John Lennon Thought Paul McCartney Could’ve Made a Better Version of an Alice Cooper Song
After The Beatles broke up, John Lennon publicly insulted Paul McCartney and began spending time with Alice Cooper. As members of the Hollywood Vampires drinking club, Lennon and Cooper grew close. This was a thrill to Cooper, who had long idolized The Beatles. He learned that Lennon also enjoyed his music. Still, Lennon thought his former bandmate McCartney could have released a better version of one of Cooper’s songs.
John Lennon told Alice Cooper that Paul McCartney could have done a better version of a song
One of the things Cooper appreciated most about Lennon was that he seemed to genuinely appreciate 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.”
One of the songs Lennon liked most was “Elected.” Still, he couldn’t help but think that McCartney could have improved on the song, something he told Cooper to his face.
“When ‘Elected’ came out, that to him was like a great poke in the eye to all politics,” Cooper wrote. “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!’ 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.”
Alice Cooper thought John Lennon and Paul McCartney were the best songwriters of all time
Cooper didn’t take any insult from Lennon’s words because he agreed with him. He believed Lennon and McCartney were the two best songwriters of all time.
“And when you think of great songwriting, nobody was better,” he wrote. “McCartney and Lennon just did such great songs. When I think of The Beatles I always think of early Beatles. Take any song and it’s like the perfect three-minute song, and I think anyone in the world would love to have written any one of them. ‘She Loves You’ is a good rock song.”
Alice Cooper believed The Beatles changed his life
Cooper’s affection for The Beatles is rooted in the fact that he believes they changed his life.
“Before The Beatles there were three hairstyles: you had to be a surfer, a greaser or a jock,” he wrote. “I was much more a greaser, being from Detroit, but I always looked for ways to stand out.”
The album Meet The Beatles! expanded his view of what music could be.
“[I]t was the first one that totally knocked me out, because I’d never heard anything like that before,” he told Rolling Stone. “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.”
