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High Times with Alice Cooper

Dennis Dunaway — bassist for the Alice Cooper band from 1968 until Cooper became a solo act in 1975 — has collected his wildest tales for a new memoir, Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Group, written with ROLLING STONE contributor Chris Hodenfield. Here are five things we learned.

Early on, the band's management team paid the bills by selling Dylan bootlegs.

Cooper's managers allegedly got the tapes through a source at Columbia Records and sold them to record stores as the band toured. "They had carloads of them," writes Dunaway.

Cooper's famous boa constrictor fell into his lap — almost literally.

The snake, featured with Alice on the cover of ROLLING STONE in 1972, became a signature after a fan threw it onstage one night.

Salvador Dali was a fan.

The artist spent time with the group in order to create a 360-degree hologram of Cooper. "With the tips of his mustache curled and his giraffe-hide vest... he was every bit as surrealistic as his paintings," writes Dunaway.

The bandmates thought Kiss ripped them off.

"Just as we had borrowed elements from our hero bands," writes Dunaway, "now it was happening to us — the makeup, the glitter, the theatrics."

Dunaway still isn't sure why the original group broke up in 1975.

"Friends... suggested that reducing the size of the band also reduced the number of profit splits," he writes. "One day I was a rock star. The next day I was uninvited. Boom. Deal out. Gone."

(Originally published in Rolling Stone magazine, July 16-30, 2015)