, the lurid, unexpurgated saga of The New Yorks, as told to Uncut by the band themselves...){kind=link}
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From Uncut’s June 2004 issue [Take 85]. The lurid, unexpurgated saga of The New York Dolls, as told to Uncut by the band themselves…
November 4, 1972. The New York Dolls are backstage at Liverpool stadium, preparing for one of their most prestigious gigs of this, their first UK tour. It is barely six months since their public debut, yet here they are about to open for no less a rock luminary than Lou Reed. The group that Melody Maker hailed as “the best rock ‘n’ roll band in the world” before they’d signed a deal or recorded a note.
Ten minutes before showtime and the Dolls’ adrenalin is pumping hard. Exploding with nervous energy, their delight at being invited to support Reed is countered by the expectation that they will soon upstage him. If Lou is the established doyen of Neil York’s art-rock Max’s Kansas City crowd, then the Dolls are its underground enfants terrible. “We were a threat,” confirms bassist Arthur Kane, speaking to Uncut in February 2004. “We were about to blow him off the fuckin’ stage.”
Unfortunately, they never got the chance. For reasons he will never explain, Reed dispatches a lackey to deliver the bombshell: if the Dolls go on, he won’t. “I remember standing behind the curtain,” Kane recalls. “I had my bass on, all tuned up and ready. He could have told us earlier not to make the trip, but he didn’t. He waited moments till we were about to go on. It’s not enough that he rejected us; he also had to disappoint us. He had to hurt us.”
Devastated, the Dolls consoled themselves with the prospect of their next concert supporting Roxy Music in Manchester five days later. Except they wouldn’t make that one, either. Not because of a similar queenie strop in the Roxy camp, but because within 48 hours one of them would be lying dead in a bathtub after an accidental drug overdose.
By rights, their story should have ended there. A tragic footnote in history, the could-a-beens that never were. Instead, the Dolls would survive to rescue rock’n’roll from post-Woodstock tristesse, challenging accepted sexual stereotypes and draft the outlines of what would become punk rock. If only for the blink of a mascara’d eye, The New York Dolls would become the best rock’n’roll band in the world after all.
They were five young, straight, shaggy-mained bucks from New York’s rough Bowery district who happened to enjoy wearing lipstick, chiffon and crotch-clinging spandex. They sounded like The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album played at 45rpm: hot hit-and-run guitar boogies complementing lyrical fantasies about riding in spaceships with Diana Dors and fucking Frankenstein’s monster.
The New York Dolls took the raw power of The Stooges and applied it to the jukebox pop of The Shangri-Las. Mystified critics dismissed their savage bubblegum hybrid as “subterranean sleazoid trash”. The Dolls took this as a compliment.
“We were a totally revolutionary way to play rock’n’roll,” Dolls frontman David Johansen tells Uncut. “The real deal, not manufactured. We played rock’n’roll music and made it look like rock’n’roll music. With the clothes, it wasn’t really considered drag. We were kind of lost souls. We took male and female and made this kind of third choice. It wasn’t like we were trying to be girls; we were trying to mix and match, y’know what I mean? It was ‘Look at me, I’m masculine, and I’m feminine’.”
“We were stealing out girlfriends’ make-up to get more girlfriends,” laughs Sylvain Mizrahi, alias Sylvain Sylvain, the guitarist who christened the group after a local toy store repair centre, the New York Dolls Hospital.
FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT JUNE 2004/TAKE 85 IN THE ARCHIVE
