ALICE COOPER Finally Comments On JOE PERRY’s Recent Stage Collapse – “It Scared The Hell Out Of Me”

Alice Cooper vividly remembers the shock he felt when he learned that Joe Perry had collapsed onstage mid-song during a Hollywood Vampires concert in Brooklyn. “It scared the hell out of me,” he tells Rolling Stone. “The lyrics to [“Raise The Dead”], the first song we played that night, go, ‘Cardiac, heart attack … they never feared the reaper,’ and I look around the stage and he’s gone. He was lying behind an amp on his back, and I went, ‘Oh, my God.’ We didn’t know what happened until after the show.”

The causes, he learned, were dehydration and exhaustion. “Aerosmith does two shows a week, but we were on our eighth show in nine days, and I’m used to working like that,” the singer says. “I’m used to working an hour and 40 minutes or two hours, five nights a week. I was in shape and so was Johnny and everybody else. I think Joe was not ready for that kind of pace.

“We were doing 25 to 30 songs with no break,” he continues. “You’re in fourth gear, and there’s no 24-hour resting period. I think it just caught up with him. He finally got up there onstage, dehydrated. And I think he was exhausted. He told me the night before he hadn’t eaten in two days.”

Read more at RollingStone.com.