Fifty years ago, the most important American underground rock band of its generation was dying. The New York Dolls, the androgynous-but-tough band who mixed the Rolling Stones, girl groups and garage rock, were imploding under the weight of their own addictions and failures. You wouldn’t say they split, per se – there was still a version of the band led by David Johansen in existence until the end of 1976. But 1975 was the end for Johnny Thunders, Arthur Kane and Jerry Nolan, and the Dolls stopped being the Lower East Side’s rock’n’roll street gang.
They only made two albums, and barely played outside New York. But the band laid the foundations for punk, and taught a generation of outsiders and refuseniks they could be something different, as those whose lives were changed by them recall.
Joan Jett
I always looked to England for inspiration, but the Dolls were one of the few exceptions. I saw them when I was 13. We were living in Rockville, Maryland – it was either them or Sabbath for my first concert. I would have read about the Dolls and talked my mother into taking me to a record store to buy their record. My mom was my enabler with rock’n’roll – my dad just didn’t see it.
I saw them at a small theatre in Washington DC. My friend Gary and I had front-row seats – I guess it must have not been sold out – and I took David Johansen’s Budweiser bottle from the stage afterwards. The crowd was the DC version of the freaks, and this was the popping of my cherry – moving from Donny Osmond to the New York Dolls. I was not dressed in any crazy way; this was all brand new to me.
And they were trashy. Not unlistenable; as in not polished. The music seemed really connected to the musicians playing it. Even at that young age, you could hear the difference between them and a super-famous act with a record company push behind them. They seemed genuine.
At that point I was trying to learn how to play guitar. I hadn’t decided I was going to form a rock band, but seeing bands like them, I could relate. And soon after that I did leave for California, and started thinking that if I wanted to play rock’n’roll there must be other girls like me who wanted to play it too. And if the New York Dolls could do it, I could do it.
I wanted to show that girls could play rock’n’roll, and it was hard to convince people. In school you were told that girls can’t play rock’n’roll – not because you couldn’t master the instrument, but because you’re not allowed. The Dolls represented a breaking of that norm: you can’t wear a woman’s dress? Watch me!
Walter Lure, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers
By the late 60s and early 70s, even the bands I liked were degenerating into half-hour solos and you had to be a Juilliard graduate to play them. When the Dolls got up it was something that anyone who learned a guitar could do: two- or three-minute songs like in the late 50s. They were sloppy and they ripped it up – it was pre-punk but also post-glam. That’s what got me.
I used to see Johnny [Thunders, guitarist] in the late 60s – he would always stand out because he had English clothes on: ruffled shirts and high-heeled boots. The first time I saw the Dolls, though, was at the Mercer Arts Center [in Greenwich Village, Manhattan] because there was all this buzz about this new thing going on. They looked like a glam band, but a little crazy. It was roughed up – like they’d been hit by an atomic bomb – and they weren’t acting feminine.
I heard Johnny referred to as one of the “primitives”. He didn’t know much technically, but he got a noise that I’ve rarely heard anyone come close to approximating. Jerry Nolan, the Dolls’ drummer, used to call it “a dinosaur screaming in the jungle”.
He was a nice, quiet, humble guy, but when he was on drugs he changed. Jerry told me that in the Dolls, Johnny was on speed and would get crazy, so Jerry would take him into a room and punch him in the face a couple of times. But after he went on his own he didn’t have Jerry to keep him under control.
• Walter Lure died in 2020; this interview was conducted in 2018
Martin Rev, Suicide
They were the darlings of the Warhol school. Every time the Dolls played it was to an incredible crowd of very good-looking people dressed colourfully, guys and girls in very similar clothing. It’s not like the music struck me as revolutionary, but everything was done well.
When I think of them, I think of the culture around them: Barbara Troiani who designed so many of their clothes, Frenchie [Christian Rodriguez] who was their road manager – all these people very close to the Saint Marks scene of thrift shops. Everyone was making their own clothing from used things they found: you’d take a woman’s top, change the sleeves, add polka dots and it looked great. It wasn’t a New York thing before then.
The Vietnam war had been going on for several years, escalating, until 1972 when the US started to pull out. I did see it, as many movements are in times of war, as escapist: “Let’s party. Let’s forget about things.”
Danny Fields, A&R, music writer, artist manager, New York scenester
The first time I saw them would have been at the Mercer Arts Center on a Monday night. It was the coolest party in New York: everyone was there. Their songs were so good, they looked so fabulous, and David [Johansen, frontman] had the best hair in rock’n’roll. The Mercer had tiered seating, with the stage at the bottom, like a lecture theatre – it was like you were in an ordinary building and then walked into an incredible party.
They made an immediate impact because they were ours. They weren’t a bunch of dorky musicians who cared about what notes they were hitting, and they weren’t unapproachable. They were the house band of the alternative scene in New York, which meant they could get in Rock Scene magazine, which meant they were immediately kind of famous: you could follow their lives in a nationally distributed magazine.
They were inventing a new definition of sexy: so a guy could have hair like Johnny Thunders and be sexy. The band was the five straightest guys in town, rabidly heterosexual, but they dressed in drag and were the house band of a culture that was pretty gay – between 30% and 60% of the crowd was gay or at least gay-friendly. That’s an irony about the New York Dolls. But some things don’t translate to other media – because it was a bunch of drag queens, radio wouldn’t touch it. That’s the damage radio can do to a career.
