I, Doll: Life and Death with the New York Dolls

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I, Doll

I, Doll eath D d n a e f i L w i t h t h e l ls Do New York arthur “killer” k

foreword and ep

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ilogue by barbara

An A Cappella Book

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kane, Arthur, 1949–2004. I, doll : life and death with the New York Dolls / Arthur Killer Kane ; foreword and epilogue by Barbara Kane. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55652-941-2 (hardcover) 1. Kane, Arthur, 1949-2004. 2. New York Dolls (Musical group) 3. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title. ML421.N52K36 2006 782.42166092—dc22 [B] 2009002805

Interior design: Sarah Olson © 2009 by Arthur Kane Foreword and Epilogue © 2009 by Barbara Kane All rights reserved Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated 814 North Franklin Street Chicago, Illinois 60610 ISBN 978-1-55652-941-2 Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Publisher’s Note · vii Foreword by Barbara Kane · ix acknowledgments · xi

1 13 · Rusty Beanie’s Bicycle Shop 3 27 · The Dana Beal Yippie Benefit 5 41 · Costume Factory Flap 7 61 · Max’s First Happy Hour 9 71 · Fiasco Fourteen 11 85 · Suicide in the Blue Room 13 93 · Martians in Manhattan? 15 107 · Hail Britannia! 17

1 · Sunday in the Park

2

Nobody’s from Nowhere · 9

4

Hotel Ozone · 21

6

Trouser Splitting with Diplomacy · 33

8

Chaos on Chrystie · 53

10 Death Contract · 67 12 New York Doll Museum · 77 14 Man’s Country · 89 16 Dancin’ with Mr. D. · 99 18 Escape from New York · 115

19 127 · Speakeasy While Smashed 21 139 · Liverpool or Bust! 23 149 · Let It Rock! 25 159 · Floating in Wembley Pool 27 173 · Who’s Guy Fawkes Bash 29 187 · Some Gave All 31 121 · Escape from Escape Studios

20 Escape to London · 123 22 To Hull and Back · 135 24 Good Morning, Leeds · 145 26 Coals to Newcastle · 153 28 Lord Montagu’s Party · 167 30 His Majesty’s Request · 181

Epilogue by Barbara Kane · 193 Editor’s Notes · 229 Index · 233

Publisher’s Note What follows represents Arthur Kane’s personal

view of his history. What he says about his former bandmates and managers should not always be taken as literal truth. Rightly or wrongly, Arthur blamed his misfortunes largely on David Johansen, Marty Thau, Steve Leber, and David Krebs; nothing in this book should cause readers to infer that any of them actually engaged in illegal, wrongful, or immoral conduct. Arthur also made some errors of fact due to faulty recollection; corrections to these, along with other explanatory comments, will be found in the Editor’s Notes at the end of this volume.

vii

When Arthur “Killer” Kane (February 3, 1949–July 13, 2004) died suddenly at age fifty-five, he left behind not only the New York Dolls’ timeless music and their many thousands of fans and friends, but also a memoir covering sixteen months of his life—his early days with the Dolls—that he called I, Doll. He also left me, Barbara Kane, his one wife and his constant lover of thirty years. I learned firsthand about the chaos, sex, sleaze, sordidness, spectacle, and brain-battering fun of the legendary seventies rock group. In Arthur’s time on this planet, he went from rock star to rock bottom—and I went with him all the way. I now embark on my final collaboration with my late husband: publishing his life’s story. My tribute to the man known as “Arthur Doll” is to help his writings make it to book form. I, Doll is Arthur’s story, in Arthur’s words. As he described it in a “publisher’s letter,” it is “a collection of true stories about America’s once most promising yet most misunderstood rock-and-roll phenomenon, the legendary and outrageous New York Dolls. . . . It is the real story of how five young misfit outcasts from the unfashionable outer boroughs of New York City united to do something about their mutual love of rock and roll and give something exciting back to the people.” To read I, Doll is to revisit a glorious, glamorous era of modern music. Arthur tells of high times, high drama, and low comedy. I hope his stories will give you, the reader, some of the same enjoyment they gave me—and also a better sense of the man I loved.

foreword

ix

Arthur Kane was playing bass for the New York Dolls before there even was a New York Dolls. Along with guitarists Johnny Thunders and Rick Rivets and drummer Billy Murcia, he founded the band in 1971. In ’72 guitarist Sylvain Sylvain replaced Rivets and they added singer David Johansen. Before too long they became famous at Max’s Kansas City, rubbed elbows with Andy Warhol and Lou Reed, recorded two landmark albums, unwittingly invented the thing we now call punk rock, and generally lived up to their slogan “Too Much, Too Soon.” There’s currently a whole new interest in the guys they called “the Lipstick Killers”—and Arthur in particular—because of their spectacular comeback in London at Morrissey’s Meltdown Festival in 2004. Since the Dolls’ reunion concerts at London’s Royal Festival Hall, not only are there new New York Dolls products (CDs, DVDs, books) for the first time in three decades, but more and more of their old stuff is being hauled up from the vaults and released (or rereleased). Then, of course, there’s the highly successful 2005 documentary New York Doll: The Movie. That feature, in which I’m interviewed, gave a pretty good outsider’s account of Arthur’s life. But I, Doll is the insider’s story. Although capable of cruelty and violence when intoxicated, Arthur Kane was usually a loving, beautiful man with real sensitivity. Sylvain has said, “We should have called Arthur ‘Sugar’ Kane instead, because he was so sweet.” This quality really comes through in the movie, as viewers and reviewers have consistently remarked. They—male and female alike—also remark how Arthur’s story “made them cry their eyes out.” It’s only fair to warn you that this book, despite its fun-loving abandon, just might do that too. —Barbara Kane

foreword x

acknowledgments A very special thank you to Simon Kenton,

Robert Cripps, Kirsten Neuhaus, Yuval Taylor, Sirius Trixon, Carrie Abelman, Mick Cripps, Eileen Polk, Freddie Drury, James Pasqual Bettio, Ebet Roberts, Dawn Laureen, Yvonne Duprez, Frank Infante, Robert Arce, Angelyne, Cheetah Chrome, Nick St. Nicholas, Alex Patterson, Georgia the Mechanical Bride, and my brothers Bill and Paul.

xi

1

It was a beautiful balmy sunny afternoon in late August 1971. My friend Rick Rivets1 and I had just spent the earlier part of the day bombing around New York City’s Central Park clocking (keeping mental notes on) everyone’s wares and wears alike as all good New Yorkers did, eyeballing each other for the latest fashions. Lots of people used to make the scene on Sundays in Central Park, providing a chance for Manhattanites to take a walk as well as strut their stuff for the world to behold, a veritable strolling peacock-plumage-display fashion show (for both males and females of the species). This was not your homogenized posh slick indoor videotaped couture-designer fashion-show royal catwalk extravaganza with the paparazzi having a field day taking pictures of famous celebrities in a plastic controlled environment. Oh no! This was live and comin’ to get you in the flesh, in your face, and in the street where all great fashion originates. Central Park had been the scene of many wonderful hippie events during the colorful sixties, including be-ins, love-ins, protest marches, antiwar rallies, political demonstrations, and rock-and-roll concerts. It was always a great place to go to check out all the nutty New York freaks hangin’ out and doing their own things. I fondly recall it as a kind of merry mad parade celebration for all the happy citizens of Mayor Lindsay’s then wonderful Fun City. Every Sunday was a bit like Easter, when one would wear one’s finest and go for a stroll down Fifth Avenue.

Sunday in

the Park

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There was always quite a show going on, if not several all at once, rather like an outdoor ten-ring circus. Stellar appearances by such infamous local glitterati like Roll-a-Rina were simply a must to behold. New York’s very own roller-skating tooth fairy used to skate past shocked and amused people, all the while dispensing real glitter from her glitter wand full of tooth fairy blessings for all who were lucky enough to cross her path. She looked very much like a fifties cocktail waitress on LSD, only in a glittery outfit complete with those fifties Catwoman glitter sunglasses and, of course, her glitter skates. Everyone loved her dearly and many considered her Manhattan Island’s secret treasure. Always a heartwarmingly delightful sight for sore eyes, she could chase yer blues away just by skating along. She was way beyond transcendental, man! Then there was the Cat Lady, with her own kitty train full of pussycat passengers, each sitting atop their own little tricycles that must have been welded together to form a series of cars for them to ride. We all loved her and her rolling trolley of little commuter cat people in transit throughout the park—her passenger pussycats on parade. There was also the much beloved Pegasus, the colorful and entertaining medieval clown minstrel singing songs and telling tales to kids of all ages (shades of Damon Runyon’s stories of oddball Broadway denizens of another era such as the Lemondrop Kid). Sundays in the park mixed the many elements of Manhattan’s most magical moments with a big chunk of age-old street theater. The one-of-a-kind novelty characters who enjoyed being there also included the trendiest of the ultratrendoids—the New York Mods bedecked in the very latest British rock-and-roll fashion gear from an import clothing store on the Upper East Side appropriately named Granny Takes a Trip. If one spent enough money at Granny’s, one could look like an authentic British rock star. What they were really selling was British glamour—authentic custom-made British cobra boots, star boots, checkerboard-square boots, and multicolored shoes—plus men’s two-toned velvet suits. A shopping-spree store for rich rock and rollers. Wow, how wonderful for them, I thought. I was too young to be earning enough money to even consider getting something at Granny’s. The cost of such items may have been way beyond my starving sunday in artist/musician’s fiscal realm, but not beyond my dream the park realm. Being or even looking like a British rock star was

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the criterion of cool at the time, so I was questioning the possibility of creating a new and more stellar identity myself. I had a pair of eagle eyes for finding wonderful things in thrift shops. This had started when I was going to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and studying food science and hotel management. One afternoon I had discovered an entire series of thrift shops all with lots of great twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties exotic apparel. A whole line of them was under the tracks of the now extinct Myrtle Avenue el train. And the prices were actually within my neorealistic or loafers’ union budget (no bread and no dough). Even now I get nostalgic pangs for the time I went on the very last ride of the Myrtle Avenue el with some college friends from Pratt before it was forever dismantled. Well, all of us young New York Mods and Modettes would especially want to be seen at the Seventy-Second Street park entrance near Bethesda Fountain. People wearing colorful and interesting clothes against the drab grays of the cityscape made all the statues and stuff, everything that looked old and dirty, seem to look new and Mod-erne. This was the site of the true outdoor catwalk of street fashion, center stage for the mad Mod fashion parade. Usually some nutty people would be climbing all over the fountain in various states of dress and/or undress. And future rock-and-roll devotees would be traipsing about while posing and “Looking for a Kiss”—searching for someone to love, or for mass acceptance from the crowd of gawking bystanders. Well, after spending a few hours as if on citizens’ patrol watch, Rick and I hopped in our mutually owned hippie bus and headed downtown to the West Village to our favorite pizza place. After parking the bus wherever, we started walking toward our destination, and I noticed this odd couple of characters strangely and colorfully haberdashed in what can only be described as fashions from beyond the pale horizon standing in front of our favorite pizzeria. Well, I remember thinking, at least they know where to get a great slice of pizza. And this is information that every upstanding New Yorker should be required to know. Then I thought, Who knows? Maybe these two just look like they’re from another world but are somehow very together. They were certainly dressed alike. So I said to Rick, “Hey, there’s that outer-space version sunday in of Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. I’d sure love to know what the park

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that’s all about. Where does he get those clothes that no other man would ever have the cojones to wear? I’ve seen him wearing styles and colors that simply can’t be found in any men’s stores that I know about. When I shop, I look everywhere imaginable, high and low, leaving no stone unturned. Men wearing skin-tight pink/purple/chartreuse velvet suits? How could this be? In black-and-white-and-shades-of-gray New York? And how come she’s dressed like a Raggedy Ann puppet with round rouge cheeks and a huge shocking mop of red hair, wearing a totally camp fifties oversized pink polka-dot prom dress? Could these two be the legendary Puppet People of Planet Iarga?” The male had a totally exaggerated comic-book over-the-top rockand-roll rooster-cut shag hairdo. Roll over Cousin Itt, you’ve got some serious new competition in the hair department! His crowning glory was a mass of long jet-black hair, definitely a Keith Richards/Rod Stewart­–inspired coiffure, only his version was much larger—probably beyond what many state and federal laws allowed. How wild looking could you get? The entire look was too much, too soon. This one-of-akind New York City character oozed charisma. And, since this chance to meet him might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I said to Rick, “You know, we’ve seen these two rock-and-roll oddballs everywhere we go. They were there with us checking out the Yardbirds when they played at Action House out on Long Island. We also saw them at the Jeff Beck Group (with Rod Stewart) concert at the Fillmore East. And we’ve seen them eating snowballs (chocolate ice cream desserts) at Nobody’s Café. I’m gonna go say hi and introduce myself and see what happens. Curiosity has gotten the best of me!” Then Rick said to me, “Hey, I heard he’s a bass player!” I started thinking, Hmmm . . . if I’m gonna say hello, I’d better tell him that I’m a guitarist so we can at least have an excuse to jam. My only criteria was that he was indeed a real musician and not just a flaky posing nonplayer dressed in fabulous threads. I too was an aspiring bass player, but two bass players were too many, and I had only seconds to get my pitch together. When we got a little closer, I brazenly marched up ahead and said, “Hey, I hear you play bass! Well, I play guitar! Wanna jam sunday in sometime?” That was as many words as I could muster for the occasion. the park

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Much to my surprise, he politely said, “Yeah, OK . . . sure!” And then, “I guess we should exchange phone numbers so we can get in touch, huh?” I said, “Yeah, great!” And that’s just how simple that intro was for us. Contact with alien life forms now confirmed as new reality. Well, we were soon chatting on the phone about places we knew where we could rehearse. Happily, my new friend, John, said that he also had a friend (Billy Murcia) who would love to play drums with us. Unbelievably, that little tiny bit of initiative on my part got the proverbial ball rolling toward our mutual rock-and-roll dream fulfillment. Our collective future careers appeared to be destined to begin with team spirit. It all felt very natural, organic, and slightly preordained. As if we were actors going to the first day of rehearsal for a play, we were coming together to flesh out our rock-and-roll dreams by pooling our collective talents. I was thrilled at the coming together of our new young heroic music friends and their refreshingly swashbuckling personal style. This core of characters (Johnny, Rick, Billy, and I) made up the nucleus of the future New York Dolls and the players on the Actress album. From day one, we were totally committed to our democratic solidarity and were heading for our prime destination—Superstardom or Bust! Our objective was most lucid—to co-create our futures by becoming the world’s most outrageous rock-and-roll band of all time. We had booked some time in a rehearsal studio in New York’s Flower District in the West Thirties. It was a lazy golden fall afternoon in Manhattan when Rick and I arrived and parked somewhere. We found that the studio was on the ground floor and had street access. As I was about to go in, I heard someone playing a guitar riff that I myself didn’t know how to play. It was raunchy, nasty, rough, raw, and untamed. I thought it was truly inspired—indeed, just what the doctor ordered. But I couldn’t help thinking, Hey, I’m supposed to be playing guitar today! So what’s the story? I decided to wait outside the door for just a few more moments—to just listen. Well, to my amazement, wielding this oddly different-sounding garage-barrage of electric guitar sounds was my new music buddy Johnny. A little yellow bright-idea lightbulb started flashing in my head that seemed to signify that my next move was about to change everything. So I turned to him and said, “Hey, sunday in mind if I play that funky old Fender bass? Well, plug me the park

5

in! I know exactly what to play to go with what you’re now playing on guitar. Let’s hear what it sounds like.” And it sounded great to us. We had hit the nail on the head. And so, Dolls and Dollettes, that’s how the sound of the New York Dolls came together—just by trading instruments. My adventurous new pal Johnny had just earned his promotion to lead guitarist. He had a “singing sword” signature guitar sound that was purely his own invention. But evidently no one else he had played with would give him a chance to show people what he could do with a guitar—only me. His sound was rich and fat and beautiful, like a voice. And John was more than ready to make the great leap from lowly, lonely, unloved bass player to lovable rockin’ lead guitarist and lead singer of the New York Dolls. Now I was the one left with the fabulous opportunity to become the lowly, lonely, unloved, and useless bass player. At the time I hadn’t fully understood just what the vote of confidence, musical promotion, and spirit boost really meant to John. I’m sure he didn’t think about it right away either. But our swap was the way things were meant to be. He was more naturally suited (even down to the size and shape of his hands) to play guitar. Truthfully, I had only been brushing up on guitar hoping that it might help me get into a band sooner. I was very heavily infatuated with (and I still deeply love) playing electric bass (subsonically speaking). I also loved my solid role as anchorman and prime mover. It was my job to set the tempo of each song as well as the general pace of the show. So my worries about having too many bass players for one band had been resolved. I later found out that John, like me, played some rhythm guitar too. That basic guitar background greatly helped both of us adjust to our transitions. There seemed to be an invisible hand or guiding light overseeing our actions and making everything flow smoothly and feel correct. The pieces of the larger puzzle were falling into place well as if on cue. Years later, I’ve come to understand that the Spirit of Truth (also called the Holy Ghost) can be a great blessing to humble creative people. In fact, it helps facilitate group creative synergy. But it can only aid people under circumstances of unfeigned honesty. Truth begets larger truths. The Holy Spirit is especially helpful in creating things, sunday in but only if the spirit of fair play is alive and well. Lies and the park deceptions chase it away.

6

Of course, over the years since, no one has ever given me any credit for anything about the Dolls. But don’t cry for me, Argentina. My giving John the freedom to play guitar unleashed upon the world a refreshingly daring gigantic new presence. Johnny Thunders2 created his own niche in rock-and-roll history with a combination of attitude, looks, and high musical personal style. He broke the mold completely. He was a real-life Buckaroo Bonzai, a rock-and-roll brain surgeon. Like that Kinks song about a cowboy hero—“Johnny Thunder lives on water, feeds on lightning.”3 Johnny had a new melodic twist on the “chainsaw” rock guitar sound. He influenced punk, gnu wave, and alternative music for generations to come. He pioneered his very own Wall of Sound sonic vision. It may be a lot easier today to sound like Mr. Thunders with new computer-chip technology, but nobody before or since could conjure up his rock-and-roll liberty-or-death attitude. That uncompromising force will always be at the very heart of punk rock. Just about anyone who can learn to play one note on electric guitar and can write their own lyrics can say and play anything they’d like anywhere they want if they can pull it off (did anyone see Roseanne Barr fronting a “professional” punk band at the Viper Room?). That too is part of the Johnny Thunders legacy. Not that long ago (in 1999), standing outside the Whiskey a Go Go, I saw four Johnny clones in one rock band and thought, Hey, are these young guys taking over the planet or what? It was as if every rock guitarist in the world had been waiting for the day when someone would come along with enough sheer moxie to incorporate the use of sonic feedback and overtones into their music without relying on external “outboard” gear. Johnny didn’t use fuzztones, wah-wah pedals, or other battery operated and generally unreliable plug-in devices to achieve his famous golden singing guitar tone. His pure and true sounds came from plugging old Gibson guitars (such as the Les Paul Jr.) into the newer and more modern amplifiers that were much more powerful than earlier rinky-dink equipment. Companies such as Marshall and Ampeg came along with superior high-volume amps for making more noise playing larger venues such as stadiums. John had discovered that certain old Gibson guitars really came alive when plugged into monsterific sized amps. Ask any electric guitarist what it’s like to play a Gibson Les Paul sunday in through a Marshall amp. Crunch-ability! the park

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P.S. While reflecting on this subject a few years later and still writing this book, another piece of the puzzle came to me. I remembered that John and Janis 4 had generously thanked me for agreeing to play the lowly bass guitar in favor of John’s promotion to lead guitar. My thanks came in the form of a wonderful but totally unexpected gift that fit my persona perfectly: a beautiful brown-and-white tawny checkered Wild Wild West cowboy suit, circa 1880s. It had a brown leather trim collar and cuffs on the jacket plus leather trim on the pockets and belt loops of the double-pleated pants. Whoa, partner! For someone dying for true love, this suit was the very next best thing! I had a dark pink Edwardian tiered ruffle shirt with white lace trim (it took me six months to pay for it on hold in an antique store) that I used to call my Brian Jones Special. Wearing both these items together made me look and feel like a wealthy riverboat gambler on the ole Mississippi, and ready to go out and find true love in a local dive. I’ve always fancied that old-fashioned Joseph Smith and Brigham Young frock coat, highcollar lace shirt, britches-and-boots American West pioneer look. For years I wondered just why John and Janis would give me something so cool but not tell me what I had done to deserve it. But a little bird recently let me know that it was a wordless thank-you gift in recognition for my part in Johnny’s promotion to lead guitar, lead singer, and rock god (and my subsequent demotion to unpaid deaf-mute backseat passenger). It took me a long time to figure that one out—it was a real riddle for me for years, kids. But better late than never. Puzzle solved, chapter closed.

sunday in the park 8

2

One evening while merrily carousing around the West Village, a friend and I stumbled across two rather stone female vibrations that seemed to fit the description of what real West Coast rock-and-roll groupies looked like up close and in the flesh. I wasn’t yet involved with the music scene in early 1971, but it was still obvious that these two were truly oddities out of a rock-and-roll fan magazine who were also friendly enough to talk to us non–rock stars no less. We were thrilled that these two older yet exotically and scantily clad femmes fatales wanted my buddy Dave and I as walking safety escorts while en route to their favorite watering hole just down the road. The fact that we had never even heard the name of this place before was surprising to us Pratt Institute dropouts who routinely combed through Manhattan via Brooklyn. However, these two hot babes were good friends with the highly underrated yet tremendously talented band named Moby Grape, and were going to meet up with them at a place called Nobody’s in the West Village. And although the two beautiful groupies couldn’t get us into the club for free or anything, they were so kind as to explain to us rockand-roll heathens that Nobody’s was where all the musical Somebodies—especially touring British bands like the Kinks, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Cream—all liked to hang out on their days off the road and between performance dates. No wonder I had never heard of the place—it was a well-kept groupie secret. I was just a kid who dreamed

nobody’s from

nowhere

9

about rock and roll who dropped out of college and worked for the New York Telephone Company. And to have randomly come across the true whereabouts of the rock-and-roll illuminati was a major revelation to my fertile young imagination. I no longer had to wonder (not that I ever did) about where to go to hobnob with real rock-and-roll stars if I so desired, or where the female vibrations seeking those stars could also be found. The idea of being freely allowed to even be in the presence of these rock-god greats had never occurred to me until then, because it seemed just too far out of the question—maybe I was just too young and naive at the time. Me, nonchalantly hanging out with my idols? Oh really? It reminded me of my first Murray the K show at the Brooklyn Fox Theater, where you could also meet up with your favorite artists—such as my faves the Devotions, who sang “Rip Van Winkle,” then came out to say hi to fans and sign autographs. It was quite an exciting, if not ridiculously overstimulating, experience for an impressionable preteen to have seen twenty-five or more rock-and-roll acts in one indelibly devastating rock-and-roll show one Saturday afternoon in fifties teenage-gang-era Brooklyn. Anyway, how could Nobody’s stars this bright be so easily accessible in public—or was it really public at all? Were my Icarian wings gonna melt if I dared to fly too close to the Illuminated Ones? Perhaps some of their stardust might rub off on a true believer? I decided that I had better get myself mentally prepared if I were to try hanging out in a place awash with stars along with their orbiting luminescent moons. Who was little old me in reality but a real nobody without even any aspirations to become a star—merely a youthful curiosity seeker lusting after the women who chased idols, with not much expertise in the area of making dream fantasies become waking realities. Repairing nonfunctioning telephones and making them usable again was the only reality that I understood at the time. Well, if there was ever a club where the ritualistic mating habits of the human peacock could be viewed up close, darlin’, this was it! There were certainly no holds barred as far as fashions of the day were concerned either—posing guys, poser couples, and the even deadlier species: the battling network couples. The Granny Takes a Trip nobody’s employees were there (about the only New Yorkers from nowhere who could afford to be dressed in two-tone velvet

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suits and cobra boots), as well as women in all manner of exotic outfits vying for the attentions of the stellar array of musicians. Well, I too sure had some far-out vines to wear, after combing through Amsterdam’s Waterlooplein flea market during all of 1970. I also had lots of weird and wonderful items from various Brooklyn thrift shops, such as my famous “golf sweater,” and certainly wasn’t about to be outdone fashion-wise by any posers in leathers with star boots! What I wanted to wear required a bit more thought and action (as in hand-dyeing and custom-sewing) than just simply handing over dad’s hard-earned cash for some off-the-rack, store-bought, pseudo rich-rock-star look. Any idiot could do that. But it required thought, time, balls, creativity, desire, a vivid imagination, and zillions of hours of dedicated eagle-eyed thrift shopping to get that totally unique look that I was after. Nobody’s was also the hangout for the rest of the New York Mods, as well as American musicians like Todd Rundgren, Rick Derringer, and the Johnny and Edgar Winter crew, who evidently knew where the scene was at. It was an ongoing, open-house toga party for players along with a few wannabes and posers who liked to be as close as possible (within inches) to their favorite rock-and-roll heroes. You had to be a famous rock-and-roll musician to be the center of attention. There was no point in being a look-alike, because only the genuine article would do. The great unwritten law was simple: no substitutes allowed! Johnny and Janis (as Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls) were highly visible patrons of this ultra–high-fashion world of peacocks, along with other trendsetters such as Jerry Nolan, Billy Doll, Syl (and his girlfriend Valerie), and Buddy Bowser—all of whom later played in the Dolls. At Nobody’s there was a bar, of course, as well as tables where you could order food and drinks and listen to the jukebox. The very first time I was there, John and Janis, after a few drinks, both ordered something called a snowball. Alcoholic drinks for starters and then straight to the chocolate fantasy ice cream cake snowballs. No pedestrian in-between stops for any such mundane trivialities as appetizers, soups, salads, or entrees. Then perhaps some fried chicken wings and then more drinks. I had once taken a course as part of my food science nobody’s and hotel management studies in which the students would go out to various famous restaurants to dine from nowhere

