About Me
"The New York Dolls created punk rock before there was a term for it. Building on the Rolling Stones' dirty rock & roll, Mick Jagger's androgyny, girl group pop, the glam rock of David Bowie and T. Rex, and the Stooges' anarchic noise, the New York Dolls created a new form of hard rock that presaged both punk rock and heavy metal. Their drug-fueled, shambolic performances influenced a generation of musicians in New York and London, who all went on to form punk bands. And although they self-destructed quickly, the band's two albums remained two of the most popular cult records in rock & roll history. All of the members of the New York Dolls played in New York bands before they formed in late 1971. Guitarists Sylvain Sylvain (who named the band), Johnny Thunders and Rick Rivets, bassist Arthur Kane, and drummer Billy Murcia were joined by vocalist David Johansen. Early in 1972. The group began playing regularly in lower Manhattan, particularly at the Mercer Arts Center. Within a few months, they had earned a dedicated cult following, but record companies were afraid of signing the band because of their cross-dressing and blatant vulgarity.
Late in 1972, the New York Dolls embarked on their first tour of England. During the tour, drummer Murcia died after mixing drugs and alcohol. He was replaced by Jerry Nolan. After Nolan joined the band, the Dolls finally secured a record contract with Mercury Records. Todd Rundgren -- whose sophisticated pop seemed at odds with the band's crash-and-burn rock & roll -- produced the band's eponymous debut, which appeared in the summer of 1973. The record received overwhelmingly positive reviews, but it didn't stir the interest of the general public; the album peaked at number 116 on the U.S. charts. The band's follow-up, Too Much Too Soon, was produced by the legendary girl group producer George "Shadow" Morton. Although the sound of the record was relatively streamlined, the album was another commercial failure, only reaching number 167 upon its early summer 1974 release.
Following the disappointing sales of their two albums, Mercury Records dropped the New York Dolls. No other record labels were interested in the band, so they decided to hire a new manager, the British Malcolm McLaren, who would soon become famous for managing the Sex Pistols. With the Dolls, McLaren began developing his skill for turning shock into invaluable publicity. Although he made it work for the Pistols just a year later, all of his strategies backfired for the Dolls. McLaren made the band dress completely in red leather and perform in front of the USSR's flag; all of which meant to symbolize the Dolls' alleged communist allegiance. The new approach only made record labels more reluctant to sign the band and members soon began leaving the group.
By the middle of 1975, Thunders and Nolan left the Dolls. The remaining members, Johansen and Sylvain, fired McLaren and assembled a new lineup of the band. For the next two years, the duo led a variety of different incarnations of the band, to no success. In 1977, Johansen and Sylvain decided to break up the band permanently. Over the next two decades, various outtakes collections, live albums, and compilations were released by a variety of labels and the New York Dolls' two original studio albums never went out of print.
Upon the Dolls' break up, David Johansen began a solo career that would eventually metamorphose into his lounge-singing alter-ego Buster Poindexter in the mid-'80s. Syl Sylvain played with Johansen for two years before he left to pursue his own solo career. Johnny Thunders formed the Heartbreakers with Jerry Nolan after they left the group in 1975. Over the next decade, the Heartbreakers would perform sporadically and Thunders would record the occasional solo album. On April 23, 1991, Thunders -- who was one of the more notorious drug abusers in rock & roll history -- died of a heroin overdose. Nolan performed at a tribute concert for Thunders later in 1991; a few months later, he died of a stroke at the age of 40."
In 2004, former Smiths vocalist Morrissey -- who was once the president of a British New York Dolls fan club -- invited the surviving members of the New York Dolls to perform at the 2004 Meltown Festival, a music and cultural festival that was being curated that year by the singer. To the surprise of many, David Johansen, Syl Sylvain, and Arthur Kane agreed to the gig, with Steve Conte standing in for Thunders and Gary Powell from the Libertines sitting in on drums. The group's set was well received by critics and fans (and was recorded for release on DVD and compact disc), which led to offers for other festival appearances, but only a few weeks after the Meltdown show, Kane checked himself into a Los Angeles hospital with what he though was a severe case of the flu. Kane's ailment was soon diagnosed as leukemia, and he died only a few hours later, on July 13, 2004, at age 55. With Sam Yaffa (of Hanoi Rocks) on bass, the remaining Dolls played a hometown tribute to their fallen brothers at Little Steven's International Underground Garage Festival in New York City on August 14, 2004, reuniting again in 2006 for the all-new CD/DVD One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
The New York Dolls BBC Documentary
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OFFICIAL NEW YORK DOLLS MERCHANDISE
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ONE DAY IT WILL PLEASE US TO REMEMBER EVEN THIS
Morrissey recently exclaimed this with a fervor that somehow made his chronologically impossible claims seem plausible. Watching footage of the 'Dolls onstage two years ago at the behest of one of their biggest fans (who was curating the prestigious Meltdown Festival in London) one realized just how vast - and heretofore unsung - their influence truly was. Everyone knows the famous logo: chrome lipstick, scrawling that name across an unseen mirror, but it's more than the great brand. It's not about the androgyny either. Skinny boys were wearing make up long before them. Little Richard. Elvis. It's not even about the music, as the Dolls themselves were always quick to credit 50's R&B numbers or early 60's girl group productions as their own influences. Really, what makes the Dolls so eternal is the attitude - it got into rock's water supply and never left. Kiss, Aerosmith, The Ramones, Blondie, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, Motley Crue, Guns N' Roses, Hanoi Rocks, The Strokes, The Libertines and just about any gang of strutting rockers who are convinced that their band could take your band and possibly your whole town in a pretty for pretty, ugly for ugly throwdown. The Dolls, and their disciples win, not just with brawn but with what guitarist Sylvain Sylvain calls "plenty of intellect and plenty of sex."
"You know how England is," David Johansen quips in his Staten Island drawl, thick as South Ferry sludge, "We made a big noise over there, and we were having so much fun, we decided to keep going." "The phone didn't stop ringing," Sylvain adds, "The kids wanted this. Kids of all ages." An album's worth of brand new New York Dolls compositions, as unlikely as it may have seemed in 2003, was a foregone conclusion after wildly successful festival and live dates that spanned the past two years. They were a reunion when they re-started. Now, with replacement members feeling comfortable stepping into the stack heels of departed legends like Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, and most recently Arthur "Killer" Kane, they're a gang once more. "It won't be very long that we'll be together longer than the original band was," Johansen laughs.
And so we have official studio release ..., ONE DAY IT WILL PLEASE US TO REMEMBER EVEN THIS, where the New York Dolls' hallmarks: perfectly mean riffs, deceptively sweet choruses and miles of that infamous attitude meet the 21st Century. What's the same? "I think it's still an up kind of thing," Johansen says describing that quality that makes the Dolls, whatever, whomever and whenever, unmistakably "the Dolls." "It's got a non-defeatist philosophy and attitude. It says 'We can do anything."
- Marc Spitz
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