By 1974, rock’s wildest after-hours club was hiding in plain sight above a burger joint on the Sunset Strip. It was a place where hangovers were a badge of honor, not a side effect.
Up in a private loft at the Rainbow Bar & Grill, John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, Alice Cooper and Micky Dolenz were part of a notorious drinking circle dubbed the Hollywood Vampires. It was a loose coven of star musicians determined to drink till dawn and then some.
| Vampire | Claim to fame | Party reputation |
|---|---|---|
| John Lennon | Beatles co-founder, solo icon | Unleashed during his LA ‘lost weekend’ |
| Harry Nilsson | Writer of ‘Without You’, cult genius | Lennon’s partner in crime and drinking |
| Alice Cooper | Shock-rock pioneer | Self-appointed president and ringmaster |
| Micky Dolenz | Drummer-singer of The Monkees | Softball captain turned late-night Vampire |
The original lair above the Rainbow
The real clubhouse was the cramped upstairs bar at the Rainbow, where the original Vampires – Cooper, Nilsson, Dolenz, Keith Moon, Ringo Starr and assorted friends – held court most nights. Initiation meant drinking every other member under the table before you were accepted.
Alice Cooper later recalled that the staff at the Rainbow started calling them the Hollywood Vampires because they only appeared after dark and never stopped drinking, joking that instead of blood they lived on the ‘blood of the vine’. He remembered Lennon and Nilsson arguing over anything and everything while he played referee in the middle.
From charity softball team to blackout brotherhood
Micky Dolenz has said the Hollywood Vampires name actually began as a weekend softball team, dreamed up by Cooper, Dolenz and friends to play charity games against local cops and corporate teams, usually losing badly. After games they would troop back to the Rainbow loft, where the team identity quietly shifted from sports to serious drinking.
In another recollection, Dolenz describes how the same crowd would ‘hold court’ in a private corner of the Rainbow, drinking what he calls an ocean of booze, raising hell until morning and signing their names into a plank of wood that still hangs upstairs as a relic of those nights.
Keith Moon in costume and a plaque on the wall
Cooper has described the Vampires as a ‘perverted drinking club’, a Rat Pack with teeth that met in a hidden loft at the back of the Rainbow marked by a plaque reading ‘This is the lair of the Hollywood Vampires’. He remembers that on any given night Keith Moon might stumble in dressed as Hitler or show up the next time as Julius Caesar in a full Roman toga, just to keep things unhinged.
John Lennon’s lost weekend collides with the club
In the mid 1970s John Lennon entered the 18 month stretch he later called his ‘lost weekend’, separating from Yoko Ono, living with May Pang in Los Angeles and New York, and slipping into a blur of booze and drugs with friends like Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr. During that time he produced Nilsson’s album Pussy Cats in Los Angeles, with accounts of the sessions describing near constant substance use, a screaming contest that hemorrhaged Nilsson’s vocal cords, and an after-hours jam with Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder later bootlegged as A Toot and a Snore in ’74, where you can literally hear Lennon offer cocaine across the studio.
The record they made together wore the chaos on its sleeve. Its title was reportedly a sideways joke about the bad press they were getting as rowdy ‘pussycats’ trashing Los Angeles, and fans have pointed out the cover’s dark visual pun: children’s letter blocks ‘D’ and ‘S’ sitting on either side of a rug so that the layout spells out ‘drugs under the table’, a detail noted in session histories of the album.
The Troubadour meltdown that defined the Vampires
The moment that truly burned the Hollywood Vampires myth into the tabloids came on March 12, 1974, when Lennon and Nilsson staggered into Doug Weston’s Troubadour to catch the Smothers Brothers’ comeback show. By mid set they were heckling so loudly that security escorted them out, and Nilsson later complained that the fiasco ‘ruined my reputation for 10 years’ and snapped, ‘Get one Beatle drunk and look what happens,’ ruefully adding that he had only introduced John and Ringo to Brandy Alexanders.
Lennon later summed up the night with brutal honesty: ‘I got drunk and shouted,’ explaining that it was his first night on Brandy Alexanders, which he thought tasted like boozy milkshakes and clearly underestimated. Contemporary accounts describe him hurling insults at the Smothers Brothers, scuffling with staff, allegedly punching their manager and being physically thrown out of the club, losing his trademark glasses in the process, before he and Nilsson sent flowers the next day and Lennon wrote an apology note to actress Pam Grier while a waitress’s assault case quietly disappeared.
Those same tinted glasses have since morphed from evidence bag to trophy. A recent auction catalog describes Lennon’s ‘Lost Weekend’ specs, worn into the Troubadour that night and scooped up afterward by Tom Smothers’s wife, as a centerpiece item expected to fetch close to four hundred thousand dollars, complete with photos showing Lennon enjoying himself inside the club and leaving without them.
Tampon hats and other Vampire insanity
One detailed Nilsson biography notes that Lennon and Nilsson were practically begging the press to notice them during this period, with Lennon at one Troubadour show wearing a sanitary pad on his head like a hat and firing off farmyard themed obscenities at the stage until he and Nilsson were tossed onto the sidewalk. The same piece has Nilsson still protesting years later that people saw him as a mean, rowdy drunk from the seventies who merely ‘introduced John and Ringo to Brandy Alexanders’ and paid the price in headlines.
Beatles historians have since untangled the timeline and argued that the infamous ‘Kotex on the head’ moment was actually a separate Troubadour visit from the Smothers Brothers debacle, meaning Lennon managed at least two public meltdowns in the same club, one with a sanitary pad glued to his forehead for emphasis. A fan who tracked down the shirt he wore that night at the original Hard Rock Cafe recalls Lennon joking that he had stuck a Kotex on his head in the club, a detail that has become macabre rock folklore all its own.
Put it together and you get a picture of Lennon and Nilsson as the double act from hell: one of the greatest songwriters of the century and one of its sharpest cult vocalists, ricocheting around Los Angeles comedy clubs and rock bars while egging each other on. It left Alice Cooper and Micky Dolenz trying to provide some vaguely adult supervision over a nightly circus that clearly did not want to be tamed.
From blackout club to cautionary legend
The Hollywood Vampires story did not end in that loft. Several of the original drinkers, including Nilsson and Keith Moon, would die relatively young, while Alice Cooper sobered up and eventually formed a modern band also called Hollywood Vampires with Johnny Depp and Joe Perry, cutting an album of covers by dead friends like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Lennon and others that he bluntly described as a salute to their ‘dead, drunk friends’.
For older rock fans the tales are irresistibly funny – Keith Moon in a Hitler outfit, Lennon with a tampon on his head – yet they also read like a warning label on the excess that nearly killed an entire generation of players. The original Hollywood Vampires were never really a supergroup, but a super-hangover, and their legacy sits somewhere between the last great rock and roll fantasy and the moment the party very nearly stopped for good.