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and then write a report before discussing the experience in the classroom. At one place I learned how to pace myself while eating a sevencourse meal without going overboard. It was an exercise in patience and self-control. And going from drinks straight to dessert is a definite dining etiquette no-no. Anyway, it seems that all of the nonfamous people who used to hang out at Nobody’s later joined the New York Dolls—which also meant that we were tolerated by the real stars who didn’t mind us gonna-bes hanging out too. One of Jerry Nolan’s favorite Nobody’s stories concerns the time he showed up in a custom handmade suit that he had tailored and put together all by himself—a men’s red tuxedo outfit with red velvet trim. Jimi Hendrix was in the club at the time and came over to Jerry especially to ask him where he bought his great suit—and Jerry was proudly able to reply that he was flattered that Jimi liked the suit but was sorry that it wasn’t for sale, it was the only one of its kind (a man’s red tux with red velvet trim is still a bit too far-out even today, thirty years later) and that he had fashioned it exclusively by and for himself. Well, very Jimi, very Jerry, and very Nobody’s!

nobody’s from nowhere 12

3

While searching for the least expensive rehearsal space in New York City, Rick Rivets and I found a place advertised in the Village Voice whose price was right ($3.50/hour). For us pauper pioneer Dolls, this was the greatest bargain in the cosmos. The space, however, was located not in the Flower District in the West Thirties (where most of them were) but instead on the Upper West Side at Eighty-First Street and Columbus Avenue, right across the street from the scientifically inspirational Hayden Planetarium. We were very lucky to be in a neighborhood that was both cool and classy. However, we faced a major transportation expedition to get there from where we usually stayed—the Hotel Ozone in Jamaica Estates, Queens. It took us three “terror trains” on the subway. And travelling around New York City in the daytime presented a visual culture-shock problem (for others) because of our youthful insistence on dressing in our normal rock-and-roll gang attire (long hair, nail polish, makeup, mascara, platform boots, tights, leather, and lace). What we liked to wear at night at our rock-and-roll shows, we used to like to wear around in the daytime as well. The mere sight of us would cause various shocked reactions from the workaday public, not to mention the many catcalls, boos, whistles, and shouts of “Hey, baby” that would inevitably accompany us in our travels. My personal favorite reaction was from some woodsman types who, after seeing

rusty beanie’s

bicycle shop

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me pass by on foot in a zebra-print overcoat, commented, “Gee, the things you see when you don’t have your rifle with you!” Sometimes outright violence would erupt right there in the subway car, since most New Yorkers also felt that if you didn’t understand something (such as another human being), you could feel free to beat it to death with a lampshade and ask questions later. Well, it was only 1971 in Cenozoic Age–mentality New York. One of the features we liked best about our new rehearsal space was that nobody else seemed to know about it. Exclusivity was a big plus factor. Without having other bands next to or on top of us (like in most studios), we were very lucky to have an off-the-beaten-path place that provided headroom—that is, enough mind space to think and create without the distractions of external superficial noises incessantly roaring away. New York already had enough sounds droning away at each other in a kind of cacophonous din anyway. This was in a relatively quiet part of town. Our underground concrete bunker (really a bicycle rental shop) provided us with the kind of privacy we needed in order to be isolated from other bands, musical rip-off artists, hecklers, or the fanatically curious. And there was no one around cracking the whip, looking over your shoulder going, “Hey, you can’t do that!” or “What do you think you’re doing over there?” In other words, our place was perfect as our creative cubbyhole. To put it mildly, the bicycle shop wasn’t the most high-tech studio around. It was simply a gray cement basement storage area consisting of one microphone, one half-dead Fender Dual Showman amplifier, and one nameless badly pre-trashed drum kit replete with concrete cinder-block primordial drum throne. That was it. No frills whatsoever gave the experience a spartan flair. No heat, no complimentary buffet dinner and shiatsu massage, and no sweepstake-prize vacations to the island of Atlantis. There were also no restrooms, no cigarette machines, and no candy or coffee machines to distract us from our primary goal: creating our unmistakable signature sound. Our shared musical experiences somehow encompassed everything that we had picked up from the sounds of the city and growing up around the Big Apple. With all of the fabulous musirusty beanie’s cal stuff pouring forth from those little transistor radios, Cousin Brucie and Murray the K spinning bicycle shop

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the greatest music to date, we had absorbed it all. We were products of our environment, the kids who grew up on flying saucers and rock and roll. And very shortly it was gonna be our turn at bat, when we would show our contemporaries just what we could do with all that knowledge. Four guys, each around twenty years old, merrily preprogrammed to play the music that we so dearly loved, embodied a physically tangible musical talent pool worth eighty to one hundred years of musical knowledge. We poured every ounce of that information into our new creation and boldly cemented our style with the rock-solid cornerstones of early rhythm and blues. The original lineup of the pioneer version of the New York Dolls (dubbed Actress by fans) was Rick Rivets, Billy Murcia, John Genzale, and me. When we first arrived at this makeshift studio, a real cigarsmoking oddball gentleman with red hair wearing a leprechaunish devil-may-care smirk on his face introduced himself simply as Rusty. Well, ever the merry prankster in his younger days, our guitarist Johnny Thunders simply couldn’t resist asking, “So, if your first name is Rusty, then what’s your last name—Beanie?” And to our mutual shock and awe, he said, “Yeah, that’s my name—Rusty Beanie!” It was at this point that we knew he was putting us on and vice versa—so we all cracked up laughing. It was a very New Yorker-meets-fellow-New Yorker encounter. Later that day, we joked that Rusty had so eagerly accepted his fake new alias that he must have been an escapee from a federal witness relocation program. Rusty actually liked the brand-new name that Johnny pulled out of a hat while jokingly busting Rusty’s hump. Rusty had explained that if he wasn’t gonna be around during our practice sessions (and nobody needed that), he would have to lock us all inside the place using a steel padlock to secure the metal gate. This was his insurance policy that we that weren’t going to waltz away with his precious music equipment. To which we all replied, “What equipment?” And we started complaining that it was in a pretty pathetic state. Then Rusty (who also just happened to be a serious jazz drummer himself) cordially explained his personal musical viewpoint to us heathen infidels. “Professionally speaking, of course, I prefer rehearsing under adverse conditions. Because when you have to work that much harder, you get your chops together rusty beanie’s that much faster.” bicycle shop

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So after this brief yet philosophical excursion into the benefits of the Christian work ethic (musically speaking), we hummed in unison, “OK boss, whatever you say!” The idea of being locked and chained-up in a ten-by-twenty-foot concrete torture chamber didn’t exactly meld with our Woodstock Nation–inspired philosophical ideas about the high-voltage surge of exhilaration that petty personal freedoms can bring to the human spirit. However, the privacy and bargain price of three hours for ten bucks couldn’t be beat anywhere in town. We were thrilled to have a private-world sanctuary all to ourselves. To me this part of town was rather familiar, as only about a year earlier I had held a for-real job as an outdoor coin-telephone repairman with Ma Bell Telephone Company up that way in that very same neighborhood. My gig came complete with my own equipment truck and macho tool belt. (You can’t be an ultramacho Cro-Magnon beast from twenty thousand fathoms under the sea without a manly tool belt. As my fellow employees used to say, “A man without a tool belt just ain’t no man!”) My phone repair route went from Seventy-Second Street to NinetySixth Street and from Central Park West to West End Avenue, all cointelephone booths and kiosks. Occasionally I got to fix telephones in such places as the Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium. The only reason that I was out of work and so available to play music at that time was that the telephone company had gone on strike in the spring of ’71, during which I was able to collect unemployment. It also left me with a big window of opportunity time-wise, and enough youthful naive optimism and energy to run around on foot starting a rock-and-roll band. Well, I certainly wasn’t Ma Bell’s model employee by any means. I used to drink alcohol while on the job, ignore fixing the telephones on my repair route, and take my truck over to Bethesda Fountain to sleep it off every weekday. And although my fellow employees knew that I was completely goofing off, no one ever finked on me and told the boss. (Hey, thanks a lot guys. Really! I still love you too!) The telephone company also used to have its own secret police that monitored the rest of the employees. How’s that for sinister efficiency? Most of my evenings at that time had been glorusty beanie’s riously misspent hanging out at Nobody’s Cafe on MacDougal Street, drinking and carousing until four bicycle shop

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a.m. or so, when all the bars closed. At first, I was living in Brooklyn near Pratt Institute (the milkmen delivered door-to-door back then). I would have to make my way back to Brooklyn after partying all night, hopping on one of those terror trains for a short siesta (one or two hours?). Then I would have to wake up again and get back on the trains for the nightmarish and surreal journey back to West Forty-Second Street to pick up my truck. I would drive it to West Seventy-Third Street to report for work and get my daily instructions. After that, it was back to Central Park to re-crash in my secret parking spot for as long as I could. I get tired just thinking about all the energy that I must have used going back and forth that way. I was truly thrilled when the telephone company oh-so-conveniently went on strike not long after training me to be a repairman. But I must confess that it was a great job for a young man like me at the time. Plus, there was always access to lots of those loose round metallic discs. However, dear readers, that story belongs to another set of tales about a lonely planet boy’s search for his hidden true super-identity. Meanwhile, back at Rusty’s Ranchero, one evening when we were about halfway through rehearsing, our ever-alert man-on-the-job Rick Rivets noticed that the padlock that was keeping us Dolls locked inside the studio was ajar (as in almost open). That meant that we could actually leave our Columbus Avenue condo. Hooray! We unlocked the gate and went upstairs and outside to the sidewalk for a cigarette, some oxygen, and a chance to stretch our limbs. And although we weren’t exactly feverishly chanting “Attica, Attica,” it was certainly a very nice change of pace. So, we’re milling about when Restless Rick decides to go for a trek up the block just to see what was happening. I must explain that it was only a day or two before Christmas ’71. We Dolls always liked to get some form of booze to help us (or so we happily imagined) counter the icy damp of the bicycle shop basement. We would all chip in whatever we had for a cheap bottle of gin and something sweet to mix with it— blackberry brandy, cherry cordial, or anything fruity. We would somehow manage to get these two poisonous liquids into a large two-quart plastic bottle. Then we’d pass around the lil’ brown jug o’ plastic like there would be no tomorrow, behav- rusty beanie’s ing like mischievous altar boys who had accidentally bicycle shop

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found the keys to the secret liquor stash. Each of us would get happily buzzed on our jet-boy-juice-rocket-fuel cocktail. It certainly also helped us to drop our musical inhibitions as well, so that we could really let our ideas soar without limitation. The New York Dolls actually learned how to play under conditions of various stages of drunkenness. But was this gift gonna be an asset or a debit in the long run? Oddly enough, this dubious talent proved to be extremely handy during our future misadventures on the road, especially while touring Merry Old England. When Rick excitedly returned from his trek up the street, he said, “Hey, there’s a big Christmas Bash going on right now at the Hotel Endicott right up the block. I asked them if they’d like some musical entertainment to liven up the festivities and they said, ‘Sure, come on over!’ If we play there, maybe they’ll give us something to eat and drink!” At least someone in the Dolls was still thinking correctly at that point in time. Well, we were all about to break Rusty’s forbidden taboo—that no musical equipment was allowed to leave the bicycle shop, ever. But we had a better idea that wouldn’t take very long to put into operation. So we began hauling the drums and our one amplifier up the street through the snow to entertain the happy welfare recipients of the Hotel Endicott. These wonderful poor souls wanted to sing, dance, and party so much that although we were total strangers they welcomed us inside like we were the Return of the Jedi. We just set up our gear and started playing every single blues song we had ever heard with a hungry fervor that sent our new friends into an elated frenzy of Christmas dancing and singing and serious par-taying! Everyone was just so thrilled about these strangely attired young men who, out of the blue of outer space, had just dropped in to play some blues du jour. Our new friends asked us questions like “What planet are you guys from?” and “Did Santa Claus himself send you all here to bring some Christmas Cheer to us old folks?” We (of course) had no explanations about anything. It was just one of those things that can sometimes occur spontaneously when you happen to be in the right place at the right time (and somehow in harmony with the universe). Serendipity saves the day. All the senior citizens and the future New York Dolls managed to rusty beanie’s have a rockin’ rave-up in the tradition of a real live wang-dang-doodle shindig. bicycle shop

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After a good hour or so of playing, we started getting tipsy and sloppy (since we were also toasting and tippling with our senior friends). We knew that it would soon be the witching hour, time to get our goldenpumpkin equipment back to Rusty’s Bicycle Shop before the clock struck midnight—just in case Rusty came cruising by to check up on us. (Luckily, he never stopped by that night. A successful operation had been carried out without incident.) But before saying Merry Christmas and goodnight to our new friends, they insisted that we each take as much food with us as we could carry. Our unplanned mission was accomplished. Those plates of ham and potatoes sure made us hungryman Dolls very happy campers! That evening, we learned about sharing what little we had (as well as what we didn’t even know we had) with complete strangers. And although our Christmas musical gift ended up making so many beautiful people so very happy, it was the Dolls who were really the lucky beneficiaries. How did we just happen to be there at that given time and space? Was it coincidence? You tell me! That night, the true spirit of Christmas appeared in a little corner on the Island of Manhattan, and touched the hearts of us all.

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In a once ultraposh neighborhood called Jamaica Estates was the infamous Hotel Ozone. The place was really just a large, ramshackle old house with lots of rooms. Our drummer Billy Murcia’s folks lived there—they were originally from Bogota, Colombia. Once upon a time, only the ilks (idle rich) could afford to live in Jamaica Estates, as all of the houses were large mansions, each with a few acres of land. This one was on the corner of Sutphin Boulevard and Hillside Avenue, down the block from the Queens County Municipal Courthouse. Now it was a rambling, falling-apart old mansion on a hill next to a Christian church, with a Tobacco Road look to it—overgrown weeds all over the grounds, the wood a weathered dark red with aging dirty white trim. Both the Munsters and the Addams Family probably would have felt at home there. I had been living in Brooklyn since returning from Amsterdam. I wasn’t too thrilled to be living in Brooklyn again, and I sure never got the hero’s welcome-home celebration I deserved for returning alive. I felt a bit defeated coming back to live under the dark shadows of the old Myrtle Avenue el once again. And—even though I had friends there and the cost of living was almost attainable even by my low standards—I knew that Brooklyn was just another place for the living dead. I’d best be movin’ on up above and beyond a dead alcoholic cul-de-sac if I ever expected to amount to anything. I loved Brooklyn, but young talent wouldn’t exactly be discovered posing in front of an abandoned burnt building and swept away to Hollywood—no Schwab’s Drug Store

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tales there. Au contraire, if you accidentally got off at the wrong subway stop and appeared to be a new stranger in the area, nasty teenage hoodlums were gonna chase you, catch you, and beat you until you were ER material. I was living in a very violent and dangerous neighborhood surrounding Pratt called Brownsville (No Man’s Land). Even daily life in that part of Brooklyn was scary, and living under the noisy, dirty Myrtle Avenue el was just plain depressing. Our guitarist John (yes, Mr. Thunders) first introduced me to Billy, and we hit it off really well right off the bat. We were a natural rhythm section, regardless of our silly living conditions. Billy looked like a healthier, younger version of Marc Bolan of T-Rex fame. At some point he said to me, “Hey, why don’t you pack up your stuff in Brooklyn and move in with me and my brothers and my folks in Jamaica Estates? There are lots of empty rooms here, and you could have your pick! You could pay rent to my folks, and I’ll make sure it’s cheaper than what you’re paying now. And you can stop taking so many trains going back and forth to rehearsal. We’ll be together and can work on our music— or anything!” Well, it didn’t take me long to realize that he was providing me with an escape route from my dreary lost outsider rut in Brooklyn. The first evening that I spent there I dubbed the place “Hotel Ozone” after an art movie I had seen at Pratt called The End of August at the Hotel Ozone. Only by spraying many cans of Ozium disinfectant over everything in the house could anyone feel at ease about not contracting the dreaded black plague. Billy took me upstairs upon my arrival, flung open a broken door to one of the several rooms on that floor, and said, “Here’s your room. I hope you don’t mind the sound of dripping water from the ceiling splashing down into this plastic boat thing. It only happens when it rains.” And of course it rained cats and dogs for the next five days. I felt as though I had taken my first baby steps on the way down to hell trying to sleep in that dusty and filthy room, but for me there was no turning back. And after a night of the dreaded incredible Chinese water torture, I had truly reached an all-time low. I had been a squeaky-clean Lutheran altar boy not that long ago; now it indeed seemed like I had successfully found that famous descending hotel stairway to Hades. The small plastic boat collecting the dripOzone ping water was like a petri dish gone amok growing germs.

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Compared to my previous human living environment, this joint was Bedlam—right out of that old movie starring Boris Karloff about terminal patients in a London Victorian hospital. Boy, was I sorry that I didn’t look before I leapt. I should have at least inspected the place in the daytime before taking Billy’s word and diving right into the frying pan. It was a decomposing dive covered with years of layers of grungy dirt. However, I had been duped, and it was too late to backtrack back to Brooklyn. And so, come what may, welcome to Shantytown, Arthur! The joke was on the enthusiastically naive new Gringo, all right. But to my young and adventurous mind, it was all kind of just camping out indoors and things would get better soon, as they couldn’t really be much worse. Well, what happened at the Hotel Ozone? In truth, not that much, actually, but the bond of friendship between Billy, Sylvain,5 and me— the nutty bass player from space—certainly grew. Both Billy and Syl had these machines for creating sweaters—electric looms, sewing machines, and Merrow machines, as well as other sewing paraphernalia. Rock and roll meets the fashion industry at the Hotel Ozone! It used to seriously blow my mind watching these two unlikely captains of industry threading their looms with various colored threads—and then moving the loom back and forth to create the patterns for what the finished fabric would look like. Billy and Syl were their own fashion designers and created handmade and custom-made ultra–high-fashion (translation: small and short) sweaters for all the beautiful people who could afford to shop in pricey uptown boutiques. Each sweater sold for a pretty penny—sweaters with polka dots, sweaters with silver threads (silver being the seventies rage). They sold like hotcakes—never to be reproduced. And so, with rock music at high volume, I used to sit and watch my two new friends looming away and cranking out saleable product. And of course there was always something to take or smoke or drink to break up anything too closely resembling seriously tedious work. Work and play went together like coffee and cigarettes. So the Hotel Ozone was the beginning of a clothing manufacturing business that later became the Costume Factory on Thirty-Second Street in Manhattan, which never really got off the ground because the New York Dolls’ endless rock-and-roll par-tay had already Hotel begun—marooned in lame-o Queens or not! Ozone

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Most of the days there I cheered on the sweater brigade while a happy air of thoughtful industry permeated the basic whistle-whileyou-work seven-happy-dwarves atmosphere. Very New York Dolls. Weeknights were a problem, though. The evenings were scary and dark in that neighborhood, yet hopelessly boring unless you decided to somehow instigate a major gang war for kicks. Billy and Syl would sometimes pop over to the quiet church property next door just to jam some old-time rock and roll on the piano—mainly because it was there. I somehow don’t ever remember my being there on a Sunday morning at the church service, or maybe it was just that I was off to Manhattan on so many weekends to get out of that scary yet boring place, so I simply missed out. It was certainly just as scary as my old place in Brooklyn, only less familiar—a bit of Bowery at Midnight, as it were, when Earth’s “children of the night” appear to crawl out as if reporting for their midnight shift after sleeping in their native soil in their own coffins all day. We too had joined the midnight shift. It was much more fun to get into Manhattan to flip around and see what would turn up on our youthful “I Search for Adventure” missions. We never rehearsed or played much music at Hotel Ozone. There must have been a couple of guitars on occasion to fool around with there, but this wasn’t a musical rehearsal hall by any means. It was a clothing workshop and a pathetic crash-pad. Years earlier, however, a teenage Johnny Genzale on bass, Billy Murcia on drums, and Sylvain Sylvain on guitar used to rehearse in the same basement of the Murcias’ hotel—until one day the frustrated bassist quit. John said, “I used to hate those guys—they threw me out of our band ’cause I was a creep.” Oh well, reunited ’cause it feels so good. Actually, it probably took an outside influence like me to restir that old pot and make it happen. As the week progressed, we’d all get itchy to hang out at our usual haunt—Nobody’s. So back and forth we went between the West Village and Queens at all hours of the day and night. We would be truly riproaringly drunk at four-something in the morning from West Fourth and get on the F train back to Sutphin Boulevard and a short distance to the Hotel Ozone—that is, if we didn’t fall asleep on the train and end up riding to Neptune Avenue at Coney Island’s last stop. hotel However, we would be so tanked by the time we actually got Ozone on the train at West Fourth, falling into the arms of Morpheus

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shortly after hopefully boarding the correct train was a rather common occurrence. Imagine being parched dry and smashed and frighteningly, delicately hungover simultaneously, combined with the absolute shock of waking up—not in your own bed—but on a moving public subway filled with swarms of scary, angry, hostile, and irate commuters giving you the hairy eyeball since it’s obvious that you’re still bent out of shape and just returning from partying the night before. That, along with being dressed like teenage drag queens—resplendent in smudged mascara over our white talcum-powdered faces, wearing multicolored fingernail polish, wild long hair, platform boots, black home-dyed straight-leg jeans, etc. (You try taking a pair of bell-bottoms, tapering them straight, and boil-dyeing them black on the stove sometime for fun. However, I must confess that I too customized my wardrobe of thrift-shop treasures. Shortage of seamstress fans? Was it too early in our careers? All the Dolls were busy creating their own fashions for themselves and no one else. The early Dollmen had enough machismo to wield an electric guitar or thread a needle for sewing!) My main memories of Hotel Ozone are of cool mornings drinking cappuccino with Billy’s brothers and sister and folks, sights and sounds of busy electric looms humming along with rock-and-roll music blasting, and possible angelic physical encounters of the fourth kind with beautiful Chris of the nympho sisters (not a band) on lucky rainy days. And an awkward and strangely quiet snowy weekend date with the New York Dolls’ once and future seamstress—a bighearted woman who truly and deeply loved our lead singer, and not me. And I still recall that dirty, creepy Municipal Courthouse building at Sutphin and Jamaica Boulevards—very concrete, very “No Exit,” very “no, thanks.” I never pine for Queens or the Hotel Ozone, believe me! But for some young men I once knew, it certainly provided the perfect place to escape from.

