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!"
Nevertheless, Cooper was excited at the prospect of working with the great artist.
"[Bassist] Dennis Dunaway and me started out as art majors in high school before the band had even started, and Salvador Dalí was our hero," he recalled. "He was our art Beatle! So when he called and said, 'I want Alice to be the subject of a project I am doing', it just completely flipped me out."
For the project, a shirt-less Cooper was draped in a million dollars’ worth of diamonds, with a tiara on his head, and was required to pose cross-legged on a rotating dais, holding an edible Venus de Milo statue like a microphone and occasionally taking bites out of it, while Dalí 's assistant filmed around him.
"I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on," Cooper confessed.
"On the last day, he comes in, and says, 'I have created the Alice Cooper brain!'," the singer recalled to Planet Rock. "And he has this plastic brain that has a chocolate éclair running down the back, and all these ants, that spell out 'Alice and Dalí'. I asked if I could have it when it's done,. and he said, 'Of course not! It's worth millions!'"
"I have been looking for that brain forever," Cooper told Another Man journalist Paul Moody as he reflected back upon the day some 45 years later. "That’s my Holy Grail. Someone might be using it as a paperweight for all I know!"
Watch a film of the bizarre art project below.
