gravitating towards albums like Welcome to My Nightmare and Go to Hell and the more I found myself not only going to albums like Love it To Death and Killer but Pretties For You. What a great album. Maybe not so much when you’re 14 but hearing it now, holy shit.
[laughs] In New York City recently, this guy Nick Didkovsky, who’s an amazing guitar player, put together a band of young people that really did their homework and performed Pretties For You from beginning to end live. Neil Smith and I were there and people came from Florida, Italy, Australia, and a guy even flew in from Sweden just for that. Afterwards, Steve Conte, who played in the New York Dolls and is with Michael Monroe now, he was saying, “I know that album but I never realized how much jazz and everything that was in that album. I have to go back and listen to it some more.” This band did do their homework and they were really tight.
The thing about Pretties for You is that this album was recorded over two nights, from midnight to sun up [laughs]. That’s what we had to do that album. I mean, how sharp are you at that time? [laughs] I actually thought Pretties for You was too commercial [laughs]. I wanted to go way out to totally abstract music and sound collages. Everybody voted against it so we decided collectively that we were going to write songs that were more relatable.
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Pretties for You was such a world all its own but after this album Alice Cooper would venture out be a band that seemed to be more relatable and easier to grasp. What led to this decision?
Well, it’s because we were starving [laughs]. We quickly realized that you could do whatever artistic statement that you want to do, but if people aren’t going to buy it, they aren’t going to hear it. We decided, mostly because of Michael Bruce pushing for it, to make our songs more relatable.
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Easy Action seemed to be where this transformation was starting but at this point the band sounds like it was still trying to figure things out as far as direction.
When we did the Easy Action album, we had just started to focus on going in that direction with our songwriting when we got pulled into the studio pre-maturely. We went into the studio with half an album at best and the rest was just kind of knocking it out any way we could think of coming up with something on the spot which isn’t the best way to do an album, for us anyway.
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Bringing in Bob Ezrin for Love it to Death seems to be where it all took shape. What did Ezrin bring into the mix that you guys really needed?
By the time we got to Love it to Death, Michael had really sharpened up his songwriting skills and the rest of us had to. When Bob Ezrin came along it was the perfect timing. It wasn’t like Bob Ezrin took a band that couldn’t write those kind of songs and made us write them. We were already well headed in that direction when Bob came along. We had already made leaps and bounds in that direction of coming up with more relatable songs like Caught In A Dream. Bob taught us how to whip a song into shape to be a hit single. That’s what we weren’t able to do. We were learning how to write songs on Pretties for You and we were getting better at it on Easy Action and by the time we got to Love it to Death we had learned how to write songs. Neil wrote Hallowed By My Name. Nobody ever mentions that one [laughs].
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Wow. I had no idea he wrote that one. That’s one of my favorite songs!
[laughs] Oh man. I’m glad you said that. It’s one of mine too. Neil also wrote Alma Mater, he wrote Teenage Lament ’74.
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That is probably my all time favorite Alice Cooper song!
That’s a great song. Not a bad group of backup singers either huh? Liza Minelli, The Pointer Sisters, Patti LaBelle, and Ronnie Spector [laughs]. Yeah, not a bad backup group huh? On “Man With the Golden Gun”, that real high voice that’s singing in the James Bond style, that’s Liza.
Holy shit. I’m learning all kinds of awesome stuff today!
[laughs] You can’t read the album credits these days. Not on the CD. Even with a magnifying glass. I can’t see it [laughs]
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Another song that is such a stand out track to me is “Black JuJu.” This one is credited to you but what I love is that even when a song was written by just one of you, it sounded like it was really created by all of you.
Generally, I’d say that 95% of the songs that we did would be brought to the table and then just dissected. Every single part was pulled so that we could try and find the best ultimate part. There was a lot of creative work that went into every song. Like I mentioned earlier with “Caught In A Dream”, that song didn’t have as much of that beat it up and spit it back out kind of stuff. “Black JuJu” didn’t either. Actually, “Black JuJu”, we recorded it exactly the way I wrote it. I thought that we should have condensed the middle part because we decided to record it the way I had written it for the stage presentation. The middle part, I wrote that part where Alice would swing the giant pocket watch and hypnotize the audience while the band was imitating the “tick tock, tick tock” of a clock. Glen Buxton had that nerve shattering slide guitar thing going on. When we recorded it in the studio, we just decided to go ahead and record the live version and just lay it down. That was one of few songs that we ever recorded with Alice singing the vocal track live at the same time. We got one take but Michael had hit a dissonant organ note in the beginning so he wanted to do it over. We recorded it a 2nd time and got another take but then when we compared the two, all of the sudden that dissonant organ note grew on us and we used that one [laughs].