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Early in 1972, we were still young and free. We had yet to permanently sign away our future careers and souls by inking those satanically antihuman contracts (all-inclusive, exclusive, written in stone for all eternity, just like the pyramids) created behind the scenes by fiendish contract writer Mighty Thud in a secret deal with the Devil’s own henchman, Mr. Slave Labor.6 We played our very first show under the name the New York Dolls at a benefit for a gentleman named Dana Beal, a yippie (post-hippie) movement leader who’d been arrested for possession of just one joint of smoke and was sentenced to twenty years in prison somewhere in the U.S. wilderness. Talk about absurdity in Nixon’s Amerika! In any case, it was time to launch our own Anti-Establishment Chaotic Assault Weapon—ourselves, the New York Dolls, of the urban-legendary “Doll Man Prophecies.” Anyway, it was a hip enough excuse to throw a big rock-and-roll bash, as well as the perfect opportunity for us to make our local debut as the new kids on the chopping block. This would be our first ever preannounced show in public (but without written publicity or fliers), and would of course let everyone else in New York see what we looked and sounded like. It was gonna be interesting for us to find out just what other people thought about a band that dared to put the sacred words “New York” into its name. We were putting our collective family

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jewels on the killin’ floor. The only other group to date that had dared to name its state in its name was Kansas—and we all knew we never wanted anything to do with anything that lame. Well, we had talked among ourselves and agreed that if people liked us locally, then our fellow New Yorkers would really have something new and rock-solid to get excited about and cheer over, like the New York Yankees, New York Mets, or New York Jets. New heroes! We were self-appointed rock-and-roll clowns of song fiction come alive (the only way to go in the seventies). We gleefully accepted our role as the merry pranksters/court jesters of the day, but alas the masses would never get it. No one save a precious few journalists seemed to understand what camp or kitsch were, not even when presented to them in the flesh. The Dolls were simply too sophisticated, too etheric, too far-out, and, yes, way “Too Much Too Soon” for the average radio listener. Meanwhile, as I was unfamiliar with the ballrooms at the Diplomat Hotel, one day Billy said to me, “Hey, if you’ve never been before, check this place out—the Christmas Bar! There’s a bar here inside the hotel where it’s always Christmas—here, let me show you.” And so, as if in a dream, we waltzed in through the back door of the bar, and I wasn’t disappointed. It was always December 25 at the Christmas Bar. Christmas trees, lights and decorations, fake snow on the floor, with bartenders and waitresses who had donned their gay apparel and were dressed as Santa’s helpers. I thought it was a great place, and what a great idea—especially during the August dog days of a hot summer in the city. We also loved the idea that these same venues were used by earlier generations of New Yorkers who wanted to party in ages past, and now it was our turn. As this premier performance came upon us out of the blue, we didn’t have much time to get bent out of shape over the whole thing. We would be making only a brief appearance along with a number of other local acts such as Uncle Bucks or Teenage Lust or Elephant’s Memory. (It was still a couple of years before Stan Bronstein of Elephant’s Memory would so fabulously wail on sax during the Dolls’ recording of our most universally appealing song, “Human Being,” the very last tune on the Dolls’ swan song LP The New York Dolls in Too Much Too Soon.) We wanted to make a big splash, but we had some the dana beal difficulty in deciding how to break ties with yet still yippie benefit appeal to the Woodstock Generation’s rather tired

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bell-bottom-blue-jean-look adherents. The fashion times were a-changin’. (Since then I’ve been told through the grapevine that someone actually played a video of the New York Dolls for then-President Richard Nixon, and after seeing it he screamed, “They’re a bunch of faggots!”) We had already moved toward a more strikingly visual and aural level of gestalt rock-and-roll entertainment. None of the Dolls looked or dressed like hippies or yippies (except for the long hair). We all looked most natural, like photos of the Stones or the Beatles when they were in their most colorful rock-and-roll regalia, way beyond the fringe of normal day-to-day street attire. No way could you look at the Dolls and say, “They’re obviously just some assembly-line, run-of-themill, corporate Stepford Robotoids for rent.” Au contraire, dear fans, we looked wilder, stranger, and, yes, dare I say, prettier—and had more to say—than all other New York bands that preceded us combined. That looking-spiffy list from the past had to include the Vagrants (with Leslie West), the Blues Magoos, Al Kooper and the Blues Project, the Left Banke, and the Young Rascals. All these bands dressed in the most extreme Beau Brummel fashions of the day, and were always spruced up to kill in public appearances. They set a very high standard of fashion excellence for all future New York rockers, but especially for the Dolls. In the truest sense, we were Dion and the Belmonts’ kid brothers from Belmont Avenue in the Bronx, and heirs apparent to the entire doo-wop generation of early rock-and-roll greatness. My direct inspiration was my cousin Bobby, who spent a bit of time singing with Randy and the Rainbows (as a Rainbow). And so, the New York Dolls, as logical musical descendents, gladly took upon ourselves our roles as links in a time-spanning, cohesive, rock-and-roll genetic chain gang of flaming torch-bearers (including the beloved pre-rock icon and glitter pioneer Liberace). As this was our debut, we of course had a discussion about what we were gonna look like, and we definitely wanted to separate ourselves from the past. We didn’t have lots of wild rock-and-roll threads, and none of us had the money to actually consider anything but shoplifting at Granny Takes a Trip. For us that was way too simple—any schmuck with a buck could buy “British Cool.” How were we to come across as new and different if we didn’t the dana beal look new and different? Under these rather vacuous Yippie benefit

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fiscal circumstances, I had silently decided to appoint myself as the one who would “go that extra mile for the Gipper.” I had decided to appear onstage playing bass without any pants! It was a statement of sorts. “Well, if he wasn’t wearing pants, was he wearing any clothes?” I had decided to exploit my best asset: my long legs. Not something a guy would normally think about, but I had seen an Italian rock-androll poster all over St. Marks Place showing four guys in shorts playing onstage. I think they were called Los Bohemos. Well, we wouldn’t be outdone by a photo of some guys on a poster dressed more outrageously than the New York Dolls! However, they were only in shorts— they might have been in mountain-climbing threads or something macho—and not black leather hot pants, pink stockings, mascara, lipstick, and the rest of our type of crazy gear. It was also a first for all bass players everywhere who came after me (especially women) to feel free to break out of that nondescript obese anchorman/journeyman stage prison. I did more than dream I was performing nude onstage in my Maidenform bra at La Scala! No pants, no jeans, no short-shorts (hot pants), no fisherman’s waders, and no scuba gear—I dared to play live in public in red opaque pantyhose, high-heeled boots borrowed from a tall female vibration, a tiny black velvet bolero jacket with gold sequins over a black dancer’s leotard from a Brooklyn thrift shop, and a clownish antique bow tie. Oh yeah, plus mascara, eyeliner, nail polish, rouge, and lipstick. I was ready for some serious swinging anywhere in the world, baby! Just one of the boys? My gear was economical, lightweight, and disposable—as well as sexy, funny, and comfortable to wear. I was pretty thrilled by the whole daring idea, and that my outfit cost less than five bucks—but what would my comrades think? I was going for the less-is-more concept, and reckoned that it was the least I could do for mom, apple pie, and America. Lose the pants! That was it! That was my most comically economical solution to an uncommon problem! And so, while we didn’t look like any of the Woodstock bands of the time, most of us had already spent some time in London or Amsterdam, and individually had a British fashion thing going on already. We knew that we wanted to look like we were together from wherever—but like individuals also. Does any of this sound familthe dana beal iar? Everything about KISS was stolen from the New yippie benefit York Dolls! Larger-than-life rock-and-roll comic-

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book superheroes? Band from another world? Guess whose ideas these were—mine and Johnny Thunders’! It was important for us to be known as the original motley crew band of nonconformists/rebels/ misfits/buccaneer swashbucklers from beyond the pale blue horizon. No planned shows with special effects to satisfy impressionable prepubescent minds who need real-life heroes as opposed to greedy paranoid ugly old men hiding behind masks and ad-campaign marketing-strategy schemes to sell absolutely nothing. No one coming before or after the New York Dolls would ever be able to compete with our street-level, rock-bottom simplicity and natural style. Too much synergistic creativity, heart, soul, and steel balls in one package. We were gonna carve out a chunk of rock-and-roll history for ourselves, and our fans were welcome to come along on a voyage of experimentation and self-discovery. We understood that everyone who saw us was gonna say Yay or Nay anyway, so we figured we might as well go a bit overboard for shock appeal. On no terms did we want people to say, “Oh, they’re OK.” Au contraire, we wanted people to say things like, “Well did you ever?” or “What hath God wrought?” or “Where’d they get them boots?” or “Five guys in women’s clothing rocking out?” or (hopefully) “Wait till I tell my friends about these guys!” Well, people started to get happy when we started to play, and although I personally felt a bit scantily clad, none of us got the razz or were given any guff while we strutted our stuff. We loved the yippie nonjudgmental appreciation. Our new friends seemed happily amused (or just plain stoned anyway) by our masculine/feminine gender-bending appearance. We as freaks were accepted by other freaks! The New York Dolls had won the Yippie Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval— smiles, cheers, applause, and joints thrown on stage (plus some erotic fringe benefits later on that evening). We were a big success after just a few songs, and everyone seemed pleased to know that some fresh rockand-roll freaks were coming to the rescue. I do believe that Mr. Dana Beal didn’t have to go to prison for having a joint!7 Hooray!

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It was spring 1972. After playing the Dana Beal yippie benefit, the upand-coming New York Dolls must have signed our “Rape of Youth” wonderful management contract with Satan’s henchmen (they help you by removing your money from your poor cadaver before lowering your coffin into the earth, thus simultaneously delivering a regular two-for-theprice-of-one catastrophe deal)—thanks a lot, evil manipulators! 8 We ourselves could never afford to rent the Grand Ballroom of the Diplomat Hotel on our own. So if the money had to come from somewhere, then why not hell? The American Red Cross (heaven) simply wasn’t interested in chipping in. And although we had once played “unofficially” at the Hotel Diplomat, this was the first official show, and properly advertised. Big difference! At this time the group was very concerned about our collective stage image. Could we look even more outrageous than our direct competitors, the Spiders from Mars, in their seventies space gear? Or the original Alice Cooper group guys dressed in silver leather jumpsuits doing rock-and-roll theatrics complete with big-time-movie special effects? Whoa! Pretty tall order for a band living by our wits (and no, not by our kindly Aunt Minnie and Uncle Moskowitz) and not much else (such as food). Well, maybe if we put a little more effort into what might separate us from the

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rest of the pack on a striking visual level, we’d come up with something! Hmmm . . . Evidently the rest of the Dolls weren’t quite mentally prepared to follow in my brazen footsteps by appearing in something close to what I had worn (or not worn) at the yippie benefit. That was basically a leotard, stockings, bow tie, and boots—what would have forever branded us as the fruitiest bunch of flaming faggots back then. For those who weren’t there in 1972, gays either were in the closet or simply didn’t exist. Modern taboos die hard. It would have been way too much of a blow to the American macho male ego’s point of view if five young men were all to come onstage in stockings and lingerie. Too much, too soon, to say the least—plus banishment to eternal media damnation from the Amerikan Puritanical Society for the Preservation of the Status Quo. Score one for the Stepford Wife robotoid Lawrence Welk fans. Meanwhile, we certainly weren’t about to buy into the five-penguins-in-tuxedos look either. Since we had only a few weeks to get “it” (X, the unknown factor) together for our first, for-real New York debut, it was a matter that we all took rather seriously. We were straining our brains to come up with something that we all could wear—possibly the same jackets or pants that could be matched up in different colors, or something to that effect. We had already solved the riddle of where to get the only men’s platform boots anywhere in the States—by ordering from a custom shoe shop in England. That we accomplished by pooling our funds and sending away to London, where Billy’s sister Heidi Murcia had them custom made. Being already accustomed to the rag trade—especially since Billy and Syl once had a sweater business together called “Truth and Soul”—a solution to our haberdashery problems was floating around out there somewhere in the immediate vapors, a bit like a three-dimensional crossword puzzle. And so, one afternoon while bombing around the streets of the Lower East Side as usual, some of us Dolls happened to be passing a local fabric shop when Syl said to me and Billy, “Hey, maybe there’s some kind of weird fabric we could make something out of right here!” So we all popped into the fabric joint (notwithstanding shocked and stunned employee reactions) to see what we trouser splitting should see, and one of us “discovered” this shiny, glittery, fuzzy black Lurex-type fabric which with diplomacy

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almost seemed to fit the bill. Syl then said, “Hey, my girlfriend has a sewing machine back at the pad. I’ll bet she’d love the challenge of helping us try and figure out something great to do with this fabric as far as whipping up some stage clothes for our upcoming Diplomat gig.” We’d thought that we’d found the missing part of the puzzle. The elusive “it” turned out to be the weird fabric. We also knew that we would be roasted on a spit by all those cynical and jaded New Yorkers if we didn’t look and sound completely all together. A typically tough and smart New York crowd would be there. As I mentioned earlier, we must have signed our Evil Deal in order to be getting significantly better gigs. But for some reason known only to sadomasochists, the group members still weren’t on salary, and we spent most of 1972 broke on our butts, lucky to eat anything at all. “Eat and Run” was a popular restaurant survival game if you got away successfully. We would sometimes jump on the back of a truck, thus solving those pesky urban fiscal transportation problems that can make the holidays so hectic! We would also play G&R (as in Gas & Run) as well as the “Lover Doll” routine in which we would re-create the scene from King Creole where Elvis creates a big distraction inside a department store so that his hoodlum friends can steal everything in sight. I never had the luxury of being able to go home and spend the weekend stuffing myself at Mom and Dad’s amply stocked refrigerators. Lonely Planet Boy was mostly on his own food-wise, and that’s why I remember those days so much. I was starving to death (more like modern malnutrition), and not of my own accord. Working without a salary? Our new managers must have thought that we were androids without need of any human being–type necessities (such as food or shelter). Some great management deal. It was nice to get signed up, guys, but how about living long enough to make some records before we collectively croak in a body-pile from scurvy? Something indeed was rotten in Denmark with the whole arrangement, because our physical welfare was totally irrelevant to our managers. Some survival money for food as an investment in our future would certainly have been a lot better than what we actually got—less than zero. All military people know that an army trouser splitting travels on its stomach, and that without rations the war would be lost because the men wouldn’t with diplomacy

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have the strength to fight. New band, no food. Only forced fasting was allowed on that budget. Slave Labor’s evil dad (Dr. Sardonicus) actually owned some big buildings on the Manhattan landscape—very handy as an introduction to the seduction of innocent youth with false dreams of “stardom.” For those who might foolishly think that the role of a management company should be to help develop and promote the artists it begged to work with and sign up in the first place—guess again! How completely opposite in the New York Dolls’ case. Our own managers turned out to be the evil ones who hated us and sought to destroy all that we represented—hope, talent, power, passion, youthful enthusiasm, looks, and vitality. They feasted on our life-blood and willfully destroyed our musical creation with so much sadistic pleasure that their hatred must have simply rendered our mere disposable human lives totally expendable. Yes indeed, death is a way of life inside the music industry. So you too wanna be a rock-and-roll star? Back at Eleventh Street and First Avenue, where Sylvain was staying with his girlfriend, we wanted to see if she was gonna help sew up something great for each of the Dolls with that weird Lurex fabric that we had found. She seemed to think that making pants might be a tall order, but that it was the only way to go. We were so thrilled that someone was gonna sew for us, we eagerly chipped in whatever “chump change” (a favorite Jerry Nolan expression) that we had, and merrily marched back to the local fabric shop to get enough material to make five pairs of pants (or trousers) in that great glittery black Lurex fuzzy fab. We then went back to our brave seamstress, content that we had found something that no one else might have—our own custom-made threads. Well, we all had our measurements taken and were pretty excited that we were at last getting personally involved in an attempt to present something unique to our fans. Our seamstress had over a week or so to get it together before the Rilly Big Shoe (as the late great Ed Sullivan used to say). The day of the show (again at the Hotel Diplomat, but in a different ballroom) we had to go to sound check in the late afternoon. Nobody on the bill (which included such then-luminaries as Ruby and the Rednecks and Queen Elizabeth, starring Wayne trouser splitting County) got to do a sound check that afternoon because of PA problems. About sound checks in with diplomacy

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general, it’s good to see if the equipment is functioning properly. But an empty room has totally different acoustics than the same room filled with human bodies—it’s a whole new ballgame, acoustically speaking. All sound checks, good or bad, are more or less a necessary occupational pain. The sound problems of the afternoon were wasting everyone’s time. However, lots and lots of curious onlookers from street traffic near the hotel had somehow started drifting into the place and were gawking away at us Dolls and our strangely attired friends. And so, without music or a show, we were drawing a crowd. We finally had to be on our way, and made a date with each other for later that evening. We all had to try on our new sparkling “vina-fina thread” trousers before we left for the Diplomat Hotel—just in case some last-minute adjustments might be necessary. Well, the best-laid plans of mice and men can sometimes go awry if and when you’re playing beat the clock. As the fates would have it, there just wasn’t enough time to try on our newest pants until after we arrived at the hotel. However, there was no dressing room anywhere near the stage. Somehow, though, we all managed to get dressed inbetween the folds of the huge velvet stage curtain in the dark. Dare I say risque? Dare we speak in Braille? Anyway, we had all miraculously gotten there and managed to don our gay apparel, since we were curious as to whether or not our groovy trousers could handle some normal rock-and-roll wear-and-tear punishment. In our new collectivelytogether pants we were standing upright behind the curtain when our musical intro, with Dionne Warwick singing a really long and oh-sopainfully-slow version of the song “Valley of the Dolls,” began to play. Tension was mounting (the band was about to mount the fans!) as our first legitimate musical Manhattan debut was only seconds away. The hour had arrived and we were totally psyched up, pumped up, hopped up, and ready to pounce on the impatient and screaming crowd like a cat on a dog (a famous Frenchy expression). We were confident that we each looked great and that we would indeed all be looking great together—despite the fact that we were draped inside that huge velvet curtain in pitch darkness. Then, several million eons later, the Dionne Warwick song ended. Despite the pre-debut butterflies, we were enjoying the preshow buzz of trouser splitting excitement (as well as the audience’s fever-pitch with diplomacy

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anticipation). We stormed onto the stage like swaggering gangbusters, manned our instruments, and ripped into our rip-roaring song “Personality Crisis” with our take-no-prisoners stance. We were all wearing our brand-new sparkling black glittery fuzzy Lurex pants, and were jumping around wildly. Well, about ten seconds into the song I quickly realized from a sudden lower breeze below the equator that the pants I was so proudly wearing had already ripped from the sacred area of my crotch straight down to my ankles. It was a big, big rip! Oh brother, what’s gonna happen next, I wondered. I was about to hit the panic button over being busted for obscenity laws against being lewd and nude in public places, but then my mind reeled in utter disbelief at what I saw. As I looked around at my band-mates, I realized that each and every one of them also had huge gaping ripped holes in their new trousers too! We had all simultaneously ripped our brand-new threads to shreds! It would still be thirty years before the invention of magical Enzyte (male member enhancement pills), and years and years before the British comedy movie The Full Monty. The show had barely begun, and we were already “out of trousers”! Well, whether it was a mass ESP intervention or just some old-fashioned Boy Scout “be prepared” for a worst-case-scenario, each of us was ready nevertheless. What prevented us from thus displaying full frontal nudity in public after we had shredded our trousers? Women’s opaque pantyhose and colorful tights—that’s what saved the day! We had all (very wisely) taken precautionary measures to prevent such a disaster. Each of us had independently made damn sure to wear something (eye-proof) under our virginal new “vina-fina thread” trousers just in case. So none of us was ever fully nude at any time on that stage that night. It was pretty close, though. And thus we averted an obscene and perhaps violent adventure in jail trying to explain why five guys who were playing music on stage were suddenly wearing shredded holy-yet-unholy trouser parts while nearly displaying our macho grande cojones collectively in public. What a debut! But then again, just what was debuting about, after all? Was it all a strange coincidence? Were “the trouser splitting grays” from Zeta Reticuli goofing on the Dolls? Did urban witchcraft play a role? Were solar with diplomacy

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flares disrupting cosmic conditions and causing Moon Wobble? Was there really a need to consult Carl Kolchak about a possible overload of psychic activity in Manhattan’s electromagnetic grid that night? Well, probably not, beloved readers—it was the black sparkling glittery fuzzy Lurex stuff itself that was to blame. Evil fabric was at fault! Where were you, spandex, when we needed you most? Spandex had not been invented quite yet (although it was just around the corner, a few months later).9 Stretch satin and lamé were still in-the-future fashions. Oddly enough, in just a few months, spandex would soon appear in the marketplace and revolutionize clothing fashions forever. The old-fashioned sparkling fabric that we had found and bought locally for our show simply didn’t have any give and take, any push and pull. How un-sexy can ya get? Therefore, it had no basic rock-and-roll stretchability and simply wasn’t tough enough for any real rock-and-roll punishment. Believe me, five New York Dolls were plenty of rock-and-roll punishment. Stretch satin and stretch lamé would soon create a whole new approach to clothing. The all-that-glitters glamour of the past became instantly de rigueur with the advent of the brand-new stretch materials. That created a big demand, which was soon fulfilled by the fabric companies. Less than a year or so later, the Dolls met up with some friendly fashion designer friends, Amy and Ginny, who took us to their fancy uptown special designer fabric shop. There, they had just come out with stretch satin and stretch lamé in the latest new colors (purple, fuchsia, lime, red, pink, gold, silver, and green). Wow, it was all way beyond tres chic in 1972. The new materials that could handle extreme movement arrived just in time (but not that long) for farther-out fashions for the Dolls. “Safe as milk” in stretch fabrics, the band never had to dread or repeat that lower first chakra mighty arctic breeze wind-tunnel effect. Or the equally dastardly “I dreamt of being crotchless in Seattle sans my Maidenform bra” and the dreaded “public banana-peeling feeling”! It was almost as if we had created a demand for spandex to be invented. We really needed it—not spandex per se necessarily, but certainly its much more elegant offshoots of stretch satin and stretch lamé. Dear, this is haberdashery history. Let’s just say that the Dolls were young enough to not mind being a bit lewd and nude in public—but the authorities of the day wouldn’t trouser splitting have bought it. with diplomacy

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What a debut. What a show. What a close call. What a fabric. What a fabric disaster. Mere threads with the huge burden of holding everything imaginable together (such as the fate of our careers?). So let this be a lesson for everyone, kids. When choosing the proper and correct fabric for those oh-so-rarefied occasions (such as a date with Batman or the Tiny Avenger) one simply can’t go wrong with chartreuse stretch lamé, darling. Accept no low-sparkle, low-gloss vain imitations!

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Early in 1972, some of the New York Dolls moved into a nonresidential office space on Thirty-Second Street near Park Avenue. The sign on the business directory downstairs read “The Costume Factory.” It was a large fifth-floor walk-up loft space with high ceilings (max headroom) for commercial purposes. Billy Doll had decided that he wanted to live and make clothes there after leaving the beloved yet aging Hotel Ozone. His folks had sold that property to the owners of the church next door, who politely asked me to leave. That meant going from church to lurch. Initially Billy didn’t ask me to move to Manhattan with him, but I ended up there nevertheless when I could no longer afford to pay my half of the rent (sixty-five dollars) on my bathtub-in-kitchen dive on Second Street and First Avenue above a funky bar called Port of Call East, a place I had somehow managed to split with a roommate for a few months. The Costume Factory, however, was putting out less and less product after relocating to Manhattan. The importance of making clothes started to dwindle as our endless-party rock-and-roll lifestyle started to expand. It was a big novelty to be in that loft space in Manhattan, around the corner from Park Avenue and the all-night Belmore Cafeteria for zombie nightshift taxi drivers, playing in a rock-and-roll band that was gathering momentum. We were attracting all kinds of fans as we were playing everywhere in the New York metropolitan area. Most of our new fans, however, wanted to

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party and also stay the night with us—even couples. They could then impress their friends with tales of their “wild all-night party’’ with the Dolls. Maybe they thought that we were starting our own Swingers Anonymous after-hours club? Not a bad idea maybe, but we were hardly that enterprising. Planning didn’t have anything to do with our partying, which was strictly spontaneous. So just as we were getting popular, couples who hoped to swing with the Dolls were indeed some of our earliest hardcore fans. For a goof, one night after we had played a show, I went home with what I thought was a swinging couple. I remember getting into bed with both of them, but that’s about all (I was later informed that I passed out cold shortly thereafter). I woke up on the hard wooden floor all by myself the next morning suffering from a severely nasty hangover. So much for my “swinging” career. We were basically straight healthy randy young males looking for AC/DC babes just like our beloved “Andro Sisters” from Queens. In fact, I’m still waiting for those “rainy day women”—you know, the ones who come over on rainy days and silently make love to you until the rain goes away. We weren’t particularly interested in other guys who were also ready to swing. Just swingularly minded ready-to-strip-for-immediate-action babes, thanks. Of course everyone wants love, but how much of that kind of love (teenage lust) does one really need? The Dolls, as underdogs ourselves, had somehow automatically begun to inherit the latchkey kids’ generation. Kids from broken homes were looking for answers from people who they believed were their very own role models, spokesmen for and champions of the poor, abused, and downtrodden. Just when will the meek inherit the Earth already? Why not last Thursday? People were searching out real-life heroes and were ready to join up with us fringe outlaw misfits. Maybe we should have started a cult? Maybe it’s still not too late? Roll over, Reverend Moon, baby! Many evenings at our loft were merrily spent in rock-and-roll revelry with the main sources of noise being a record player (Big Brother had yet to replace twelve-inch discs without the public’s consent) and an old Gibson Melody Maker guitar. The guitar had been cleverly “released” by Billy and Syl (with a serialcostume factory flap number scam) from a music store known for having

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“hot” merchandise. Those, along with a little Fender champ amp that made a small racket, were our main noisemakers. Because we were living illegally in a nonresidential office building where all of the workers would leave the place at around five p.m. every day (when we Dolls would just be emerging from our vampire coffins), the building would become what I used to call a “ghosty”—a large empty space with nary a soul inside except for a bunch of guard dogs from a business on the first floor called K-9 Control. It stayed that way until eight the next morning when all the preprogrammed robotoid office workers returned to their jobs. We New York Dolls were not interested in the chain-gang nine-to-five set. That particular daytime lifestyle was just way too droll for us young nocturnal creatures. The Dolls’ nights revolved around our becoming permanent fixtures at a club on Seventeenth and Park Avenue, Micky Ruskin’s Max’s Kansas City. In the truest sense of the word, Max’s Kansas City was our home away from home, our very own hub of the universe. It was de rigueur for the Dolls (plus assorted guests) to get dressed to the teeth to show up at Max’s sometime after midnight and hang out until four a.m., when the club legally had to close. Then, if we were still able to remain conscious, we would often take the party to an all-night afterhours club that would start serving breakfast at six a.m. and remain open until ten a.m. But no matter where the evening’s festivities led, the jumping-off point was always Max’s. Like clockwork, all the New York good nuts came out ready to play at night too, including the Warhol Illuminati School with their proteges and cohorts. These rather illustrious self-appointed glitterari gemstones in their own splendiferous orbital auras, such as Ultra Violet, Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Viva Superstar, and Candy Darling, as well as our most beloved magical Eric Emerson, lead singer of the Magic Tramps (an exclusive Warholian nonrecording rock band), were but a few of the regulars who haunted Max’s infamously outrageous back room (actually the dining room toward the rear of the club). Each table at Max’s had a full bowl of chickpeas, and waiters kept them well stocked. These proved to be a very handy way of getting someone’s attention, and costume they were constantly being hurled at various people. Flying chickpea wars had been known to erupt on factory flap

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certain full moon evenings. You might also see a nude Eric Emerson whose body was painted gold hanging from the chandelier or having sex in the phone-booth kiosk with a Max’s waitress. It was politically correct during those times to become a selfappointed star if one so desired. You could reinvent a grander and more spectacular version of yourself, if you had the imagination and nuts to come up with one. You could then re-dub yourself with a flamboyantly outrageous new moniker. Self re-creation as artistic self-fulfillment? All hippies had alias nicknames such as Quiet Fire or Starshine. Just where are you today, Silva Thin (always seen with a pack of Silver Thin cigarettes)? So why not future entertainers as well? Dreams of grandeur were free for all. At some point after we had moved to Manhattan, all of us had come to the same conclusion: that life for us otherworldly Dolls would be a lot simpler if we didn’t have to venture into the harsh and violent daylight world of the nine-to-five set. We knew what it was like to be treated as misunderstood aliens from another world. During daytime regular business hours, frightened torch-bearing villagers would laugh at, fear, chase, and attack us, based entirely on our nonconformist appearances. Human beings opting to become nocturnal for the sake of artistic selfexpression? You bet yer booties! Long lashes cast tall shadows in the big-city night. At that time, the Edgar Winter Group was pretty popular. But like everyone else in show business they borrowed other people’s good ideas for their own purposes. We Dolls were a brand-new sparkling band with lots of (unprotected) great ideas ripe for the taking. I believe that’s why the New York Dolls as a creation had to be immediately dismantled by our peers—we had way too many good ideas for just one band. We were unaware at the time that we were entering a business already populated by artists who had long ago run out of great ideas. So the Edgar Winter Group decided to cash in on our visuals by putting out an album called They Only Come Out at Night with a huge color photo poster of Edgar Winter in drag. For them, this was a promotional device, just a total marketing strategy put-on. However, for us, the “they only come out at night” lifestyle was our costume basic survival tactic. Those guys in the Edgar Winter factory flap Group all lounged around the fireplace of their par-

