NEW YORK

Credit in here All dolled up: New York Dolls (from left) Arthur Kane, David

Johansen, Johnny Thunders (part obscured), Sylvain Sylvain (in hat) and Jerry

46 MOJO Nolan, Paradiso dressing room,

Amsterdam, December 7, 1973.

Credit in here Getty

N JUNE 13, 1972, THE New York Dolls played the first of 14 Tuesday nights at the Oscar Wilde Room in the Mercer Arts Center, on Broadway & West 3rd Street. Stretching into October, this residency established the band as the premier new group in Manhattan, and created a meeting place for the outsiders who attended Max’s Kansas City and peopled the East Village: Warholite scenesters, pop stars, drag queens, designers, disaffected teens, what writer Alan Betrock called “the Dolls’ nouveau-freakish-bisexual audience”.

This interview with Dolls singer David Johansen covers their story between the start of that residency and the release of their first album in July 1973. The subsequent downfall of the group has been much emphasised in the intervening five decades, yet in the summer of ’72 the Dolls struck many as a powerful restatement of rock’n’roll verities: namely that songs should be short, attitudinal and exciting, played by a young group (they were all aged between 20 and 23) who reflected their place and their time.

Fusing Chuck Berry via The Rolling Stones with ’60s girl-group harmonies, chord changes and interjections, the Dolls sounded like their East Village neighbourhood – an urban petri dish of cheap rents, plentiful thrift stores and colourful characters. As Johansen tells MOJO today, “Since the ’50s with the beatniks, the East Village had been incrementally moving along, and wound up at this spot, in 1972, and the rest of the country was still in the ’50s.”

In 1972 and early 1973, the Dolls stood alone. Johansen was influenced by Janis Joplin, Mitch Ryder and out-there art troupe The Cockettes, while guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders’s thrift store cross-dressing chic placed them at the cutting edge of fashion. The look brought them attention both positive and negative: while the Dolls were heterosexual, they looked like they cared less what you thought they were. In the spirit of the time, they enjoyed playing with the possibilities of what a man could look like and what a man could be, and if that meant wearing women’s clothes, so what? Nevertheless, a wider American public would prove less receptive to those ambiguities. In these early days, however, success was not the goal. Having fun was. Catching a show at Max’s Kansas City in January 1973, the drama critic Stefan Brecht – the son of playwright Bertholt – noted the group’s curious innocence: “The Dolls are just that – real dolls: nice, pretty, gentle, friendly, clean youngsters, nothing more (except that David is intelligent and a good performer for the public), nothing else.” Yet darkness had already touched them: original drummer Billy Murcia choked to death in November 1972 on the group’s first trip to London – a tragic and shocking event. Following the deaths of Johnny Thunders in 1991, drummer Jerry Nolan in 1992, bassist Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane in 2004 and Sylvain in 2021, David Johansen is now the last of the first five Dolls. Although recovering from a recent illness, he’s in good spirits and warms to enquiries about the roots of his band and its early impact. And as he reveals, more Dolls-related activity is afoot. A forthcoming documentary by Martin Scorsese will offer an overview of Johansen’s 50 years as an iconic American performer.

East Village people: (clockwise from above) Dolls (from left) Billy Murcia, Thunders, Johansen, Kane and Sylvain, October 30, 1972; Ridiculous Theatrical Company founder Charles Ludlam; Johansen gets lippy, 1973; Janis Joplin (1967): David was “crazy” about her; Johansen and Jayne County share a bottle; big influence Mitch Ryder, circa 1967.

It’s 50 years since you started your residency at the Mercer. How did it come about?

Well, I knew a guy called Eric Emerson. He had this band, Magic Tramps, a gypsy violin kind of band, and he told me he was gonna play at this new place, the Mercer Arts Center in a room called The Kitchen – Nam June Paik had videos in there, that kind of business – and I said, “Yeah, I’d like to play there with you.” So we opened for him, and the manager of the place – I think his name was Al Lewis – says, “I want you guys to play again.” I guess he was impressed by… I don’t know what. So anyway, we played again, and I went into his office to get the 30 dollars or whatever it was, and he asked if we would we like to play on a weekly basis in the Oscar Wilde room – I think they had five rooms. So that was that.

What was the Oscar Wilde room actually like?

It wasn’t that big. It had very tall ceilings, there was a stage and a little area in front where you could dance, and then there was like bleacher seating that went back up to the ceiling. That’s what I recall, anyway. It wasn’t huge, but you could comfortably fit a hundred or 200 people in there.

