TamTam Books News

Thursday, May 27, 2004:

As most of you know by now, the New York Dolls (the ones who are still with us on Earth) are getting back together to do a performance or two at the Morrissey related Meltdown festival. Oh, and Morrissey of course invited my favorite band Sparks as well as Jane Birkin to participate in the festival that will take place this June in London.

Down below is an essay by Malcolm McLaren, who for a moment or two managed the Dolls in their last months of existence as a band. Also included are some personal observations by well-known fans of the Dolls. I too like the New York Dolls!

I got this from today's Guardian.

Friday May 28, 2004
The Guardian


'They looked the best tarts on parade': the New York Dolls
 In 1974, the Sex shop I owned with my partner, Vivienne Westwood on the King's Road in Chelsea became a magical place. The New York Dolls called it their "glory hole". In it, we created a feeling that was both euphoric and hysterical. You felt an enormous range of possibilities that whatever was happening couldn't be predicted, that it was a movement towards a place unknown. The New York Dolls were part of that feeling.

To the generation that followed in their wake, the flamboyant failure of the band was an inspiration to all. Where did it all begin? How did it all happen? For me, the answer lay at my first store on 430 King's Road, where I sold the ruins of pop culture - a jukebox stood proudly in the centre of the store. Among this rock'n'roll debris of posters and memorabilia and old records, stood some fine ancient jackets in leather, velvet and tweed resembling clothes worn by such dead stars as Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent and the Shangri-Las.

All of this stuff was situated in a field of glitterdom that I had named Let It Rock in 1972. Within a year, I was bored with it all. Bored with the same surrogate suburban teddy boys that drifted in from God knows where. Bored with the hippies and refugees of Chelsea's swinging 60s looking for charity and kindness. Bored with the demands of the BBC wardrobe department and their dreadful revivalist TV shows. I felt like Steptoe and Son. I was lost in dead tissue. I wanted something new. On a typically rainy, grimy London day, I stood by the jukebox glumly listening to the antique rock'n'roll music, occasionally falling asleep to the whining semi-literate, pimply, racist wannabes debating whether to buy pink or yellow fluorescent socks.

Suddenly, a force-10 gale blew open the doors of my pathetic sartorial oasis, and in burst a gang of girly-looking boys looking like girls dressed like boys. Tiny lurex tops, bumfreezer leggings and high heels, this gang with red-painted lips and rouged cheeks and hair coiffed high ran riot. They crawled all over the jukebox, destroying the neat racks of teddy boy drapes in their wake. Their tongues revealed they were not from the old country. The Uxbridge teddy boys were stunned into silence by this alien invasion - from Harlem? Dressed up to mess up, their shoulders became enormous in their new teddy boy clothes. I learned that they were called the New York Dolls before they vanished.

Months later, on my first trip to New York, I met them again. We drank at Max's Kansas City, a bar on Park Avenue, a stone's throw from Andy Warhol's Factory. At their apartments, we began for the first time to hear the NY Dolls. I was shocked by how bad they were. How much it hurt my ears! And then I started to laugh - laugh at how stupid I was. How bad they were. Bad enough to be good. By the fourth or fifth track, I thought they were so, so bad, they were brilliant. I was smitten - like my first real desire, first kiss, first everything. I had seen the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the High Numbers, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, but this was the first time I had fallen in love with a group.

Vivienne and I moved into the Chelsea hotel. I wanted to give tout New York a party. I wanted to invite everyone we knew in NYC: Michael J Pollard, a star in Bonnie and Clyde, Candy Darling a star of Warhol's factory, Patty D'Arbanville, the subject of that famous 60s hit, Where Do You Go to, My Lovely?, Bob Colacello, followed by Andy Warhol himself and of course, the Dolls. There was Sylvain Sylvain, a red-cheeked Egyptian toyboy dressed in a child's fringed cowboy shirt; Johnny Thunders, a rock'n'roll Latino rag-doll whose face I had great difficulty in finding; Arthur Kane Jr, a boy-girl who seemed to think he was every suburban girl's wet dream of a Teutonic god in gold spandex, and David Johansen, a New York Mick Jagger lookalike, only 20 years younger and a lot taller, wearing a dress that belonged to his girlfriend, Cyrinda Fox.

