After The Beatles broke up, John Lennon publicly derided Paul McCartney, but Alice Cooper said the musician behaved differently behind closed doors. While he could speak ill of his former bandmate, nobody else could. Cooper shared how Lennon would react and revealed that McCartney had a similar approach.
Alice Cooper said John Lennon defended Paul McCartney
After Cooper rose to fame himself, he got to know The Beatles. Their breakup was messy and painful for the former bandmates. Lennon and McCartney insulted each other’s music and behavior. Still, Cooper said they never allowed others to speak badly about the band. Lennon would go so far as to try to fight people who insulted McCartney.
“Here’s the thing about them,” he said, per iHeartRadio. “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, John would take a swing at you, because that was his best friend.”
McCartney took a similar, if less violent, approach.
“If anybody said anything about John to Paul, Paul would walk out of the room,” Cooper said. “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.”
John Lennon was complimentary to Alice Cooper but still thought Paul McCartney was better
Cooper idolized The Beatles, so his eventual friendship with Lennon meant a great deal to him. He recalled how it felt when Lennon complimented his music.
“In the prime of Alice Cooper we were getting all this publicity, and I think John understood and really did like the idea that we were so controversial, that we were banned, and that we couldn’t care less what Mary Whitehouse said,” Cooper wrote for Louder Sound. “And he liked the songs.”
Still, Lennon couldn’t help but compare it to McCartney’s work. Cooper didn’t care.
“He came to listen to the record at the office in New York, and he kept bringing people in, like, ‘You’ve gotta hear this record!’” Cooper recalled. “One time he’s walking out and I’m walking in. ‘Hey John, how are you doing?’ ‘Hey Alice! Great record.’ Then he says: ‘Paul would have done it better.’ And I went: ‘Well, of course he would – he’s Paul McCartney!’ The fact that he loved the record was a big deal.”
He listed an early Beatles album as 1 of his favorite records of all time
Cooper compiled a list of his top 10 favorite albums of all time for Rolling Stone and included 1964’s Meet the Beatles! He explained that while he loved The Beatles’ discography, Meet the Beatles! was the first album to shock him.
“I picked Meet the Beatles! only because it was the first one that totally knocked me out, because I’d never heard anything like that before,” he said. “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 believed that the simplicity of their songs set them apart from other groups. Still, the songs felt fresh and enduringly impressive.
“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,’” he said. “I’m still pretty sure they’re aliens. I don’t think they’re from this planet.”
