I've always loved Salvador Dali's art. Ironically, it didn't frighten me at all while Alice Cooper seared my 14-year-old brain. Having been raised in a hyper-religious home, Alice scared me. He must be into the occult, I thought. Thankfully, time not only heals wounds, it also cleanses the mind of neural pathways ingrained in ones formative years by a paranoid-schizophrenic mother figure. Poor thing. She loved me and couldn't help it, but she f**ked up my thinking for a long while.

But I digress...

One of my favorite rock 'n roll stories is about the time Salvador Dali and Alice Cooper met, became friends (and I suspect more), and produced the first three-dimensional hologram.

Alice Cooper describes their first encounter:

“We met in the bar. Gala (his wife) comes first. She’s dressed in a full tuxedo. She looks exactly like Fred Astaire – top hat, cane, spats. I went ‘WOW!’ Then about six boys and girls — or whatever they were — about 16 or 17 years old, came in. These creatures he had with him were like something out of ‘Satyricon’. They were dressed in a lot of silk. Flowing things, loose things. They didn't say anything but they were real pretty. I had this vision of Count Dracula and his wives. They kind of floated around the room. Then Dali comes in. He said, ‘I am the great and grand Dali!’ And I said ‘Hi, `I'm Alice Cooper.’ I felt like Jerry Lewis, you know.”

Dali wore purple crushed velvet pants; a pair of gold elastic shoes [where the toes go up to the end]; a pair of purple glitter socks that Elvis gave him; a giraffe-skin coat; his usual moustache; and sideburns “kind of up in pincurls.” The preferred cocktail for the evening (and for the entire entourage) was The Scorpion. Each Scorpion drink came in a bowl with lilacs floating inside. Dali ordered a glass of hot water. “He pulled a jar of honey out of his pocket and started pouring the honey in. He filled it up and up and up until he had this long strand of honey, then with his right hand he reaches into his other pocket and pulls out a pair of scissors and cuts the honey. Alice looked at his manager Shep and said, “We ’re in trouble. This guy is out there.”

From that meeting was born a creative alliance that produced the first three-dimensional hologram in which Cooper was the rotating figure adorned with a couple of million dollars worth of jewels.

By the way, Alice Cooper (a.k.a. Vincent Furnier) turned out to be a perfectly normal guy.  These days, his passion is golf!  He  also grew up in a hell fire and brimstone home with a preacher father.  Guess he erased some pathways, too.

Sickthingsuk.co.uk has the full story.