‘Now John Lennon . . . Y’know, that song “Gimme The Truth”?’ The Dolls’ David Johansen’s cracked Brooklyn drawl appears from the side of his mouth while a cigarette is coyly dangled directly to the right, so as to give the impression that he’s seen too many Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall movies and can never quite decide which one he wants to steal his poses from. ‘I just want to throw the words to that right in his face to show him what an asshole hypocrite he really is! [Shouts] I’m a yellow-bellied-son-of-Tricky-Dicky . . . Oh my God! Do you know someone showed him a film of us performing, on a video machine, when he was in LA, and do you know what he called us? Faggots! He called us a bunch of fuckin’ faggots.’
‘Huh! So would I if I was that pussy-whipped!’ cracks Johnny Thunders, perfectly on cue with a goofy grin sprawling across his amiably deranged features. He’s thatched with a coiffure that might resemble Ronnie of the Ronettes, were a tree to have fallen on her.
‘Pussy-whipped!’ hiccups Johansen, seizing up with the giggles. ‘Oh Johnny, how fabulous.’
Five minutes off the plane in Paris, walking up towards the airport entrance, and Johnny Thunders throws up. Bl-a-a-a-a-g-g-h-h! God knows how many photographers are there: Paris Match, Stern magazine, all the European rock press and the nationals. The record company folks have arranged a special welcome. Bl-a-a-a-a-g-g-h-h! The other members of the band start taking odds as to whether he might actually fall into his vomit. David Johansen, who’s always one to inject a little humour into any given situation, pulls out his best German officer impersonation: ‘Vee did not co-operate viv de Naz-ees.’ David finds this very funny. The massed media minions look just a little bit more nervous. Bl-a-a-a-a-g-g-h-h!
The New York Dolls the toast of Paree? Oh honey! I remember these buckaroos when they were still playing dingy Manhattan clubs, sprawled out on minute stages and insulting their downtrodden zombie audience between numbers by way of Johansen’s charmingly condescending raps: ‘We just luhv playing these places because we just think you kids are really [sneer] where it’s at. Ha, ha!’ Or posing down Max’s Kansas City every night where Thunders would invariably be seen staggering around with the sexiest-looking babe in the joint and Johansen would be socializing with the right people as usual.
Meanwhile, Iggy Pop and his cronies are just lying fallow amid the accumulated debris of their past notoriety and gross untogetherness, with only true devotees still wagering that the Stooges can pull off their grand coup and destroy us like we’d all hoped they would from the beginning. Almost all the New York deca-rock bands are struggling away, hoping in vain for a record contract to pull them out of the tedious New York club circuit. The Modern Lovers, one of the few true originals of the whole schism, are reportedly splitting and re-forming with alarming regularity around the amazing Jonathan Richman, their vocalist (he’s the one who looks like Dustin Hoffman’s afterbirth), true romance idealist and writer of such nuggets as ‘I’m Straight’ and, more recently, ‘Picasso Ain’t No Ass-hole’. An album on Warner Bros., produced by Kim Fowley and John Cale, remains unreleased.
Of course, there’s the Blue Oyster Cult, who are more mainstream heavy metal really; and Wayne County, who’s signed with Mainman. ‘Yeah, he’s blown it now,’ mutters Johnny Thunders cryptically, while Johansen recounts some extremely amusing tales of County’s pre-transvestite days in the South, where he used to have buck-shot fired at his buttocks whenever he paraded around the streets in his Beatle suit jacket and Cuban heels, but . . . While others still search in the wilderness, the Dolls have strutted out to infinitely greener pastures, capturing the American spotlight more than any other pack of glowing up-and-comers in 1973. Notoriety was already guaranteed via advance flak, so is it any wonder that Johansen was busted onstage in Memphis, or that the Dolls were banned from two – two, mind you – hotels in LA. Or . . . the list continues.