Our entertainment was our rack of clothes from the new shop, Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die (we wanted everyone to try them on), a punch bowl, some hula hoops and the reggae soundtrack of the Jimmy Cliff film, The Harder They Come. Guests screamed from the balcony of the hotel down to the streets below, welcoming everyone up. Some peed out of the window.

The Dolls returned to London in 1973 and played on the roof of Biba's, a large, fashionable store on Kensington High Street. There was nothing dangerous about pop culture at that time. Nothing sexy, nothing stylish. But the New York Dolls seemed to incorporate all of that because they played so beautifully badly. They were chaos incarnate, so sexy. Every muscle in their body could be seen.

They were so trashy with their garish makeup. They looked the best tarts on parade. Their music, a crude, raw marriage of the Shangri-Las and John Lee Hooker spat out that look and sound that we all desperately wanted. Songs about the subway, Personality Crisis, Jet Boy, Looking for a Kiss and a cover of Stranded in the Jungle. Somehow, they made you feel you could do it yourself. They made you feel a part of something that was always on the verge of collapse. That night, without a second's thought, I replaced the sounds of John Lee Hooker, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Gene Vincent on my jukebox with the Dolls.

What was it they had that so enchanted me? It was simply because they rang all the bells that I wished pop culture had but couldn't find in London. The charts were full of groups like the Sweet - ugly men in tight glitter clothes singing Ballroom Blitz. How old-fashioned was that? The Faces were old hat. Reggae had become boring. Rock'n'roll revivalist groups were just TV fodder. I couldn't wait to escape and so, Vivienne and I packed our bags and followed the Dolls on tour to Paris.

The Dolls embodied sex and androgyny, translating it into fashion. Sex translated into fashion becomes fetish, and fetishism was the very embodiment of youth. Youth has to behave irreverently; it has to take drugs, because of its fundamental belief in its own immortality, which it needs to assert over and over again. And fashion and music are the natural expressions of its need for confrontation and rebellion, and fetishism, in both, is its necessary razor's edge, the exhilarating border between life and death. Fashion and music, music and fashion - they were expressions of the same needs - and it now seems natural and right that a shop producing a street fashion of boredom should be the venue for its music.

The Dolls had pinpointed for me some essential deficiency in the English imagination. I began to cast around for people who could equal the Dolls' fantasies. I decided to close down Too Fast to Live, and rethink the entire shop. The one thing that hit me clearly at that time was sex clothes. That's what the Dolls were doing! They were wearing fashion as sex. I decided to change my shop and call it Sex, a place for liberated teens. An emporium of perversity. It would look like a cross between a school gym and a padded cell. I ripped out the dancefloor and used the wood to make parallel bars. I covered the walls with sponge and sprayed slogans from pamphlets I'd picked up in NYC - the SCUM (Valerie Solanas's Society for Cutting Up Men) manifesto, adding the words: "Does passion end in fashion? Or does fashion end in passion?"

As soon as the new store was complete, I decided to set sail for the US, to engage, belong, harness, dominate and ultimately, I thought, control the New York Dolls. I decided to make them look not like girls, but worse, like Communist dolls. Red, patent leather Communist dolls. I had a fondness for all that Chinese stuff. Drugs and alcohol had seeped into their lifestyle and they were already past their shelf life. The music industry paid no attention to anyone who liked the New York Dolls, dismissing them mistakenly as homosexuals. It now continued to deteriorate even further.

The Vietnam war was just about to end and for me, red was the colour and I thought it needed to be their colour. Their lyrics, I felt, should have the word "red" in them at least six times. I wanted a chance to have just one affair, one moment, and persuaded them to let me make a show. I found a venue, hung a lipstick logo'd flag outside, and designed a backdrop - a banner with a hammer and sickle on stage. I wrote a press release - a manifesto of sorts that declared the politics of boredom: "Better red than dead". The Dolls came on stage soaked in a ray of red light. David waved Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. Everyone drank red-coloured cocktails and sat on red upholstered chairs.

The critics railed against me: "He's a communist! I know, the NME in London told me." To David Johansen: "What is all this communist shit?" David laughed but got scared and disappeared into the toilets. Backstage, Lenny Kaye - another journalist - and later a member of Patti Smith's group went to Johnny Thunders and asked him the same question. Much to my delight, Thunders said, "What's it to ya?" Johnny had the attitude. Now it was just a question of getting everybody into the same boat. I convinced the group to leave for Florida.

