The U.K.’s Pink Floyd and America’s Alice Cooper band were trying to make names for themselves on the rock scene when their world’s unexpectedly collided in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.<\/p>\n
Floyd was in its early incarnation, and featured guitarist and singer Syd Barrett, keyboardist Richard Wright, bass<\/a> guitarist Roger Waters and drummer Nick Mason. The group was making its maiden voyage to the U.S. to promote its debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. through a few appearances in clubs and on the TV show American Bandstand.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Alice Cooper and his band were two years away from releasing their first album, Pretties for You, and performing around L.A. as the Nazz, a name they were forced to abandon in 1968 when they discovered an East Coast band with that name \u2014 featuring Todd Rundgren<\/a> \u2014 was signed to an Atlantic Records imprint. Like Floyd, the group was playing psychedelic rock, which is why they were interested in catching the Brits’ show when they came to town.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n “Not many people had heard of them, but we knew all about them,\u201d Cooper told Classic Rock<\/a> in 2022. “We had a copy of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. They were a big deal to us because they had a record out \u2014 and we didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n \u201cSo the Floyd came into town, ran out of money \u2014 like everyone else does in L.A. \u2014 and ended up staying in our house.\u201d<\/p>\n Syd would be sitting there with a box of cornflakes in front of him, watching it the way I would watch television.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \u2014 Alice Cooper<\/p>\n The group’s financial difficulties were likely down to their frontman. Syd Barrett’s drug use and undiagnosed mental health issues made him behave erratically, and led to the cancellation of numerous dates.<\/p>\n Cooper saw Barrett\u2019s struggles firsthand.<\/p>\n \u201cSyd Barrett was just so out there,\u201d Cooper says. \u201cI\u2019d get up in the morning and go into the kitchen, and Syd would be sitting there with a box of cornflakes in front of him, watching it the way I would watch television. We\u2019d all sit around whispering, \u2018How can anybody get that high?\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cBut Syd was also very bipolar. We didn\u2019t find out until later that he was half-high, half-insane. That\u2019s a very bad combination.\u201d<\/p>\n Cooper\u2019s guitarist, the late Glen Buxton, who makes a posthumous appearance on the reunited Alice Cooper Band\u2019s latest album<\/a>, also reflected on his experiences with Barrett.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n \u201cHe never talked, but we\u2019d be sitting at dinner and all of a sudden I\u2019d pick up the sugar and pass it to him, and he\u2019d shake his head like, \u2018Yeah, thanks,\u2019\u201d he recalls. \u201cIt was like I heard him say, \u2018Pass the sugar.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cIt was like telepathy. That was the first time in my life I\u2019d ever met anybody who could actually do that freely. And this guy did it all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n Although Barrett was physically present for Floyd’s appearance on American Bandstand, his mind was somewhere else entirely. He was practically motionless during the song. The band’s show at the Fillmore Auditorium up in San Francisco didn’t fare much better.<\/p>\n \u201cSyd literally went onstage and stared into space,\u201d Rick Wright later recalled (via Far Out<\/a>). \u201c[He] de-tuned all of his strings on his guitar, hitting it to make this god-awful noise.\u201d<\/p>\n Ironically, Floyd\u2019s drug-related antics had an unexpectedly positive effect on the Alice Cooper band. During Floyd’s stay, Cooper’s group scored an audition at Gazzarri’s nightclub on the Sunset Strip, the same venue where Van Halen would get their break some seven years later. The group was excited, since a spot on the club’s schedule would give them some much-needed exposure.<\/p>\n Thanks to Pink Floyd, they put on a memorable performance.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had an audition at Gazzarri\u2019s, and Pink Floyd said they\u2019d come down with us,\u201d Cooper recalls. \u201cThey made brownies. They were totally laced with pot, of course.<\/p>\n \u201cI was halfway through the show, and all of a sudden I was\u2026oooooh\u2026errrrrr\u2026 The world went that way. I fell off the stage, like, three times.<\/p>\n \u201cWe got the job, though. We were so whacked out that the guys at Gazzarri’s said, \u2018Okay, we\u2019ll hire you!’\u201d<\/p>\n We were so whacked out that the guys at Gazzarri’s said, \u2018Okay, we\u2019ll hire you!’\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Alice Cooper<\/p>\n It was also around this time that Cooper’s group befriended the Doors, another act making waves on the L.A. scene. Doors guitarist Robby Krieger contributed a solo to the track “Black Mamba”<\/a> from the Allce Cooper group’s recently released comeback record. To complete the band’s new revised lineup, they went in search of a guitarist as unique as Buxton, and found their man in Gyasi<\/a>.<\/p>\n As for Pink Floyd, Barrett\u2019s time in the band was coming to an end. He was ousted from the group the following year, and replaced by David Gilmour, who had filled in on dates when Barrett wasn\u2019t up to the task. It all worked out fine for Floyd and Cooper. As for Barrett, following a brief solo career, he retired from music and maintained a private life until his death in 2006.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The U.K.’s Pink Floyd and America’s Alice Cooper band were trying to make names for themselves on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-151894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}