New York Dolls (part three): Hurled In Their Fun

Dolls In The Days Of The Good Old Times

Dolls In The Days Of The Good Old Times¹

Am reprinting here my New York Dolls piece from 1997, which because of its length I've broken into three parts, this being the final part. Printed originally in my fanzine Why Music Sucks #11. Thanks to the University of Georgia Press, who published my book Real Punks Don't Wear Black (and here), where I reprinted this, and are letting me reprint this now.

"Actually, if I were a young person I think I'd be most interested in having old folk like me write about what things were like back in the day: what the Fillmore was like, what the crowd was like at a Dolls show in the early '70s, etc." So Lucy Sante wrote me recently [i.e. October 1997]. Good timing, as I happened to already be at work on "Boys in Makeup." But as for what the crowd was like: Despite my having seen the band six or seven times in the space of about ten months in 1973–1974, I find myself unable to say what the crowd was like, at least not with any accuracy. Partly I don't remember, partly I never noticed in the first place, and partly I rarely can come up with the words to describe anything, even when I do have a picture in my mind. As for what people were wearing, I don't know. My defense against fashion while I was growing up was to put up a complete block in my mind, so I really didn't see what people were wearing. I only got vague impressions and such. Since I wasn't going out searching/shopping for clothes or thinking of clothes items as constituting a potential ensemble for me to wear, I never learned a vocabulary, I never learned to see how shirts, shoes, makeup, etc. went together, I never could describe why (or how) a person looked freaky or hoody or glam. I never had a sister, either, so I was culturally deprived in major ways, no knowledge of makeup, magic beauty secrets, hair styling. Also, I was in general (and still am, of course) too busy in my own mind thinking, calculating, imagining, and so on to see what was in front of my nose. I do remember being eventually disappointed that there wasn't a more interesting sartorial response among Dolls fans, that there wasn't more of a visual echo in the audience of what was happening onstage and in the music. Maybe the crowds were fairly nondescript. The way I remember it, the dressed-up girls in the audience weren't looking nearly as glittery, cheesy, slutty, cheap pasted-on glamorous as they could have been (nor were the boys, of course). The look of those trying to make an impression was more a stylized stylishness: I'd say Early Goth, maybe, with a lot of ornate towers and stained glass and flying buttresses and... oh, I went off there, sorry... the look was, you know, black – black clothes, dark eye shadow, pale makeup. At least it was on one young woman whom I remember, first row center in the basement of the Viking Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, who, at the end of the encore, was helped up onstage, along with a woman friend, by Johnny and Arthur and then accompanied the band backstage as it went off.

New York Dolls "Personality Crisis" live (Don Kirshner's Rock Concert)

As for what the crowd was like in its behavior, let's see, first show: I didn't yet like the New York Dolls; I'd heard the record once or twice and thought it was sludgy and lumbering, not all that different from Grand Funk, it seemed, who were hitting at the time with "We're an American Band." So I saw the Dolls in New York at Max's, and Jay and Maureen and maybe Robin (Jay's mother [a real sweetheart, by the way]; I forget if she went along with us) got a table up in front while I stood farther back with my arms folded, having no real response within me and not yet hearing the beauty that was embodied by the sludge or connecting to any of the starts and stops and syncopation that gave the music movement. My arms weren't folded in disapproval, just in nonconnection. Next to me was another boy with his arms folded too. I don't remember the crowd. The people cheered after songs. Afterwards, Jay and Maureen were radiant and ecstatic, saying it was the best concert they'd ever seen. I was puzzled, not having felt anything in the air, in the music, in the event. Not quite true; there was one moment, in the middle of "Subway Train," where a wail attached itself to the melody, like the guy's voice was a train horn, and I got a sudden sense of tunefulness. This is important, because later that night I couldn't get that one song out of my head; so I said to myself, "There's at least one song I like, even if they play like clodhoppers."

