"It’s hard to appreciate how little Warhol’s art was worth at the time. Twenty-five hundred was the going rate at the time. Why would Andy give him a fake?"

"He had plenty of electric chairs. They were not an easy sell. They weren’t decorative in the conventional sense. It’s a brutal image."

He = Alice Cooper, who "says he remembers having a conversation with Warhol about the picture. He thinks the conversation was real, but he couldn’t put his hand on a Bible and say that it was."

"Little Electric Chair" (from the "Death and Disaster" series) was found rolled up in a tube in storage.

Never stretched on a frame, it sat in storage alongside touring artefacts including an electric chair that Cooper used in the early 70s as part of his ghoulish stage show.

I saw that show, actually. I remember the electric chair. It must have been July 28, 1971 in Wildwood, New Jersey. That was the "Love It to Death" tour:

The Love It to Death tour featured an elaborate shock rock live show: during "Ballad of Dwight Fry"—about an inmate in an insane asylum—Cooper would be dragged offstage and return in a straitjacket, and the show climaxed with Cooper's mock execution in a prop electric chair during "Black Juju."

Let's see if Alice Cooper is mentioned in "The Andy Warhol Diaries." Yes! Exactly once:

Bianca took us to On the Rox, owned by Lou Adler. When we got there it was Ringo Starr and Alice Cooper. I’m not saying they were the only celebrities there— they were the only people there, and they were in the john. Whoever is there is in the john taking coke. Bianca introduced me to Ringo. Alice came over to say hello. Bianca left because she was staying out in Malibu and Mick was coming in and then leaving town the next day so she wanted to get home early to see him.

Those were the days.



And here's what Alice Cooper said last August about the 2016 election:

[The election is] funny in a Kurt Vonnegut kind of way. It's also funny and kind of seriously demented that nobody wants to vote for a candidate; they want to vote against the other candidate. I can't think of anybody that's going, "I really like Hillary. I'm going to vote for her." No, it's: "I'm voting for Hillary 'cause I hate Trump." Or it's: "I hate Trump, but I hate her worse." Nobody's actually for anybody.... I honestly cannot in my head look at either candidate and say, "Oh, yeah. I'm behind that." So it's weird. I'm going to vote, but it's really going to be one of those last-minute decisions going."

Ha ha. Me too. That's exactly what happened to me. I decided which one I would vote for as I walked to the poll. (That's all I'll say about how I voted.)