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ents’ Connecticut mansions. While we were living it for real in the streets, these posh boys were making money writing about us and lifting our good ideas, paving the way for such bands as KISS. After all, they were the stars with the record deals and careers that needed to be kept afloat by hook or crook. The ultimate insult, though, was the release of a really lame keyboard instrumental jam (none of the EWG’s songs had any lyrics) that must have been lying around the house for years waiting to be retitled before radio release as “Frankenstein.”10 Why bother to make a record when you have nothing to say? That title was the name of a brand-new (unpublished) New York Dolls song with original subject matter. But our song had lyrics predicting a Frankensteinian youth music movement that was still to come (such as punk, new wave, rap, goth, and alternative music). Well, that Edgar Winter Group album jacket (with mega-macho Edgar himself in makeup and jewelry) is still a scream to behold today. We New York Dolls didn’t think that it was very funny at the time, though. The world is now familiar with EWG’s multiplatinum nonthreatening monster radio/jukebox smash hit song, “Frankenstein”. But nobody knows anything about our song or why our version says “Frankenstein—Orig.” on the record label. And where were our great “managers” while this blatant thievery was going on? Out collecting coins with blind man’s glasses and tin cup in the street? No, they had probably made a deal with the Edgar Winter Group saying that it was OK for them to steal anything they’d like from the Dolls—as long as they were compensated in return. One evening, everyone in our little core family of friends and lovers decided that they had things to take care of before heading out for our usual midnight romp. We agreed to meet up again after midnight at Max’s as usual. It was starting to get kind of cold outside at that time of the year, maybe October, and it looked like we might be having our first ever snowstorm of the season that night.11 And so, right around eight p.m., I found myself alone in the Costume Factory in a empty building, dressed only in a one-piece red leotard. I decided that if I were going to go out later, now would be a good time to take some of that Christmas acid that was gathering dust lying about. We had costume these red dome tabs that were perfect for remaining pleasantly buzzed-up all night long if you were careful factory flap

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not to take too much at once. A whole tab of the stuff was enough for a heavy-duty thirty-six-hour super-cathartic melting-your-mind soulsearching gut-wrenching reborn-again-and-again quasireligious experience that was way too much for most people (and very taxing on the body’s resources). At lower doses, though, it was a great super-aware multibuzz. So I bit off a quarter tab (enough for about a twelve-hour buzz), like I used to do almost every night before I went out, so that I could be up all night for the continuing “endless party” and washed it down with the remains of a small bottle of Rock and Rye whiskey (yes, the kind with the fruit at the bottom of the bottle). It was only meant to fuel a visually colorful body high for a spacey, sexy, trailing, tripping nighttime fun of hanging out with friends and fans. As I passed the window, I noticed that it had started to snow. I then wondered if the weather really mattered to our hard-core friends, who would show up loyally under all circumstances. I often noticed a phenomenon in Manhattan on certain evenings in rainy or bad weather. When you’d least expect to have some fun, suddenly a dark and dismal fog would lift and give way to light, and you’d enjoy yourself bigtime with great music and food and all your friends. The darkness just seemed to go away and the brightness returned. It was what I call Manhattan Serendipity or New York Magic. Back at the Costume Factory, I felt the urge to take a leak. I had to push hard to open the heavy steel door in order to get into the hallway where the bathroom was. (There was no bathroom inside the loft; we had no running water except in the hallway bathroom.) After relieving myself, I started back into the hallway to get inside the warm and safe loft when absolute terror struck. In my absinthe-mindedness, I had forgotten to take the keys with me. I had irrevocably locked myself out of the Costume Factory till whenever. This huge error meant that I was now stranded in the hallway of a commercial office space like a “Naked Civil Servant.” I was just another retard in a leotard (good one, Killer!). Thank goodness that the family jewels weren’t on display. Have Mercy! I was still in a state of shock at my own stupidity when I began to understand the true meaning of this dilemma. I tried not to panic and convinced myself that there was still plenty costume of time to find some viable solution to my problem factory flap before the preprogrammed robotoid regulars would

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begin to show up for work again at eight a.m. I hoped that I wouldn’t still be locked out in the hallway prancing and dancing in a red leotard. No one was supposed to be living in that commercial space. I now had no clothes nor shoes, no money nor keys, no telephone nor radio, no food nor drink, no American Express card, and no ohso-convenient wireless cell phone. My sole possession was the leotard that I was wearing. All I had to work with were mind and body, either brainpower or brute force. I could identify with a movie directed by and starring Cornel Wilde called The Naked Prey. At that moment, I felt very close to the central character, a “great white hunter” who had been stripped of his clothing and weapons before being released into the savage jungle only to be hunted down by some irate African tribesmen. The hunter had suddenly become the hunted, and survival had become a whole new ball game. As far as I’m concerned, we were both naked in the jungle (mine being an uncaring concrete jungle), with mind and body being our only survival tools. I then began to wonder if perhaps my ESP was strong enough to send out an SOS signal into the cosmos. Maybe the scientists (wasting innocent taxpayers’ money) at Project SETI could reply to my vibration via the Marconi (as explained in the Pythagorean Monochord Creation of the Universe). I was forced to imagine a worst-case scenario. That would entail me, still walking around half-naked (and thereby blowing our cover), and shocked returning office workers calling the police to report the incoherent and scantily clad man on drugs running amok unchecked in their office building. Worse yet, someone could unleash the fury of the K-9 Control dogs (big vicious Dobermans) to destroy the unwanted infidel intruder. How was I ever going to get back into the Costume Factory? Should I attempt to hail a taxi in a snowstorm, half-naked and with no visible pants or jacket pockets for money, and convince a jaded New York cabbie to take me over to Max’s, where I might possibly get some real help? Sure, maybe on a friendlier planet in a galaxy far, far away! But not in cosmopolitan Manhattan, 1972. My imagination started to run wild with silly theoretical possibilities, but most of them bordered on impractical science fiction–like metaphysical solutions. Then I wondered if any of the other Dolls might be costume coming back to the Costume Factory that night before they went out later to Max’s Kansas City. And would factory flap

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they be returning here after Max’s? Were unknown rescuers on the way? I could only sit and collect my thoughts and guess. I wished that I could spiritually precipitate the keys out of the ether like Indian master Sai Baba (who was known for being able to draw forth from thin air genuine flawless gemstones). What if I could psychically will the keys (a la Uri Geller) to appear in my hands despite contradictions to the laws of physics? And heaven forbid I was to foolishly overlook the potential ramifications of the direct application of the Mendelian Laws of Botany! Maybe I could be saved by some unemployed malevolent outerspace plants (like in Night of the Triffids)! Just what was I supposed do to resolve my present precarious state of silent exile on Thirty-Second Street? Should I have been meditating for Interdimensional Peace between the Galactic Federation and the Alliance of Anchara in my spare time? Having correctly concluded that trying to hail a cab the way I was dressed (or, more correctly, undressed) was not that great an idea, I reserved it as a desperate last resort. It would probably lead to a Daily News front-page-photo article about how “Frosty the Nudist from Queens Survives Antarctic Snowstorm Conditions—Only to Live to Regret It All!” Then I thought about trying to re-enter the Costume Factory through one of the front windows, maybe from the roof (like Douglas Fairbanks in one of his swashbuckling movies). Oh really? And just where was my stuntman body double when I needed him most? My mind decided that it was time to stop thinking and start motivating my seminumb body into doing some investigating. I wanted to take a look and at least try to figure out what options I might have. And so my red leotard and I headed to the rear of the building to see if I could open the window that led to the fire escape. I was thrilled to be able to but was shocked to see that it was snowing like crazy, huge snowflakes that turned to slush on the ground. I’d have to climb up a slush-laden metal ladder in a snowstorm to find out what was on the roof before engaging in any rope-swinging derring-do rescue feats worthy of the Three Musketeers. I had convinced myself that I was ready to go where no schmuck in a red leotard in his right mind would dare go—up, up to the roof in a slushy mushy snowstorm. costume I wasn’t feeling the cold at all, but paid it no mind. factory flap That is, until I got up to the top of the metal ladder

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to look over the roof and mistakenly glanced downward to the street below. I remember thinking, Whoa Nellie, this is a really spacey view of Thirty-Second Street. Was I that far above it? And since when had I become a victim of extreme vertigo? Why did everything way down on street level look so concretely deadly? Double Whoa Nellie! Then it dawned on me—the Christmas acid I had taken an hour or so earlier was now starting to kick in and take effect in no uncertain terms. No wonder I was seeing such thrill-packed visuals everywhere I looked! What was once merely in 3-D was now being shown in 4-D and 5-D. I was also receiving supersonic audio stereo surround-sound effects galore! I was becoming a very, very buzzy boy! I decided that I’d better get up and onto the roof as soon as I could, because the metal ladder that I was presently hanging onto didn’t feel very safe to my wet bare feet. Getting onto the roof was a mental and physical relief, and I was able to sit down for a few moments and collect myself. At the same time though, my trip was coming on hot and heavy. And although it was still snowing and the temperature outside must have been around freezing, I wasn’t cold. Au contraire, I was warm and toasty. While my personality was becoming fully realized (and my journey yet blossoming), I was also regaining my superhero superpowers (much like Samson letting his hair grow). I would soon become as indestructible as Superman, Aquaman, and Green Lantern combined (or so the drug would have me believe). Surveying the rooftop landscape, I saw that the entire roof was covered in a three-inch-deep blanket of cold wet slush. I was crestfallen however to find a bunch of pyramid-shaped skylights about four feet high blocking my direct path to the roof edge. I did manage to slosh around past them and actually got to look over the edge—but only by lying down so that I wouldn’t fall over. I was now perched six stories above the rock-hard concrete sidewalk, and saw that trying to get back into the loft from that precarious place was a task only for a heavily pre-sedated (or brainwashed) kamikaze tightropewalking daredevil-type personality, not for a young bass player accidentally locked out of a loft in the snow, clad only in a leotard while tripping his brains out. Even if I had had the correct costume gear (mountain-climbing or window-washer equipment), swinging on a rope secured on the roof to try factory flap

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and crash through the window of the building below could only later be viewed as a blatant suicide attempt. My idea was all wet, much like me. So I cautiously crawled to the fire ladder and climbed down to the fire escape and back into the building through the window from whence I had come. Whew! Back inside the hallway, I could at least rest for a bit from my newly discovered case of vertigo. However, I was now tripping away and was getting way too stoned and hallucinating too much to do anything but sit down to calm and collect myself about what to do next. So I sat in front of the Costume Factory’s steel door, soaking wet, to ponder my fate, grateful to the Lord that I at least was able to re-enter the haven of the building and get out of the way of Mother Nature’s raw elements. After regaining my composure somewhat, I thought that I should take a good look at what was around to see if there was anything in the hallway that might possibly help me to get back to the warmth and safety of our loft. Just then, I spotted something that might help, and thought, Eureka! In the hallway was a complete old-fashioned fire hose with foot-long heavy brass nozzle—a possible golden treasure! I wondered if I could use it to bash my way back in through the lock, bruteforce caveman style? Would I have the strength and perseverance? I definitely had the motivation. Dare I vandalize the Costume Factory door so unmercifully? What about the noisy racket I might create? And if someone were to unleash the K-9 Control dogs, I’d be instant dog chow. That was not an encounter I was ready to deal with while tripping. Well, I thought, is it gonna be nonstop nozzlemania or what? Since then I’ve been fortunate enough to catch up with a real sci-fi clinker from the swinging sixties called 4D Man. In it, Robert Lansing plays a scientist who has solved the walking-through-walls-intact problem and is able to reintegrate his body’s molecules at will almost anywhere (with evil consequences, of course). The 4D Man would definitely have no problem passing his hand through a two-inch-thick steel-reinforced security door. I had a much more daunting task before me—with or without the help of enhanced superhuman powers. Oh well, I sighed as I unscrewed the fire nozzle from the hose and began bashing away at the metal lock with grim determination. costume The acid that I was tripping on must have been cut factory flap with a high dose of speed, as I initially had plenty of

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energy with which to vigorously attack my problem. However, I did have to stop every so often when I ran out of breath, before continuing my brutal assault, which was extremely hard physical work. This savage use of force (not my style whatsoever) was truly an exhausting misuse of time and energy. It was also a very juvenile (as in reform school) pre– punk rock (not to mention pre–heavy metal) approach to the problem. Since in my state I couldn’t tell what time it was, it felt like I spent hours and hours and hours hammering away but making little real progress at breaking on through. Once I noticed the creeping dawn coming through the window, I determined to redouble my efforts, knowing that the sands of time were rapidly running out for me and my (de) construction project. Then, at what I psychically reckoned to be very nearly eight a.m., I succeeded! I had finally broken through the heavy metal door and was able to get my hand inside and release the lock. Oh, happy day! I immediately got on my knees to gratefully thank the Lord for allowing me the divine privilege of being back inside the warmth and sanctuary of the loft, and especially for my not being discovered by angry office people. Completely exhausted physically, mentally, and spiritually, I soon fell deep asleep like a happy vampire returning to his coffin of native soil before dawn to avert the sun’s destructive rays. It was crash city and back into the arms of Morpheus for the rest of the day. After a good solid ten or more hours of heavy-duty construction-site-type labor, I was way beyond just being tired. As it turned out, none of the New York Dolls nor any of our many friends and acquaintances ever stopped by the Costume Factory that night. No one even came back to sleep there! They all must have been partying like crazy at Max’s over on Seventeenth Street and had decided to spend the night elsewhere. The Dolls were shortly thrown out of our loft by the authorities for camping out in nonresidential office space—and it was little (not so innocent) me who was directly to blame. Oh well! I did feel bad for a few years and rued the day that I was such a supreme screw-up and ultimately responsible for putting an end to the merry fun we once had in our beloved Thirty-Second Street Costume Factory. Then again, maybe it was just a natural end to that particular chapter of costume the continuing adventure of the New York Dolls.

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Sometime after the New York Dolls had been tossed out of our ThirtySecond Street Costume Factory, John and his paramour Janis had managed to get an even larger loft space below Houston Street downtown. This was years before the yuppification of lower Manhattan had begun. Everything below Houston Street was pretty much the same—large commercial loft spaces that became drug-commerce streets after dark. Most places were rented out to people in the manufacturing business. This part of town was basically off-limits to tourists, who would have no reason to be there in the first place. It had yet to be turned into Urban Disneyland for rich little snobs whose parents footed the bill while they slummed it in order to pretend to be hip. We Dolls, however, came before all the oh-so-trendy restaurants or tres chic SoHo art galleries were built to amuse the young and the restless. The loft was on the corner of Chrystie and Grand Streets,12 across from an old-fashioned police station reminiscent of the Barney Miller TV show. It was a municipal-style building with lovely khaki green walls and breathtakingly panoramic views of the windowless sooty brick wall next door. I think it was very close to one of Nicola Tesla’s (very electrical) inspirational old haunts somewhere on Chrystie Street. In pre-SoHo days we would often go to great parties at real artist’s lofts where it would be anything goes as far as dress and behavior went. Hey, Mr. Jimmy Clothespins (no clothing—just clothespins on his nipples) or Mr. Pop Top (wearing a caftan, vest, and hat made from

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silver soda-can pop-tops), where are you nuts now that planet Earth’s low morale could use some nonsensical cheering up? Well, the kids back then certainly didn’t need any instructional DVDs on how to get down and get with it, darling! Many artists would throw what were called rent parties in order to defray the high cost of living in and/or sharing one of these large and roomy spaces. Sometimes the New York Dolls would play these loft parties if we were each promised a bottle of something to drink. Talk about cheap live entertainment! On several occasions, we’d take a rocket-refueling break and continue playing and drinking until we all eventually fell over. We would wake up in a collapsed body pile not unlike many tribes that sleep in a heap. One of the features I liked best about those old lofts was the fire escape, which on certain buildings was located on the front and could be lowered down to street level to act as a bridge between the partygoers upstairs and those partying below. People could walk up or down the fire-escape bridge rather than having to use the traditional hallway stairs. How droll! The old fire escapes created an atmosphere reminiscent of a quainter and more civilized age in Old New York (in theory, anyway). The first time I saw the new Chrystie Street loft, my mind was completely blown. It was large enough for a big old Cadillac to make a U-turn in! Then I saw this huge graceful silk parachute hanging from the fifty-foot ceiling in the center of the room and wondered, What in the world is this desert fantasy tent/abode doing here? It was still pretty early in the day and I was half asleep, but I was in shock as to how anyone could have possibly moved into the place so fast and already be living there. Then, out of the flowing silk tent’s inner sanctum, waltz John and Janis. Of course, they wouldn’t be caught dead in normal sleep attire. Instead, they were both wearing tremendously colorful ornate Chinese forbidden-stitch silk pajamas and kimonos, looking every bit like Nick and Nora Charles in Return of the Thin Man. Pretty classy for a downtown loft space. Was romantic fantasy fashion boldly daring to enter the daylight consciousness of our mundane everyday lives? And why not? There was nothing mundane about the New York Dolls! Well, I wasn’t sure if I should simply say hi to my friends or if I should bow down in awe in the presence of Johnny Thunder’s version chaos on of the High Lama of the Shangri-La Monastery. I guess I chrystie should have expected nothing less than the unexpected

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from a couple who were already Manhattan fashion icons. Their future was now, and they somehow lived in the eternal present—very Zenlike! Having just gotten out of art school myself, I thought they were the perfect couple from another world. In one of the corners of the loft were all our amps, drums, and equipment for rehearsing. We used to practice late at night—sometimes all night, jamming away till we were too tired to stay awake. Long practices were a must. I used to sleep on the kitchen countertop, and although it was a hard place to sleep, I was young and immortal and thus didn’t care. One afternoon, Syl and I showed up at the Chrystie Street loft after sound check at the Mercer Arts Center in the big room called the Kitchen. We had hoped to rip the roof off the old building in a noholds-barred sonic assault. We wanted to create some real rock-androll excitement for future fans. As I started walking up the stairs to the loft, I could see Sylvain turning around and coming back down after a brief word with someone who answered the door. I said, “Hey, what’s up?” Then Syl gestured to me that we should go downstairs and outside before telling me what he had just seen and heard. When we got downstairs, Syl said, “I knocked on the door and this nasty looking gangster-type creep with a gun sticking out of his pants answers and says, ‘What do you want?’” Syl said that at this point he noticed Janis standing in the background, and that she hadn’t been prepared for armed intruders either. He said that she looked a bit overwhelmed and helpless standing next to a second gangster who was also brandishing a gun. Syl must have thought quickly and said something to the guy who opened the door, like, “Sorry, wrong address!” before he turned around and we both bounded back downstairs. Syl then said, “Those guys must be criminals looking for drugs or money.” (Which reminds me of the time when a couple of us Dolls had found both John and Janis naked and tied with ropes to a bedspring after they had been robbed in their Tenth Street apartment. Occupational hazards? Oh, yeah!) Well, at that point we both began to worry about Janis’s welfare. She was alone inside the loft in broad daylight with a couchaos on ple of gun-toting characters right out of a Mickey Spillane pulp-fiction pocket novel. chrystie

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Syl then said to me, “Hey, there’s a telephone booth. I’m gonna call the cops over at the precinct to see what they know about these strange guys with guns in our loft holding Johnny’s girlfriend hostage.” Well, after a few minutes of red tape over the phone in an old-style red kiosk phone booth, the police explained that it was they who had sent some plainclothes detectives to the loft. They said that the loft had been targeted as the site of a major drug bust. Whoa! As soon as Syl hung up the phone, ironically enough, we both saw a fuzz-mobile passing by within inches of where we were standing. And who do we see in the backseat of the squad car, handcuffed? Our pal Ozzie, Johnny’s business partner. Oh no! He too looked rather anxious while being driven over to the Tombs (an old Manhattan prison on the West Side) for questioning. Syl and I soon realized that it was poor Ozzie who had been busted in the “major drug bust.” But where was Johnny? No one knew. Was he somewhere back in Queens? Or was he at the Chelsea Hotel? Was that the beginning and end of the “big bust,” or was our own Johnny Thunders Doll on his way to the Tombs too? Maybe he was there already, facing police interrogation and whatever unimaginable fate? No one knew, but Sylvain and I agreed that it was definitely time to stop calling the fuzz on the police. How would any of this affect the Dolls’ show at the Mercer Arts Center later that evening? How could a New York Doll show go on without Johnny Thunders, the sound and fury of our music? It was only our second gig at the Mercer Arts Center. Since Ozzie had gotten popped with or without Johnny only hours before the show, there wasn’t time to even think about trying to replace the irreplaceable Mr. Thunders. That afternoon, word went out on the street that the Dolls had been busted. But who were the New York Dolls and why did they get busted? There were only rumors, which made for great organic underground word-of-mouth promo. Mystery lent an air of concern for the future well-being of our new local rock-and-roll heroes. This was during an age when pigs-versus-hippies confrontations were fairly commonplace, especially right around the corner in Washington Square Park, where the police tactical force on scooters was always busy clashing with hippie protesters. News of our “big bust” and that the Dolls’ chaos on big show later that night might be in peril must have chrystie whizzed through the city’s youth all over town through-

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out the afternoon. Kids must have wondered what all the fuss was about and if the Dolls were going to appear at all. Was the American-dream freedom of artistic self-expression now in peril? Would rock and roll prevail or was it gonna be both the beginning and end of the Dolls’ future? It turned out to be the best and most exciting type of publicity we could ever have imagined—and free of charge. Normally, we Dolls would select a meeting place at someone’s apartment somewhere before a show. There, we would put the finishing touches on how we all looked when completely dressed and standing next to each other. We relied on each other’s opinions to refine our individual looks and our total presentation. Our approach had much more to do with a costumed stage play than a dirty hippie long-haired rock-and-roll band. But no one told anyone what to do or not to do. We were concerned about our beautifully, outrageously over-the-top visuals. Getting all spruced up together was always a fun and very natural activity. We used to compete with each other for newer and wilder looks, which in turn inspired us to greater heights. Look sharp, feel sharp was another unspoken law we all subscribed to and understood well. As the only New Yorkers who dared to go that far out on a limb (except possibly for Shirley MacLaine), and with our own twists on the cutting-edge of fashions of the day, we felt that we were pioneering new ideas of dress for men everywhere and anywhere. Well, as far as getting together to clock our wares that evening, due to the chaos of the day I can’t remember where or if we did. I do remember that we all managed to arrive at Mercer Street on time to play—even the MIA Johnny Thunders magically appeared out of the ether. The troubles of the unmerciful day were about to give way to a nighttime Manhattan magic music party. It was the New York Dolls’ first-ever barrier-smashing breakthrough. The audience’s response to this show was what got us our “permanent slot” gig every Tuesday night in the infamous Oscar Wilde Room (for seventeen weeks). That’s where we, as real-life living Dolls, became available for all fans in a place where they could actually meet their heroes in the flesh if they so desired. The New York Dolls became a band of the people that evening. We were all very accessible real human beings that you chaos on could talk to (and/or flirt with), not golden idols living in cellophane display cases. chrystie

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Every so often (and you can ask any musician or performer about this), all the critical elements converge. You find yourself playing a part in a spiritually uplifting cathartic breakthrough that may surprise you as well as your fans. It was one of those rare experiences of serendipity that can happen on certain Manhattan nights, a sparkling magical evening of connection between band and audience. We struck gold with local New York City kids as present and future fans. We also found out that we could keep people dancing as long as we liked by playing one of our newer songs called “Endless Party” (the only Dolls song we never recorded) for twenty minutes. We didn’t know any of that before. Nor did we know anything else about ourselves as an entertainment entity or how people might react to us. For the Dolls, as a brand-new band, with brand-new unknown song material, to see people getting up and dancing to our music was the ultimate tickle. It sent us into waves of giddiness and laughter mixed with tears of joy while we were playing! It all had to do with the acceptance we were feeling from the crowd right then and there. (We also learned that tears create a streaking mascara mess that can become a real cosmetic nightmare!) The highly danceable “Endless Party” didn’t really have an ending yet, so it was the perfectly noisy sloppy street-savvy rough-and-tough rock-and-roll last encore song of the evening. We had the crowd up, dancing, and moving around. It was a transcendental evening for both the Dolls and fans. We each learned something. The fans learned that we could play solid rock and roll and weren’t pussyfootin’ around. We found out that if a band can connect with and inspire the audience, there is a tremendous invisible power-surge of energy exchange going on. When people who are like you agree with you, dance along to you—well, that’s the greatest acknowledgment of appreciation that any musician could get. It was on this night that the Dolls realized just how powerful our simple straightforward rock and roll could be. It was the first time we felt the push and pull with the kids as we were still exploring our own musical material and how the various songs motivated the audience differently. Learning to play in public and building a relationship with fans came very naturally to the Dolls. Like the clothes we chaos on wore, the music we played suited us and was a part of us. chrystie Feeling waves of love from the crowd put us Dolls in total

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ecstasy, and made us thrilled to be alive and grateful for the chance to entertain the crowd by giving them an excuse to dance. They had given us a reason to exist! This was a brand-new experience for us novice players. Don’t you feel great when someone you care about finally shows you how much they love you? Well, we Dolls quickly learned about the live rock-and-roll energy equation. The band plays, the fans respond with delight, the band becomes inspired to reach greater musical heights, the fans respond again, and so forth. Much like sex, live interaction with the audience could be both fun and cathartic. We were in miraculous musical form that evening and could do no wrong. And to our fans as well as ourselves, one thing had become obvious—that the New York Dolls’ gift to New York City had arrived, and nothing would ever be the quite the same. I am reminded of an old clinker science-fiction movie that I still love (mostly for the spooky Bernard Hermann-ish piano soundtrack) entitled The Colossus of New York, about a large robot-monster that contains the brain of a deadbut-once-genius scientist who turns evil and runs amok in Manhattan. The mighty Colossus has to struggle between his good and evil self. Unfortunately, his evil side wins out and he runs amok. Prophetic similarities between the New York Dolls and the Colossus of New York abound. Later that evening, a few of us ended up at our singer’s apartment just in time for early morning cartoons. And although we had played and had been paid plenty of money to go around, our singer (who had collected the money) gave me a big two bucks. After I had seen him with a winter coat full of stacks of loose bills! Did this mean that a liar, cheat, and thief already had his filthy paws on the Dolls’ money without so much as a democratic group vote on the issue? Were secret agendas already unfolding behind the scenes? Well, it was around five in the morning and I was watching an old Felix the Cat cartoon on TV in which Felix’s friend, Poindexter, is wearing a huge pair of black round clear eyeglasses. They just happened to be the exact same glasses that our singer had worn that night especially for our show (strictly as an experimental comedy effect, as he normally didn’t need glasses at all). Earlier that day, some of the chaos on Dolls had talked about whether having a stage alias was a good or bad thing. We decided it was a good thing, and chrystie

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we all agreed that a swingin’ stage name for a performer was a must. I got the nickname Killer Kane right off the bat when our first musical review raved on about “killer bass lines.” Biblical or not, Buck Roger’s evil enemy or not, it stuck anyway. Fans loved the name (though I had to make some adjustments in order to become a Killer Kane). My buddy Johnny had already dubbed himself Johnny Thunders (either from a Western comic book or an obscure Kinks song). He put his new name on his apartment address doorbell. Our other guitarist’s stage name was Sylvain Sylvain, a campy nod to the robotoid (and unfortunately brainwashed and unaware of his crimes) assassin of Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan. “You’re Sylvain” was not a Carly Simon hit song in 1972. So what about our anxiously under-monikered singer? David Napolitano was one of his own bad ideas for a stage name, but let’s face it, he just didn’t look very Italian. And so I yelled out to David, “Hey, there’s a cartoon character right here on TV wearing the very same round black glasses that you wore at our show tonight! His name is Poindexter. Maybe you should call yourself Ball-Buster Poindexter? What do you think?”13 He of course said nothing, but soon became interested enough to come over and watch some of the Felix the Cat cartoon for a while to see what Poindexter actually looked like. He was certainly a very busy guy, with a notebook filled with my lyrics. What would Bob Hope think? Wouldn’t the Biblical Moses heartily disapprove? How might Val Thor from Venus feel? What might the once aquatic inhabitants of Planet Iarga say? Betrayed from our first payday? Who knew? But, as his late wife Cyrinda Foxe would so often repeat in public places, “All of David Johansen’s brilliant words and ideas first came from Arthur Kane’s lips.” Amen, Cyrinda!

