The 70s were a wild time, man, and that was even more true if you happened to be a bona fide rockstar.

In the decade’s early years Alice Cooper, rock ‘n roller, moved to New York and befriended pop art icon Andy Warhol. The two hung out quite often – Warhol came to Alice’s concerts, and Alice once feigned electrocution onstage using a replica of an electric chair in a famous Warhol print.

According to Alice’s longtime manager Shep Gordon, Andy was a groupie and the pair enjoyed hanging out with the bevy of famous people that both attracted.

So what’s all that about a 40-year-old discovery? Over to Rolling Stone:

…it was Cooper’s girlfriend at the time, model Cindy Lang, who purchased the “Little Electric Chair” print from Warhol. Warhol based his print (dated either 1964 or 1965) on a 1953 press photo of the death chamber at Sing Sing prison where Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed that year for sharing secrets with the Soviet Union.

Lang apparently handed the print off to Gordon, but it quickly got lost amongst Cooper’s vast assortment of gear. “At the time Alice is making two albums a year and touring the rest of the time,” Gordon said. “It was a rock and roll time; none of us thought about anything. He ends up going into an insane asylum for his drinking and then leaves New York for L.A. Alice 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.”

Fast forward to four years later, and Gordon remembers something about Alice having the print.The rocker has no idea what’s cracking, but luckily someone was on the ball.

This from the Guardian:

…Gordon was having dinner with a Los Angeles art dealer, Ruth Bloom. She mentioned how much a Warhol had recently fetched at auction. Gordon mentioned that Cooper had had a Little Electric Chair. Bloom advised him to find it.

“Alice’s mother remembered it going into storage,” he said. “So we went and found it rolled up in a tube.”

The top price ever paid for a Little Electric Chair print is $11,6 million (R152 million), but that was signed by Warhol himself.

It’s estimated that Cooper’s print could still sell for millions of dollars, but he might have developed an affinity for it:

Gordon said the singer had changed his mind and was now considering hanging his Little Electric Chair in his home, when he comes off tour at the end of the year.

“Truthfully, at the time no one thought it had any real value,” he said. “Andy Warhol was not ‘Andy Warhol’ back then. And it was all a swirl of drugs and drinking. But you should have seen Alice’s face when [Warhol expert] Richard Polsky’s estimate came in. His jaw dropped and he looked at me.

“‘Are you serious? I own that!’”

Yeah you do.

Rock ‘n Roll, what a ride. Can’t say I’ve ever woken up from a binge with anything of much value…

[sources:rollingstone&guardian]