Alice Cooper, Joe Perry on Hollywood Vampires Tour: It’s About Fun

Hollywood Vampires – the supergroup featuring Alice Cooper, Johnny Depp and Joe Perry, among others – will be mounting an 18-date North American tour this summer, and that means one thing to the singer. “Apparently, Johnny’s not making any movies this summer,” he says with a big laugh. “I think he loves playing rock & roll more than he does making movies. He calls movies his day job.”

Ever since the group put out its raucous self-titled debut last year – a collection of cover songs by artists Cooper calls his “dead drunk friends” that made it into the Top 10 of Billboard’s hard-rock chart – Hollywood Vampires have only given short glimpses into what they’re capable of live. They played a couple of star-studded gigs at Los Angeles’ Roxy Theatre and a date at Brazil’s mega-festival Rock in Rio, and they debuted a new original tune and paid tribute to Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister with a fiery performance at the Grammy Awards this past February. Now, with each of the musicians’ schedules somehow in alignment and the addition of Stone Temple Pilots’ Robert DeLeo replacing bassist Duff McKagan, they’re ready to take the show on the road. “This is a real band here,” Cooper says. “We actually tour and do shows, argue, do everything.” He laughs.

The singer and guitarist Joe Perry spoke to Rolling Stone in early April in anticipation of the tour, which kicks off in Verona, New York, on May 24th, to preview what fans should expect.

What can people expect on this tour?
Joe Perry: It’s really about us having fun. Obviously, I love watching the audience get off, but to turn around and look at the people onstage with me, I’ve just got to shake my head. Never in my wildest dreams. To have Matt Sorum and Johnny Depp and Alice – I mean, I’ve known Alice for years and years and years, but we’ve never really had the chance to play together. And Johnny’s sat in with us a few times on Aerosmith shows, but we’ve never really had the chance to do something like this. So it’s really exciting. All that excitement is what we’re going to bring to the stage and put it out there for the audience.

Will it be a theatrical show, like an Alice gig?
Alice Cooper: I don’t think it needs to be theatrical. It needs to have its own flavor.

Perry: It’ll be a good rock show. I don’t think we’re going to go in with a bunch of bombs, fireworks and all that stuff. I don’t think we need that. And it takes away from the music. We’ll just let the music do the talking.