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My first experience at the world-famous Max’s Kansas City restaurant was on my twenty-first birthday, when some curious friends from college and I managed to survive the train trek over to Manhattan from high-camping around the Pratt Institute campus for an in-depth 3-D view of Andy Warhol’s superstars misbehaving in their native habitat. I also had wonderfully spent the previous evening at the Plaza Hotel with Rebecca, a thoughtful and imaginative lover who went to Pratt too. It was a pretty great twenty-first birthday all around—a celebration of being young and also becoming old enough to be of legal drinking age. Well, although we ordered and enjoyed dinner and drinks aplenty, our waitress so rarely appeared at our table we felt ignored, and then the place started to get really crowded for whatever reason. After a few more drinks, I began wondering what would happen if my pals and I were to just waltz away—would anyone care? And so all five of us nonchalantly got up, put on our coats, and strolled off into the night without so much as leaving any money on the table. Outside the restaurant, milling around, we were bemused and delighted as well as puzzled by Max’s seemingly loose policy of come-and-go-as-you-please-andeat-and-drink-all-you-want. We thought Max’s must somehow be the total antithesis of most restaurants, where the staff pay close attention to the customers and certainly notice if they get up and leave before paying their bill (at least in my past eat-and-run experiences). Maybe

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we simply weren’t famous enough and were just taking up space when they could instead be serving people who were more spectacularly costumed or famous or something. Then it finally dawned on us that we were just college-kid nobody wannabes. In contrast, our waitresses were the haughty and stuck-up Max’s underground “waitresses to the stars”—and if you weren’t Jim Morrison you simply didn’t exist. Max’s didn’t even need your money. Wow! For someone who spent a couple years of his life kind of studying a course called Food Science and Hotel Management, my experience at Max’s went completely against all that I had ever been taught about the restaurant business. The only luminaries that I knew by sight that evening were Viva Superstar and Candy Darling, who were certainly radical enough inspirational characters for anyone’s novice crash course in Warhol superstar identification. My friends and I also appreciated the “neorealistic” financial aspect, having rather meager funds set aside for such extravagant off-campus outings. That was back in February 1970. Two years went by. Then one day, with the newly completed Dolls lineup, including our new singer and guitarist, we went en masse to Max’s happy hour on a seriously hungover afternoon, totally famished. As usual, I woke up first and began assembling the urban street version of the Dolls, man by man, street by street, right up First Avenue in a line connecting the dots to where we all lived in different pads. I used to call it the First Avenue linear cattle round-up—urban pedestrian convenience at its finest. When whatever I had consumed the night before wore off, I would arise thirsty and I’d first go and wake up our singer on Sixth Street since he was closest (I was living on Second Street and First Avenue), but that could take a while depending on the amounts of drugs and alcohol on the previous evening’s nocturnal spree. Then together we’d go call on our lead guitarist Johnny on Tenth Street and he would come with us to call on our other guitarist Sylvain on Eleventh Street, and hopefully somewhere betwixt and between in our travels we would find our drummer Billy—very West Side Story. Within an hour or so, the urban-guerrilla five-man dogs-of-war street division of the Hungry Man Dolls were assembled, on the prowl and at large on the Manhattan max’s first cityscape. Duck and cover, everyone! We must have all happy hour been pretty flaked out that day because we weren’t even

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in the mood to play “King Creole” (our teenage hoodlum food shoplifting game of chance capers) in any of the local delicatessens we would haunt (like the ZING deli, whose neon letters on the storefront spelling APPETIZING were partially broken, dark, and unlit). A shill (usually me) had to buy something with real cash in order to properly pull off that stunt without the clerk, realizing he was outnumbered, calling the cops. And, as usual, we didn’t have a dime to our collective names. The Doll-Men weren’t pussyfootin’ around—it was time to chow down big time, and the prices were right, so our swashbuckling party of starving desperadoes made its way from the Lower East Side over to Park Avenue South at Twenty-Sixth Street for our first-ever collective visit as a group to the world famous Max’s Kansas City. We were always dressed in our rock-and-roll urban street gear in the daytime—stuff like strategically ripped blue jeans or hot-pants with ripped opaque pantyhose, lacey shirts, platform boots, little velvet bolero jackets, thirties Art Deco dresses cut down into medievalstyle tunics for men, Egyptian eye makeup, and motorcycle-gang S&M gear. From my Second Street apartment window, I would always see the late, great, beloved unisex playwright Jackie Curtis in torn granny dresses draped over blue jeans and motorcycle boots—a tribute outfit that was half James Dean and half unadulterated Joan Crawford. I always thought it was a great macho yet feminine statement that hit the nail on the androgynous head, the ultimate urban street-art fashion outfit. You had to create your own wardrobe if you wanted something different. Jackie and I had the nerve to try out various combinations of old and new threads to try to make it all look natural, brand-new, and cutting-edge. The Dolls felt that clothing was a legitimate art form, and American freedom gave us the right to wear anything that looked great, be it originally designated male or female. Anyway, how can a piece of cloth have a sexual identity? As Bela Lugosi so aptly put it in the 1931 H.G. Wells film Island of Lost Souls: “We are not men, not beasts, but things.” “Keep ’em guessing” was our philosophy. Live, in the flesh, and in your face—with or without guitars! Not spoiled suburban richkid idle poseurs who couldn’t get it together to dig a ditch if their lives depended on it. “Page the butler, darling, and pass the Grey Poupon.” We, on the other hand, were “dangerous max’s first when wet” and volatile when drinking, and could easily happy hour

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transform ourselves into the Force-Field Five from Hell upon the slightest provocation. I’d gloriously misspent my youth sniffing glue, smoking, drinking, and taking drugs in a teenage gang called The Continental Gents from Queens—a kind of mutual-self-protection society whose members used to hang out in front of Sol’s luncheonette on Union Turnpike. Now that I was getting older and bolder it was a pretty comfy and secure feeling to be a part of the team-effort rock-and-roll band that I knew to be in essence a professional musical extension of the Three Musketeers’ all-for-one-and-one-for-all teenage-gang mentality. As David Bowie so brilliantly said it on Ziggy Stardust, “I can fall asleep at night as a rock-and-roll star.” The Dolls—a spiritual/musical/ philosophical comfort zone? For this lonely planet boy, yes! Well, we all spent the time ravenously gorging on the chicken wings and chili (put out to make people thirsty and buy more drinks) and, at some point, started to get mighty thirsty, but opted for hot coffee instead of asking any of the waiters or waitresses for a free glass of boring water—too tacky! So we all helped ourselves to the big coffee pot as it was at least something to wash down all that salty, greasy food. We had a table and were happily amused, passing several hours consuming everything edible that wasn’t bolted down. Max’s daytime martini crowd was completely different from the night-stalker crew. These people were conservative business types who went to Max’s happy hour for drinks after work. We were pretty well behaved and weren’t picking fights with them or being overly obnoxious or loud, mainly because we had no money for drinks. However, we were dressed like no other males have ever dared to dress before or since, and were a bit too much of an eyeful from beyond for most daytime people. At some point it seemed that the old happy hour at Max’s was winding down as the last of the food was taken away, and it was time to think about trying to get to a rehearsal space where we might be able to jam for free. So we went back to the Lower East Side to relax for a bit before we would regroup for the evening’s adventure festivities. We went outside and started to march back to our pads, but when we got about two blocks away from the place, a frustrated waiter rushed up to us and said, “Hey, you guys forgot to pay for your max’s first coffees!” At this point, one of us explained to the poor, happy hour curious, huffing-and-puffing waiter who had chased

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us so fervently that we really were starving artists who had no money whatsoever—not even a penny for a tip. And then he said, “Hey, who are you guys, anyway?” To which we replied, “We’re the New York Dolls, New York’s newest and most outrageous rock-and-roll band of all time!” Then he said, “Oh, wow! Can I please have your autographs? Here’s some Max’s napkins you can write on.” We did as he requested and that was the first time we were all together, out in the streets, no less, without so much as a recording contract or any real signs of hope of anything, signing autographs! We had our first die-hard fan! Paying for the coffee had nothing to do with anything. The curious waiter became our first real rock-and-roll disciple. And so, my second time at Max’s was also free! Shapes of things to come? Definitely! We would later secure a record deal and actually have a New York Dolls’ food and drink tab going with the wonderful owner (and avantgarde media artist in his own right), the beloved Micky Ruskin. Micky and the Dolls got along famously—he liked our do-it-yourself stardom philosophy, and we loved his let’s-help-keep-the-creative-artists-alive philosophy. He let us raid the wine cellar all the time we played there, and also put up with us when we were misbehaving—without ever getting mad (he would laugh instead). He was a true modern saint to the starving artists floating around the scene because he fed them for free and provided a hangout, and we loved him and he loved the Dolls. (There were exceptions: Billy Doll was once banned from hanging out downstairs in the back room even when the Dolls were playing upstairs, and I too was once banned from the downstairs back room while we were performing upstairs, after a little altercation involving a plastic jean jacket that said “Property of the Shangri-Las” painted on the back in orange lipstick.) Micky Ruskin was the heart and soul of Max’s Kansas City, and the reason it was such a pivotally important venue for so many up-and-coming musical artists. He genuinely cared about the welfare of the people in that passing parade of nutty yet talented New Yorkers like ourselves—who lived as well as played there. His vision was the creation of a real-life artistic sanctuary for the commercially disenfranchised New York artist fringe-ites, the too-numerous Warhol wannabes, and lots and lots of lost souls searching for something. We love you Micky, wherever in heaven you max’s first may be! happy hour

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All of my financial and musical career woes to date—thirty years of humiliation, poverty, and obscurity—can be traced back to one dark day of evil in June 1972, when we signed our production/publishing/ management deal with Leber, Krebs, and Thau and threw away our careers forever. Johnny Thunders was only seventeen on that fateful date, and that fact alone made the whole contract illegal.14 But of course, that’s only part of why that evil contract was totally bogus. We first met Satanic henchman Empty Pockets “Mighty Thud” at an early Mercer Arts Center show in the infamous Oscar Wilde Room. He was with his wife Betty, who was semiattractive, but I was immediately repulsed by his fat, drooling pervert presence. I despised his retarded smarmy safari outfit and his oh-soclever line, “I don’t know if I’ve just seen New York’s best new band or New York’s worst new band.” I’m forever sorry that we ever gave him the time of day and that we didn’t just kick his ass in the parking lot. However, Betty’s peaceful female vibrations saved him. Billy and I should have jacked him outside, got his car keys, and crashed his car into a brick wall at the very least for even daring to speak to us like that. The evil bastard wrote the totally illegal contracts (sixty-four-plus years long) that we signed but which no living Doll’s eyes have seen in over thirty years! Lost forever in a warehouse somewhere in Queens, so we’ve been told. However, there are no regulatory authorities to complain to in the free-for-all Devil’s playground called the American music industry. How the U.S. government allows

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such an unlawful and unregulated industry to run totally amok ripping American artists off, Lord only knows—but it must have something to do with huge campaign donations to key insiders. In the New York Dolls’ case, our “managers” have been successfully perpetuating an ongoing illegal game of make-believe since ’72 by simply pretending “All is kosher.” This absurd and mean-spirited joke was perfectly executed by modern-age Vampire Society members with surplus stolen money from unknowing artists to spend on buying exemptions for themselves from the law against human fiscal slavery. At any rate, Mr. Empty-Pants knew someone who had the money to fund a rock-and-roll project. When we first met, Mr. Slave Labor’s office was in a secluded building on the West Side in the Twenties. I remember there being a lot of trees outside, and it was an extremely hip, posh place, away from the hustle and bustle of more commercial areas of Manhattan—a place where dreams might just get fulfilled. B.B. King lived down the hallway—how cool could one possibly get? As young rock and blues and R&B aficionados, we were impressed, to say the most about the least. We even got to meet B.B. a couple of times, and were awestruck. For the New York Dolls, such music luminaries were inspirational Earth Gods to admire and emulate. Leber-Krebs knew that we would be impressed by a legitimate older successful father-figure bluesman. It did indeed foster dreams of continued and ongoing success for an entire lifetime of music for us young upstarts, and made the young, impressionable Dolls feel secure and in trustworthy hands. What could possibly go awry if B.B. was right next door? However, it was just one facet of the grand illusion presented to the poor naive young men dreaming dreams of lifetime successful music careers with staying power. Financial security, worldwide fan adulation, record royalties for years and years to come, as well as music awards and celebrity, stardom, fame, film cameos, and universal love were supposed to follow. What a crock! “None of the above” was the correct question-box answer in the Dolls’ case. Very shortly after we had spent time at these restful and reassuring plush surroundings, getting accustomed to being around those comfortable, out-of-the-way digs—our managers moved. No more B.B. Ruse over. No more exotic secluded offices death contract encouraging youthful romantic dreams of interstellar

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acceptance and career longevity. No, they moved smack into the center of business commerce—to the center of the flea market, as it were. Seems that they weren’t philosophers or artists or patrons of the arts themselves, or even make-believe “hipsters” anymore. After we had been convinced that signing with them was our only safe career move, the facade was over and they showed us what they really were—reeking fishmongers! Mr. Moneypants’ dad owned several high-rise office buildings in Manhattan, so their new offices were crass and commercial and ugly but conveniently located right in the thick of the “altar of commerce” on the Upper East Side. This was the day I’ve personally regretted on a daily basis for over thirty years now. This was the day Judas Priest Capricorn David Johansen sold his friends into the slaughterhouse of eternal damnation in exchange for personal stardom at all cost. A real deal with the Devil, signed in the blood of the victims. For giving David Johansen a chance when neither Andy Warhol nor the Ridiculous Theatrical Company nor anyone else wanted him, this was the thanks. Three dead New York Dolls remain dead forever. Warner/Chapell Music (the company that has no qualms about using illegal forged signatures from deceased rock acts) refuses to acknowledge our gold/platinum records yet collects our money to pay our old managers since they oh-so-cleverly have phony music songwriting credits a la Dick Clark. And New York Dolls fans have had nothing to look forward to since Mercury Records proclaimed “New York Dolls are dead” with a double-LP release worldwide with that horrible black-and-white death-mask artwork in 1977.15 I however am not like my other Doll friends who have departed this mortal coil— I am still alive and well here on Earth. I am not the least bit interested in coffin shopping quite yet, and I don’t believe I will ever need a grave site. Yet Mercury pronounced the New York Dolls as deceased over twenty-five years ago. Maybe I’m only “dead” on paper. What paper? Phony forged documents no one has laid eyes on since 1972? Just when do these “contracts with Satan” end? I guess life on planet Earth will have to end first. Or I’ll have to wait until homophobic TV mogul Dick Clark dies. I hope the Mayan calendar is correct with the end of all life as we know it on December 23, 2012. death And where are the New York Dolls this afternoon, May 2003? Well, Mr. Johansen has found another clever contract

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ruse to continue performing with something called the Harry Smiths. Wrong Smith (not Joseph Smith—the right Smith!). Harry Smith was an American oddball collector/artist who was asked to put together a compilation of American rural music for historical purposes. This is the source of the blues material that the Harry Smiths play, although Harry Smith did not write blues songs himself; he just collected them. David Johansen had another seven-record album deal immediately after putting the Dolls name to rest in 1976. He was just here playing a low-key “popularity meter” show at the Getty Museum. I almost went, but they were charging money for a musical history lesson as an excuse to perform in public. He got here and played without incident. On the other hand, our lovable but disaster-bound Sylvain, who knows nothing about astrology, started a tour without a lead guitarist, practically when the dreaded time of “Mercury in retrograde” began a good three weeks of ongoing disasters. This is a time when there is very little forward movement in people’s lives and accidents and mishaps abound. Travel, electrical problems, and communications problems all arise, making it best to stay home and make plans about what to do when Mercury leaves retrograde and everyone’s life can start to move forward once again. But impulsive Sylvain didn’t know anything about heavenly stellar alignments, and the very first night that he played in Texas, his rented equipment van was stolen. Then there were problems with club managers, other acts, and getting paid. He and his two pals managed to get to Oklahoma City smack-dab in the middle of severe thunderstorm activity in the country’s Hurricane Alley, not to mention the two tornadoes that devastated the area. FEMA was called in because President George W. Bush declared the area a disaster. Syl said that hunger may have spared his life, since he and his friends pulled off the highway to get some food. Later, back on the road, he passed areas that had been devastated by tornadoes. Syl and his buddies were lucky to have gotten off the highway where they did, narrowly averting disaster. I sure hope that someone someday can explain to Syl that starting (and not wisely planning) a tour at the onset of Mercury in retrograde can only lead to disaster upon disaster.

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Lord only knows what became of our wonderfully huge loft space at Grand and Chrystie Streets. However, the pimps, prostitutes, and derelict drug addicts sleeping in the stairwell all hours of night and day had become too much like having the inhabitants of hell only inches away from your every move. These faceless homeless were the for-real subterranean mutant dwellers from the sewers crawling up to get ya. It was time to bid our fond farewells to our fun times on dear old Chrystie Street. At some point shortly after that, I found myself living with Johnny Thunders and girlfriend Janis. I was tagging along with them out of sheer survival instincts in a five-flight walk-up above a Kentucky Fried Chicken near the corner of Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue. Fourteenth Street was urban decay at its raw and live worst—grungy thirdworld shops, lots of bars with dirty neon signs, filthy movie theaters (such as Variety Photoplays), multiple crime scenes being enacted, and drug deals going on in every alley and doorway. And underground was an insanely huge and scary interconnecting subway station (big enough for roller-skating gangs to skate through). At street level were burnt out streetlights, dusty ugly bodegas, wandering drunks, homeless wrecks, and aging streetwalkers (that happily didn’t live in our hallway), plus drooling deranged dirty old perverts leering and lurking about. It was a typically depressing urban nightmare cityscape, nonstop dirt-and-trash-galore cesspool, and always a real urban scream—one of our town’s many examples of the pits.

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The first day we moved in, John and Janis went shopping and returned with a spider monkey in a cage from the local exotic pet shop. Thank heavens it wasn’t a Tasmanian devil. I was basically stun-gunned at the prospect of having an official wild creature from the jungle living in my midst without my written consent chiseled in stone. Jungle fever, anyone? Play misty for me, gorilla baby? And although he, she, or it was in a cage, it certainly wasn’t my idea of a loving pet, unless maybe you had some latent unfulfilled organ-grinder fantasies. John also had four Dobermans that the spider monkey might have to deal with at some point. Well, we soon found out that the spider monkey could easily get out of his cage and was perfectly capable of going through everything imaginable as well as unimaginable. It could wreak havoc in a small apartment in a very short time. A few days later, we all returned from a shopping trip to find that the cage was empty. Maybe the monkey had left for greener pastures? But where would you go if you were a spider monkey, especially after having been removed from your tropical jungle and set free in the concrete jungle? Anyway, it was gone without so much as a farewell piñata party or even a poorly scribbled suicide note. A bit later that same day, we got a phone call from an excited preteen boy who had found our missing primate friend. It seems that the monkey had climbed onto his fire escape in its travels, and the good kid was willing to return him to us intact and in good spirits. At that point, though, John (who secretly had a heart of gold) also understood that the kid (who was only about ten or so) very much loved the monkey who had so magically appeared and become his new friend. So John let him keep the monkey. John, too, was still a kid. And his generosity made some very happy changes in the young boy’s life. Anyway, the Dolls were way too busy for silly pet tricks at that point in our blossoming careers. We were now literally only three blocks away from party central (our favorite watering hole, the beloved Max’s Kansas City). When the Dolls played out, we always met up at someone’s apartment so we could then invade Max’s en masse. Shouts of “the Dolls are here” let everyone else know that the big par-tay had officially started. Our proximity to Max’s also attracted an unusual number (even for us) of younger female fans who felt free to use our living space fiasco fourteen to primp and preen and get ready for our show. Only there

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wasn’t room for any of us Dolls to get dressed—the place had become overrun. Oddly enough, this was already in the lyrics of one of our prophetic songs, “Personality Crisis”: With all the cards of fate that Mother Nature sends, Your mirror’s gettin’ jammed up with all your friends . . . All kinds of nutty people were attracted to the Dolls. We were freakmagnets for both good and bad nuts. And we also knew all the nutty people who were stomping around out in the streets, usually as semicasual acquaintances (local bag ladies and drunks, etc.). Nutty girlfriends, though, had to take the proverbial biscuit! One day a good friend’s not completely sane girlfriend (she purposely set fire to her and her husband’s loft after a Dolls show there one evening) with a mangy mutt came to visit. More than likely, she had found the dog wandering the streets somewhere. This lady went way out of her way to seriously annoy us Dolls, and was a real troublemaker (a moonlighting nonunion professional). She had decided to play Frisbee with her new dog friend on the roof—as if this were a normal dayto-day occurrence. I don’t remember answering the doorbell. But she must have somehow gotten buzzed into the building, as I briefly opened the door because of all the noise in the hallway. I saw her and her dog go bounding up the stairway. Had I been more awake, I probably would have said something like “Have you flipped or what? Please go away!” I’m sure I was nursing a nasty hangover (as usual), and was really not awake enough to care much what this daytime incursion into my sanity was all about anyway. Maybe I fell asleep for a little while, but I was soon re-awakened by one of the Dolls (probably Billy) looking out the front window (directly facing Fourteenth Street), shouting something like “Hey, there’s a crowd of people in front of our downstairs doorway! I wonder what’s goin’ on?” Well, my curiosity soon got me over to the window too, to see that a small crowd of spectators was gathering in front of our downstairs doorway while chanting, “Huzza, huzza,” near the buzzer. Just then, Miss Loose Cannon reappeared at our fiasco doorway hysterically crying and screaming, “That stupid dog dove off the roof trying to catch the Frisbee!” Well, fourteen

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duh! I’d like to believe that if being the pet of this crazy female was just too much to bear, then a dramatic public suicidal leap into the great unknown just may have been the long-sought-after existentially cathartic release he so desired. He will now and forever be known as Fido Frisbee, last of the don’t-bother-to-look-before-you-leap mutts. In his brave young vision quest, Fido dearest dared to know too much, too soon. At this point, we threw Miss Loose Cannon out of our pad, saying, “Please leave and never return.” When she got downstairs, she could then explain to the authorities just what her dead dog was doing on the front steps of a building where she didn’t even live. Then, there was the time that Amy and Ginny (our beloved clothing designer special friends) had come over to visit our place on a mission of revenge on another girl they had come to hate—Miss Connie, loosely of the GTO’s (Girls Together Outrageously).16 The GTO’s were a bunch of California groupies who got to make their own album in the late sixties (courtesy of Frank Zappa). Amy and Ginny showed up, came inside, and promptly poured a liquid chemical exfoliating agent over my friend Miss Connie’s head. They had hoped that she would immediately have to shave off all her hair as a result. As it dried it quickly began to solidify in her long blond hair. Unfortunately for Amy and Ginny, Miss Connie ran downstairs and found a graphic arts student who had lots of chemicals on hand. He (of course) had the correct chemical combination remedy and supplied the antidote; further calamity was averted. Connie appeared to triumph in this situation, probably because good people using evil tactics in desperate acts of revenge are generally unsuccessful. I personally prefer to leave crimes to criminals, and revenge to the Lord. Then there was that oddball day I silently watched Johnny getting dressed to go outside in the daytime for whatever reason. He walked around the apartment in various outfits for over an hour or so. John’s hobby was collecting unique clothes and outfits; the threads that he chose to wear that day, however, weren’t being used as spectacular rock-androll stage attire, but had a much more down-to-earth practical purpose. Ever so puzzled and amused, I watched my pal do fiasco something he was really an expert at—getting dressed fourteen to the teeth. I still hadn’t asked him where he was going

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or what this was all about and simply let the drama unfold. Finally, he happily settled on a samurai warrior outfit with black jacket and pants with white cross ties. Then, he put on a pair of the weirdest multicolor suede boots I had ever seen outside of the movie Genghis Khan. Were they samurai boots or Cossack boots, or were they on permanent loan from an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History? It was almost as exciting as reading “Puss in Boots” in Braille for the phonetically impaired. But I still did my very best to not say a word. Then Johnny put on an aqua-and-red forbidden-stitch golden Chinese robe over everything. Whoa! And over that, he put on this huge leather sheath/satchel thing. I’m still silently sitting there, watching and waiting. The crowning touch was this five-foot-long samurai sword complete with oversized scabbard and sash. I’m thinking, this guy must really have a heavy date or something! With whom, I wondered, but didn’t ask any silly questions yet. Then, with his outfit complete, he leashed up his four Dobermans. Where in the world could he possibly be going? Could he be meeting Alice Cooper’s girlfriend Cindy at the Russian Tea Room?17 Or was it brunch at the Botanical Gardens with Brigitte Bardot? Who could he be trying to impress with this highly exotic wardrobe this early in the afternoon? Well, after watching all this time without saying a peep, my curiosity was going nuts. So, just as John was finally walking out the door in his samurai warrior gear, Bushido blade and Dobermans intact, I could no longer silently keep my cool and finally had to blurt out, “Hey, Thunders, where ya goin’?” And he said, “I’ve got to go out and take care of a big cash pot deal. Only, it’s down on Avenue D. You know—no man’s land. That’s why I’m wearing my samurai warrior gear and taking the dogs too. I need all the protection I can possibly get today.” He then said, “Hey, Killer, if I’m not back within one hour, call Janis!” And I said, “Gotcha!” Luckily for all, John was back in a just under an hour. He was very happily relieved that all had gone well, and was satisfied that the spiritually protective garments had served him so well. Clothfiasco ing used for intimidation purposes? “Got any porcupine quills left in yer quiver, babe?” Very interesting indeed! fourteen

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Who ever said that watching people on TV is more exciting than watching people who are not on TV? Well, kids, that’s about all the wonderful and heartwarmingly American Norman Rockwell–painting-type memories I can muster up about life on lovely verdant Fourteenth Street. What? No urban folklore tales of overgrown monster alligators attacking subway victims while fighting over Kentucky Fried Chicken nugget portions? Hey, it was almost life in paradiso, Alfredo! Our crash pad was home to bold amateur productions such as Boudoir of the Obnoxiously Spoiled, The Space-and-Time Vortex of Lost/Found Pets Phenomena, and the gratis ever-popular adult extracurricular educational symposium lecture series on such contemporary themes as “Successful Samurai Sword Use in Modern Business Practices circa New York City 1972.”