So is that where you built your audience?

Yeah. There was a lot of people on the street in the East Village who had, ah, artistic pursuits: dress designers, actors, playwrights, everything. I think that room, when we played there, was somewhere they could come together and meet each other, rather than just observing each other on the street. It became a scene where people could network, make business, stuff like that.

Was there a gay element to that?

Yeah, but, you know, people didn’t use the word ‘gay’ so much in those days. People were just people. If someone was outrageously gay, you wouldn’t say that person was gay, you might say they were fantastic, maybe. Gay wasn’t a part of the lexicon.

So you weren’t typifying people. Did you play with Jayne County as well?

Sure, we used to put on all kinds of shows there. Eventually we moved to the Sean O’Casey Theatre, the “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest room”, we used to call it, because that’s what was running there, the play. When we moved there, we started putting on longer shows, with like five bands, but at the Mercer, people would come in and open for us. I know we played with Wayne, we were good friends with her.

Where did the Dolls get their sense of style from? Was it each member bringing something, or was it something in the air at the time?

Well, both. I mean, we noticed each other because of that, the way we would dress on the street. Essentially that was how it was when we met. It wasn’t like we were trying to be outrageous, or anything.

Going back a bit, you were from Staten Island? What is the relationship of somewhere like Staten Island to Manhattan?

Depends where on Staten Island you’re talking about. The area I come from is called the North Shore, it’s close to the ferry, the skyline is there across the bay, so it’s a bit more cosmopolitan, more Democrat, whereas the South Shore is what we used to call the ass-end of Staten Island. It’s hard to explain what it’s like, but you really wouldn’t want to hang out there. Provincial. But where I lived, you could get on the ferry for a nickel and be in Manhattan in 25 minutes.

All the Dolls came from outside Manhattan, didn’t they? Do you think that made Manhattan special for you, that when you got there you could make it your playground?

I guess. I don’t know. I had been living in Manhattan for a while before I met any of the other guys in the Dolls. I’d been through this, for want of a better word, hippy metamorphosis, the psychedelic scene, going to the Fillmore, they used to put on these great, eclectic kind of shows, you could see Miles Davis and The Who, there was a lot happening there. I’d been in bands in high school. I wanted to be in a band, and make music.

I used to work for this guy at this shop called Matchless in St Mark’s, Lohr Wilson. He used to say, “Ah, you’re not gonna do anything, you’ll never do anything.”I was kind of like his slave, and I think that gave me the impetus, you know, I’ll show you.

Everyone in the Dolls had a kind of musical speciality. A fandom speciality. Syl was a T. Rex kind of guy, Arthur liked Sky Saxon and The Seeds, John [Genzale/Thunders] liked the MC5, I was crazy about Janis Joplin. I can’t remember what [original drummer] Billy [Murcia]’s thing was.

So what was your inspiration for wanting to form a band in the first place?

I always liked rock’n’roll. I have five siblings, two of them are older, and when I showed up, rock’n’roll was playing. We used to go to the Murray the ‘K’ show, you could see the show all day if you wanted to, and the person who got me was Mitch Ryder. They gave the bands five minutes, and Mitch Ryder would come on and in five minutes he’d do three or four monster songs. At the end of it, he’d have no shirt on, he was soaking, sweat was flying everywhere. I was awestruck by him, I think that cemented that I’m really gonna do this. I didn’t really have any other ideas about what to do, so…

Were you inspired by The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?

To a degree. I liked all of those bands. The Kinks, The Zombies, whatever came out, all the bands from England. But also tempered with American R&B. The band that we had then, we could do things like Mustang Sally – but also the Four Seasons, crazy singers like Lou Christie. Something about the camp value of rock’n’roll appealed to me.

Did you work with [actor/director and Ridiculous Theatrical Company founder] Charles Ludlam?

Well, the guy I mentioned before, who had the store on St Mark’s Place, he had these racks of costumes – big, lush boas and wild costumes with sequins, there was this giant sequinned phallus – and I wondered what he was doing with this stuff. “Oh, this is a costume that I’m making for Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater” – and I thought I’ve gotta check this out. So, I went to rehearsals, I guess, and these were like the greatest people I’d ever met. They were so much fun, and so brilliant. I’d met individuals like that, but I’d never met a mob of them!

