by Michael McCarthy
I recently had the opportunity to watch Unleashed Spirits: The Rise of the Hollywood Vampires, Daniel E. Catullo III’s new documentary feature about Hollywood Vampires, the supergroup featuring Alice Cooper, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, actor/guitarist Johnny Depp and guitarist/music director Tommy Henriksen. The band’s touring lineup also includes keyboardist Buck Johnson, who has played with Aerosmith and Ringo Starr, Alice Cooper drummer Glen Sobel and bassist Chris Wyse.
I’ll admit something right off the bat: before watching Unleashed Spirits, I always thought Johnny Depp was something of the odd man out in Hollywood Vampires. Obviously, I knew that he could play guitar, but there’s a big difference between being able to play guitar and standing onstage beside Alice Cooper and Joe fucking Perry. Part of me wondered if the guys were cutting Depp some slack or basically humoring him because, well, he’s Johnny Depp.
By the time Unleashed Spirits was over, I didn’t wonder anymore.
“If you’re gonna be standing up there with those guys, you have to earn your stripes,” Depp says in the documentary. Interestingly, it quickly becomes apparent that nobody was more aware of that than Depp himself.
As Unleashed Spirits reveals, Depp was a musician long before he was an actor. He says he started playing guitar at 12 after conning $25 out of his mother to buy an electric guitar. “That was it. It was over. I knew instantly that was where I belong,” he recalls. He jokes that he doesn’t even remember puberty because he spent about a year in his bedroom learning to play.
In fact, Depp went to Los Angeles intending to pursue music, not acting. While he was filling out job applications, his friend Nicolas Cage introduced him to his agent, who thought Depp might have potential as an actor. The agent sent him to audition for Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. “Somehow, I got it,” Depp says.
Of course, we all know how that turned out.
An old interview clip from Depp’s 21 Jump Street days finds him saying that at some point he had to “let go” of music or he’d become a “cheese ball,” referring to the often embarrassing phenomenon of successful actors deciding that they want to be rock stars. For years, Depp apparently believed that his serious musical aspirations were behind him.
Then he met Alice Cooper.
The original Hollywood Vampires wasn’t actually a band but a notorious 1970s drinking club centered around the Rainbow Bar & Grill in Los Angeles. Its revolving cast included the likes of Cooper, John Lennon, Harry Nilsson and Keith Moon. Eventually, Cooper would resurrect the name for something considerably more productive.
Depp first met Cooper while making Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, in which Cooper appeared performing “The Ballad of Dwight Fry.” In 2011, Depp joined Cooper onstage at London’s 100 Club, where Alice jokingly told him, “Johnny, this whole movie thing — if it doesn’t pan out, join us.”
It turned out not to be such a joke.
Cooper later proposed that they form a band called Hollywood Vampires and pay tribute to their “long lost, dead, drunk friends.” By February 2013, they were jamming at Henriksen’s house. Their first original song, appropriately enough, was called “Dead Drunk Friends.”
Eventually they set their sights on Aerosmith’s Joe Perry.
“There was something very abstract about Joe’s playing,” Depp says. “Nothing he played was obvious or predictable.”
Depp and Cooper set about “trying to wrangle Joe,” as Depp puts it. Fortunately, he says, “it turned out to not be too difficult.”
“It was really loose, but it was a lot of fun,” Perry recalls of those early sessions. “It was as good as it gets. Every day, it was so much fun.”
The loose nature of Hollywood Vampires also meant that an astonishing number of famous musicians wandered through its orbit. Joe Walsh, Orianthi, Dave Grohl and The Doors’ Robby Krieger were among the musicians who jammed with them during the band’s formative period.
Then there’s Paul McCartney.
In 2014, McCartney joined Hollywood Vampires at Depp’s studio. Depp suggested they record “Come and Get It,” the song McCartney wrote for Badfinger. McCartney sat down at the piano and sang it himself, delivering a surprisingly raw performance that, to my ears, makes him sound more like Lemmy than the guy who sang “Yesterday.”
What’s especially amusing is that Depp recalls Cooper “wowing over Paul McCartney.” Apparently even Alice fucking Cooper can get starstruck.
“He fit in perfectly with the Vamps and he was immediately one of the guys,” Cooper says.
Before long, however, Hollywood Vampires had to prove that this was more than a bunch of famous friends having fun in a recording studio.
After playing a couple of intimate shows at The Roxy in Los Angeles, they headed to Brazil for Rock in Rio in September 2015. And this wasn’t exactly a group of anonymous backing musicians accompanying Cooper, Perry and Depp. Former Guns N’ Roses members Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum were playing bass and drums respectively, giving Hollywood Vampires a ridiculously star-studded lineup.
Even Cooper and Perry were taken aback by the sheer size of the Rock in Rio stage. But Depp, who was about to play guitar in front of roughly 90,000 people alongside some of the most famous rock musicians on the planet, had even more reason to be nervous.
“Johnny saw the crowd and he kind of turned a little bit green,” McKagan recalls. “He went like, shhhhhiiit.”
Depp remembers thinking, “What the fuck are we doing here?”
“That was really an all-star band aside from me,” he says. Once again, he comes back to the same thought: if he was going to stand on that stage with those musicians, he had to earn his stripes.