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The way the New York Dolls looked and dressed and behaved set us apart from anyone in any crowd. We were always dressed outrageously and ready to play day or night. Like the Boy Scouts, our unspoken motto was “Be prepared.” However, full makeup and dress was reserved mostly for nocturnal outings or musical performances. Oddly enough, it was socially acceptable to be outrageous in those days, but only at night. You simply couldn’t be a megazoid freak from another dimension crash-landing headlong into the nine-to-five world. In the daylight, our strange attire (long hair, makeup, nail polish, hot pants, stockings, leathers, furs, feathers, and boots) made us prime targets for angry mobs. Just being a longhair on the subway in 1972 could be a life-threatening scenario, especially if you were alone. And though there was safety in numbers, having another set of eyes in the back of your head would have been extremely helpful. You had to be on guard at all times. I had something extra (where street theatre meets thespianism)—I knew how to effectively throw an epileptic seizure on the floor in front of a crowd of shocked gawking strangers. Even violence-mongers feared the possessed, and would naturally assume that you were demonically disturbed and leave you alone (to writhe and croak in agony, unaided on a subway platform). This bit of tourde-force acting was simply de rigueur for self-preservation in the Big Apple in those days. When you are physically outnumbered and there’s

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no other way to avoid being the victim of a senseless brutal gang beating on the very hard concrete street, this type of improvisational acting can be invaluable. In March ’72, before we had ever even heard about the Mercer Arts Center, we were just gaining some local popularity but were stone-cold broke. I considered it a lucky break to get something to eat every once in a blue moon. I was more interested in staying as stoned as possible and praying for pennies from heaven. I didn’t really have a place of my own to live and was just wandering from hither to yonder—I may have been crashing at my pal’s art gallery. Well, at some point someone in the Dolls got a phone call from an up-and-coming photographer/early avid fan/friend (with the steel balls to wear eye makeup in the daytime) who had an idea about an interesting locale for a photo shoot. He wanted to photograph the New York Dolls uptown at the New York Doll Museum (a museum of historic dolls). It sounded like a good idea for some free local publicity, so the Dolls agreed. (Oddly enough, it wasn’t very far from where my rich eccentric stock-market-genius uncle and his wife used to live. He froze to death on New Year’s Eve 1969 in his own apartment. Their rent was thirty-eight dollars a month and they lived there with no telephone, no radio, and no TV—just a cuckoo clock that would drive anyone nuts. He made plenty of money playing around with stocks and bonds down at Wall Street every day but wouldn’t spend a penny on himself for anything. Their lives were a testimony to their personal no-frills philosophy that “much less is that much more.” They were proudly thrilled to be prudent and thrifty and really didn’t need much of anything just to be happy. Modesty was their unspoken quest.) The New York Dolls were in motion and playing venues all over town, packing places through word-of-mouth on the street. Just prior to our visiting the doll museum, we had spent a rather psychedelic weekend, managing to interrupt our revelry long enough to squeeze in a few music shows at the newly reopened world-famous Electric Circus. Some of us who lived near there decided to not stay on Eighth Street that weekend because it was just too close to the gig (and therefore useless as a getaway retreat) and so ended up camping out indoors in the Flower District with some new york doll museum female fashion-designer friends. Whatever drug the

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Dolls had taken (taking drugs back then was a communal social pastime—the more the merrier) had a lingering effect. You would take it, be buzzed for so many hours, crash, wake up, and still be buzzing away for the next few days. It made your body clock lose track of real time and seemed to homogenize everything into one continuously spacey endless party tape-loop effect. I felt that I was blissfully soaring above the dark clouds of gravity that chain men’s minds to the mundane mud below, and that the Dolls were from the future history of our planet visiting on a mission of goodwill and cheer. I don’t remember much about that weekend except that our fashion designer girlfriends Amy and Ginny (friendly androgynous visitors from the ninth planet) let us borrow some of their one-of-a-kind wild personal clothing creations. Both of these beautiful young women were well over six feet tall and had designed special fantasy outfits for themselves (that luckily also fit me). I remember wearing a satin multicolor checkerboard storybook frock coat with a book of hand-sewn pages on the front and miniature toys dangling all over it. I also borrowed some red, white, and blue platform adult baby shoes and a cream-colored rubber flying saucer jacket (a Billy Meier Pleiadian Beamship Jacket of course—not to be confused with George Adamski’s Venusian Bellship footprint jumpsuit attire) that someone like Ziggy Stardust would have been thrilled to own. I’m not sure what the rest of the Dolls wore except that it was even a bit beyond the fringe of our normally over-the-top outrageous look. I’m sure we spent that Sunday evening after the Electric Circus gig was finally over resting and recuperating at Amy and Ginny’s TwentyEighth Street playpen. The appointment for our photo session at the New York Doll Museum was the very next afternoon and I was still lost in space. A taxiful of New York Dolls came by to pick up the rest of us that midday, and away we went to our merry destination in Harlem. We all felt safe enough together riding in a taxi that early afternoon, still wearing most of the wild clothes that we had borrowed all weekend, since they were truly far-out enough for a colorful photo session. (Once in a while the Dolls would all jump on the back of a truck for a quick lift uptown somewhere, a la the Dead End Kids. Somenew york times our free-the-people philosophical approach would work, and sometimes it wouldn’t. On our neo- doll Museum

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realistic budget—jeans pocket lint—though, anything gained was certainly worthy of an honest leap for the brass ring.) The museum itself, in weathered red brick, was tucked away in its own little cul-de-sac niche at One Hundred Twentieth Street. As we entered, we were greeted by some nondescript bookworm-type assistants (of undetermined gender) who worked there and politely showed us around. The place wasn’t very big at all, and the several rooms were filled with tall glass cases that held various little doll exhibits from the past. The exhibits were not all that spectacular, especially in comparison to the Museum of Modern Art or a liquid light show at the Fillmore East. The presentation sorely lacked any techno-glitter displays of the modern world. The museum had seen better days and was kind of a forgotten throwback to a pre-TV/film media age when people might have thought that going to see a quaint little doll exhibit was something exciting and wonderful (in 1820). In 1972, however, everyone wanted something electrifyingly new and earth-shattering. The New York Doll Museum was a really dull place to visit. It was frozen in time. Nothing living was going on. Being there simply wasn’t the high-voltage gutwrenching experience we were all craving back then. Our photographer friend then asked us to stand in front of one of the glass display cases and line up for a group photo with some of the little dolls in the background. However, after just one or two shots, it became apparent to him that there was just too much glaring light bouncing off the glass display cases to take any photos at all. That was it! Our trip to the museum had become a waste of time—as had our grand efforts to get there en masse—within the first five minutes of being there. A great idea had bombed. I am reminded of a line from Johnny Thunder’s “Chatterbox”: “All spruced up—I got nowhere to go.” So, disheartened but not despondent, we decided to leave the deadend place on that dead-end street in some dim forgotten past where it belonged—gathering dust, just like the old relics inside. We found one of the assistants and explained that although it seemed like a great idea, taking photographs at the museum was a visual impossibility because of glare from the glass cases. We thanked her for her trouble in accommodating us and asked for the use of a telephone to call new york for a taxi to take us back downtown. Just then, another doll museum female (?) assistant waltzed in and said, “The museum

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director would like very much to talk to you fellows about something of importance to the museum that involves your music group. Will you please follow me this way to his office?” Well, we all gave each other why-not shrugs, ambled into the hallway, and were led into a really beautiful antique wooden room with a huge magnificent wooden desk in the front and wooden chairs for just about half a dozen people. We were asked to sit down as the director would be with us shortly, and we did. All of us were still slightly bent-out-of-shape from the endless weekend’s excessive behavior and in various stages of drug and alcohol recuperation, with no idea of what to expect next. Taking pictures had only required our bodies, not our minds. Well, in a few minutes the director walked into the “classroom.” He was a very handsome man, extremely well dressed in a beautiful antique brown tweed suit, with a full head of dark wavy hair and hornrimmed glasses. He looked like he should have been our music manager (in a more perfect world)—he was very Brian Epstein, to say the least. As soon as he spoke, though, we realized that here was the ultimate raging closet queen—curator of the New York Doll Museum! And tucked way off the beaten track in a big doll’s “hidden closet” no less! In 1972, despite the original gay-pride cats who clashed with police at the ’69 Stonewall riots, this fellow was still in the closet—a large closet with a man-sized doll. In any event, without laughing in his face at the absurdity of it all, we Dolls started silently smirking over the fact that we all knew the museum director was a total flaming fruitcake. However, this also put him in that keep-them-guessing unmentionable gray area— just like the rest of us freaks. Fellow nut recognition, pure and simple. But the guardian of this historic antique doll collection seriously wanted to talk to us about something. And, despite the slightly humorous credibility gap, he did have our undivided attention. As a matter of fact, things were almost getting interesting for a moment. We kind of admired him a bit for whatever utter nonsense he must have had to go through to actually get his groovy job in the first place. He went on about how very important it was that the past be preserved and that the doll museum was a place that did that, and that the past is very important to people of the future so that they might better be new york able to see and understand just what life was really like in a time that no longer existed, and blah blah blah. doll Museum

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Wow. Shades of Rod Taylor in George Pal’s 1960 film H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. The now fruitier-than-thou director also said that the museum had some antique clothes that weren’t on display at that time but were equally important to their collection. Then he asked us if the New York Dolls always dressed the way we did, day and night. We collectively said, “Yeah.” He then asked us where on earth we had come across all the wild and weird clothes we were wearing at the moment. We explained to him that some of the stuff was from thrift shops, some from antique shops, some from women’s shoe stores, hardware shops, plastic stores, sporting-good stores, found in the trash, and just plain borrowed from far-out fashion-designer Amazonian girlfriends. In fact, some of the Dolls made their own clothes themselves anyway and were already in the rag trade. I personally was all for customizing my own threads with rhinestones, studs, batik dyes, glitter, glue, and needle and thread. Our second drummer, Jerry Nolan, was a tailor (one of his many skills) who could sew up an entire tuxedo (plus fancy vest) for himself, and did just that—only Jerry’s was in red, in an age when all men’s clothing was either brown, navy, tan, or gray. Black Levi’s jeans were still twenty years away from becoming available to the general public. Only Johnny Cash knew where to get black clothing in those pre-fashion-designer-label days! He must have “walked the line” over into Memphis for some thread shopping along with his buddy Elvis. We, however, had to dye things that were other dark shades in order to have anything black. In 1972, black (and white) wasn’t considered to be a color at all, but scientifically merely the absence of light. Then the museum director said to all of us, “I would like you fellows, the New York Dolls, to donate your clothing—perhaps even the very clothing that you’re wearing right now off your backs today—for a future New York Doll Museum exhibit about just what men were wearing on the streets of New York circa 1972. It won’t be going on display until one hundred years from now—in the year 2072. It’s tremendously important from a cultural standpoint. You young New York fellows will become an integral part and special-feature exhibit of the future history of the New York Doll Museum!” Well, how we managed to not burst out laughing new york in his face at that point at the silliness of it all, I have doll museum no idea! It was a real-life acting-lesson test. This was a

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truly tutti-frutti off-the-wall idea whose time would (definitely) never come. Besides, nobody else would dare to walk around in those days looking like us but us. It was too dangerous to your physical health. Like that new TV reality show that I enjoy from the safety of my living room, it was an urban version of Fear Factor (only without the media fame or cash prizes). We were in a small fashion-club clique of our own invention. No other men were wearing what we were wearing, except for late-night drag queens (or maybe if San Francisco’s Cockettes were visiting town). I started wondering if this wasn’t some Candid Camera TV stunt to goof on the New York Dolls (pretend nutty professor type asks attractive strangers to strip now and forever in the name of historic preservation). Would we let some soulless android robotic mannequins from the future rip off our present-day images to cash in on the future? A life-size exhibit of ourselves years after our own demises? What if I’m not all that thrilled about having an Arthur Killer Kane doll in my campy fab gear sexually available in the year 2072 for the museum director’s fantasy? I then thought, Hey, those clothes won’t still be in style by then (not that they ever were) anyway, so who cares? This wasn’t exactly the great honor of being asked to be immortalized in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. Just how, pray tell, I wondered, was this New York Doll 3-D diorama supposed to affect future generations of New Yorkers? Inspire nuclear mutants to create of an army of androgynous punk rock inflatable dolls that could only pretend to mate with their own mirror reflections? Who would be left to uphold the (cracked) mantle of civilization? You know, the one that must be upheld at all costs? Well, had this idea been presented to us Dolls late at night in a rock club after a show when we were really smashed we might really have bought it. The Dolls would probably have merrily doffed it all in the name of future scientific research and donated our clothes to posterity (and for mom and apple pie) and went forever streaking into the moonlit night (a popular pastime in the seventies). However, that afternoon we all were hungover, dehydrated, tired, and aghast to be dealing with the harsh unmerciful glare of God’s flashlight (the sun). Solar flare activities? I knew just what the rest of us were thinking about the very oddest of offers we’d received to date. Just like me, all new york of the Dolls were wearing something borrowed from Amy and Ginny’s fashions-of-Tomorrowland personal doll Museum

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NASA-space wardrobe. How embarrassing—the clothes we were wearing didn’t even belong to us. Our threads were at best on temporary loan and were to be returned unharmed and intact later that afternoon. The Dolls didn’t own much of anything in the way of material possessions, which made our great (however temporary) outfits of very real tangible worth to us! How we looked was what differentiated us from the rest of pack and was the golden capstone of our group’s appeal. Well, dolls great and small, living and dead, mannequin, human facsimiles, future puppets, and displays of life in tomorrow’s future past were all great and wonderful, but not very practical for us at that moment in time and space. If we had given up the clothes that we were wearing right then, we would have really been in hot water. However, I am sure that the museum director would have been thrilled to death to have New York Dolls cavorting about the New York Doll Museum in our birthday suits in a celebratory emotional shark-frenzy of donating fever! However, our thread benefactors Amy and Ginny would have been totally furious with us and would have definitely concluded our friendship as a result. We were all penniless, and our few bits of one-ofa-kind rock-and-roll gear were tough to come by when broke. So the Dolls had to explain to the director that although we all loved the idea about becoming a part of the New York Doll Museum’s future history, we couldn’t leave the exact clothes we were wearing that particular day as a donation (mainly since they weren’t even ours). We suggested that maybe some replicas of things that we wore could be put together at some future point, when we would hopefully be able to afford to donate them. And so, after leaving the museum that afternoon, we all had a big laugh about the odd experience. Was the director really serious about us taking our clothes off right there? Why didn’t he offer us some LSD? He acted perfectly serious, though. Was he expecting six naked men to be able to casually walk outside in Manhattan and hail a passing taxi? Was he himself tripping? We’ll never know. Of course, the museum never heard from the New York Dolls again. End of tale. But this still leaves us inquiring minds with two semirelated yet unanswered food-for-thought-type questions: (1) When one has nothing, how does one give something away? And (2) With new york what does one replace the totally irreplaceable?

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When the New York Dolls played at Mercer Arts Center near New York University, we did two shows in the big room called the Kitchen before we were assigned a permanent slot on Tuesday evenings in the back room, appropriately named the Oscar Wilde Room. We knew lots of fellow musicians who also were just starting out, and among the Dolls’ faves were these couple of guys named Alan and Martin.18 For a group with only two members, this was a wickedly sinister yet rockin’ gruesome twosome, a regular minimega gale-force tsunami to be reckoned with. Like it or not, with them the frightening future of music had arrived! Gone were the innocent days and naive ideals of the Love Generation. It was now time for an urban reality-check wake-up call. It was a new dawn for new bands and artists with new ideas, who were now beginning to address a new subject matter: the dark underbelly of urban survival in the big bad steel-andglass-and-concrete Metropolis. We weren’t in a rock-and-roll club or some sleazy bar, but rather the ultratrendy Mercer Arts Center complex—stately home of offBroadway theater (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Danny DeVito, was happening at the time), where people from Uptown would come Downtown to check out the very latest in happenin’ events. So, it wasn’t at all uncommon to see the ilks (idle rich) dressed to the nines in flashy formal attire with their expensive trophy-wives on their arms,

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bathed in mink and diamonds, “slumming it” with drinks in hand, mulling about the whole complex in search of art and adventure. Most of the Dolls’ fans would be let in the rear entrance at some prespecified time by me personally—the nutty tutu-clad anarchistic bass player. To see the New York Dolls you didn’t have to do any gate-crashing— oh, heavens, no, we made it free and easy to get in on the exciting festivities, especially if you liked to get really dressed up to party down. Ergo, there was always a great-looking cross-section of “the faces of humanity” at Mercer Street. The Dolls brought in all the younger, various artistic types and Warhol Superstars—while One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest brought in the more serious intellectuals and the ilkish trendoids. There was a bit of something for everyone in a rather culturally relevant atmosphere. An interesting phenomenon would occur when our two outrageous friends, who called their two-man musical army Suicide, played at Mercer Arts Center. I will always remember this stuff as being very funny in the old Candid Camera style—watching unsuspecting people reacting to unusual prearranged circumstances. Too bad nobody was taping it. (In 1972, very few characters were so privileged as to have access to the new video technology, which was in its infancy. However, I do recall a gentleman from Bogota, Colombia, who filmed our afternoon rehearsals with our original drummer, Billy Doll. For me, that early footage would be beyond priceless. Who or where that person might be today is anyone’s guess. However, it’s nice enough to know that out there somewhere in the cosmos is the earliest and most vital raw incarnation of the Dolls, and I can only hope that it will someday miraculously reappear—like the forthcoming return of our beloved Lady of Fatima.) The Arts Center’s posh Blue Room was decorated in the style of the Korova Milk Bar featured in A Clockwork Orange. There was fuzzy blue fabric on the walls, ceilings, and floors, and white molded-plastic tables and chairs (although, dear fans, not the molded-plastic nude women’s bodies dispensing ultraviolent drug cocktails from obscene orifices as in the movie). When bands played in this room, no stage or velvet rope designated just where the performances or the audience started or ended. The fourth wall, that suicide in the blue room invisible line, simply didn’t exist. You could literally

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be standing next to someone who was busy performing. Tres Julian Beck’s “Living Theater” experience, in which the audience is urged to become as much a part of the show as the players. Mercer Arts Center was a fun place to watch the ilks reacting to real bohemians in their (our) native habitat. Anyone could bump into anyone, and just about anything could happen. So when our buds Suicide were playing in the Blue Room, our drummer Billy and I were always on hand to get an eyewitness report, just for chuckles. What we witnessed that first night would become part of a recurring cycle. Out came these two sinister-looking guys in Hell’s Angels black leather motorcycle gear (jackets, boots, belts, and hats), one playing a modified electric keyboard something and one carrying this eightfoot-long, ultra–heavy-duty, thick metal motorcycle chain. From my viewpoint it was obvious that they weren’t about to be lip-synching to children’s versions of Pat Boone’s Softest Hits. We were now on groundbreaking new turf, which was gonna bury the naive past in one fell swoop. All was perfect except for the anxious looks on the faces of the virginally uninitiated, who were obviously a bit concerned as to just what a huge chain had to do with the “act.” Well, Martin started to play some high-distortion hypno-riffs at high volume on his keyboard—mesmerizing and trance-inducing music using a hyperactive drum machine, a revved-up sonic assault sending pulsating waves throughout the building—while Alan began savagely whipping the floor with his humongous chain. Then all hell broke loose as the terrified ilks spilled drinks all over their expensive suits and wives’ gowns in a grand effort to evacuate the premises immediately. What a scream! It was a human buffalo stampede in a posh tres chic setting, almost as savage as film actors being told that it’s lunchtime! Was the ceremonial whipping of the floor really necessary for the sake of high art or what? In any event, Suicide had managed to clear out the entire Blue Room of panic-stricken guests in a matter of minutes. I am reminded of an old SCTV comedy sketch in which Eydie Gormé is scat-singing a love/hate song to hubby Steve Lawrence: “Your creation was Satanic/All the people fled in panic.” What an idea! What a gimmick! Frightening the audience into leaving suicide in the building! Hooray for the marvelous illusions of showbiz. the blue room

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After watching this same thing happen for a couple of weeks, the Dolls would make silly bets with new people on just how many minutes it would take for Suicide to clear the room. “Betcha a joint that it’ll all be over in three minutes.” And, true to either form or human nature, the fans did the same thing every week, like lemmings diving off a cliff, because no one could tell if it was art (the illusion of violence) or the real deal. And in the long run, our friends had the last laugh: several months later they were headlining a bit further uptown at Max’s Kansas City, where they were packing in the ilks like sardines, playing for SRO crowds—sometimes three shows a night. They have since been recognized as proto-punk godfathers and performance-art pioneers, and have influenced many, many newer fans of today’s modern industrial music movement, as well as rap music. And they are no longer feared as a couple of deranged escapees from a mental institution who had lots of fun getting paid to terrorize their audiences with whips and chains.

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It’s hard for me to remember whether or not we had signed our deal with agent Satan’s Lover of the posh Lederhosen and Crabs Agency.19 I guess that must have been the case, or how else could the beloved young Dolls have gotten such a horrible gig? Only our genitorturer managers could have OK’d such an abominable venue. It must have been Satan’s Lover’s idea of a sick joke. None of our managers or any fans or anyone from that wonderful firm who begged us to sign with them even had the nerve to make an appearance at this particular gig to see how things were going. They were probably attending a witches’ coven or torturing their own children while on holiday somewhere else that weekend. More moral backup or a word of encouragement certainly would have been much appreciated by the marooned Dolls, but as it was, the rescuer never arrived. We, as a tightly knit band of fringe-ites, acted as one when up against a wall—but in this case we were all alone together in a very strange land, and spent a very surreal and demented weekend playing for the clients of a gay bathhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn. How (thanks, David) we got talked into doing this ridiculous gig was truly beyond human ken, but the Dolls—ever the rock-and-roll storm troopers—managed to grin and bear our way through the most retarded display imaginable from a bunch of emotionless people. What an absolute waste of time and talent—playing a “pearls before swine” show for a bunch of selfcentered ingrates. To this day, I still get ticked off about this pathetically sad excuse to perform.

