New York Dolls

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New York Dolls

Rock band

Fusing the raw, rock n’ roll energy of the late-sixties era Rolling Stones and the funky fashion sense of the then-emerging glam-rock scene, the New York Dolls are considered by many to have been the starting point of punk rock in the early seventies. When the group formed in 1972, lead singer David Johansen, lead guitarist Johnny Thunders, rhythm guitarist Syl Sylvain, bassist Arthur Kane, and drummer Billy Murcia leaped into cult status before ever recording an album or ever playing outside a few venues in New York’s downtown music circuit. Although short-lived, the Dolls made a lasting impression on the late-seventies punk revolution and so bands that claim that period as an influence can include the Dolls as ancestors as well. With three members succumbing to drug related deaths, and Johansen continuing his Buster Poindexter persona, the Dolls chapter in rock history is all but closed.

“Johnny Thunders, Billy Murcia, and I formed the New York Dolls out of New Town High School, Queens [New York],” Sylvain recalled to Jon Savage, author of England’s Dreaming. When they formed Sylvain and Murcia were working at a clothing store in Queens. “That’s where we got the name for the band,” Sylvain is quoted as saying in Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. “The New York Doll Hospital, a place where they fix rare dolls, was right across the street.” That was at the beginning of 1972 and Kane and Johansen joined shortly thereafter. Johansen, with his intelligent wit and Jagger-like stage moves provided an ideal focal point for the band’s outrageous mix of high energy, classic rock n’ roll rhythms and transsexual style.

“There wasn’t a lot of intellectualizing going on when we started the New York Dolls,” said Johansen was in Please Kill Me. “It was just a bunch of guys practicing in a storefront who started playing together.… None of us said to each other, ‘You wear this or you do that.’” Although they were considered part of glitter rock, Johansen said they didn’t consider themselves as such because it was primarily the audience who wore glitter. The Dolls wore women’s clothes, high heels, and lipstick. Ed McCormack, in a 1972 profile for Rolling Stone noted, “Before going onstage, the Dolls pass around a Max Factor lipstick the way some bands pass around a joint.”

The furor surrounding the Dolls began in a fit of desperation by the managers of the Mercer Arts Center, a now-defuncttheater/nightclub complex on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, who hired them to play in the Oscar Wilde Room every Tuesday night. The center would feature plays in one room, a cabaret show in another room, conceptual art in the room next to that, etc. The center also had a bar that was doing lousy business, that is until they hired the Dolls. “They didn’t even want us at the Mercer Arts Center until they counted the bar receipts,” guitarist Thunders told McCormack. Indeed, the Mercer Arts Center became the place to see and be seen. In a matter of months the Warhol art crowd, Lou Reed, Bette Midler—and almost every night—David Bowie would be in the audience. “Not since the original Velvet Underground has any local band cultivated such a loyal cult following among neo-decadents in New York,” McCormack wrote, “and—more surprisingly—managed to do so without benefit of a recording contract.”

Even more surprising was that, although each member had been in a band in high school, none of them were exceptional musicians. Jerry Nolan, who would later become the drummer for the Dolls, recalled in Please Kill Me, how he fell in love with the band right away. “I said, These kids are doing what nobody else is doing. They’re bringing back the three-minute song!’ These were the days of the ten-minute drum solo, the twenty-minute guitar solo.… I’d get into these incredible arguments with musicians my own age, friends of mine. They couldn’t understand why these guys were getting so much attention.… I’d say, Tou’re missing the f—ing point. They’re bringing back the magic of the fifties!’… Their songs were like nobody had ever heard for ten years: beginning, middle, end, boom-boom-boom.” Johansen, in the same book, recalled how easy it was to become the darlings of lower Manhattan simply

For the Record…

Members included David Johansen (born January 5, 1950, Staten Island, New York), singer; Johnny Thunders (born John Anthony Genzale, 1952, died April 23, 1991), lead guitarist; Sylvain Sylvain (born Sylvain Mizrahi), rhythm guitar; Arthur Kane, bass; Billy Murcia (died November 6, 1972), drums; Jerry Nolan (born 1946, died January 14, 1992), drums; after disbanding in 1975, Johansen and Sylvain put together a short-lived touring version of the band which included Peter Jordan, bass; Chris Robinson, keyboards; and Tony Machine, drums.

