Alice Cooper has revealed he's got probably one of the best drug stories in rock’n’roll history, and it involves a legendary guitarist, weed and alien technology.
Okay – maybe not quite the latter. But according to a new interview, the shock-rocker reveals he shared his introductory moment into the world of illegal substances with Jimi Hendrix on a “vibrating bed”, which the late musician referred to as his “spaceship”.
When asked to describe his first drugs experience, Cooper tells Ralph Sutton and Big Jay Oakerson on The SDR Show, “Weed was the first drug, and it was [with] Jimi Hendrix.
“I’m sitting there after the show. I went to see them. And we were just a little high school band. But they said, ‘Hey, come on up to the hotel room.’
“And we were sitting on his bed, and Jimi goes, ‘Here, man,’ [and he passed me the joint]. And I went, ‘Okay.’ And then he goes and puts a quarter in the bed – you know, the vibrating bed. There was, like, eight people sitting on the bed. And he goes, ‘We’re on a spaceship.’ And I went, ‘Okay.'”
Cooper then goes on to describe his worst experience with drugs, saying “it was Detroit, and I think it was crystal THC. It was, like, four in the morning. I regained consciousness. And I thought it [was] a Jim Jones thing. And I got up. I remember it was about 20 degrees below outside. And I walked outside just in my shirt on, just to wake up. And when I came back in, everybody was just kind of coming up.”
“It was weird; it was like a [Federico] Fellini thing. It was so strange that I really did believe that everybody was dead, and I was the only one that survived it.”
Recently, Classic Rock asked fans to vote for their favourite Jimi Hendrix song of all time. The winner was Hendrix's cover of Bob Dylan's All Along The Watchtower, ahead of classics like Little Wing, Purple Haze, Hey Joe and Voodoo Chile (Slight Return). The full results of the poll are included in the one-off magazine Classic Rock: Jimi Hendrix, dedicated entirely to the guitarist, which is on sale now.