The next show was a different story. I'd absorbed the album, memorized the album, knew as much of the lyrics as I could make out (about 65%); what had been sludge now felt like thickness of emotion. I and my friend Steve (not a Dolls fan, but he went along with us) drove from Tolland, Connecticut, where we shared an apartment, to Providence to pick up Maureen from Brown and then headed down south to the University of Rhode Island, in Kingston, where the Student Activities Committee had, for some reason, booked the Dolls. At Brown that afternoon Steve and I had sat in Maureen's dorm room and listened while she – in a monologue I'll never forget – talked about the day her mother had died, and how no one would tell her that it had happened, and (if I'm remembering this right) she was first told to go sit with one person, then another, or maybe she was sent from one house to the next. Her mother had committed suicide – Maureen was about nine when it happened. I'd known there'd been a suicide in her past, I think Jay had told me, but Maureen had never talked about it, never mentioned it, until that day. Down at Kingston we discovered that the Dolls would be playing in a cafeteria. We were second in line. First in line was a young woman and her boyfriend who'd come all the way from Boston – the boyfriend seemed like a regular guy (not that he necessarily was, but that's how he dressed, like the guy in the bar, the guy in the mail room). The woman was dressed more like – well, in a dress, a light-colored dress that seemed interesting on her because it was like an adult person's dress, not a young woman's dress, like a cheap version of something Jackie Kennedy would wear; it wasn't part of the youth uniform and it wasn't glitter. But it did announce a stab at fashion in some way, and the Dolls may have inspired this in her. Nowadays this would be no big deal, someone dressing up at a rock show, but in 1973 it said something. She talked nonstop, too, full of opinions and dissatisfactions, and kept saying stupid things and being real irritating. I think Maureen and I had a common disappointment, that this would be the first person with whom we'd share the potential rapport of Dolls fandom.

New York Dolls "Human Being"/"Jet Boy" (live)

The performance room – the cafeteria – had been cleared of tables and seats. People were to sit on the floor, or stand. Maureen and I went up front, though Steve stayed back. The place was packed, all these college kids sitting on the floor. Maureen and I and one other person, right by the stage (which was a platform not very high off the floor), stood and danced to the music, made motions to the band, shrieked between songs; in back and to the sides some other people were dancing too, and applauding, maybe twenty-five or so of them. And the rest of the crowd, maybe a couple hundred, sat, immobile, not applauding, not leaving, watching the band and the three of us as if we were space creatures. In my memory, it's all brightly lit, everything's in clear view, the three of us are in clear view. This memory is wrong: It was a show, it was night, it was dark, only the stage was lit. But I felt exposed, which was kind of thrilling. Close to the stage, maybe we were wavering between dark and light as we danced. My shrieking might have been forced – hey, I'd never had the chance to be a teenybopper, had only learned recently to respect teenyboppers, and now at age nineteen I was shrieking. Steve said later that it was obvious that Johansen was playing to the three of us. As the show ended one of the dancers from the side came up and asked me to try out for his band. I explained that I was from out of state. Then Maureen said, "Hi, Mac." It turned out that he was a friend of hers at Brown. He was a tall black guy, halfway between a dressed-up '60s freak and a glitter guy; I think he had Lou Reed shades and Hendrix scarves or at least an air of Hendrix-like flamboyance, but maybe some leather too.

There was tension and excitement in all this: the uncomprehending crowd, the audacity of us standing next to the band. That was a year when a few crucial critics (Christgau, Paul Nelson, Dave Marsh) liked the Dolls, but most others and the music press in general had a general attitude of contempt. "All flash and no music" was what they said. I remember constantly reading putdowns. One jerk I think it was in Rolling Stone joked that the Dolls were really dental students who only dressed that way for the money. This was part of the atmosphere too, part of the event for me, standing up and dancing, withstanding the contempt.

New York Dolls "Chatterbox" (live)

The next Dolls concert was that one in the basement of the Viking Hotel. It was me, Maureen, and Mac. This time those who didn't like the music left right away, leaving forty or so of us who wanted to be there, and it was one of the best concerts of my life. In my memory it looks warm and hazy and dark. As for how the crowd looked and acted, though, I can't remember. Dancing, cheering, being happy. At one point all of a sudden a crazy wild-eyed guy started hitting Mac, and Mac pushed back at him. The band handled this well; the roadies lifted the guy right onto the stage and let him off on the other side, where he was away from Mac. Johnny made a funny comment about practicing his Kung Fu fighting, and the situation was defused. When the tussle had started some people had jumped between Mac and the crazy guy to separate them, and I'd grabbed Mac as if to hold him back; Mac got angry at me, saying that he wasn't trying to fight, he'd just needed his hands free to fend the guy off. I mollified Mac by saying that I wasn't trying to restrain him, I was trying to make the crazy guy feel safe, like the threat was over. This was a quick thing for me to say, but I was probably lying. I didn't know Mac, really, and maybe he was a crazy guy too.