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Since we all knew where we were supposed to go and play, the Dolls mutually decided that we might as well get as stoned-out as we could get because we couldn’t possibly imagine how the patrons were gonna react to a live rock-and-roll band in their bathhouse. We had nothing to compare this show with, as we usually played either in rock-androll clubs or at the Mercer Arts Center. We were breaking new ground here. At that time I had this brain-candy drug stuff called MDA. It was a bit like LSD, very visual and spacey, but without the heavy soulsearching cathartic/ecstatic physical wear-and-tear draining effects of a regular LSD trip. It was more like a peaceful psychedelic vacation—and I had plenty to go around for all of us. It was in fact the perfect drug of choice for that upcoming weekend of who-knows-what’sgonna-happen. Also, MDA was a good choice because you didn’t really want to drink alcohol on it, as that would just drag you down from the nice buzzy high you were already on, complete with colors and trails—and so we drank surprisingly little hard liquor that weekend. Also, the Dolls could easily turn into the Dills if there was too much free booze around! Then all you’d have is five prone bodies to deal with. With MDA, we wouldn’t rack up any huge bar-tab considering where we were and who we were supposed to be entertaining. It was a stoned paid music rehearsal for the Dolls in any event. There were no “panics” or “freakouts” on MDA—it was just an amusing pastime drug as far as I knew. But then again, in those days, we all used to take things that we never tried before, pretty much on any user’s claims. The atmosphere of the time was one of experimentation, self-discovery, and “better living through chemistry.” We must have been dropped off by car at the entrance to the fab Man’s Country and were met by some undistinguished men who didn’t really seem to care whether or not we had arrived. We were led to some area of the “club” where we could hang out away from the maddening throng of fans. In reality, there were no fans and no reason to suspect that we might actually be a travelling band that plays music. This place had nothing whatsoever to do with rock and roll, and no one tried to make us feel welcome in the least. We were determined to make the best out of the sick joke that someone had played man’s upon us by consuming enough MDA for everyone in the country entire club—with the understanding that it was gonna be

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another one of those Us-vs.-Them scenarios—and nobody was gonna spoil the Dolls’ fun. That first night the Dolls thought that we might go for a “femme” look, and showed up in hot pants, tights, and pumps—erroneously thinking that there might be some familiar drag-queen Dolls fans that we knew and loved. But no dice. No freaks to entertain. As a matter of fact, when we started to play no one was there to watch the band at all! Where was the audience, we were wondering? After a couple of tunes, though, the Dolls got the message that the patrons of this “club” were really only there for one purpose and one purpose only: to have anonymous sex with multiple strangers! Whoa! Just as well all the Dolls were blitzed on MDA to nullify the shockingly nasty behavior of these grown men. So the patrons were quite busy with their own agendas, bouncing around from cubbyhole “screw rooms” ad infinitum. Maybe they were having a contest—how many anonymous strangers could one have sex with in one evening in a pre-AIDS world? In any event, that’s why no one was watching the band play—we were only providing the ambient background music for a Caligula-styled gay orgy of sorts. What a gig! At least we were all rather stoned from MDA’s lifesaving, calming effects, so we didn’t really care or get bent out of shape. We just played a stoned paid rehearsal under the weirdest conditions to date. No one was even vaguely interested in the fact that a for-real, honest-to-goodness, colorful, and exciting rock-and-roll band only a few feet away was grinding out classic “hits.” For the first time ever, we the New York Dolls were being ignored. Unless we were gonna strip down naked and wear towels like everyone else and participate, we simply didn’t exist. In our naivete, on the second night we decided to try another approach on the fashion front, and thought that maybe we weren’t properly dressed for success considering the “no-reaction” reactions of the club’s patrons the previous evening. A much more “macho” look involving leathers, rubber items, and chains a la Hell’s Angels attire might get a different reception. Silly as it all was, however, our change of threads was a big hit—at least compared to the “sex zombies” indifference of the night before. Evidently we struck a chord with the S&M set, I reckon. And so, lo and behold, we started playing and man’s one or two straggler “swingers” popped out of their sex cubbyholes for a few moments on their way to their next country

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screw, to actually notice that there was a rock-and-roll band present on the premises cranking out tunes. This almost gave the Dolls the illusion that we had an audience hidden away somewhere. At least we saw people passing by in their towels, pausing to listen for a few moments, which gave us a little something to go by, fan-wise. No musician wants to be ignored while performing. For a band whose crux of rock-androll was the push-and-pull between group and living audience, that evening was a great improvement on the sorry state of affairs the night before. But to tell the truth, without the numbing effect of the passive MDA, the Dolls would have wrecked the “club” and stormed offstage to have a scene with the management—something that often happened when the Dolls were in the wrong place with the wrong people. In this case, however, we were too stoned for such a “showdown” and at least managed to enjoy performing our own music. It was also extremely weird to be in a place where there were zero females—we didn’t see a single woman anywhere all weekend. It was antisocial, the coldest, least friendly place we ever had the displeasure of performing in in all our travels. No one there was even civil to us. No smiles, no humor, no camp, no nothing! “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places” seems to sum it all up pretty well, rather politely. As we left, we vowed to each other that we would never again let ourselves blindly go off and do whatever our managers told us to do. No thanks—the Dolls would rather have played inside a dumpster en route to the garbage heap.

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During the summer of ’72, the New York Dolls attracted the Andy Warhol crew, including his entire Superstar entourage and their farout friends. Some serious gay intellectuals such as Truman Capote and Taylor Mead were almost always present at our shows as well. They, along with a few competing musical contemporaries such as Lou Reed (unfortunately, no relation to the nice lady on The Donna Reed Show), Alice Cooper, and David Bowie rounded out our original audience. Not many fellow artists could resist satisfying their curiosity about this new band of angelic upstarts and the magical new sights and sounds at those early live shows. At that point in time our music sets were a work in progress and as such were rather entertaining and enlightening (especially for exploitative peers taking mental notes). Playing every Tuesday night at Mercer Arts Center was the greatest gift any new band could ever imagine. We instantly began to pick up a hardcore following of local fans without ever having to leave town. Hey, we boy Dolls didn’t even have to leave our own neighborhood! Some kind of nut suggested at the time that we become a live in-person version of the New York Experience (a popular tourist film)— local attractions that could be found only in the Big Apple. If we didn’t sign any traditional record deal, we wouldn’t have to travel anywhere, and would be much like your typical ongoing Broadway show. This idea probably could have revolutionized the limited viewpoint and

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focus of modern rock and rollers. Bands that sign deals immediately get into monster-sized debt just by making a record. Then they have to hit the road ad infinitum to begin repaying the debt to the record label, which wants its investment back right away. However, all new ideas were discouraged by our evil managers—to say the least. Even after signing our totally bogus management deal, we were still starving to death (for food and money). At some point we were informed by our evil mongrels (evidently via telepathic smoke signals) that Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars were going to be playing some shows right here in New York at the wonderfully beautiful Radio City Music Hall20 and that David Bowie himself wanted to hang out and get acquainted with the Dolls a bit. Wow! Some of us were thrilled, and some Dolls couldn’t care less. However, we all went to see the show. Then during his set, in-between songs, Bowie turned around to his band and said, “Well, what shall it be now, Spiders? Should we play ‘Lookin’ for a Kiss’?” Well, “Lookin’ for a Kiss” was the title of a very popular New York Dolls song at the time. And our fans in the audience went crazy, as did we. We were all screaming and jumpin’ around, thrilled to have been acknowledged onstage like that by everyone’s favorite new hero from Mars. We had made arrangements to meet up with a certain Mr. Bowie one evening shortly thereafter. The Dolls had a favorite watering hole, an ultraseedy Canal Street dive that was just a real cheap place in which to get totally wasted. The other patrons were generally so far gone they couldn’t care what we looked like. They had been blind-drunk for years. It was a safe haven for us urban fringe-ites. But let’s face it, it really was the pits. A more downtrodden joint for advanced cases of alcoholism talking to themselves might be hard to find. But for the Dolls this seedy and disgusting place almost seemed like home away from home, especially if you bought three shots of Wild Turkey from the bartender. For that, he would serve you a Three Feathers chaser. How does one beat that combo? Liver biopsies on the house? Hardcore alcoholism run amok was the stagnant atmosphere in the Canal Center Rest, definitely the seediest joint on a martians in seedy block. But in a sleazy derelict Charles Bukowski manhattan? way, it was a low-camp novelty for us urbanite Dolls.

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This simply wasn’t the new and trendy bar serving up thirties and forties cocktails with exciting names like Singapore Slings or Rob Roys, which were just becoming repopularized during this early seventies era of Art Deco reappreciation. Chic clothing of the thirties and forties was also in vogue. At Canal Center Rest, though, we’d usually drink nasty macho shots of whiskey followed by a beer chaser (aka “depth charges”). So after squeezing out of a taxi after one of our shows at Mercer Arts Center, the five Dolls alone (unusually, sans extraneous female entourage) piled into our favorite scary-exterior (but harmless liquid-center) sleazoid bar. Along with original Doll guitarist buddy Rick Rivets and gal-pal Suzy Creamcheese, we immediately grabbed a few drinks. We were awaiting the arrival of our favorite new alien friend, Mr. Ziggy Stardust. And so we’re waiting and drinking and waiting and drinking and waiting and drinking until we started to wonder if our maestro from the cosmos was gonna be a no-show. He was way beyond fashionably late. Then Billy enlisted my aid in finally doing something (although not very much) about something. We both went over to the window and started peering through the dirty hazy glass to see if anyone was daring to come in from the outside world. Well, after a few minutes, we saw a limousine with dark windows drive right by our frightening-looking rendezvous (with its tacky dusty old neon beer signs in the window). We wondered if maybe Ziggy’s limousine driver couldn’t make out the correct address. Then the dark car reappeared, but only passing by once again. Well, this went on for over an hour or so. However, by that time no one was really paying that much attention to the matter anymore since we were busy getting sloshed. To tell the truth, we didn’t think that Ziggy had the cojones to even show up in this part of town. Then, back at the window again, Billy saw something outside and started goofing around, saying, “Attention, Earth-men, the space limousine is now orbiting the block. Martians have landed in Manhattan and are comin’ ’round the bend once again for planetary re-entry.” He then said, “Hey, the driver has seen our faces at the window! Hooray! He knows we’re here! He’s gonna finally stop the limousine! Wow! One small step for mankind martians in . . . Whoa! He’s now coming through the door . . . A-OK, Houston, we’ve got a splashdown!” manhattan?

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Well, the David Bowie strolled right inside. It was a real honor and treat for us to meet him. We were some of his biggest fans. He came in and gave us Dolls a big warm happy greeting! He really was star power personified. We were impressed that he had the balls to appear in the great outdoors in his famous Ziggy Stardust space commando outfit (in shades of Martian-pink space-quilt, no less) plus full pristine makeup (not to mention flame-red hair and lace-up space booties). Hooray for Ziggy and hooray for Martians everywhere! In retroview, it was just about the only way to go when meeting the New York Dolls for the first time, darling—dressed to the teeth. I should talk! I was scantily clad in ripped purple panty hose, a goldand-purple-sequined thirties bathing suit, a black velvet bolero jacket with gold sequin designs, and brown suede forties Joan Crawford–style “screw me” pumps. And I pulled the look off (I’ve got great legs, or so I’ve been told). Not many guys, however, before or since, would ever have enough sheer steel balls to show up at a seedy whiskey bar dressed like Killer Kane on bass in the middle of the night. Well, Ziggy wasn’t about to disappoint anyone either. It was a regular mini–fashion-showcatwalk cavalcade of stars as well as a futuristic rock-and-roll extravaganza meeting of like minds. Where were the cameras? Where was Cecil B. DeMille when we needed him most? So we grabbed our favorite table for six and sat down to continue getting plastered while tuning into Mr. Stardust going on and on about this and that, generally getting acquainted. Then we indulged ourselves playing some English pub drinking games that Mr. Bowie was so kind to teach us. Most of the Dolls thought he was an all-right cool cat. We were all generally impressed by Ziggy’s presence. Billy seemed especially happy that we were all partying together like one big rock-androll family. However, our singer wasn’t too thrilled by being around another charismatic entertainer, and (in that sense) could only view him as a rival (since both their names were David). There was no love lost between those two. Myself, I thought David Bowie as Ziggy was a pretty cool nutcase. He was bold, fresh, multitalented, and had even created a new rock-androll character to tread the boards of the world’s stages. martians in He also really loved to entertain people—whether it manhattan? was hordes of fans or just a few new friends. He was a

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kind, gracious, and entertaining gentleman (who could have given us Dolls some pointers on civilization, charm, and social grace). After several hours of laughing and drinking, we all started getting too seriously smashed to continue staying awake much longer! It would soon be time to take a brisk evening stroll in a homeward direction and hopefully get to breathe some oxygen along the way. Thus, a group of six strangely attired young men left dear old Canal Center Rest. I reckon we all walked along Canal Street for a few blocks to Broadway before turning north toward where we lived and loitering in our quaint enchanted forest (also known as the East Village). That night, however, our Martian friend got a little dose of what it was really like to be a New York Doll (flamboyantly attired twenty-four/seven). While walking en masse uptown, as if on cue (of course), a macho truck driver passing by in a manly big rig started screaming at us, calling us a bunch of faggot pansies! So, in retaliation, our foul-mouthed (and professional troublemaker) singer started shouting back more obscenities and threats. For some reason, this reckless and very noisy shout festival seemed to frighten our Martian friend, who was doing his best to pretend to hang tough with the guys while simultaneously becoming unglued. For us locals, however, this was all part and parcel of our everyday lives in the dark age of ignorance, 1972. There was always lots of angry social interchange with hateful people claiming they were gonna kick our butts around the block or organize a mob to burn us heathen infidels at the stake a la Joan of Arc (whose only official crime against the state was dressing as a man). And so, without any further adieu, Mr. Stardust bounded off-world and into the dark Manhattan night. Gone in the twinkling of an eye, he probably took off down an unknown dark alley in search of a taxi back to his hotel. However, as we Dolls (and characters like Wayne/Jayne County, who used to dress up as a female Dave Clark Five groupie) already knew too well, it might not be too easy to hail a cab. I know because I used to drive a cab in Manhattan, and allowing “oddball weirdos” (or suspicious-looking characters) to enter your taxi was a professional taboo. Being alone in the big scary city on foot in the middle of the night probably martians in wasn’t all that much fun for our Martian friend. Just how well a humanoid alien presence in makeup and manhattan?

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costumed attire would have been tolerated while casually strolling our own Naked City at night, I can only imagine. Did Ziggy really think that the Dolls were going to duke it out with the beastly truck driver? Did he believe that a bit of ultraviolence inspired by the movie A Clockwork Orange was truly forthcoming? Was there gonna be a major bloodbath on the city streets? Well, not really! Within a few minutes, our loud and menacing macho truck driver had also disappeared into the darkness of the night. At least Mr. Bowie lived to tell the tale—and even mentioned something about it in two songs of his called “Watch That Man” and “Cracked Actor.”

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It was Spring 1972, and the Vietnam War was in heated dispute among our fellow Americans. The very first time the New York Dolls left Manhattan,21 we were expecting to be in trouble right off the bat with conservative gung-ho war lovers who generally weren’t quite ready to meet and greet a gang of guys with long hair, dressed in colorfully weird antique women’s clothes, makeup, lots of boot action, leather, lace, glitter, and nail polish. At that time, it was bad enough just being a longhair—that alone made you an Anti–War Protesting Commie Pinko Turncoat a la Lee Harvey Oswald. So our arrival in ultraconservative redneck Long Island would definitely create confrontations and conflicts. The world had been polarized into two camps—hippies vs. right-wingers. It wasn’t uncommon for hippies to be attacked just for having long hair and what it symbolized, and almost anywhere peaceful longhair types could be in the wrong place at the wrong time and get their heads handed to them. I know someone who got married outdoors at the first-ever hippie wedding in Central Park, and immediately after the ceremony was beaten senseless and turned into a vegetable for life by some nasty anti–flower-power murderers. The brand-new bride was raped and killed while he was forced to watch. Violence was the answer to a generation’s cry for peace and love. It took a lot of balls—or sheer alcoholic stupidity—to be a longhair and go into a redneck bar for a drink, because when the juice kicked in and the fake politeness was over, there would be a philosophical showdown with the

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status-quo types who would have preferred to see all hippies tarred and feathered anyway. So the Dolls had a vague idea of what kind of lowerplane mental monsters we might be facing out in the gung-ho Vietnam War hinterlands of Long Island. But the Dolls had to start getting used to performing under hostile circumstances, since we were the one-andonly indestructible New York Dolls comin’ at ya, armed with a bloody fistful of rock and roll! This time, our evil managers sent us with a guy who would come to befriend the Dolls and later play drums with our evil singer. Tony22 was almost comforting as an older-brother–type friend, but we all felt a bit like fish out of water traveling in a limo headed for Redneck Country, Long Island, where we had to go but really didn’t want to, and leave our cozy little surreal cityscape of beloved Manhattan. Our managers had said that this gig was a must—like it or lump it. It was a trial experiment in the sticks, as it were. At some point we asked our pal Tony if we could stop the car for a few minutes before we got there to stretch our legs and get some fresh air outside the limo. While we were outside the car, however, some smashed yahoos drove by us screaming something like “Go home, faggots!” reminding us that we were in hostile enemy territory. Where were our real managers for moral support when we needed it most? Cluck, cluck, Super-chickens! So we finally got to our destination, a typically lame-looking Long Island club with a big neon sign outside called Mr. D.’s. I wish to say thanks again to our satanic chicken managers for dropping us off in the middle of nowhere again and again in prehistoric 1972 to increase the possibility that we might not return from one of these fab gigs—except in body bags! That would have fulfilled one of their fondest hopes— that we would all be murdered by some rednecks at a lynchin’ party in the woods, which would allow the prestigious Mr. and Mrs. Liver Cancer With Crabs along with professional liar and demonic trickster sidekick Fat Jabba the Hut23 to be able to really cash in big-time. As we all know by now, your best move in the entertainment field is to fake your own death to increase dead-idol sales, but why fake something that can be realized so easily for free by some willing rednecks? Upon entering the venue it was obvious that we Dancin’ weren’t welcome whatsoever by anyone on the premises, with Mr. D. except for one or two cute un–hippie-looking waitresses.

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It was gonna be the Dolls vs. Pseudo Hippies vs. Club Owners. There was a band onstage already playing Grateful Dead songs for fake hippies. Definitely not our usual crowd. Where were our many girlfriends and their girlfriends? Anyway, would the hippies love us? Fat chance! Would they attack us? Probably not—they were too busy pretending to be passive and enlightened. These people probably thought that we were some post-apocalyptic demonic C.H.U.D. mutant underground dwellers escaped from the dark depths of the catacombs of the Evil New City of Nostradamus’s predictions. We collectively groaned upon surveying the club’s patrons at the depressing thought that if this were the present state of music out in the sticks, then heaven help those who were about to get a glimpse of one of the possible future directions of rock and roll. We were briefly shown our downstairs dressing room where we settled in and came to the obvious conclusion: boy howdy, were we in the wrong place at the wrong time. We were also bored out of our skulls without adoration and attention of famous people, and without Warhol Superstars to flirt with in the flesh. “Dollsville Goes to Dullsville” was the Daily News headline in my imagination above the story of the upcoming fiasco. Beware, beloved future children of the damned! Although we had arrived there on time, the egomaniacally arrogant Grateful Dead cover band continued to hog the stage pointlessly for what seemed like forever. We bored and rambunctious teenage delinquents started to get restless and had a few drinks each. We went on after the cover band and played a semidrunken, typically sloppy set that no one was too thrilled about. Nevertheless, it was a kind of “paid rehearsal” for us musical misfits, which almost justified our grand transglobal trek to get there. Billy Doll had a shout festival with a heckler between songs right away. After our set, we were informed that we had to play another set after the Grateful Dead cover band played for more aeons or till the cows came home, whichever came first. Oh no, I thought, snooze city! I wondered how the hell I was supposed to stay buzzed, since there was absolutely nothing to do there while the Endless Hippies played on and on. What a drag! Where were our portable Michael Jackson hyperbaric chamber cylinders for us to dancin’ hop into and stay young and rejuvenated? Who wants to play a gig that lasts forever or until you drop dead? with mr. d.

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However, Mr. D. wasn’t too happy with our “sloppy” musical set and decided that we had already had enough to drink. He sent word, through one of his huge bouncers, that the group had exceeded its bar tab for the entire night, and that the Dolls were forbidden to have any more drinks. Not even from the sexy flirtatious waitresses? Dry gulch in a wet bar? Well, unless we could somehow send a roadie out for a few sixpacks of some tall cool ones to be discreetly consumed in our limo outside, rage was the prevailing emotion among the Dolls. How dare anyone, anywhere, tell us anything about their rules of behavior? The bad joke was on us, all right. Thanks for the scary mob lecture, but drop dead! Screw your lousy club in the sticks and your pathetic fake Deadheads. All we wanted was to go home to our nutty friends who loved and understood us. But we weren’t allowed to leave until we played another set and the house felt they’d got their money’s worth of rockand-roll jollies. Just another set, you say. Well, if the Dolls couldn’t solve our alcohol deprivation problem by imbibing something with booze in it soon, five Frankenstein monsters were gonna be running amok searching for an Angry Forbidden Drink somewhere in the club. And since there were no attempted escape to the liquor store and no lifesaving brewskis coming to the rescue, we all felt trapped like rats on a sinking ship. Our drummer and singer, however, were on their own missions of Murcia, and continued their partying, drinking, and playing with fire by chatting up the cute waitresses to see if they could convince any of them to bend the liquor-banned-for-the-Dolls edict. I must admit the waitresses walking around in short skirts and stockings were certainly a lot sexier and cooler than the unfemme Deadhead babes that were boringly unisex. While waiting, our sometimes mischievous hotheaded Latin drummer whispered to me that there were some errant liquor bottles like peppermint schnapps downstairs near the dressing room in an unused minibar off to the side. If you were slick enough, you might dare to partake from the forbidden cabinet without those nosy waitresses noticing. When I got the chance, I too casually wandered downstairs over yonder, stealthily lunged for a Dancin’ thirst-quenching bottle of anisette, and began socking it with Mr. D. down like there was no tomorrow. Wow! Instant relief

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from “the heartbreak of psoriasis”! Plus optional hypoglycemic attack averted! (A violent convulsion once put me in the hospital because I didn’t have enough alcohol in my bloodstream.) Getting retanked on that high-sugar rocket fuel sure made me feel alive again. I then saw one of the waitresses catch David red-handed in the act of taking liquor bottles, and she immediately got a huge bouncer to escort him into yet another spare room (mobsters must like lots of spare rooms). I heard the door slam behind them. As I watched in amazement, a few minutes later our drummer strolled downstairs to hit the minibar. He too got busted and was escorted into the same spare room with our missing singer. What about our second music set? Well, after a very long twenty minutes or so, our singer and drummer reappeared intact and ready to play once again. The rest of us were told to be prepared for our second set. I still have no idea what went on behind closed doors that night. And so we started to play again, and some drunk in the crowd started screaming really loud, heckling us. In the middle of a song, our drummer stopped playing, stood up, and screamed back. Then, more than several drunken goons rushed the stage to attack us, and our singer said, “Show’s over—it’s time to get the hell out of Dodge!” So we unplugged our guitars, backed off the stage, and went downstairs to get the rest of our stuff for a getaway dash to the sanctuary of our limo, hoping to let the brawl in the club rage on without us. Then our mellow limo driver Tony appeared, hoping to calm things down. He went over politely to talk to Mr. D. himself, who promptly punched him in the nose, leaving him bleeding! We were all in shock. Whoa! What was next? Rushing upstairs with our stuff, we were told that the club had been closed to the patrons. That left me wondering, “Why are all these very large mean-looking bouncers still here, and why are there so many of them?” We were outnumbered by at least a dozen. Was it gonna be curtains in the woods for our unruly Dollboys? It was looking a bit bleak, to say the least! You’d think we were at a World Wide Wrestling Federation audition (which, come to think of it, takes place somewhere on Long Island also). I was not in the mood for a severe dancin’ beating at that point, and my efforts to save us went into a silent prayer for an act of God to somehow save us all. with mr. d.

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We were too wasted already and had been through enough drama for a hundred gigs. Then our singer and drummer appeared with a huge bouncer because the boss, Mr. D. himself, wanted to have a word with us—and with everyone else present. When he appeared, he said, “We don’t like you guys, my employees don’t like you guys, and they don’t like you making passes at the waitresses, who are also their wives! So we’re taking you out to the parking lot to teach you bums a lesson that you’ll never forget. Let’s go—march!” Well, with the entire group’s physical welfare at stake, our hotheaded but clever drummer had a flash of brilliance a la West Side Story meets The Three Musketeers. As we were about to step out the back of the club into the parking lot, Billy started what appeared to be a real knock-down-drag-up affair by screaming, “This is all your fault! We’re always in trouble because of your big mouth!” And, although it took our singer a second or so to catch on, he understood that Billy had engineered a very realistic-looking street brawl to take center stage in the parking lot. Our amazed tormentors must have thought that they had caused a real-life row among the Dolls themselves. That in itself was a kind of victory for Mr. D.’s crew. Everyone in the parking lot watched as two angry Dolls fought each other rather convincingly for about ten minutes or so. The spectacle must have satiated their hellifying anger. Like the aristocracy watching gladiator action in the arena, vicarious thrills could be gleaned from the safety of the peanut gallery. Even I felt bad to see that it had come down to this—a theatrical mock-fight to disperse the real yet unknown dangers of mob violence. “Death to those smart-ass Dolls—they’re worse than hippies, you know; they must be anarchist queers who belong to the White Panther Party!” Well, I felt a bit as if I were watching two brothers brawl in the mud over a girl, which was a sad commentary on our state of affairs. In any event, the staged street fight did the trick. It stopped the entire club from having a giant free-for-all rumble in the parking lot to kill us. Extremely hip, to say the very least. Mr. D.’s people were bemused for free without having to get their own hands dirty, even Dancin’ if they only wanted to kick our butts to impress their with Mr. D. sadistic wives. Mr. D. seemed happy to have caused so

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much discord in our ranks and derived some sadistic pleasure from it all. The New York Dolls were driven back to home in total silence to the Big Apple, to lick our wounds and reflect upon all things great and small. However, the next day we all vowed that we would absolutely never return to the heartwarmingly wonderful Soprano-style hospitality of dancin’ with Mr. D.