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I love hearing that. It’s those kinds of “happy accidents” that a lot of times are truly magical.
Exactly and we loved that. The Alice Cooper group would jump all over that. If somebody would make a mistake we’d go, “Yeah, that’s great!” [laughs]
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Another song I’d love to ask you about is “Dead Babies.” That’s one of the few songs that is credited to all of you. Now I’m trying to picture the five of you sitting around writing this masterpiece! What’s the story there?
It was two different songs that were going to fall by the wayside. One song had a good verse and the other song had a good chorus but they over all, the entire songs weren’t making it so they had fallen by the wayside. I really wanted to put the good verse and the good chorus together but nobody was going for the idea. I wrote the bass part to glue them together. At that point, the band had a farm in Pontiac, MI, outside of Detroit. We could play as loud as we wanted, as late as we wanted because the nearest neighbor was a prison farm across the field from us [laughs]. When it was a nice day, which meant that the ice had thawed on the ground we would open up the barn doors and play. This prison farm, not every song would get a response but if it was something they really liked we’d hear them cheer [laughs]. So our goal was to get these guys to cheer. So for this song, the ongoing rule in the band was that you had to try everybody’s idea. You couldn’t throw it out until you really gave it a heartfelt try so the other guys had to really try putting together this verse with this chorus. I finally got them to try it and when we did, we heard a giant cheer from the prison farm. I’m sure that helped me win my case with this song [laughs].
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“Dead Babies”, like many of the other Alice Cooper tracks really had a much deeper meaning than just what you heard on the surface.
We weren’t sure if we could pull it off because we were wondering if the censors would be all over us. The song is actually about parental neglect. The child gets a hold of the pills and, you know, it’s actually a good message. Then of course, it became a highlight in the middle of our show because Alice would chop up the baby dolls which didn’t go with the lyrics but it made for a great, dramatic scene in the middle of our set [laughs].
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Alice Cooper songs, to me, were this kind of warped caricature of the political and social commentary of the times. The funny thing is that the songs were considered to be ugly but were really no uglier than the reality of what you were addressing.
The censorship was so heavy in those days. We had to sort of artistically push right up to that line where if you went across that line you’d be censored. We’d push things right up to that line and stick our toe across and only go as far as we thought we could get away with. You look back on it, censorship is much more loose now and you can get away with all kinds of language on albums and all kinds of controversial ideas but back then you couldn’t. When people think about our shock rock and say, “What was so shocking about that?”, well, it was back then [laughs]. Bands just couldn’t get away with that stuff.
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Didn’t you also feel the bands today, who actually take things so much further are losing the art. To me, the art of Alice Cooper in those songs was that you guys, like you said, never took to beyond the line. Nowadays, bands go so far beyond the line that it’s not even artistic.
You know, that’s art, Don. Art has always pushed the boundaries and you always try to do something that has never been done before. Sometimes, doing things that are more outrageous is the obvious way to go. We also had a combination of the visuals where other bands might just have an image and their music to go with it, like the Beatles who were able to change their image and their music and get away with it like nobody else could. We had this image so even though we were doing something that had some sort of a moral thing to it, we would deliver it with this serious, dressed androgynously and all the things parents didn’t want their kids to see, that was part of it. In the live show, we delivered it with this presentation that was so dramatic and sinister that the lyrics that would be able to be played on the radio, in a live presentation had a much stronger impact.
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Dennis, these days you are playing in a band called Blue Coupe (the band features Dennis, and two Blue Oyster Cult members – drummer Albert 
Bouchard and guitarist Joe Bouchard). What can you tell me about this band?
Well, we just now took a break because of health reasons. Albert is recuperating nicely and we will be at BB King’s in NYC on March 26th and then we’ll be out touring again this summer. We have two albums, Tornado on the Tracks and one called Million Miles More which has a track that Alice sang on called “Hollow’s Grave.” Buck Dharma plays on it and so does Goldy McJohn from Steppenwolf is on it, and all kinds of other guests. We still have our own sound which is just classic rock with a fresh approach. We just have a lot of fun. Our background singers, Tish and Snooky, are from Manic Panic in New York City. They do all of the colorful hair dye that’s used by everyone from Cyndi Lauper to Rhianna to you name it. Sometimes we just go out as a trio and sometimes Tish and Snooky join us. Wherever we go we usually have people sit in with us. We tour Canada every year and France because they like us there [laughs]. We are spreading our wings more and working on a new album. You can find out more about it at www.bluecoupeband.com.
