Alice Cooper remembers Syd Barrett

You might not think that the king of shock rock and Syd Barrett had much in common, but that's not the case. When the Alice Cooper band was still making their name in Los Angeles in the late '60s, they were the house band at the Cheetah Club, where they met the original members of Pink Floyd, who were in town to play a couple of shows there. In fact, the Floyd guys ran out of money and moved into the house where Alice and his bandmates lived, and the two groups hung out a lot.

Cooper told us that he and Barrett shared "a moment" of sorts one day over breakfast: "Syd was sitting there at the table, and the box of cereal was between us. And he was watching the box of cereal the way that I would watch Star Trek on television. He was seeing something I wasn't seeing. I don't know what he was on, but he could have sat there all day, staring into that cereal, and he would have been just as happy as anybody else."

Cooper also told us that he knew something was really wrong with Barrett at one of the gigs: "I remember the one night -- and in fact, I mentioned this to (Pink Floyd singer-bassist) Roger Waters, and he says, 'That was the night we knew Syd was in a lot of trouble mentally' -- during their first song, he hits a chord, and he gets a shock, and then he just stops playing. The rest of the set, he just stands there and stares, for about an hour-and-a-half. Never played another note -- just stood there and stared. And the band just played."
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