Europe is a horse of a very different colour. The Dolls swooned into London, gave a chaotic but entertaining press conference (where, in between questions about their supposed ambiguities and debts to the Velvet Underground, Johansen got into a number of eminently quotable statements like, We attract only degenerates to our concerts,’ and ‘We want to be known as the tackiest boys in New York.’ When asked for definition of ‘tack’ by one reporter, he free-associated, ‘Oh . . . I think it’s an arch-attitude towards a particular thing . . . It’s like . . . it’s just like that terrible jacket you’re wearing. That’s tack, if I ever saw it’ And he was right) and played a predictably controversial pair of gigs at trendy old Biba’s restaurant – which failed to approximate the feeling one can get from any real Dolls performance when they are working within a suitably sleazy environment. ‘Y’know, we were caught changing price-tags on the clothes at Biba. They were gonna get heavy, so Marty just came along and said, “I don’t wanna hear anymore about this incident.” They dropped it.’
Marty is Marty Thau, and Marty Thau is still the New York Dolls’ acting manager and father-figure. (Even though the group are really managed by two early yuppie Jewish lawyer-types called Leber and Krebs.) The Dolls are His Boys. Period. And nobody messes around with His Boys. No half-assed local record company is going to cop out on promotion with the New York Dolls. No petty faction of this industry is going to put the brakes on the New York Dolls’ progress to the top, because the New York Dolls are the most important thing to hit rock music since they invented electricity, and if you don’t think so, then go suck a brick, buster! Marty’s got that kind of attitude. He’s also got unique punk management credentials: a partner in Cameo-Parkway records, hall of fame for Terry Knight and the Pack and Question Mark and the Mysterians. The Lemon Pipers too. He even had Van Morrison signed up during his Astral Weeks/Moondance phase. But what about Question Mark, Marty? ‘Yeah, his real name was Rudy Martinez. Didn’t you know that? And his mother, this fat Mexican woman, owned Go-Go Records. The reason he wore those shades all the time is because he was crosseyed.’
‘Yeah,’ butts in David Johansen, ‘just like Ian Hunter, who has these terrible “piggy” eyes.’ Johansen’s rap on his touring experience with Mott is typically bitchy and libellous:
‘They used us on that tour. I mean, the times when we were getting booed onstage, I’d say, “Listen, if you think we’re bad, just wait’ll you see Ian Hunter” [howls of laughter]. It was hysterical! And Hunter would bring out – what’s his name – (guitarist Ariel Bender) into the audience when we were onstage and tell him to study how Johnny was moving. And all the times, after gigs we’d go up to their room, steal their drink, fuck their groupies and leave ’em wondering what happened [more laughter].
‘I mean, all the Frenchies are so serious about these bands. They get so offended when I put down all their fave groups that I just go ahead and do it! Like someone asks me what I think of the Stooges and I say, “Yeah, well, they’ve done a coupla good things, y’know, but. . .” and when they ask me what I think of the Blue Oyster Cult, I say, “Oh, you mean the Blue Oyster ‘Cunt’ don’t you?”’
The band have grouped around the bar of the Ambassador Hotel in readiness for their afternoon gig at the Olympia and are behaving in their usually invigoratingly boisterous manner. Sylvain Sylvain, ex-native of Paris, who also spent some time at Finch’s pub down in good old Ladbroke Grove dealing dope, is going wild with a cap-gun. Drummer Jerry Nolan acts sullen and seems none too bright. Bassist Arthur Kane, a completely freakish character, dressed in a ballerina’s pompom and looking to all intents and purposes like he’d just been run-over by a truck-load of valium, takes me aside for a moment.
‘Hey. You know Stacia?’ (Hawkwind’s well-proportioned dancer). ‘She’s a nice girl, I met her in New York. She’s kinda crazy. I like crazy girls but the last crazy girl I was with tied me up while I was asleep and tried to cut my thumb off/ He stops the dialogue – performed in a slow drizzle of a monotone – for a second to show off a slashed-up thumb. ‘I’m worried she might come back and try to kill me,’ he adds as an after-thought. Jeez, another death in the band and the Dolls could trade themselves off as the Allman Bros, of sleaze rock.
And then again, Johnny Thunders looks none too well. Also quintessential punk-kid stance with impeccable rocker credentials, his dialogue is hardly the kind to set a typewriter on fire while it’s being transcripted into print but still pin-points his nononsense attitude. And those credentials? Eddie Cochran, early Who and the MC5 are Mr Thunders’s cup of meat – while he’s also living with fifteen-year-old legend, Sable Starr, in New York. His thoughts on his beloved are typically dynamic: ‘We just . . . uh . . . livin’ together, y’know . . . We ain’t married, or nuttin’. . . She got out of the whole groupie scene. Changed a lot. When I first met her, she was really . . . I dunno . . . weird chick but kinda nice. She’s crazy but. . . uh . . . she’s cool. . . y’know?’