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I just recently finished your book, Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! One of the things I love the most about the book was that you didn’t spend ½ the book belittling or even being the slightest bit negative.
I started that book on Easter of 1997. I was in the hospital for a month and had surgery for Crohn’s Disease. At that point, I decided I was going to write a book. I started writing and I got about 1/3 of the way through the book and I thought, “Let me go back to the beginning and read to make sure that I’ve got the right direction and stuff. There were a lot of demons being exorcised in there and I thought that had become a better writer since then so I just started over. By the third time I started over, I asked myself, “What was the Alice Cooper band about?” Well, it was about a bunch of high school guys getting this idea to incorporate artistic ideas into a rock band and talking their friends into believing in it [laughs]. How dedicated we were and how much fun we had. That’s what it’s about. It wasn’t about the breakup. It wasn’t about this should’ve happened or he did that or that kind of stuff.
The Alice Cooper group was about the initial concept that we had that through thick and thin and through starving and everything else we were able to take it to the glittery top of the rock pile. From there, I started writing the book and I knew exactly what tone I wanted and I had become a better writer. Let’s face it. I’m really a conceptual artist that just happens to play bass and write songs and come up with theatrical ideas and now I’m writing a book [laughs]. 18 years from the time I started writing the book to when I had an actual book in my hand.
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In your book, you talk about the Battle Axe performance. Was that performance to be tied in with what would eventually become the Battle Axe album that was released as Billion Dollar Babies?
We were working on the Battle Axe album fully believing that it was going to be the next Alice Cooper album. I really do think that we were the last to find out that we weren’t in the group any more. The band, like I said, would vote on everything that we did and we voted on taking a break. Michael wanted to record a solo album, so Neil wanted to as well, but I was against taking a break. We had been kind of driven into the ground physically and we just couldn’t keep going at the pace that we were. Alice and Glen were both deep into the bottle and needed help. The only reason I voted for a break was because I thought that they could get a break from drinking and we could come back stronger than ever. We decided we should take a break and at this certain point we all agreed that we would come back together and do the best album that we had ever done and the best stage show.
That’s what was so frustrating about a lot of the interviews that were coming out then. While we were sinking tons of money into this gigantic stage production that had a hydraulic boxing ring, towers with lighting, and all kinds of stuff, we were reading about how all of the sudden we refused to do theatrics. This is pretty much how we discovered that we weren’t in the band anymore and we were like, “What?” [laughs] We were pumping our own money into this production thinking that Warner Brothers and our management was going to be in place like always before. I think maybe if the fans had been more upset about the name being used as a solo artist rather than the group or even the record company, we were sort of being kept on hold just in case they needed us again.
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What was this huge stage production?
It was huge and during the big finale songs, we were going to have the two gladiators come into the boxing ring and fight with guitars that looked like axes. Then we had the real battle axe which was made of clear Plexiglas with a jagged steel blade on the end and Alice was to be sitting on a throne while these two gladiators fought it out until one had the other one down and then Alice would go thumbs up or thumbs down to the audience. Then this battle axe would come out into the spotlight and then Alice would take it and jam it into the fallen gladiator and then the whole scene would freeze and the hydraulic boxing ring would slowly move back under the drum riser and then the hero would come out all resurrected and everything [laughs]. So that was the concept. We did four shows and we even played the Pontiac Silverdome.
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That’s amazing. I had no idea you guys actually did shows. I mean, even without Alice, at least you got to see that show manifest itself into something.
Yeah, we did four shows. The problem was that it was very confusing. Alice was out on the road using the Alice Cooper name and the band was kind of silhouetted behind him with the spotlight on him. A lot of people didn’t even realize that the group wasn’t together. For us to go out as the Billion Dollar Babies and convince a promoter to have us, they’d say, “But wait a minute. You guys are already out on the road.” [laughs] Then we’d have to try and educate the public in one advertisement what “this ” is now. It was very difficult for us to get a headlining slot and it was impossible to get an opening slot with this gigantic production. We got stuck trying to do festivals and at a festival, you can’t bring in that giant stage so we just got into this major losing situation.
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I would love to see footage of those performances. Does any footage exist of those shows at all?
I’ve only ever seen about 3 or 4 photographs and that’s about it.
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Billion Dollar Babies then moved forward with the recording of Battle Axe without Alice and Glen. Looking back on it, was this a good idea?
