They couldn ’t understand why these guys were getting so much attention. … I ’d get into these incredible arguments with musicians my own age, friends of mine. They ’re bringing back the three-minute song! ’ These were the days of the ten-minute drum solo, the twenty-minute guitar solo. “I said, These kids are doing what nobody else is doing. 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. ”Įven more surprising was that, although each member had been in a band in high school, none of them were exceptional musicians. “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. In a matter of months the Warhol art crowd, Lou Reed, Bette Midler -and almost every night - David Bowie would be in the audience. Indeed, the Mercer Arts Center became the place to see and be seen. “They didn ’t even want us at the Mercer Arts Center until they counted the bar receipts, ” guitarist Thunders told McCormack. The center also had a bar that was doing lousy business, that is until they hired the Dolls. The center would feature plays in one room, a cabaret show in another room, conceptual art in the room next to that, etc. 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. 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 Dolls wore women ’s clothes, high heels, and lipstick. ’ ” 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. … None of us said to each other, ‘You wear this or you do that. “It was just a bunch of guys practicing in a storefront who started playing together. “There wasn ’t a lot of intellectualizing going on when we started the New York Dolls, ” said Johansen was in Please Kill Me. 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. ” That was at the beginning of 1972 and Kane and Johansen joined shortly thereafter. “The New York Doll Hospital, a place where they fix rare dolls, was right across the street. “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. When they formed Sylvain and Murcia were working at a clothing store in Queens. “Johnny Thunders, Billy Murcia, and I formed the New York Dolls out of New Town High School, Queens, ” Sylvain recalled to Jon Savage, author of England ’s Dreaming. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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