And I just started to make myself useful, and became good friends with one of the writers – his name was Bill Vehr. We used to go to a lot of rock’n’roll shows together, we went to Boulder, Colorado, San Francisco, hit the road, kind of thing. He passed away from AIDS.

I would string the guitars, when they did a musical, I would back them up, do sound ➢

“More bubbly?”: Johansen with producer Todd Rundgren, NYC, August 1, 1973.

IN THE ANNALS of rock, the New York Dolls’ self-titled debut has generally been pegged somewhere between a flawed masterpiece and a heroic failure, and yet its significance outstripped its sales from the very beginning.

As 1973 dawned, the group had so much going for them: critical adoration, patronage from colossi like David Bowie and Lou Reed, their own burgeoning demi-monde scene, and a contrastingly colourless surrounding landscape – a pop-cultural tabula rasa upon which to scrawl their own ramalama aesthetic, in glossy lipstick. Their Mercury deal left them with the mere formality, surely, of converting all that sizzle – and some fantastic songs – into the substance of a landmark debut.

Only it didn’t quite turn out that way. After the band were snubbed by prospective producers Leiber & Stoller, Phil Spector, Bowie and ‘Shadow’ Morton, sessions at midtown Manhattan’s Record Plant were

helmed by Todd Rundgren, the pop auteur concurrently en route to a prog phase.

The two parties didn’t click: Rundgren later sniffily opined, “As far as I was concerned they were just imitation Rolling Stones, all dressed up as women for a singles jacket,” and at one point during recording reputedly shouted, “Get the glitter out of your asses and play!” His other beefs included a control room full of wasted hangers-on and a hurried mix.

However, New York Dolls has survived the intervening five decades for its many inspirational virtues: David Johansen’s wonderfully yowling Big Apple street charisma, Johnny Thunders’s explosive proto-punk guitar playing, the collective air of ramshackle genius which, despite everything, radiates from every groove.

Critics loved it on both sides of the Atlantic, with UK pro-punkers Nick Kent and later Tony Parsons flagging it as “where a new decade began”. More than just on Frankenstein (Orig.) – about green out-of-towners grappling with monstrous NYC – and Subway Train’s thrilling underground ride, this ever-pulse-quickening record channels the band members’ excitement at converging and cavorting in the big city, where kids could make their own rules and change the world. That self-belief, that attitude, carries the day, unstoppably, still. ➣ effects, shaking the tin so it’s thunder, all that kind of business. Occasionally I would be a spear carrier, you know. I just liked being with them, they were such great characters.

Do you think it influenced you, when you started performing?

Yeah, absolutely. There are so many influences coming out, when you’re performing, you can’t really catalogue them all. Like spices in a soup, or something. They come together in a combination that would be peculiar to oneself. But yeah, they definitely influenced me. Making a spectacle that’s not shoe-gazing. I got a lot from them, and from Little Richard, things like that.

Did you ever see Little Richard live?

Yeah, I saw him. I went to this party he had at the Waldorf, this was before I was in the Dolls. I think I saw him at the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park. Then I went with a bunch of people back to the hotel. There was a wild party back there, and he was carrying on, really funny, making all these pronouncements, he was a great character. Years later we gave an award to somebody at the Grammys, me and him.

What comes through is the sense of humour, and the Dolls had that, at least early on.

If it’s not fun, then it’s drudgery, really. I can’t name names because I can’t even remember who’s who, but a lot of bands, it doesn’t seem like they’re having much fun. But if it’s not fun, why do it?

Who drove the band, in the Dolls? There’s always somebody.

Well, we used to rehearse in this bicycle shop on the Upper West Side, and there was a guy, I think he was one of Arthur’s friends, he was a guitar player, and I just had a feeling in my gut that it wasn’t right, and one night he didn’t show up, and who comes in but Syl. I think he’d just got off a plane from being deported from Amsterdam, or something, he had this little carpet bag, and a guitar. He comes in. I’m like, this guy’s cool, he’s kind of like the same size as John and Billy, and he played really well – I thought he was probably the best player in the band at that point. I said, “We got to get this guy into the band, the other guy is kind of… lumbersome.” Syl was bouncing around all over the place, he really liked rock’n’roll, musically he was very astute. But over time, it would shift a little bit, here and there. In the beginning, John really wanted to rehearse a lot. Every day, practically. So he used to drive the band in the very beginning, to excel, and Syl made it possible for him to do that. When Syl became more integrated into the band, he exerted more influence.