McKagan, for one, clearly thought that he did.
“Johnny really held it down and he had a really great rhythm guitar sound,” he says.
Rock in Rio went off without a hitch, with Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale and Sepultura guitarist Andreas Kisser among the musicians joining the Vampires onstage.
If Unleashed Spirits were simply a documentary about a bunch of rock stars having a ridiculously good time together, it would still be entertaining. But the film becomes considerably heavier when it reaches July 10, 2016.
During a Hollywood Vampires show at the Ford Amphitheater at Coney Island, Perry walked behind some amplifiers and collapsed. The people who found him describe a terrifying scene. He wasn’t breathing. He was turning blue.
Cooper didn’t initially understand what was happening and made the decision to continue the concert.
“This show is not going to stop. Even for that,” he remembers thinking.
Looking back now, Cooper clearly isn’t comfortable with that decision.
“I didn’t realize how serious it was,” he says.
Perry’s description of the incident is chilling.
“It was traumatic. I was gone. I’m not sure for how many seconds or minutes,” he says, later adding that it was “not one of the high points of my life. Gotta say that.”
I remember hearing about Perry collapsing and being hospitalized at the time, but I had never realized quite how close the incident apparently came to being fatal. The film also leaves you with the distinct impression that substance use played some role in what happened, although it doesn’t dwell on the subject.
Fortunately, Perry recovered and Hollywood Vampires continued.
By the time the band was working on its second album, 2019’s Rise, something else had changed. What had begun as a collection of famous friends paying tribute to their heroes had evolved into an actual creative unit.
One of the most fascinating sequences in Unleashed Spirits involves Depp’s personal journals.
“If words fall into your head, how much time do you have ’til they fall out?” Depp asks. “That’s why I carry a notebook with me at all times.”
We see the other Vampires going through pages of Depp’s handwritten thoughts looking for inspiration as they write material for Rise. Cooper says he deliberately stepped back during part of the songwriting process and allowed Depp’s way of writing — his phrasing, changes and general instincts — to help shape the material.
By this point, the idea that Depp was merely a movie star being indulged by some famous musicians becomes pretty difficult to sustain.
Then they go to Hansa Studios in Berlin.
This is the studio where David Bowie recorded “Heroes,” and Bowie was a major influence on Depp, who remembers Diamond Dogs as the first Bowie album he bought. Hollywood Vampires decided to record their own version of “Heroes” there, with Depp singing lead.
Here’s another confession: I own the Hollywood Vampires albums, but I bought them as downloads and never paid much attention to the credits. Until watching this documentary, I didn’t realize that was Johnny Depp singing “Heroes.”
And he’s fucking phenomenal.
If you’re still wondering whether Johnny Depp has what it takes to be a rock star, go listen to Hollywood Vampires’ version of “Heroes” and make up your own mind. I think you’ll be impressed.
Even Perry admits to getting butterflies recording the song in the same place where Bowie recorded the original. But one of my favorite moments comes immediately after they’ve finished. Depp’s bandmates praise his performance and he seems genuinely surprised by the reaction.
That’s another thing that struck me about Depp throughout Unleashed Spirits. You could imagine a movie star of his stature walking into a recording studio with an enormous ego. Instead, Depp frequently seems humbled simply to be in the room with these musicians. He clearly has the chops to belong there, but he never seems to take his place among them for granted.
The later portions of the documentary become more bittersweet.
Depp eventually had the opportunity to work extensively with legendary guitarist Jeff Beck, who was also Perry’s guitar hero. Henriksen becomes visibly emotional while discussing Depp getting to play with Beck.
“It’s painful that he passed like that. It was pretty traumatic,” Perry says of Beck’s death.
“It was a massive shock,” Depp says. He remembers visiting Beck in the hospital. Beck was asleep. Then, suddenly, he was gone.
There’s something especially poignant about that loss in the context of Hollywood Vampires. This was, after all, a band born from the idea of remembering friends and musical heroes who weren’t around anymore. As the years pass in Unleashed Spirits, that concept feels less like a clever name for a rock supergroup and more like something deeply personal.
And yet the film is far from depressing. Mostly, it’s a celebration of what can happen when a group of musicians who have already accomplished more than most people could dream of accomplishing get together simply because they love playing music.
The documentary eventually brings Hollywood Vampires to Boston’s Wang Theatre in July 2023, where we see fans gathered outside hoping to meet them. Depp, Cooper, Perry and particularly Henriksen spend time signing autographs and interacting with people who have waited for them.
“It’s so sweet and cool,” Depp says of that support. “How do you properly say thank you?”
There’s a lovely bit of symmetry to that footage now. Three years after Hollywood Vampires played the Wang, Unleashed Spirits: The Rise of the Hollywood Vampires is having its world premiere at the very same theater as the opening-night film of the Boston Film Festival.
Near the end of the documentary, Cooper admits, “I don’t know where the Vampires are going.”
Neither do I.
But Unleashed Spirits makes a convincing case that what could easily have been dismissed as a celebrity vanity project became something considerably more meaningful. It’s a story about friendship, musical heroes, aging, loss and the sheer joy of playing rock ‘n’ roll with your friends.
And as for Johnny Depp?
Consider those stripes earned.
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