By Amanda Wicks
Joe Perry not only scared fans when he suddenly staggered off stage in early July during a show, he scared his bandmates as well. Perry was performing with the Hollywood Vampires at Brooklyn’s Ford Ampitheater when he suddenly wandered off stage and collapsed. Now, Alice Cooper has opened up about what happened that chilling night.
Related: Joe Perry to Rejoin Hollywood Vampires Tour
“It scared the hell out of me,” he told 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.”
Perry was later diagnosed with exhaustion and dehydration. Cooper said that even though he was used to playing five nights a week for almost two hours at a time, Perry hadn’t worked that kind of schedule in a while. “We were doing 25 to 30 songs with no break,” he said. “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.”
Cooper didn’t detail why Perry hadn’t been eating, but blamed life on the road for messing with his schedule.