Formed in 1972 in New York, NY; achieved cult status based on live performances in Lower Manhattan; drummer Murcia drowned, replaced by Nolan, 1972; signed with Mercury Records, 1973; released debut album, New York Dolls, 1973; Thunders and Nolan left the band to form the Heartbreakers, 1975; Kane left immediately after, 1975; Johansen and Sylvain put together a band to tour under the New York Dolls name, 1976.

because there was nothing else happening. “We were the only band around, really, so we didn’t have to be that good.”

The band soon signed a management contract with Steve Leber, David Krebs and Marty Thau. The trio of managers decided that America might not me quite ready for the Dolls, so they decided to break them in England and then return to America to sign a big recording deal. So the band from New York who had never even recorded a song or performed in front of more than 350 people at the Mercer Arts Center, flew to England to open up for Rod Stewart to an audience of 13,000. The English press were blown away by the outrageous Dolls and soon offers from record companies were flooding in to the management company. While this was going on, the band was enjoying the nightlife of London and one night, drummer Murcia went to a party at a flat in town. After a night of hard drinking and the ingestion of Quaaludes, Murcia started choking and passed out. Some people panicked and left, while the few that stayed panicked and put him in an ice-cold bathtub with running water to try and wake him. He drowned.

Manager Marty Thau reminisced in Please Kill Me about the aftermath of Murcia’s death. “Everything came to a halt when that happened,” Thau recalled.” It took about a month for Billy’s body to be returned [to America].… Shortly after that, the band had a meeting and decided that we were going on. So we started looking for a new drummer.” Jerry Nolan lobbied for the job and got it easily, he being a competent musician and a rabid Dolls fan. “I loved that group so much you wouldn’t believe it,” he said in Please Kill Me. “Even though I was the last guy in the group, no one was more dedicated or loved that group more than me. They were my dream come true.”

New Beginnings

The first performance with Nolan was December 19, 1972, a little more than a month after Murcia’s death. By this time the Dolls were even bigger than before with all the sinister details surrounding the death of Murcia. “After Billy’s death, we were a big smash,” Sylvain told Savage, “it got us a lot of publicity. We were living this movie: everybody wants to see it, and we were giving it to them.” Interest from many record labels continued but most were too scared to sign the group, fearing they’d be too hard to handle. Finally after months of negotiations, the band signed with Mercury Records and prepared to record their first album, New York Dolls.

Produced by rocker Todd Rundgren in the spring of 1973, New York Dolls was, as Rolling Stonesaió in 1987 when they put it at 55 on their list of the Top 100 Albums of the Last Twenty Years, “a fearsome document of rock & roll rage, a brick through the window of mellow hippie complacency.…the Dolls lashed out with a declaration of teenage discontent that filtered the Rolling Stones’ spirit of rebellious arrogance through a sobering vision of atom-age youth robbed of its destiny.” Songs like “Frankenstein,” “Looking For a Kiss,” and “Personality Crisis” were already hits of a sort around New York and for the first time, America heard the New York Dolls. Well, some of America: The album went to 116 on the charts and sold close to 50, 000 copies, but the figures were below Mercury’s expectations. “We had damn good songs,” Johansen declared about the debut album to Rolling Stone. “They had a message to them, they were socially conscious. Kids today, they put on a dress, but they don’t know what to sing about.”

Too Much Too Soon

The Dolls’ second album, Too Much Too Soon, was a more diverse effort, an attempt, perhaps, to appeal to the world that lives above Manhattan’s 14th street. Though there were still urban rockers like “Babylon,” “I’m A Human Being,” and Thunders’s “Chatterbox”, the album also contained “There’s Gonna Be a Showdown,” written by famed Philadelphia soul writers/producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. In his review, Rolling Stones Dave Marsh proclaimed, “I think they’re the best hard-rock band in America right now.” The album sold even less than the first, however, and the band’s live performances, though always energetic were musically inconsistent. Many at the time pointed out that the album’s title was an apt description of the New York Dolls.

By this time Thunders and Nolan were heavy into heroin and bassist Kane was a barely functioning alcoholic. Following a tour in support of the second album, the band remained stagnate, with few ideas about how to carry on. Malcolm McLaren, who would go on to create and manage the Sex Pistols, came to New York to pitch some ideas for the band. The Dolls had been to McLaren’s clothing shop in London, Sex, and were enamored of his tastes and business acumen. McLaren wanted to get out of London and saw the Dolls as an opportunity to do that. “The New York Dolls were an adventure I wanted to have and see the world through,” McLaren said in Please Kill Me. “It was a means of travel.” Although arrangements with McLaren were never formalized, he is often cited as being their manager at the end the band’s existence.

