Alice Cooper is a man who understands that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and his memory of his first encounter with the legendary surrealist artist Salvador Dalí remains vivid.
It was April '73, and having been informed that Dalí wished to collaborate with him on a new project, Cooper and his manager Shep Gordon had arranged to meet the then 69-year-old Spanish artist at the King Cole Bar in the St Regis Hotel in midtown Manhattan to learn more.
"All of a sudden these five androgynous nymphs in pink chiffon floated in," Cooper recalled in a 2018 interview conducted for Another Man magazine. "They were followed by Gala (Dalí’s wife) who was dressed in a man’s tuxedo, top hat and tails, and carrying a silver cane. Then came Dalí. He was wearing a giraffe-skin vest, gold Aladdin shoes, a blue velvet jacket and sparkly purple socks given to him by Elvis..
"Everything was about Dalí," Cooper recalled. "The world revolved around him. I wasn’t meeting him. I was entering his orbit."
"He was doing the first animated hologram [titled First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper’s Brain] which was going to move," Cooper explained to Planet Rock magazine in 2018. "Nobody has ever seen a hologram before, let alone a moving one. He tried to explain it to us, but Dalí would talk to you in five different languages, so you would only get one word out of every five."
"At the press conference, I was asked what it was like to work with Dalí. I said, I have no idea! I never understood a word he said!"