Thanks, John. So what about the new songs?
‘Well, there’s “Mystery Girl” and, uh, one that I wrote called “Jailbreak Opera”. It’s short, y’know – no longer than five minutes. I just like to grab everything I can, throw it all in and get out, y’know. . .’
‘Also there’s “Puss ‘n’ Boots”, which is quite sensational,’ interjects David. ‘It’s about shoe fetishism, or as Arthur observed, it’s about “the woofers in relationship with the woofee”. And then we have this ballad which isn’t quite finalized yet, but it’s the most beautiful song since the Drifters’ “On Broadway”. It’s also the title of the next album.’
The conversation turns to the Olympia gig. ‘I can’t wait. I mean, when I think of all the great artists who have performed there . . .’
Like James Brown?
‘No, like Edith Piaf.’
So, when you’re ready to label Johansen as nothing more than some preening, precocious runt, he pulls out a pure New Yorker rap like:
‘I’ve checked out all this “Paris-is-the-city-of-romance” thing. It’s just because all the chicks have to get fucked at least five times a day or else they go crazy. And that’s why the guys are such pricks. Hey, did you know I used to be a child porn-movie star? Uh-huh – well, let me tell you I was the biggest draw on 42nd Street. What films did I make? Oh, Studs on Main Street, Bike Boy Goes Ape – I was only sixteen when those were made and I was very naive. I was manipulated, so to speak. I wouldn’t like those things to get out now. They might do my image great harm. My image? Well, I think I look more like Peter Noone or David Cassidy than Mick Jagger. I think Noone is very together as an artist and a person. It was wonderful meeting him, actually. And David Cassidy – who I also think is a great performer.
‘Oh, I think the New York Dolls are very, very relevant. I see rock’n’roll as like a changing of the guard and this time around, we’re it. All I know is that we have all these beautiful, magnificent songs which I believe to be all classics. I mean, our first album is marvellous even if Todd Rundgren . . . uh . . . I don’t even want to put him down, because if I did, it might detract from the sales potential and I want everybody to hear that record because there are some wonderful songs.’
(Johnny Thunders is more blunt in his appraisal of Rundgren’s efforts for the Dolls: ‘He fucked up the mix really bad. Every time we go on the radio to do interviews we always dedicate “Your Mama Don’t Dance and Your Daddy Don’t Rock’n’Roll” – know that song? – to Todd.)
‘No, I don’t see myself as a rock’n’roll star. When I think of that term, I think of people like Jeff Beck or Stevie Winwood – that whole English invasion. Keith Richards? Oh c’mon now, Keith’s past it. He’s had his day! And Bob Dylan – I was around on the scene in ’66 – I knew what was going on and it was laughable. I see myself as an artist who is now ready to entertain the people who were always a focal point of the scene – the people I acted for or danced for when I was a kid. It was a process of self-assertion, of saying I can do this and I want to perform it for you. That’s how the Dolls started for me. Though I’m very, very different from, say, Johnny, who’s pure rocker and has that total awareness.’
The Dolls troop on stage at the Paris Olympia at 3.30 p.m., suitably bedraggled. Johansen, decked out in bastardized evening dress with various badges and emblems strategically placed on his costume (‘for political purposes, I mean the leftists will get off on my Mao button and . . .’), commandeers proceedings, but the band are immediately dogged by a PA failure which totals the electricity for over five minutes. Once underway the sound is distorted and falls like lead inside the hall, pinpointing the already cacophonous sound to a slightly less-than-comfortable degree. Then there are other problems. Johnny Thunders, for one, looks about as well as his guitar sounds in tune. He staggers around the stage in obvious discomfort, attempting to motivate himself and the band simultaneously and succeeding only in beating his instrument into an ever-more horrendous state of tunelessness. The sound reaches its nadir on ‘Vietnamese Baby’, when the guitar interplay is so drastically off-balanced that it becomes quite grotesque to listen to. On the next number Thunder stops half-way through, puts down his guitar and moves behind the amplifiers to throw up for five minutes, ‘Y’know in some ways Johnny is just a child,’ Marty Thau will state later, with a dewy-eyed paternal concern.
B-l-l-a-a-a-a-g-g-h-h!!
