The New York Dolls
Arthur Kane and his best friend, George Fedorcik formed a band at
high school in New York. Fedorcik adopted the alias Rick Rivets
and he and Kane approached a young hip-looking guy they kept
bumping into and asked if he wanted to be in a band. The guy was
called Johnny Genzale and he was to become Johnny
Thunders courtesy of a 20-cent DC comic book.
Rehearsals began with drummer Billy Murcia and Mick Jagger-like
singer David Johansen, and The New York Dolls made their
debut on Christmas Eve 1971.
When Rivets began missing rehearsals he was replaced by the
guitarist Sylvain Sylvain (real name, Ronald Mizrahi) who had
previously played with Murcia in a trio called The Box. From the
beginning The Dolls were determined to be outrageous and wild,
adopting platform boots, jumpsuits, hotpants and leather long
before the general populace caught up.
In June 1972 the flamboyant Dolls went down a storm at the
Mercer Arts Center near Broadway, and began a Tuesday night
17-week residency at the venue's Oscar Wilde Room, which attracted
scenemakers like Andy Warhol, Lou
Reed, John Cale and Roy Hollingworth, the New York
correspondent of the British music weekly, Melody Maker.
To capitalise on their resulting high profile in the UK, The
Dolls travelled to London to support Rod
Stewart and The Faces at Wembley Pool
(now the Arena). They divided the crowd but went on to play
further British concerts with Argent and Roxy
Music until the accidental death on 6 November 1972 of the
drummer, Billy Murcia.
Murcia suffocated on black coffee poured down his throat
by a girlfriend attempting to keep him awake after a drink and
drugs binge (and not, as widely believed, from a drug overdose). The
official verdict ruled that death was from drowning in a domestic
bath while under the influence of alcohol and methaqualone.
The band had been on the verge of signing to a British label
but went back to New York - though they resumed gigging in
December 1972 with Jerry Nolan as drummer.
The following March they finally signed a two album deal with
Mercury Records and began recording their eponymous debut, with Todd
Rundgren producing. The band were often at loggerheads with
Rundgren, who nevertheless managed to capture the sass and swagger
of Trash, Personality Crisis, Looking For A
Kiss and Frankenstein.
Released in July 1973, The New York Dolls was a
proto-punk revelation, a way cool schlock of visceral rock &
roll which combined the more essential moments of The
MC5, The Pretty Things and The
Shangri-Las. The Rolling Stones
were another obvious reference point, with Johansen a dead-ringer
for Mick Jagger both in vocal style and mascara'd looks -
Inevitably, Johnny Thunders was the glam-punk Keith Richards.
The Dolls trashy transvestite
attire also borrowed heavily from The Stones circa 1966, although
being American they had taken it to almost cartoon-ish
proportions.
Kane made headlines when his jealous girlfriend Connie Gripp
attacked him with a knife before a trip to Los Angeles. Peter
Jordan, a roadie, deputised for him, although Kane toured with the
band anyway to stay away from trouble. In November they visited
Britain again and appeared on The
Old Grey Whistle Test, attracting the disapproval of
presenter Bob Harris but lighting the slow-burning fuse of punk.
Dolls' songs like Personality Crisis, Trash and
Jet Boy were seminal squalls of guitar abuse, making up
in attitude what they lacked in musical ability, but meanwhile -
back in America - the Dolls album had only sold
110,000 copies.
Mercury agreed to pay The Shangri-La's producer George 'Shadow'
Morton $10,000 to produce the follow-up LP, Too Much Too Soon in
1974 - which included the single Who Are The Mystery Girls? and
a cover of The Cadets' Stranded In The Jungle.
Photographer and film-maker Bob Gruen devised a black &
white newsreel featuring The Dolls as a gangster gang called the
Lipstick Killers, and the group burst through the screen to play
their legendary St Valentine Day's Massacre Concert at the Academy
of Music in New York on 15 February.
Three months later the American rock magazine Creem voted
them both the best and worst group of the year, but a three
month-long tour sent Thunders and Nolan into a heroin dependency
spiral from which neither ever truly recovered. Kane was drinking
heavily and stayed in New York while the group soldiered on for
the last few dates.
At the end of 1974, British entrepreneur Malcolm
McLaren took over their management and dressed them as red
flag-waving communists - the ultimate threat to the American way
of life - but by then their bassist was in rehab. He returned for
an ill-fated trip to Florida that effectively did for The Dolls.
Thunders was the first to
leave, departing in 1975 to form The
Heartbreakers, while Johansen and Sylvain subsequently sacked
Kane before finally calling it a day the following Christmas.
Johansen and Sylvain both went solo. Johansen also pursued a
film career of sorts, appearing in Married To The Mob, Scrooged
and The Fisher King.
Thunders and Nolan joined forces in The Heartbreakers and Kane
stayed in Florida, drafting Blackie Goozeman (who later adopted
the pseudonym 'Lawless' as frontman with the heavy metal shock
rockers WASP) to form Killer Kane. When
that group broke up in 1977, Kane teamed up with Rick Rivets in
The Corpse Grinders, who wore chalky makeup years before Rob
Zombie, and recorded one album for the label Fan Club French.
In 1989, Arthur Kane fell from a window and smashed both his
knees. He was later mugged and beaten up badly during the LA riots
and spent several months in hospital.
Johnny Thunders died under suspicious circumstances in a New
Orleans hotel room on 23 April 1991. He was 38.
Jerry Nolan succumbed to a fatal stroke on 14 January 1992
while undergoing treatment in a New York hospital for bacterial
meningitis and pneumonia. He was only 45.
Kane developed leukaemia and died in Los Angeles on 13 July
2004 just hours after being admitted to Cedars-Sinai Hospital with
what he thought was the flu. He was 55.
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