Paul McCartney Contributes New Version Of 1969 Badfinger Song To Johnny Depp/Alice Cooper/Joe Perry Supergroup

Paul McCartney Contributes New Version Of 1969 Badfinger Song To Johnny Depp/Alice Cooper/Joe Perry Supergroup

Johnny Depp, Alice Cooper and Joe Perry have formed a super group called the Hollywood Vampires, as Cooper recently told Rolling Stone, but they’ve enlisted another icon for the project too. Fresh off of his Kanye collaborations, Paul McCartney has apparently contributed a new version of Badfinger’s “Come and Get It” to the forthcoming album from the Hollywood Vampires.

While Cooper and McCartney were in the studio together to lay down the new version, the Beatle also shared the story of how he wrote the song for Badfinger:

I was joking with him and said, ‘You probably wrote this in 20 minutes. And he said, ‘Actually, I was in bed sleeping and I knew they needed a song for this band we signed, and I went downstairs and played it on the piano and then went to Abbey Road an hour before the rest of the [Beatles], played all the instruments, made the demo and gave [Badfinger, then called the Iveys] the song.’

According to Perry, McCartney didn’t need to practice the song at all, either.

He knew all the chords, the lyrics, everything. He didn’t have any cheat sheets. It was like he’d been playing it his whole life. Me and Alice and Johnny were standing there and looking at each other and I tell you — if there’s any ego-lever in a room, it’s Paul. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done. If Paul’s in the room, he’s there. It was hard to focus on playing.

McCartney is dedicating the new version to former Badfinger members Pete Ham and Tom Evans who both committed suicide.

The Hollywood Vampires have been working on tracks since last year with producer Bob Ezrin and are planning on a full album. The name is derived from “a boys-night-out drinking club at L.A.’s Rainbow Bar in the Seventies” that included people like Cooper, John Lennon, the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz, Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon and Bernie Taupin (an Elton John lyricist). Cooper set up the hashtag #HollywoodVampires and encouraged people to share their memories of the era: “Where were you in the early 1970s? Los Angeles? The Sunset Strip?? You probably remember more than I do!”

He’s also wrote that he’s on the look out for memorabilia and artifacts from the era for a possible documentary. Please, if you have any artifacts from that time also post them in the comments, because I want to see them.

more from News