We lived in a trailer park managed by the drummer's mum and sat around night after night discussing the band's future. Our future. Around the campfire, the roadies told tales of their past adventures with the Dolls in Louisiana. Stories of them dressed in schoolgirls' clothes, feather boas, and spandex, paddled by the roadies in canoes through the swamps. The locals, Cajun rednecks, didn't understand. They thought the Dolls were still wearing their clothes from childhood and were too poor to buy new clothes that fit. Taking pity upon them, they offered Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders clothes fit for men - lumberjack shirts.

It soon became clear that the group's other habits needed to be fed, and so they fled back to NY, except Sylvain and myself. We chose to drive to New Orleans. Walking down Bourbon street, I saw whores on swings overhead, displaying their crotches, and found a T-shirt with a cut-out of a pair of breasts that I had designed in a local shop. Back in New York I raised enough money to fly back to London. Sylvain stayed with his girlfriend, gave me his Les Paul guitar and we agreed to stay in touch.

This bomb of fashion and music that I brought back would set alight London, reigniting the energy and excitement of what I had experienced with the New York Dolls in America. The tits T-shirt became a bestseller in Sex and the military fatigues were remade in shiny black cotton. I placed a strap between the legs binding one knee to the other and a zipper that went straight down the crotch and wound its way up the ass: as you undid them, all your goolies fell out, calling to mind images of doing stuff of the most obnoxious kind in the streets.

Sylvain never joined me in London but Steve Jones kept his guitar. And we finally recruited John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten, and John Simon Ritchie aka Sid Vicious into the Sex Pistols. The NY Dolls were not forgotten though. Rotten hated them and wrote a song called New York for the Sex Pistols' one and only album, Never Mind the Bollocks. It was 1976 and I was now the manager of the Sex Pistols.

A fundamental belief in the strength and purity of the amateur over the slickness of the professional (and the eternal devotion to an uncontrollable youthful urge to behave irresponsibly and be everything this society hates) became the legacy of the New York Dolls. It remains the war cry of the outlaw spirit of anything new in pop culture today.

· The New York Dolls play Morrissey's Meltdown at The Royal Festival Hall, London SE1, on June 16 at 8.30 pm. Box office: 0870 401 8181.

'They're where we all come from'

Gary Powell, the Libertines
My dad had the Seven Day Weekend album and my mum got into them because David Johansen sounded a bit like Mick Jagger and she was a big Rolling Stones groupie. At first, I couldn't stand them because, every Sunday, my dad would send me to church and then he'd make me clean my room, and while we were doing that he'd play the New York Dolls. So while I'm doing this regime I'm pissed off and all I can hear is the New York Dolls. I changed my mind when I was 15 or 16. I was on a tour bus in the States and someone played it and I thought, "Hey I know this!" They're the start of modern-day rock'n'roll as we know it now - the Strokes and the Hives and everyone else. Musically they were a huge influence on the Sex Pistols. I think the imagery was really secondary. The New York Dolls were doing it in back 1973, and we're still trying to emulate bands of that stature now. To know where you're going, you've got to know where you come from and the New York Dolls is where we all come from.

Luke Haines, Black Box Recorder
I liked their two albums when I was a teenager. They were part of the holy trinity - Lou Reed, the Stooges and the New York Dolls. There was something so wrong about them. They certainly wouldn't be allowed to exist now, or if they did exist now they'd just be some posh kids from New York. It was obvious they were never going to get anywhere, so they had this enormous outsider appeal. Later on, you realised they didn't know why they were like that. There was something quite pure and dumb and teenage about them. They weren't at all contrived. But it's funny that they're having this reunion with whoever's left. I imagine it will be a weird Friends Reunited kind of thing. They probably haven't seen each other since then.

Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth
When I was 15, I saw a picture of them in Creem magazine. There were these gritty glam bands that were much more street and raunchy than what was coming out of the UK - bands like the New York Dolls and the Harlots of 42nd Street. Creem called it the New Androgyny and the New York Dolls were the flashpoint group. They appeared on television as well and sounded like utter chaos. I mean, it wasn't Bowie, it wasn't this refined music, it was something else entirely - something cantankerous and loud. I mowed the lawn and had my mother buy me the record. I remember her looking at it and saying "Who are these people?" And the only thing I could think of was something I had read in a magazine. I said, "They're supposed to look like they're 16 and bored to the bottom of their bowels." I played the record endlessly. I was definitely the only person in town who had it. A lot of kids were afraid to go near it because it had a very gay vibe to it. People ask me why we're playing Lollapalooza with Morrissey, because people have the perception that we're from completely different worlds, and I always say, "Anyone who was the president of the New York Dolls fan club is OK by me." When we started Sonic Youth, the New York Dolls and the Stooges were the two bands Lee [Ranaldo] and I both agreed on.