Did they write tunes and you put the lyrics over them, or were the songs more integrated?

I had a couple of songs I’d been writing, and I taught them those. Looking For A Kiss was one. There were some covers that would tickle me, like Pills, and Don’t Start Me Talking, we would learn that. Then John would play a riff, and it would get my attention, so I would write words to it. I would keep a notebook of words and ideas, and put them to the riffs that the guys would play in rehearsal.

A lot of the songs on the first album are about being young in New York…

Yeah. Rock’n’roll, particularly at that time when it didn’t have so much history to it, was a teenage thing. When we were kids, we were obsessed with rock’n’roll, but rock’n’roll for adults was unheard of. So yeah, we put a lot of that into it.

It was very different to a lot of the music that was around then: the singer-songwriters.

Yeah… I guess we noticed it, but it was like elevator music. It wasn’t something we would even comment about. We were into songs that were concise, you know. You’d be at the Fillmore and somebody would start a drum solo, and you’d think, “I’ll come back in 20 minutes. See what’s going on in the lobby,” or whatever. A lot of the bands at that time had just become this be-denimed mass. We wanted to have a show that was explosive, in a way. It wasn’t even that we choreographed or planned it, nothing like that, it happened spontaneously.

When did you get a sense that the Dolls were really taking off?

Never! Taking off in the neighbourhood, maybe. “This is better than I expected,” you know. But beyond that, not really. In the neighbourhood we were just free, but when we left it, there were certain places we could go, and get that great reaction, but then there would be places where we would be kind of called out: “What are you doing? How dare you!” And we’d be, “This is no place for us,” you know. So I don’t think we ever had any great expectations about taking over the mainstream. In New York, we felt good, it felt right. We loved our audience and they loved us. It was a good match.

Did you actually say, “I’m trisexual, I’ll try anything”?

Oh, probably, but everybody used to say that in those days. It’s not something that I came up with, so to speak. It’s a way of saying, “Get off my back, don’t talk to me about this stuff…”

Did you want to get a record contract? Did you want to go through all that?

John really did. There’s a thing when you’re a kid, and naive about business, you think that if you get a contract, your worries are over. But then there’s a whole new kettle of fish. The powers that be have an interest in taming your rebelliousness, and that becomes a headache. Trying to satisfy everybody and remain true to yourself.

Did you find it difficult to get a contract?

I didn’t, [Dolls manager] Marty Thau did. A lot of people would come along to that theatre room, at the Mercer Arts Center. They used to bring people down like Clive Davis and Ahmet Ertegun, all these record honchos would all come at once, to see the show. This guy, Paul Nelson, loved the band: he was an A&R guy at Mercury and he went to bat for the band, with a guy from Mercury in Chicago, Irwin Steinberg I think his name was – a lovely man but he was an accountant, a bean counter. He had no inkling about music or what could be a trend. He put out good records, but they were like Dinah Washington records. So Paul went to bat for us, and kept picking away at Irwin, until he essentially acquiesced to Paul’s desires. ➢

Trash City Rockers: (clockwise from above) Kane and Johansen on-stage at Mercer Arts Center, NY, December 31, 1972; poolside in LA, September 1973; Grand Central Hotel, housing Mercer Arts Center, collapses, August 3, 1973; Johansen with hero Little Richard, presenting at the 1988 Grammys.

(7-inch, Mercury, 1973) The sound of the disreputable backstreets as Shangri-Las suss – that pouty, attitudinal intro – collides with the Bo Diddley beat. But for all the messy playing, it’s still delivered with a sexy, ‘fuck you’ economy.

(on New York Dolls, Mercury, 1973) Bo Diddley’s 1961 Chess single given the Dolls treatment: sped up and saturated in Lower East Side sleaze with Johansen salivating over lyrics about a rock’n’roll nurse giving pills and shots. A genius coupling.

(7-inch, Mercury, 1973) A licentious coming together of past and future where, over golden-age rock’n’roll – all primitive guitar riffing, piano pumping and forceful drums – Johansen bays about changing into “the wolf man howling at the moon”. (7-inch, Mercury, 1973) Girl-group melodrama meets Planet Stories comic book as Jet Boy steals our hero’s baby and Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain rip it up. When they played this on OGWT in Nov- ember ’73, presenter Bob Harris dubbed it “mock rock”. As if!

