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Alexxis : How are you doing tonight , Dennis ?
Dennis : Good Alexxis . How about yourself ?
Alexxis : Great I ’ m glad to have you . Dennis , you are originally you ’ re from Cottage Grove , Oregon ? And you moved to Phoenix , Arizona during your High School years ?
Dennis : Yes . My family migrated there in 1951 and I was only about 6 years old .
Alexxis : Ok , so that ’ s where you met the young Vincent Furnier , who you were in Cross Country with and you were in an art class together too , right ?
Dennis : Yes , and Journalism class . [ Laughter ]
Alexxis : Journalism class as well , that ’ s right I remember . Tell me about your dream books and diaries that you kept and how you actually got the name “ Dr . Dreary ”.
Dennis : The name came from Alice because I used to be extremely quiet all I did was think about artistic things and what the band would do next and things like that . So I was very quiet like everyone else but Alice would be joking around and the jokes would be flying back and forth and all of a sudden I would come up with a joke that would tend to be very abstract and everything would come to a screeching halt while people tried to figure out what that meant . And Alice would say “ I think Dennis is having a heartbeat .” [ Laughter ] Anyway , because I also tended to lean toward the darker side like ‘ Black Ju Ju ’ and the darker side of the Alice character came up mostly from my inclination towards you know , dark subjects and minor chords in songs . So Alice tagged me with “ Dr . Dreary ”. Now when we were on the road , you know on a different time zone every night sort of , I would keep waking up in the middle of the night . I would have a dream and I would wake up and I got in the habit of just always keeping a notebook by the side of the bed and a pencil and I ’ d just write down , I tried to sort of come awake enough to make it into some sort of an abstract poem . I wrote a lot of these , I have probably I don ’ t know , five or six different books full of these dream poems . And there were even times when I would wake up and I ’ d look at this and I didn ’ t even remember writing it at all but it was written in my handwriting . These dream poems would be referenced for Alice when we were working on lyrics and he was trying to think of an idea or whatever he would just page through these dream poems and he would see something that would trigger , an inspiration for him and a lot of the dream poems pop up here and there throughout our songs .
Alexxis : Hmm , interesting ... Were they sentences or phrases that you used ?
Dennis : It was pretty much a full page . I would write and then usually the dream would fade as soon as I woke up but say like um the best example I think would be the song “ Killer .” Because I had a dream that I was floating along , kind of like a Chagall painting , you know where the characters are floating in the air . So I was sort of floating along next to this guy who was walking down the hallway to be executed . He was on Death Row . And I could hear his thoughts . And you know , what I wrote down pretty much word for word with a few changes here and there uh was the lyrics for “ Killer .”
Alexxis : So all of these came to you in your dreams , and you had very vivid dreams I guess , [ Laughter ] right ?
Dennis : They were the very dreams that inspired poems before I woke up . [ Laughter ]
Alexxis : So now did you ever think to actually publish them as poems ?
Dennis : No , no . They ’ re too abstract . I mean it ’ s like , E . E . Cummings could get away with it . But let ’ s face it , how many people buy poetry books and they ’ re pretty abstract . When you start reading through them , I don ’ t know , they ’ re really hard to relate to most of them .
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