Brian Chase, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
I got into them in my first year in college, when I started reading Please Kill Me. I'm about a generation-and-a-half removed from them, so I needed a book like that to introduce me to the history of New York rock'n'roll. The earlier New York punk looked to traditional 1950s rock'n'roll and exaggerated the attitude and swagger. The New York Dolls song Looking For a Kiss begins with: "You'd best believe I'm in love L-U-V" and that's the beginning of a song by the Shangri-Las. English punk always feels a lot more ideological, dealing with class issues and politics. Those topics are more implied in New York punk, but they're not at the forefront. I was playing in a trash-punk band and we covered the New York Dolls' cover of Bo Diddley's Pills. I always remember playing that song as cleansing, and that's how I feel about the New York Dolls' music. It's about pushing yourself to the limit where it almost feels ecstatic - this desire to let yourself go and whatever happens happens. When you get on stage you want that kind of connection with the audience. You want to share with them that sense of extremism. You were meant to have fun with them. When you think of people going to a New York Dolls concert, you picture them dressing up in really trashy, ripped clothes and not being afraid to get dirty. That's how we view a Yeah Yeah Yeahs concert as well.

John O'Neill, the Undertones
The first New York Dolls LP is my favourite LP of all time, closely followed by their second. Growing up in such a small, parochial place as Derry, especially during the mid-1970s, things were fairly bleak. Music was the perfect escape, but the record shops were very limited in what they could sell or order in. Most people I knew were into Status Quo. Meanwhile, I was having my musical education shaped by John Peel and the NME and the Rolling Stones. We'd just started the Undertones and I was reading about what was happening in New York and how the bands were influenced by these obscure bands such as the New York Dolls, Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5, all of whom had broken up a couple of years earlier. So I got the album and it just sounded brash and full of sheer exuberance - exactly what rock'n'roll is supposed to sound like. Nothing has ever affected me like hearing that record ever since: absolute perfection.

Ginger, the Wildhearts
The first band I ever had were totally inspired by the New York Dolls. We used to wear black lipstick and raid our younger sisters' make-up kits, because we'd heard the Dolls did that. They took what the Stones had - the most exciting chemistry in the world - and gave it a street, DIY ethic that said anybody could be a Doll. They were the first people to really ram home that you didn't have to be a great player to be in a rock'n'roll band - you just needed a cool pair of boots. I bought the first album purely because of the picture on the front cover. Sylvain Sylvain with his corkscrew yellow hair was 10 times cooler than Marc Bolan, and next to him Arthur Kane, a nine-foot Frankenstein of a man with this shock of badly bleached hair next to the incredibly Jaggeresque genetic experiment of David Johansen. Johnny Thunders was arguably the coolest guitarist of the time. My entire musical life has been an attempt to get just one shot of me looking as cool as Johnny Thunders. Obviously I never managed it but luckily, unlike Johnny, I'm still here.

Glen Matlock, Sex Pistols
I'd just started working for Malcolm McLaren and there was talk of this mad band. I didn't think too much about it but I was a big Faces fan and I went to see them at the Wembley Empire Pool and the New York Dolls were the support (October 29 1972). They were just something else. I must be one of the few people in England who actually saw the original line-up, because the drummer (Billy Murcia) overdosed not long after that gig (November 6 1972).

The place was packed, they did a few numbers and Johnny Thunders broke a guitar string. It was a big gig - 13,000 people or something - and they didn't even have a spare guitar. So the gig was held up while somebody went and got a guitar string, and then Thunders put it on with everything turned up. So you've got 10,000 watts of power going weeeea-aaa aw w-ww. People were booing and David Johansen's going "Aww, fuck you guys," with his feather boa on, while Sylvain Sylvain was rollerskating up and down the stage. They started the same number again, got halfway through it and he broke the string again.

It was a big eye-opener in terms of attitude. They really didn't give a shit. I don't think the Dolls were the first punk band - that was the Troggs - but I do think they were the last nail in the coffin of glam rock.

· Interviews by Dave Simpson and Dorian Lynskey


Tosh // 9:50 PM
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