(on Lipstick Killers – The Mercer Street Sessions 1972, ROIR, 1981) A staple of their early live set and recorded at NYC’s Blue Rock Studios in June ’72, the Dolls never officially released a version of the Otis Redding song despite this demo combining high camp with raw power to great effect.

(7-inch, Mercury, 1973) The Dolls hijack Mickey & Sylvia’s Love Is Strange single from 1956 – “How do you call your lover boy?” – adding hard rock, glam flash and cutesy girl-group harmonies. Voilà: a manifesto for a transgressive age.

(on Lipstick Killers – The Mercer Street Sessions 1972, ROIR, 1981) A studio version of Sonny Boy Williamson II’s 1955 blues appears on their second album, 1974’s Too Much Too Soon, but they were demoing it back in 1972. Smothered in blues harp, it sounded even more tough, raw and trebly.

(on New York Dolls, Mercury, 1973) A rare ballad and a tale of heartbreak and loss on a Phil Spector scale. OK, it’s delivered tongue-in-cheek and it might be about drugs, not a girl, but it’s still tender and poignant and a side of the Dolls rarely heard.

(on New York Dolls, Mercury, 1973) An anomaly at seconds shy of six minutes, this foreboding part-Stooges, part-MC5, proto-grunge dirge is the closest the group ever got to mainstream heavy rock, although its lyric celebrating teen dysfunction is pure Dolls.

(on New York Dolls, Mercury, 1973) The bluesman’s railroad-as-life metaphor transplanted to the New York subway. As Johansen pines for his lost love, Thunders takes on the guitar hero mantle with a hurtling-downthe-track guitar solo that’s Pullman class. ➣ Can I ask about Billy’s death? It was devastating. A shocking situation. It was a horrible misadventure, really. You don’t really get over things like that.

Did it change the band? You got Jerry Nolan in...

Yeah. Jerry was good, at that time. A little more commercial, in a way. He was a big Gene Krupa guy, you know, and I’ve learned since that if a drummer is a Gene Krupa guy, they’re going to be good. The drummer I have now is a Gene Krupa guy. He made us a touch more listenable, maybe. I can’t really tell. I haven’t heard any stuff that Billy played on, lately. Jerry was maybe a little more consistent, but all those things are a matter of taste.

When you came to record the album, you had all the songs ready?

Yeah, and then some.

Can you remember if songs like Trash and Jet Boy were about particular people, or just the kind of people you were around?

I would imagine they were amalgams of people. Jet Boy is like an ideal. Trash could be about a million people. It’s hard to remember. I don’t know where it comes from, it’s in the air. When you write for a band it’s like being a speech writer for a political party or something, you want to make it representative. If you start writing personal songs in a band like that, it’s like, iffy, to say the least.

Can you remember anything about writing Frankenstein?

Yeah, John had this loft in Chrystie Street, we used to play there. People would walk in and out, it was a crazy place. There were all these dramas going on. There was a guy tripping, trying to rewire the place. He was obsessed that something was going on in the wires. And we came up with that tune. Certain songs I can remember exactly, I get a very vivid photograph of where it was when we created it.

Tell me about the image on the album cover…

We showed up with the clothes. Syl had arranged with Betsy Bunky Nini [a designer clothing store founded by Betsey Johnson, Anita Latour and Linda Mitchell] for them to do the shoot. Syl had been in the rag trade, he and Billy had a sweater company. There had been another shoot, I can’t remember what it was, but it just didn’t look right. It was in some kind of doll place, it was a bit heavy-handed with the dolls. And it was antique dolls, it looked very old fashioned. It was wrong.

Anyway, he got them to do this thing which was more modern. Toshi was the photographer. So, we came in and the whole thing was there, the couch was there, it was all set up. I don’t think I had any inkling of what it was going to be. There was a make-up person there. We went for it. We availed ourselves of the hairdressers, and the makeup, and the Betsey Johnson people were so into it, it was kind of infectious.

When that image came out, do you think people couldn’t cope with it?

I suppose. Whether they could cope with it or not, it didn’t matter to me. The East Village social scene was evolving rapidly, in terms of things that were becoming normal there. It was so far from the rest of the country, they couldn’t really make that leap. So it was kind of shocking to them, but the important thing is that they needed to be shocked.

You went out on tour with Mott The Hoople. How was the reaction to you across the country?

Detroit was great, LA was great, San Francisco was great, there were a couple of places in Texas that were surprisingly great. Toronto was great, Fort Lauderdale and Miami were great. Atlanta was great. We were great friends with Lynyrd