After the gig Steve Leber, the real manager, approaches Johansen. ‘Hey, David, y’know we almost blew it there, with Johnny. He was so out of tune on “Vietnamese Baby” it was painful’ ‘Oh I thought it was great,’ David rebounds. ‘Who cares about the music when one has that sense of [an obligatory hand gesture] drama. I mean, really!’
Outside the dressing-room hordes of Parisian poseurs are piled up, desperately trying to osmose a kind of gauloise-and-gold-earring cool. Only Syl and Johnny Thunders are holed up in the bar frisking back the drinks, while David socializes with all and sundry, telling one journalist, ‘Listen, you want a scoop? Whaddya mean, it’s not a scoop ’cos I’ve been talking to someone else? I got something different to tell all you boys.’
The evening sets in and everyone goes to a restaurant down along the main drag. Thunder and Syl leave first with a couple of girls, intent on smoking dope and getting wrecked just like they did the night before – in fact ever since they were the kids who were always being kicked out of Nobody’s. David Johansen has his mind set on other things, though. A young pretty girl is exhorting him to come back with her. ‘Oh, David, I luhv you, Dah-vid.’ Johansen smiles cutely in a non-committal way. I mean, the night is still young and there are other things to consider: like the party where actor Pierre Clementi is supposed to be appearing. And Nico, she of the Velvet Underground legend days, now a recluse in Paris, having had to leave New York ‘très vite’ after gouging a broken bottle into the face of a girlfriend of the city’s Black Panther leader down at Max’s one night.
‘Oh, now, Nico has a really great sense of humour,’ Johansen states absent-mindedly in the car leaving the restaurant. He, too, is starting to look tired. The sound check, the gig, the social activity, no sleep the night before – it all builds up. Arthur Kane is already sprawled out unconscious with his minuscule Parisienne girl friend. Hey David, what was the title of that song? Y’know, the new one which is the greatest ballad since ‘On Broadway’? ‘“Too Much, Too Soon” – It’s autobiographical, y’know,’ he grins. Five minutes later he too has flaked out from exhaustion.
They were the cockiest bunch I ever encountered but God knows the New York Dolls were anything but the luckiest. They managed a second album but somehow conspired to get the thing produced by a full-blown alcoholic called ‘Shadow’ Morton whose main claim to fame had been his extraordinarily kitsch work for a sixties all-girl group, the Shangri-Las. Meanwhile, the lethal combination of reckless arrogance and even more reckless drug-taking had wiped them out as a feasible live act for the stadiums and arenas. By the end of 1974 their management, Leber-Krebs, shunted them aside in favour of a more resilient Boston-based Stones-clone act called Aerosmith who’d taken several telling cues from the Dolls’ own image. This is where Malcolm McLaren stepped in to try and save them. He had the idea of dressing them up in red patent leather and making them pretend to be Marxists. They wrote a bunch of new songs too but the McLaren concept basically got them laughed out of every club they played in by the old New York cognoscenti who ordained them so ‘hip’ to begin with.
They broke up in early 1975 during a residency at a crummy little Miami club McLaren had booked them into. Thunders became increasingly irritated about being away from his New York heroin connections and he’d had enough of McLaren’s ideas and singer David Johansen’s let’s get professional’ bullshit. He told them both exactly what he thought of them and then flew back to New York, leaving several contracted gigs still to be played.
After that. . . well, Johansen and Sylvain kept the name going for a while but couldn’t get a record deal until the singer reverted to his own name. Johansen’s début solo album was a fine piece of work which added to the Dolls’ rather limited legacy but it didn’t really sell, and the ones that followed were consistently less impressive. Then, for the eighties he metamorphosized into Buster Poindexter, a sort of cross between Cab Calloway and Fatty Arbuckle who enjoyed much critical kudos but – once again – unsatisfactory record sales. Even so, he managed to stay busy working in films and has fared decidedly better in his career choices than any of his cohorts. His old collaborator Sylvain Sylvain lost most of his hair, is apparently poverty-stricken and keeps struggling to get new bands together in Los Angeles. The hapless Arthur Kane – after numerous years of fighting chronic alcoholism and incipient bad luck – was recently mugged and beaten to a condition where approximately half his brain has now shut down on him.
