The legend of The New York Dolls, erstwhile nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame yet shamefully never inducted, reached its finale last week with the announcement that David Johansen, their singer, had died aged 75, so it’s a pound to a penny it’ll never happen now. Or maybe it will. A dead Doll can’t disrupt proceedings after all.
The Dolls were the trashiest of the trash and for a year or two in the 1970s I was on first-name terms with David Jo, the last Doll standing. They were a band that never fitted in but never wanted to either. The field they ploughed alongside very few others, Iggy perhaps, maybe Lou at times, was at the extreme end of decadence, which was where they believed rock should squat. With the possible exception of Keith Moon, I cannot think of anyone who revelled in licentiousness as much as the five Dolls, David, Johnny Thunders, Arthur Kane, Sylvain Sylvain and Jerry Nolan (who replaced original drummer Billy Murcia who died in London in 1972). They made the Pistols look like choirboys. It made them enemies as well as friends, and I liked to think I was their friend, well for some of the time.
For a couple of years in New York, from 1974-76, when I was Melody Maker’s man in America, I saw David and his band regularly but they presented me with a dilemma. My predecessor in that role, Roy Hollingworth, adored them, declaring them the future of rock’n’roll, writing, somewhat loquaciously, in MM: “Here on this stage battles a baggage of balls and trousers and high-heeled shoes; and drunkenness and unwashed hair; and untuned guitars and songs that musicians would call a mess but a rock and roll child would say ‘God Bless You – You are so necessary!’ Rock and roll is sex. And the Dolls played on. And they played sex. Non-stop.”
Such was Roy’s enthusiasm for the Dolls that it seemed churlish for those MM writers that followed him not to share it, to some extent anyway. There was much to admire about them, not least their enthusiastic embrace of an “us against the world” attitude, a stance much respected by those music writers who harboured a militant streak, but at the same time, as Roy noted, they could be very loose on stage, almost to the point of incompetence. Some of their songs, though, were absolute killers, especially ‘Personality Crisis’ and ‘Looking For A Kiss’, both of which were played endlessly on the juke box in Max’s Kansas City and, later, at Ashley’s Bar.
The first time I saw them, at the Whiskey in Los Angeles in 1973, I thought they were a hoot, and the second time, at the Academy of Music in New York a year later, I wrote about how much they’d improved but how they seemed intent on imitating the Stones. I would see them perhaps half a dozen more times over the next couple of years, a period that saw their fortunes slipping and sliding alas. At the Academy, however, they were still on a pedestal, their set preceded by a short film that had been made by their biggest fan, Bob Gruen, New York’s hippest rock photographer, then and now a good friend.
The Dolls were social animals, hanging out in New York bars like Max’s and Ashley’s where musicians gathered late into the night, and I got to know singer David Jo well, along with his girlfriend Cyrinda Foxe, a beautiful blonde who left him for Steve Tyler, the singer with Aerosmith. We also bumped into one another at parties and yesterday the US writer Jon Tiven posted this picture of me at the same table as David on my FB page. I think – but I’m not 100% sure – that the girl I’m with at the back is the model Lisa Stolley.
Later that same year I saw the Dolls at Club 82, the joint where I first encountered Debbie Harry with The Stilettos. “For the past two Mondays, the Dolls have appeared at the Club 82 in New York, an ideal place for premiering new ‘glittery’ talent in New York, but hardly the kind of venue for a band with two British tours and two albums under their belt,” I wrote in MM. “An obvious step down, in fact, and a sure pointer that all is not well in the Dolls’ camp. Some observers are going as far as saying the Dolls’ demise is a carbon copy of the Velvet Underground’s story in New York. Perhaps in five years’ time, their albums will be hailed as works of art and David Johansen, Johnny Thunders and Co will be resurrected in much the same way as Lou Reed has made his recent comeback.”
It wasn’t to be though Malcolm McLaren, a Dolls groupie, tried his best to resurrect their career by dressing them up in red uniforms and declaring them communists. “The Dolls had only just survived being labelled gay transvestites and had the bruises to prove it. If they were going to pursue the Communist trip under Malcolm's regime, Vivienne [Westwood] was going to have to run up matching bullet proof vests,” wrote Nina Antonia in Too Much Too Soon, her biography of the band, published by Omnibus in 1997 and eagerly commissioned by me.
When I left New York I thought I’d never see the Dolls again but I was wrong. On the evening of March 10, 2006, I watched what remained of the group – just David and Syl – at Selfridges on Oxford Street where they played in the basement, the Ultra Lounge as it was called in those days, and it was very dark and noisy and smoky, and throughout the evening beautiful models in off-the-shoulder short black dresses with long legs and six-inch heels plied me with champagne. Decadence still followed the Dolls everywhere, it seemed. The event was to mark the opening of a punk fashion week, though quite why the Dolls had been flown over at huge expense from New York for one free gig escaped me completely. For starters they weren’t really punks, more 60% glam, 35% Rolling Stones clones with the remaining 5% punk – but only in attitude, not musically.
It would have been around midnight when the Dolls finally tottered on to the small stage in their high heels and finery but they played so excruciatingly loud that I was hard pressed to identify anything other than the opening number, ‘Personality Crisis’. Thereafter the Dolls turned up and up and, in a room with a relatively low ceiling that was never intended for live music anyway, the sound degenerated into a great wash of noise. I don’t think my ears have been assaulted in such a way since I stood on John’s side of the stage for Who shows back in the Seventies. As ever, David Jo pranced around like Mick Jagger, colliding into Syl and sharing his mike. Still, despite the volume the Dolls didn’t disappoint.
My final Dolls show was on June 18, 2004, when the two Dolls who were at Selfridges, David and Syl, appeared with their original bassist Arthur Kane at the Royal Festival Hall as part of that year’s Meltdown Festival, curated by Morrissey, one of their biggest fans who once published a Dolls fanzine. At one point in the show, between numbers, David approached the microphone and thanked their English fans for their support. “And we got a lot of support from a writer on Melody Maker,” he said. “I can’t remember his name.”
“It was Roy Hollingworth,” I yelled at the top of my voice from where I was sat, in a box at the side.
David glanced up at the box but I doubt he recognised me from those days back in New York. “That’s right, Roy Hollingworth,” he mumbled into the mike.
RIP David.
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