As an intro to "Vietnamese Baby," David said, "This song's about a soldier who falls in love with a whore in Vietnam and then he comes home to his mom."

The band seemed happy. It was a different Johnny Thunders from the one we'd see later with the Heartbreakers; he wasn't sulking, wasn't yelling at the sound man. At the end of the show he gave his arm to the girl in black.

Next show, Orpheum or Orpheus Theatre in Boston. I was in the balcony, and maybe this is why I felt more distant. One guy sitting near me – regular-type guy, again, longhaired hard-rock type – pointed at Arthur Kane, the bass player, and said to me, "I think he's a faggot." This guy was not using the word "faggot" with much precision, since Kane – whatever his sexual tastes – was not at all femme. He had the look of a hulking stevedore, and in drag he was a knock-you-down broad. I don't think the guy was saying "faggot" with any particular hostility, either, but he must have had a sense of the band being foreign to his regular-guyness. I read all this into him, anyway, in a glance; I gave him a shrug rather than an answer.

Before the show we'd stopped off at some friends of Mac's, who were also going. Roxy Music was on the record player. Roxy sounded ridiculous and wooden and put-on – all due to Ferry's voice. This was the first time I'd heard them, obviously, and I hadn't yet connected to the guitar playing. Mac's friends – a couple – were dressed in really stylized stylishness, in deliberately falsified high fashion. Unfortunately, I can't remember more than that. The woman might have had her hair up, and earrings, and maybe an intentionally obvious blonde dye job.

Mac had grown up in Manhattan. There'd never been a rock star from Manhattan, he said. They were all from the Outer Boroughs or out of town. All the Dolls were from the Outer Boroughs. Mac was going to be the first star from Manhattan, he told us.

We got his New York phone number, his parents' number. This was probably when we were in town for Iggy and the Stooges' New Year's Eve show. I never had reason to call him, but I remembered the number for several years after because it spelled out L-U-M-P-Y or W-A-R-P-I-N-K or something. Or maybe we were supposed to dial W-A-R-P-I-N-K and ask for Lumpy, like he had to use Lumpy as his nickname within his family because perhaps his Dad's name was Mac, too.²

New York Dolls "Pills" (live)³

The next show was at the old Academy of Music on 14th Street in Manhattan, what later dressed itself up and became the Palladium. I was in the balcony again. Musically, this was the Dolls' bluesiest show, which I remember their pulling off well, Johnny doing a good job on "Killing Floor" or whatever old chestnut they decided to stretch out on. I remember nothing of the crowd, however.

And then the last of the shows I saw (I think I've recounted them all) was in New York at the Bottom Line, on the eve of their second album. Suzi Quatro opened and wore black leather pants like on her album cover and like the black leather pants Joan Jett later wore on her album cover. These made her look cute. There was a bomb threat (the Dolls attracted that), so after our being cleared out and reentering, the Dolls only had time for five songs. They rocked really hard, but like at every other gig I've seen at that well-regarded industry showcase (the one exception being Television in 1978, with Tom Verlaine's guitar so mesmerizing that I simply forgot the music-biz/supper-club atmosphere), I felt chaperoned and out-of-place and as if the band were behind glass. Again, no memory of the audience except for the college-type shallow hanger-on idiot at my table whom I mentioned back in "Lester Bangs Marked for Death" who thought I'd delivered an enormous insight when I told him that Iggy was influenced by Dylan and who knew someone who'd heard Iggy after the Stooges' New Year's Eve gig supposedly asking "Where can I get thirty pounds of dope, does anyone know where I can get thirty pounds of dope?" and who said confidently, like someone happy to be in the know, that Iggy would be dead within the year.⁴