Nolan and Thunders meanwhile went on to form the Heart-breakers in 1975 with Richard Hell, but conflicting drug schedules and rampant egomania from all quarters quickly put paid to that alliance before it’d had time to blossom. Then the pair debarked to London just as ‘punk-rock’ was taking off and actually did quite well for themselves until their heroin problems turned everything to shit again.
In view of our mutual recreational activities, it’s hardly surprising that Thunders and I became fast friends for a while. He was always a lively guy to be around and he always had this genuinely classy way of carrying himself like he saw himself as the Prince of the Streets or something equally grand. He was a fearless little motherfucker and he was never boring, but the guy was also self-centred and spoilt rotten and he made himself a loser by buying into the myth that if you’re a rock’n’roll star you’re automatically absolved of having to confront the consequences of your actions.
Johnny was and remains at the very least a remarkable source for mind-boggling tall tales and it’s impossible for me not to think about him now without breaking into some sort of smile. But, oh, what a lost soul! He never even questioned the impossible, heedless lifestyle he’d rail-roaded himself into. I remember the last time I really spoke to him – it was sometime in 1986 – and he was heavy-lidded as usual and full of that whiny-voiced New York junkie attitude of his turned all the way up to 11. He started bragging to me about how in a Pennsylvania hotel some guy from ‘Narcos Anonymous’ had lately approached him and invited him to an NA meeting taking place just down the hall. Johnny told that guy just what he could do with his meeting. But the young man persisted, even offering him a book about challenging drug dependency and signed it ‘To Johnny – a hero of mine. Maybe this book can save your life.’ When Thunders read that dedication, he threw the book straight back into the poor guy’s face. I mean, didn’t this sap – this fuckin’ walking waste of sperm and egg – realize that he – the great Johnny Thunders – wanted to stay exactly the way he was supposed to stay, living the life of an unregenerate, double-dealing junkie under-achiever. So what if he’d taken up permanent residency in hell! He liked it down there.
The last time I saw him though – Jesus Christ, I could hardly stand to look at John. You know in a bull-fight how when the decisive dagger has been plunged into the neck of the bull and basically it’s all over for the poor creature and it goes limp and cross-eyed before sinking slowly into the saw-dust Well, that’s how Thunders looked on the night of New Year’s Eve just as 1991 was being ushered in: limp and cross-eyed from all the torments he’d been visiting upon himself in the pursuit of maintaining his righteous rock’n’roll identity. A few weeks later he died in New Orleans in a lonely hotel room with only some bad cocaine, some prescription Methadone and two dope-dealing low-lifers whose names he probably didn’t even know for company. Que sera sera.
But right now I’m not thinking about John’s demise or about poor old Jerry, who died only a year after his old partner-in-crime from ailments directly connected to his drug problems. I’m trying to cast my mind back to a time when everything has a naive little sparkle about it – 1973. And suddenly I’m twenty-one again and terribly over-dressed but then so is everyone else who’s come to be squeezed into this tiny little Manhattan club called Kenny Castaways to see the New York Dolls. ‘This is a song for the twenty-first century when women will have taken over all the power and all the men will have to seek refuge for themselves in massage parlours . . .’ dead-pans David Johansen in his flapper chic, perched in front of the microphone like a little girl trying to look coquettish in her mother’s high-heels. To his immediate left Johnny Thunders is twisting up his goofy Italian face into the perfect cut-throat sneer, throwing his remarkable explosion of ink-black hair back and forth and playing the only guitar riff he knows over and over again, while to his left Sylvain Sylvain is strumming rudimentary chords on a big, slightly out-of-tune Gretsch guitar while making these little tottering steps back and forth and shaking his Raggedy Ann cork-screw curls unceasingly. Just behind these three the unfortunate Arthur Kane – dressed in a little tutu and little else – is playing crappy one-note bass and looking like the world’s foremost ongoing accident statistic while Jerry Nolan with his shag-cut and that look on his face that always screamed, ‘Duh!’, is holding the music together with his power-house drumming. The music is raw and alive, played with reckless abandon until it becomes a joyous celebration of the whole ‘be young, be foolish, be happy’ school of thought. Believe me, the records don’t even begin to capture the special magic of the Dolls on a good night playing in a pissy little club to their élite little crowd of mascara-daubed misfits and vagrant vamps. Misty glitzy memories of the way we were. So cute. So vital. So star-crossed.