Bud Scoppa, A&R, Mercury Records
Paul Nelson [Mercury publicist] and I went to Mercer Arts Center to see them – they were doing two sets. The place was packed and they were obviously the talk of downtown. They seemed to me like a cartoon version of the Rolling Stones. I wasn’t able to quite get my head round it.
Paul stayed for the second set and the next morning he said: “You should have stuck around, it was fantastic.” That was the beginning of the courtship. We got to know [band manager] Marty Thau, and the guys started coming to the office. Mercury was probably the least hip label they could have gone with: David fell asleep at the table in the conference room while the deal was being done. That was emblematic of the disconnect between label and band.
I don’t know if it would have made a whole lot of difference who they signed for, because what they were doing was so radical. There wasn’t a whole lot of precedent for them. You had to fall under their spell, because they were magical – what they could do with their limited instrumental skill was amazing, in terms of entertainment, and each one of them had an incredible personality.
In retrospect you could say they were archetypes in terms of making the most of limited proficiency. Ramones certainly picked up the ball and ran with it based on the Dolls’ blueprint. What Paul was most taken with was the songwriting, and what they were able to do in terms of taking genres – girl group, the Stones, the New York demimonde – and turning it into something coherent and expressive and funny and poignant. No one else could have come up with a song like Trash – that’s highly distinctive. I don’t think Mercury had any idea what they were dealing with.
Dave Vanian, the Damned
In November 1973, they did the Biba shows in London and I went to the first night. Biba was a strange place – a shop with five floors of 1930s glamour that felt like a timewarp. The gig was full of all sorts of glittering people – a very dressed-up gig. Lots of cross-dressers wandering around.
British [glam rock] bands were playing with the same image, but in a very cuddly way. They were dressed in the same clothes, but the Sweet seemed friendly, whereas the Dolls seemed to come out of some New York film where it was all flick-knives on the street.
I was out in the sticks in Hemel Hempstead and I hated it – it was supposed to be a town of the future, but it was full of displaced people who didn’t know each other. It was a lonely place to be young if you were different. Magenta Devine grew up there – she was the only other weird person.
For the Biba gig I was wearing a midnight-blue satin jacket, six-inch-heeled shoes, black lipstick and eye makeup. I guess I looked like I was in the band. My girlfriend was outrageous. She had platinum blond hair and she was wearing a transparent glittery top that she sneaked past her parents – she had no bra on. The difference with seeing the Dolls was that it wasn’t a band where teenyboppers were coming – it was a knowing audience and it was a pivotal point in history. I’m so glad I saw that.
They weren’t great virtuoso players, but they were as good as any band around. That night they played most of that first album and it sounded really good: if it had sounded like a shambles I don’t think I would have liked it as much. They had one foot firmly in those early rock’n’roll songs: you might only know a few notes, but if you play with passion, it works.
When we came out of the gig, there was a guy giving out Dolls stickers, and I put it on my jacket. I’ve still got the jacket, and it’s still got the Arthur Kane sticker on it. At that time I wasn’t thinking of being a singer but they made me think I could do it. There was a moment where I thought: I’m not going to be in the audience, I’m going to be on that stage.
Jim Sclavunos, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
I was a teenager when I saw them on TV on Midnight Special. It was the equivalent of seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan – it was that big a shift. It felt as if I owned that music; I could claim them as a fan rather than them being a hand-me-down.
A key thing was David Johansen’s voice: I remember reading about how for some people it was a thrill to hear the Beatles speaking in scouse accents, and it was a similar thing for me – David had a very thick New York accent. I didn’t know the term DIY at the time but that was what I was identifying with: working within your limits to create something incredibly exciting and unique.
I missed the boat on the Mercer Arts Center shows, but in 1974 they started doing a few shows at Club 82. That had been a quite-glamorous trans entertainment cabaret in the East Village, run by some gangster, where movie stars would go to slum it, but by then it was down at heel.
I was determined to see the Dolls. It was a two-hour journey from Brooklyn – a bus and then a train. It was nerve-racking on public transport; New York in the 70s was a genuinely dangerous place. The first time I went to a gig – John Lee Hooker at Carnegie Hall – my friend and I got a gun pulled on us.
I had blue eyeshadow and mascara, and trimmed my hirsute Greek eyebrows. I found a nice diaphanous electric blue shirt to wear and tight women’s jeans. Fortunately, my dad didn’t see me. I squeezed into my tightest, pointiest shoes and hobbled to the bus stop.
The show was sold out but they let me in. It was packed and sweaty and there were more freaks there than I had ever seen in my life. I felt slightly inadequate but somehow in my element, and Club 82 became a bit of a hang for me.
The Dolls were very much looked down on by the mainstream and I couldn’t comprehend that. I could understand why people said they were sloppy – it was more that they were loose, like a blues artist would be. I never stopped loving them. They were the most transformative band in my life, on every level: personally, sexually, musically.
I tried to buy Jerry Nolan’s pink drum kit, but I just couldn’t come up with the money. That always chagrined me. Years later I ended up getting a pink Premier Resonator kit, in honour of Jerry, and I play it to this day.