Meta paragraph for Substack: These Dolls shows were all during my year away from college, my attempt to drop out. I assumed I was never going back. If I'd been the sort to go to bars and talk to strangers I probably never would have gone back – I'd eventually have found my way to Max's Kansas City and so forth (I eventually did discover such scenes when I returned to NYC after college). But then, if I'd been that sort, I'd have better glommed onto what was interesting in my classmates, roommates, etc. and maybe not dropped out in the first place. Anyway, to continue on from the meta paragraphs in Dolls 1 & 2, I'm going back to a convo freshman year that didn't take place: I'd seen a strange movie in high school, if.... – the phrase "strange movie" begs to have the word "little" inserted in it, "strange little movie," except this movie had a big feel to it, an open air filled with side ways and oddities. I'd loved it in high school: it pushed its oddness into recalcitrance and violence (that phrase doesn't tell you much but I want to avoid spoilers) – I saw it again freshman year and wasn't as grabbed by it, and maybe that meant I saw it better, it maybe aiming to puzzle more than to grab. Anyway, I recommended it to my roommate Kerry, he saw it, ended up way more on the puzzled and disliking it side than the grabbed – "what was that foetus?" – and for whatever reason (I had homework, he had homework, or more likely I was too scared to have a conversation full of disagreement – I didn't try to pull out of Kerry more of what he had seen, pull out of myself more of what *I* had seen). I remembered this years later with a pang – my friend Mark Sinker told me he was writing a book about if.... – a great book,⁵ it turned out, questioning the movie, poking and pushing it into various surrounding spaces that Mark devised for it – and I so wished that Kerry and I had had that conversation, that I'd been able to tell Mark what Kerry had noticed, where Kerry had fallen off from the movie, etc. Mark would have known how to use that information... The point is that if you, today, went to see if.... on my recommendation and left puzzled or intrigued or blah'd out by it, you and I might have a conversation, but like as not we wouldn't 'cos I'd need to get back to some meta paragraph I was writing, or I'd need several hours of dead air or to write that email about the Ari Falcão playlist, or... And having or not having an if.... convo is no big deal but I didn't really start to do better with that normal talk/nontalk till I got back to NYC in 1977. --I’ve a couple of additional thoughts, as an attentive reader of my original piece: (1) "watching the band and the three of us as if we were space creatures"; so maybe I was actually more accepting of David Bowie's imagery than I said I was; and (2) I notice a serious contradiction. The piece says that the time was basically limbo, but it also says that the New York Dolls changed my life. So, which is it? (somehow both?): Was I in limbo or having my life changed?

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/393829.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

1. In Why Music Sucks #10 (Dec. 1996), I had put The Kingston Trio's "Santy Anno" in the Blindfold Test. Phil Dellio wrote, "It's a song that may have been historically significant, thanks to the line 'back in the days of the good old time.' I imagine that when people heard that, they banded together and passed a resolution that 'back in the good old days' sounded a lot better." [FK 2025]

2. Wasn't "W-A-R-P-I-N-K." I made that up so no one would call the real number. [FK 2025]

3. Of today's vids, "Personality Crisis" is from Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, filmed at Long Beach Auditorium (Long Beach, California) on July 24, 1974 (according to the Internet), broadcast in November. Fwiw, that doesn't seem to be the Dolls' Jerry Nolan on drums at that gig, but I don't know who was substituting for him, and the Internet isn't giving me quick answers (as to whether it's him or not, much less who it is if it isn't Jerry).

Of the other three I've embedded, "Pills" and "Chatterbox" clearly seem to be the same gig (David in the same dress) and YouTube captions give the same venue (Club 82) but not the same date (1973 for "Chatterbox" and April 17, 1974, for "Pills," the second date seeming more authoritative for being exact, and an archival Website has them playing there on that date). No idea where "Human Being"/"Jet Boy" were recorded (they may or may not each be one performance (respectively), but the footage for each is from a bunch of different shows; so the vid is what latter-day YouTubers who pull that trick with K-pop call a "live mix"). [FK 2025]

4. "I was at a Dolls' show in 1974. This guy in the audience told me he'd seen Iggy after the Stooges' New Year's Eve show. 'Iggy was sitting on the floor asking if anyone knew where he could get thirty pounds of marijuana,' the guy claimed, then added, 'Iggy'll be dead by the end of this year.' The guy didn't sound sad. He said this to me like he was relating some interesting fact about Iggy, an interesting characteristic, e.g., the name of Iggy's girlfriend, the brand of clothes Iggy wears, Iggy's death, Iggy's hairstyle, Iggy's collaboration with Bowie." Why Mucus Slacks (WMS #4), 1988. [For several issues I'd gotten tired of the name Why Music Sucks so I began to vary it while keeping the same initials, Why Music Socks, Why Mucus Slacks, Why Mildred Skis. WMS #4 was the issue that gave its name to my Substack.] --FK 2025

5. Mark Sinker, IF...., BFI Film Classics, British Film Institute, 2004. [FK 2025]