McLaren began by getting Thunders and Nolan into a rehabilitation program for their heroin addiction and Kane into a hospital to treat his alcoholism. His next idea was to get the band out of the glam-rock scene and politicize them to the extent that they embraced Communism, or at least acted like they did. The band wore red patent leather suits and performed in front of a giant Soviet flag, complete with hammer and sickle. The new look didn’t go over well with fans and even less so within the band. Thunders and Nolan were vocal about their dislike for McLaren, and Johansen’s enthusiasm for the whole thing became almost non-existent. Nolan, in Please Kill Me, recalls the time with McLaren as “too artsy-fartsy. He had us dressing up in matching red leather suits and playing in front of a giant communist flag. It was so stupid!”

The End

Following the “red patent leather” concert in New York, the Dolls went to Florida, where McLaren had booked them into a bunch of small, out of the way clubs. While staying at a trailer park/motel, owned by Nolan’s mother, the band had it’s final disintegration. Friction within the group was at it’s worst and following a group argument at dinner one night, Nolan stood up and announced he was leaving. Thunders, stood up and said he was going to leave as well. “I thought they were leaving because they hated the group and there was no genuine likelihood of them having success in Tampa,” McLaren recalled in Please Kill Me. “This, of course, wasn’t true at all. They really wanted to get back to New York because it was easier for them to score heroin.”

Johansen then returned to New York, Kane went to California to escape from a girlfriend, and Sylvain and McLaren drove around Louisiana to look for new band members. Thunders and Nolan evidently tried to get the band back together, but Johansen didn’t want to be in a band with anybody who had to run off and get heroin between shows. Instead, Thunders and Nolan formed the Heartbreakers with guitarist Richard Hell from the seminal New York band, Television, and bassist Billy Ficca. In the tradition of the Dolls, the Heartbreakers had a cult following and played hard edge, albeit sloppy, rock & roll. In 1976 Johansen and Sylvain put together a new version of the Dolls, but quickly realized the magic of the original Dolls was too closely tied to the times in which they started, and they aborted the project.

Epilogue for a Band

Johansen then pursued a solo recording career and had modest success until he created the tuxedoed, bouffant-haired, R&B rasper, Buster Poindexter, in 1981. The Heartbreakers remained successful for a few years and toured with keepers of the punk flame, such as The Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Jam. Following the breakup of the Heartbreakers, Thunders released eight albums between 1978 and 1988 and was planning a new project with Nolan when he died of a drug overdose in New Orleans in 1991. Nolan formed his own band, the Idols, after the Heartbreakers disbanded and a few months after Thunders’s death entered the hospital to undergo treatment for bacterial meningitis and bacterial pneumonia, conditions brought on by years of drug abuse. While in the hospital, Nolan suffered a stroke and went into a coma which he never came out of. He died in January of 1992 at the age of 45. Kane went on to play bass for a band called the Corpse Grinders, while Sylvain formed the Criminals, for which he played lead guitar and sang.

With only two studio albums, the New York Dolls continue to influence bands with their raw and inspiring attitude. “People who sawthe Dolls said, ‘Hell, anybody can do this, ’ Johansen said in Please Kill Me. I think what the Dolls did as far as being an influence on punk was that we showed that anybody could do it.” But more than their music, it was their sense of righteousness, the “what’s it to ya?” punk sensibility that bubbles to the surface on the records. “It was so obvious what we were doing to rock & roll—we were bringing it back to the street.… And we thought that’s the way you were supposed to be if you were in a rock & roll band. Flamboyant.”

Selected discography

New York Dolls, Mercury, 1973.

Too Much Too Soon, Mercury, 1974.

Live in NYC—1975/Red Patent Leather, Restless, 1992.

Rock ’n’ Roll, Mercury, 1994.

Sources

Books

McNeil, Legs and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, Grove Press, 1996.

Savage, Jon, England’s Dreaming, St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

Periodicals

Billboard, March 23, 1974.

Entertainment Weekly, July 10, 1992.

Rolling Stone, October 26, 1972; September 17, 1973; June 20, 1974; August 29, 1974; February 12, 1976; July 27, 1978; August 27, 1987; June 13, 1991; March 5, 1992.

—Brian Escamilla

Contemporary Musicians