At that point the financial burden was so devastating to us in the end. The financial burden of the record company and nobody helping pay for this gigantic stage and this recording, we just went ahead and did it to try and recoup whatever we could. We pumped fortunes into it. Then, also, by the time the shit hit the fan, all of the sudden we were all scrambling trying to deal with legal stuff and all kinds of other distractions so the album kind of got derailed by all those legalities. It could’ve been a much better album. I’m proud of it.
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After all the drama and hard times, how are and Alice getting along after all these years?
Alice and I are very close. Alice and I, since we were 16 years old, have just been friends. Despite whatever went down and me feeling like I had some knives in my back at certain points, it didn’t matter. Whenever we’re in the same room, we just kind of continue as always. There’s no filling in the gaps or anything. We always have a lot of laughs and the same goes for the other guys. Michael Bruce just got married and we’re good friends. Neil is my brother in law and we get along great. We all get along. The Alice Cooper group thrived on humor. Whether it was sarcastic humor that sounded nasty to outsiders, it was always just a bunch of high school buddies having a lot of fun and it still is.
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Over the years, I have seen a classic ACB show circulating under many names such as “Freak Out” and “Science Fiction.” What’s the story behind that?
Well, it’s a bootleg that they can’t seem to get rid of [laughs]. It was actually recorded live at the Toronto Rock N’ Roll Revival Festival. It’s the one where we threw the chicken into the crowd. Most of it is us playing live on stage while someone in the audience had a cassette recorder or whatever. Then there’s two songs on it that aren’t even us [laughs]. It’s some other band. It seems like it’s become a collectible in its many forms because it’s had so many covers. I bet it’s had 40 covers over the years.
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I actually bought a copy on cassette titled “Freak Out” many years ago from a gas station.
[laughs] Yeah. People collect it because there’s so many album covers to it. They’ll get rid of it and all of the sudden it’ll come out with a different name with a different picture and people will buy it again. They know what they’re buying, hopefully, because if not they’re being ripped off [laughs]. They buy it because they’re collecting all of the various forms of it. I wish it would go away [laughs]. It’s terrible quality and I just feel like it’s cheating whoever forks out the money for it.
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If you could reunite with the classic Alice Cooper group and re-create any album/tour from the past, which one would it be?
I’d probably say Killer. Just because it was the band at our peek. It was the band still doing all of our own ideas and it was a powerful show. Than hanging, the dramatic light show. We would have to have Charlie Carnell with his light show to do it properly. That’s the problem with rock shows these days; lighting. Everybody seems to be happy about putting 100 lights behind the group and then with every song all you do is flash the lights in time with the music. That’s not what the Alice Cooper group did. We did, dramatic, theatrical lighting like you would do on Broadway. When Alice was in his straightjacket, there was a spotlight on him and it looked like he was in a prison cell or asylum. You didn’t have a bunch of lights flashing to distract from what was going on onstage. The lighting was to light what was going on stage rather than show off how many lights the lighting guy has [laughs].
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I also feel that sometimes these HUGE light shows can be super distracting at times.
Exactly but some bands need that. Some bands that just stand there and play, having the lights create all the action on stage is probably a good thing. What we did was that Alice would be in a straightjacket, a nurse would be mean to him, he’d kill the nurse, and then we’d drag him up the gallows steps and hang him [laughs]. If you have all that rock n’ roll lighting going on it makes it hard to believe that this is actually happening but when you have dramatic lighting, it creates a very strong impression.
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Dennis, last but not least, what are your plans for 2016?
Oh man, I tell you. My book has done so well and I’m still getting a lot of requests for interviews and book tours to promote the book. I always have a lot of different artistic ideas that I’m always working on . Blue Coupe are working on some new material and I’m also doing an abstract, avant-garde album which, like I said earlier, was where I really wanted Pretties for You to go. I wanted to go to a place where there’s no musical scales, where notes didn’t matter. I have another album for this band called ARC, American Rock Celebration. We did an EP of six songs which are basic rock. If you had to say it sounded like somebody I would say someone like Bad Company. I also want to do my first album ever where I have the final say on every single thing. I want it to be the scariest music ever done [laughs]. I’ve got lots of irons in the fire. I’m a creative person and I can’t think of much of anything else.
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Dennis, thank you so much for taking the time out to talk to me. This has been such an honor for me and I really enjoyed the hell out of this.
Thanks, Don. I really enjoyed it. We have to do this again sometime.
For more on Dennis Dunaway, check out his website at http://www.dennisdunaway.com
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