Salvador Dalí was no stranger to the bizarre. The Spanish painter and self-appointed genius once appeared on the Tonight Show carrying a leather rhinoceros. Grasshoppers terrified the hell out of him. He routinely lugged around a piece of ‘lucky driftwood’ to ward off evil spirits. At a party in New York, he offered to pleasure Cher with an oddly shaped dildo. Yet all of this seems like Surrealist foreplay compared to his grand scheme to accompany the release of 666, the 1972 album from Greek quartet, Aphrodite’s Child.
Car crashes. Vast tracts of blood red. The number of the beast. And the mysterious ‘Sahlep’. 666 attracted nearly as much attention for its sleeve as for the music. But what did it all mean?
Dalí’s plan was to stage a ‘happening’ in Barcelona, witnessed only by a couple of local shepherds, who would later relay the wonder of it all to the people. There were to be loudspeakers in the streets, blaring out 666 for 24 hours, accompanied by marching soldiers in Nazi uniforms. Hundreds of live swans were to flock before Gaudi’s famous Sagrada Familia, sticks of dynamite sewn into their bellies, set to explode in ‘slow motion by special effects’. Navy planes were to roar overhead, their pilots instructed to dump their munitions on the great cathedral. No bombs, though. Instead they were to bombard the building with elephants, hippos, whales and, yes, archbishops carrying umbrellas. “It’s about time to finish with the church!” declared Dalí.