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That summer of 1972 the New York Dolls got to play at every type of weird venue under the sun, from a gay bathhouse in Brooklyn to the posh outdoor backyards of the rich and famous with the literary set in upstate New York, as well as loft parties both uptown and downtown Manhattan and all around the outer boroughs. These times were our busiest and most hopeful to date. We were blessed from above as well, which was a bit surprising, especially for such a ragtag group of rebellious spirits. We were experiencing something that none of us had ever dealt with before—acceptance! Success was a total stranger to us. And then, fame too? Fame alone is a strange enough thing to get used to, even over a period of time. But instant fame, instant success, or instant acceptance can be nearly devastating, especially if you’re used to living in your own private world as well. This was the time we needed to grow. We were learning how to help each other while under pressure (and often personality-crisis conditions) and to act and react in unison as part of an all-star team of young professionals. We were young, alive, vital, and in the prime of our creative period (and on many an occasion very stoned on various combinations of whatever was around). We were learning about trust and teamwork in the trenches. And even though there were disagreements, they got aired out diplomatically, so that we could come to a compromise that satisfied our own high sense of moral justice. When Billy Doll was alive, the Dolls were able to disagree and fight, with fisticuffs if necessary— but everything would be out in the open and resolved peacefully. Like a

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real family! No secrets, no hidden agendas—just truth and resolution. Doll democracy at its best! I had spent five years as a Lutheran altar boy and still understood nothing about the workings of the Holy Spirit until my own negative actions chased it away. The loss of this invisible guiding hand would eventually be the Dolls’ downfall. The Dolls had done an interview for Melody Maker, then Britain’s most influential rock-and-roll paper. It was a nice big two-page story with some truly great photos in our Chrystie Street loft taken by the brilliant Leee Black Childers. Word of mouth had aroused much interest in the group, and the story got a lot of fans curious on the other side of the pond. Well, we were very busy playing every hellhole our satanic managers could dream up. Then one day they called an official meeting. It seems that we had been invited to England to play some prestige dates in exchange for some recordings. Wow! From Avenue B to Kings Road without a breath! The Dolls couldn’t have been more thrilled. Repressed Ed Sullivan Beatle fantasies were about to be fulfilled! Every young musician’s dream was coming true! We didn’t have a record deal and had never even recorded. Was Swinging London ready for the wild and wooly gender-bending New York Dolls? Sure! Were the wild and wooly gender-bending New York Dolls ready for Swinging London? Well, the question never even occurred to us. Mentally, at least, we were already there. We were bouncing off the walls. From that afternoon meeting onward, each of us could think of nothing else but how much fun it was gonna be rockin’, rollin’, and screwing our way around the UK in America’s newest and most exciting band. We were told that it would only be a few weeks away, and were each given some money to go shopping for some outrageous new clothes for our trip. However, this posed a problem because our clothes were mostly from local thrift shops and were already used. Just where would we Dolls find something new and different—as opposed to something old, previously owned, falling apart, and different? Well, why not ask our in-house experts in this particular field, Johnny and Janis? These two had already crossed the time/space barrier threadwise. So we planned to go shopping with them the next day to find out just where their secret surprise store might be located. We met on the Lower East Side and started walkhail britanNia! ing leisurely south. We may have stopped off at Yonah

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Schimmel’s knish parlor (our favorite such haunt downtown) on Houston to partake of a rockin’ coffee and swingin’ kugel. We finally arrived at Orchard Street and Mr. Johnny Thunders said, “Well, here we are!” Orchard Street? What could possibly be here for us teenage drag-queen vampires with which to impress our new British aviary fans (as in “swinging birds of London”)? I’ll shop anywhere, I thought, but what’s here? Orchard Street used to have a lot of weird stores all on top of and next to each other selling mostly cheap bad stuff but also some good stuff (only for the eagle-eyed) that seemed to have arrived there after being stolen from some poor ship’s loading dock. Lots of different types of useless junk (including men’s faux pearl clip-on ties and black wayfarer-style silver mirror shades)—however, as we all know, one man’s junk is another man’s priceless treasure. Orchard Street definitely was not a trendy place, just a place with weird ethnic stuff—like thousands of leather jackets displayed outdoors that one could only wear in a Puerto Rican mambo disco (but only on a Tuesday afternoon after five p.m. if it rained earlier that day). If one were to be seen on the streets of Manhattan dressed like that, angry citizens might just kick your ass right then and there for indulging in such wantonly extreme tackiness. Orchard Street clothing, yesterday’s unwanted and unsold fashions, was never coming back in style (mainly since it had never been in style in the first place). That was a totally antitrendy place to go—especially for our very own king and queen of the ultratrendoids. (The Dolls had already solved any boot problems earlier that year, with the aid of Billy’s sister Heidi, who was in London at the time. We had all chipped in and ordered men’s platform boots, and Heidi brought our order to a shop there that custom-made them and was still less expensive than Granny Takes a Trip.) And so we started going south once again on Orchard Street, which was a few blocks long, not unlike a Chinatown in any major city. Our merry hit parade of freaks was soon clocking all the endless amounts of cheap useless stuff for sale everywhere. When we got to the end of the second block, however, our search was over. John and Janis showed us nonbelievers that we were now “where it’s at.” I looked up to see what the name of the place was, and in garish black letters on hail an orange Day-Glo plastic sign were the words “JACKY K’s”! Oh, she’s probably some relative of the famous disc britaNnia!

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jockey Murray the K from Brooklyn. Well, into the store we all went. Then we started looking around to figure out what they sold there, which wasn’t too tough—the entire store sold nothing but women’s pantsuits from the sixties. The sixties were over! What? Hey, Johnny, I’m now thinking—this has gotta be some kind of a sick prank. Am I now expected to dress like Phyllis Diller on Laugh-In in order to meet the queen? From serious rock-and-roll posing to Benny Hill high camp without a breath is a very large leap of faith indeed, career-wise. How funny do you wanna get? We could all wear paper bags! Since when were the Dolls doing slapstick couture? Would anyone else get the joke anyway? Nevertheless, we had all been presented with some serious food-for-thought choices. Women’s fashions were so much less expensive than men’s clothing. Trading in our original thrift-shop antique thirties and forties stuff (which cost pennies) for tacky sixties retro fashion? The price was right as we didn’t have a big budget in the first place—probably a whopping one hundred dollars each. Where was Bob Mackie now that we needed him? Why not get one or two women’s pantsuits in outrageous colors at twenty-nine dollars each and get them tailored—after all, a single man’s suit would cost over two hundred dollars in exciting beige! Would I be able to find a sexy female tailor with some time? Well, maybe me, but it simply wasn’t necessary for John, Billy, or Syl. At about five foot three each, they had no trouble finding women’s sizes that they could fit into neatly (and trade with each other) and had lots of color choices. Were men allowed to freely shop in this store? Who knew? Without a woman with us in the shop, however, we might have been thrown out for being cross-dressing perverts. The spirit of Joan of Arc would have had a good chuckle had she somehow been able to view the young gender-bending Dolls that afternoon boldly going where no man has gone before (off to London wearing a chartreuse paisley pantsuit). It reads to me like a Maidenform erotic fantasy TV commercial script. So we spent much of the rest of that day looking at every style of pantsuit in the entire shop for whatever possibilities, without appearing too tutti-frutti—just young men shopping for surprise gifts for their wives. We would first look at the selection, then sleep on it, then hail we’d go back and buy. I had to think about color and style britanNia! and size and fabric. How many times was this article of

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clothing supposed to be worn? Maybe if it were just once for the flight over it might be OK. We surely would rather have gone shopping in London prior to getting on a plane to go to London, but in 1972 time travel was still a fantasy. I was one of the ones who had to sleep on it before foolishly wasting my clothing allowance money on a woman’s pantsuit that I may not even have the balls to wear in public. At a height of six-foot-one, I had fewer choices than my fellow Dolls. I had to look for extra-large sizes in not-too-shocking colors (unlike men’s drab Armed Forces colors, women’s clothing actually came in various shades of Mother Nature’s many hues) that might squeak by as a yard of cloth pretending to be an outfit. What about exiting the plane, when we would surely be met by people—perhaps even the press? Even I know that first visual impressions are permanent. So “if you can’t dig it, eat hot boot, baby!” became our new interstellar travelling motto with which to deal with the obnoxiously curious. I finally settled on an almost conservative black pantsuit with tiny little white polka dots and white collar trim in a flimsy fabric. It fell quite a bit short of the Edith Head–meets–Ursula Andress look that I was after. Once I tried it on back home (wherever that was that day), I managed to rationalize that it would do in a pinch. But I was never truly convinced that this was some kind of great new look for anyone my size, as it didn’t even have long sleeves. I guess it was a spectacular yet summery caprice outfit. Nutty, fruity, airy-fairy, and not much beyond (only philosophically). It was kind of a Phyllis Diller homage after all. I now realized how utterly exposed most women must feel in women’s flimsy fashions, especially women in the workplace. And that being a man who’s not wearing traditional men’s underwear under men’s slacks is not the most secure feeling in the cosmos. By the by, just what do men in kilts wear, anyway? Feeling generally vulnerable, maybe I just needed to pick up a medieval heavy-metal codpiece from some S&M shop that would help make me feel less exposed to fluctuating local weather conditions south of the equator. We didn’t have a lot of time left before we were to leave for London, maybe ten days. We all had to get photos and passports, hail and run around getting ourselves together for our big trip. In retrospect, some odd things come to mind after britaNnia!

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the years. I don’t remember having any music rehearsals or live shows for weeks and weeks before we went overseas.24 Our chops were down, and we were musically a bit out-of-sync and unrehearsed before we left. I don’t remember any rehearsals in England at any time either, only live shows. Is that any way to prepare for a make-it-or-break-it British debut? We should have spent the entire time sleeping and eating inside a rehearsal studio polishing up our sound—since the reason we were invited was to play, to entertain, to amuse! Why was something that monumentally important so totally overlooked by our managers? Well, the fateful day arrived soon enough and we were off to JFK International Airport for our first trip to London together. (Billy, Syl, Johnny, and I had already been in London at earlier dates. I had made a couple of side trips to England on a few seasick overnight boat journeys through the North Sea from Amsterdam. In London, I remember seeing a band that looked and dressed like a gang of Skinheads. I liked them a lot and thought that they rocked the place to the max. These four guys wore identical white tanktop t-shirts, black suspenders/braces, and black hobnail stomping boots, and had totally shaved heads. I had just seen Slade, from very up-close! Everybody else in the club was a longhair. From that night on, Noddy Holder became my favorite rock-and-roll screamer.) We were all decked out in our Jacky K fashions when we appeared at the airport with a few bags of boots and the rest of our safety-pinned-together antique pieces of clothing. We must have been quite a colorful sight early in the morning for other people at the terminal. Ever the merry prankster, Billy Doll had picked up something in the shopping frenzy before we left—a dog collar and leash. It turned out to be a novelty item from a joke shop. (The New York Dolls used to shop in every joke shop we could find.) The collar and leash were stiff and outstretched, and therefore gave the impression that we were walking an invisible dog. Of course, this only added more insanity to our outlandish visuals. Why weren’t more people taking photos back then? We were asking for it and got the well-earned negative attention we so craved. Destroying all stereotypes was one of our hobbies, like when Johnny would walk into an ultraposh restaurant and order dessert before dinner (thereby upsetting hail the grand order of the universe and sending the maitre britanNia! d’ and head chef into growling spasms). Screw the status

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quo generation! Go back to sleep! We Dolls were thrilled with ourselves, but heaven help anyone else who wasn’t. Maybe the other patrons weren’t that thrilled to see what our invisible dog looked like, but then a couple of wildly dressed young women got on the very same flight with us. Whoa—female-vibration fans showing up before we were almost infamous? Unknown Molls coming to London with us Dolls? Was there a coincidence? Maybe, but one of them, who called herself Rhinestone, later became one of my New York girlfriends. I didn’t think that the two babes on the flight were that friendly, and we all quietly went our separate ways upon deplaning at Heathrow Airport. In retroview, I suppose that we could have asked the two to tag along and hang out, but we really didn’t know where we were going and/or if extraneous new faces might be welcome as well. Most everyone eventually fell asleep during the flight anyway. Plus, we New York Dolls were probably the only American guests that our hosts were prepared to deal with at the time. But for all I knew, Jet Boy Billy could have had both of them on the plane somewhere while we were busy crashing. Sex with total strangers? Oh yeah! In fact, that was the whole point of the Love Generation. And in the pre-AIDS, pre-herpes world of 1972, why not? Death as a result of casual sex was unknown back then—there were no lethal diseases or permanently damaging viruses in our society. Sex among consenting adults was something wonderful and beautiful to anticipate and cherish, not something to fear. A single shot of antibiotics or some pills from a local free clinic could cure anything and everything in a matter of days, including once-dreaded killer syphilis. When we arrived at Heathrow we were met by some people from Escape Studios who said that outside somewhere was an old-fashioned horse-driven hearse from yesteryear that they wanted us to climb aboard for some pictures. So in our Jacky K’s Orchard Street fashions we posed for a few shots atop a horse-drawn buggy with an Escape Studios logo painted on the back. I’ve somehow forgotten the name of the horse over the years. We then began to wake up a bit more and, realizing that we were at an airport somewhere near London, we wanted to get there to meet some “birds of London” right away. hail Duck and cover, everyone!

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Well, the New York Dolls couldn’t have picked a better name for Escape Studios if we had named it ourselves. We certainly wished to escape the tedium of being flat broke and starving in Manhattan all day and night. Without Max’s Kansas City restaurant and (courtesy of the late beloved Micky Ruskin, patron saint of starving New York artists) its fried-chicken-and-chili happyhour free food, the Dolls would have died of starvation/malnutrition that summer of ’72. Just like Judy Garland as a child actress literally being starved into submission, our managers were using the same who-cares philosophy. Our lives in the Big Apple up till then were on a par with homeless teenage runaways—no money, no food, no transportation, and nowhere in particular to live except the sidewalks. Our greedy managers felt that we young guys could have all the spine-tingling excitement imaginable just trying to stay alive daily in a steel-and-concrete antihuman habitat without a cent in our pocket. I’m very happy that later in life, Johnny wrote a great song called “Help the Homeless”—because the Dolls have always been homeless. Why do you think Sylvain has been playing Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s blues classic “I Ain’t Got No Home” for years now? I’d love to play music again someday for other people so that I can have a real place to live. The early Dolls, though, had nowhere to go but up. And so we were thrilled to have survived the flight and happy to be in England. But what about

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the aviary life in London? Surely we’d be there in a short while, shopping and chatting up the local talent. Well, we all piled into the van that was there for us. Billy, Syl, John, and I, who had already been over there, were naturally curious and were looking out of the van windows searching for any familiar sights—or new ones. Then we passed something Billy recognized, and he said, “Hey, this isn’t the road to London, but the road away from London! Hey, driver, we thought that we were going to London today! What’s up? Is this a prank? Should we jump out of the van? Why are we going in the opposite direction?” Then the driver calmly explained, “Didn’t your managers tell you guys that you are first going to the countryside to do some studio recordings before anything else? We’re on our way to the country!” A moment of dead silence followed. Then the rest of us, practically in unison, began saying things like, “The country? What country, where? We don’t like nothin’ about no country! You can keep your grass! And, we don’t cotton to no country critters, neither! To us, no gnus is good gnus!” And so the great shocking news had been delivered. The Dolls were stunned and dismayed, to say the least, but not suicidal. Who booked this tour anyway, “Wrong Way” Corrigan? What if we’re allergic to the country? These were some of the sentiments and remarks we came up with to make light of the whole thing, but in reality we were totally bummed. Sometimes, though, you just can’t fight city hall, so we resigned ourselves to be bored beyond belief out in the sticks for no apparent reason. We were urban creatures, not country bumpkins! We hated the country shtick! Did we go shopping for clothes and go through all that trouble to impress some cows in the woods? Please! We thought that this was some kind of weird British in-joke that we didn’t quite understand yet. But when we finally arrived a few hours later in front of several rustic buildings complete with a duck pond and wild geese running around, we were certain that the bad joke was on us. So we got out of the van with our clothes and guitars and were led into what used to be an oasthouse, where a kiln would dry hops for making beer. Now it was going to be living quarters escape from for us misplaced New York City street kids stuck in the sticks. new York

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After we settled in a bit, though, we got some good news. We had been invited to stop by the local pub for a few drinks. Great—at least they thought it was OK to drink. Maybe we had something in common with the British after all. So we got back in the van and were off. It was then that we started to take notice of our surroundings—the rustic beautiful green countryside of Kent in southern England. It was certainly a far cry from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Well, we were warmly greeted at the pub (where the visuals were right out of the movie An American Werewolf in London) and settled down for a few hours of serious drinking and talking and lunch. Fish and chips, shepherd’s pie, steak-and-kidney pie, and such items were on the menu and were all very tasty. One of us ordered something called a ploughman’s lunch, consisting of a piece of bread, a piece of cheese, and an apple—thus sparking jokes about how anyone could live on so little fuel and expect to accomplish anything, especially hard labor in the field. We, however, were five young guys who consumed lots of food and drink. And, since we played a very physically involving and sweaty hard-driving style of rock and roll that was the musical equivalent of performing hard labor, we needed lots of fuel to operate at optimum output (like a small army). We had been briefly shown the recording studio on the property, but that stuff would have to wait until tomorrow for a closer examination. It had been a long day and it was time for crash city. Next morning, beyond the sheep, cows, and ducks, it was over to the studio to have a look and see what equipment was happening. It was a small barn that had been equipped for recording and not lavish or fancy in that respect. Who needs candelabras and chandeliers in a recording studio (unless you’re Liberace)? I, however, was pretty thrilled with an orange piece of bass equipment—an Orange bass head. Orange amplifiers were not used much in the States at all, and were practically unknown to most American musicians. Two of the settings on the amp had “depth” and “drive” written over the oversized black control knobs. Wow! Why didn’t American amps use groovy descriptive adjectives pertaining to bass as well? With my borrowed yet nonetheless truly antique (even back in ’72) Gibson Thunderbird bass (courtesy escape from of Peter Jordan) and an Orange bass head, Mr. Killer Kane was now invincible! Roll over, King Arthur—I new york

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too had a singing sword. Gibson meets Orange in Kent (sounds like a medieval battle). I felt that I was set up for come-what-may, basswise and sonically. The Orange bass head was all the motivational force that I needed to get excited about recording at Escape Studios. Inside the oasthouse was a large living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a few upstairs rooms for sleeping. Some cases of bottled beer were available most of the time. Personally, I got sick as a dog after drinking an entire case of warm barley wine over a period of a day—a drink that no one else wanted. Our time in the country was a bit strange so far in that we had seen no women anywhere. I thought, You’re in the Army now, Private Kane. But wait, I didn’t enlist! Were they hiding the women somewhere? Should we have consulted Dr. George King of the Aetherius Society and Interplanetary Parliament in a group-trance near-death Samadhic yogic state if we couldn’t reach him by telephone? Anyway, I felt like I was on a planet without women and was basically bored to death in this one-dimensional world. A few days later, though, after we settled into the studio and began recording, Syl’s lady friend Valerie Sutain (her dad was of world-famous Sutain sunglasses fame) arrived and also moved in. That was just ducky for Syl to be the only one—at that point we needed at least ten Valeries to make things fair. Something was changing in our initially fiercely solid camaraderie. Little chinks were forming in our collective protective armor. Maybe we had too much time to think about things like “what am I gonna get out of this deal” as opposed to “what are we gonna get out of this deal.” So nothing that wonderful or memorable happened to us at Escape Studios, but as the seemingly endless days plodded onward, the attention- and love-starved extremely horny young stud Dolls, who were now out of the limelight, started to get really bored and restless. There was no television to watch (all three channels!), just Radio Luxembourg to listen to, and enough beer for normal people who drink, but not much in the way of food or anything else was really happening at the Oasty Ghostly House. And what about our favorite drug dependencies? Did they expect us to crash, burn, and volunteer for detox? Was there a local brothel where they might at least have some photos of women, if not some reasonable robotoid facsimiles escape from thereof? Where were the Stepford Wives when we needed morale boosting the most? There was nothing new York

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to do but to play with the ghosts of dead geese—aside from doing some recordings, which didn’t take thousands of years (four songs, twenty minutes?), get drunk on beer, and pet the pond duck for kicks. After a week or so of this stuff, the Dolls had had enough. Rock and roll in the country? Drop dead everybody!

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Barb Captions by

ara Kane

Clockwise from top left: Arthur’s sixth birthday party, 1954. He loved watching Space Patrol, a 1950s TV show. Fourth grade school picture. Fifth grade school picture. At Niagara Falls, 1958, eleven years old, rainsuited and ready. Notice how he stands: just like he stood when he played bass.

left: His imitation of Zorro. He loved dressing up. top: Arthur in an American Indian outfit.

School pictures from sixth grade and junior high school.

May 1963, freshman year in high school.

Arthur in 1967, after his mom died (in his arms) of cancer, seventeen years old.

above: He loved pizza. Freshman year at Pratt Institute. left: Taking a hit— Maryjane was his middle name.

From their second gig as the New York Dolls, at the Mercer Arts Center, 1972. Arthur wears a goldsequined 1930s bathing suit, with David Johansen superimposed. Billy Murcia plays drums, and Syl Sylvain and Johnny Thunders (in polka dots) play guitar.

Same gig: David Johansen as Cousin Itt, and Billy again.

left: The entrance to the Oscar Wilde Room at the Mercer Arts Center, 1972. below: Arthur in green boots and pink hose with Syl Sylvain, New Year’s Eve, 1973.

Johnny Thunders, circa 1974.

At the Roxy, 1974: Arthur, David, Jerry Nolan on drums, and Syl on guitar. Arthur gave a “space jumpsuit” just like this one to Ace Frehley.

One of the Dolls’ last gigs, 1974, possibly with Malcolm McLaren, in Florida.

Clockwise from top left: Arthur, a bit worse for wear, in a pink jacket. Me in 1973, before meeting Arthur, when I was acting for Orson Welles. Arthur and me, 1974, shortly after we met in Los Angeles. This was the night of the Aerosmith, Mott the Hoople, and Montrose after-party.

Arthur and me when we lived in the Nirvana apartments, 1975. The two cars we posed on were always in front, and we loved them. Photos © James Slyman.

above: December 23, 1977, Yonkers, before a justice of the peace, holding our marriage license. We were so broke I was wearing a three-dollar thrift-store dress from Frenchy’s store the Late Show. right: Arthur in his Corpse Grinder outfit, with me at a Blitz Benefit at CBGB. Photo © Eileen Polk.

The back cover of the Corpse Grinders’ 1978 single. Arthur is at the bottom right.

I was one of the three women who ran the punk rock store Revenge and made and designed the clothes. From left to right: Howie Pyro, me, and Eileen Polk; a guy named Mitch is behind me.

right and below: Arthur with the Corpse Grinders, May 1978. Jimmy Criss is on drums.

The Idols: Arthur, Steve Dior, Barry Jones, and Jerry Nolan, backstage at Max’s Kansas City, 1979. Photo © Eileen Polk.

Arthur with David Johansen, me, and Marty Thau in 1980. Looks say more than words. Photo © Bob Gruen.

Same night. Photo © Bob Gruen.

A print of Bob Gruen’s contact sheet of the two of us. The same roll of film, I believe, also included the last shots of John and Yoko. Photos © Bob Gruen.

November, 1982. Photo © Ebet Roberts.

Clockwise from top left: Arthur at the Grand Canyon, 1982. With Prudence in front of Bob Roberts’s bungalow, Tropicana Motel, 1982. With James “Pasqual” Bettio, an extraordinary photographer, artist, entrepeneur, and mentor whom Arthur loved and respected. We used to visit his studio a lot—it was a rough time for Arthur, and Pasqual always made him happy. At his home on Mulholland Drive, summer 1983. A pensive Arthur in Griffith Park, overlooking L.A., 1984.

A letter to New Rose Records: “Contrary to popular belief, I am not dead, very rich, or lost at sea.” They never responded.

In Pasqual’s “wearable art,” January 1985. Photo © James Pasqual Bettio.

Clockwise from top left: Arthur’s beloved Guild bass, his favorite, with cat hair in the case. On the set of Death Spa, 1986. In Holloway House, Apartment 306, 1986. Marilyn Monroe and Shelly Winters lived in the same apartment in the 1950s. Photos © James Pasqual Bettio. On the set of Fright Night II, 1986. We had a lot of fun making this movie.

above and top right: At the Roxy, backstage and on stage, with Jerry Nolan, for a Johnny Thunders show, January 1987. Photos © James Pasqual Bettio. right and below: In 1987, we celebrated Arthur’s birthday with our next-door neighbors, Mick and Robert Cripps. Robert, who was in the Arthurproduced band Demolition Gore Galore, is the one handing Arthur his birthday cake; Mick, who was in the LA Guns, is the one with Arthur at the Cat ’n’ Fiddle pub.

Arthur was always looking for those mysterious UFOs. Here he is at the Integreton in Landers, California, and posing with his favorite magazine.

Arthur makes the cover of Endless Party, a zine, 1987. Inside is an interview by Robert Cripps.

top left: On Arthur’s baptism day, October 1989, with Pasqual and me. top right: Same day, here with the two Mormon sisters who brought Arthur the Book of Mormon—they were so good and kind to him. What a change from the crossdressing lipstick-wearing Arthur everyone knew! right: Arthur and me, right after he was beaten up, early 1990s. Photo © Dawn Laureen.

Arthur with Syl Sylvain, and Frank Infante and Nigel Harrison of Blondie, 1993. Photo © Dawn Laureen.

At the recording sessions for the Johnny Thunders tribute album, I Only Wrote This Song for You, 1993. Steve Dior is in the checkered suit, Syl Sylvain is wearing the cap, and Frank Infante is in the dark shirt. All photos © Dawn Laureen.

With Wicaipi, my one-and-a-half-yearold wolf, in 1998. He adored Arthur. Photo © Yvonne Duprez.

left: With Ozrina the cockatoo, 1999. below: In 1999 or 2000. Photo © Dawn Laureen.

Arthur at work in the Mormon Church Family History Center, 1999.

A head shot taken for this book. Photo © Robert Cripps.

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Even drinking beer was becoming passé for us. How sudsy can you get when there are no female vibrations to entertain? It’s not like we had been invited to go on a foxhunt or were being taught to play polo or golf in our spare time. All the songs we were going to record were already done. Why were we still hanging out in the sticks when we thought that we had some live dates to play somewhere eventually? But who knew where and when? Not us! The Dolls traveled over two thousand miles to just get here and hang around with some farm animals? Thoughts like these became more numerous as time on our hands grew tedious. I was wondering things, like maybe I should drink another case of barley wine and get sick all over again just to kill yet a few more days of anonymous exile in Nowheresville. To us, rock and roll is sex! For five overly horny young guys, experiencing forced celibacy for a few weeks25 was beyond torture. So a plan came to mind. But only the two most oversexed and horniest super-stud Dolls would dare to invent it. Using the excuse that some weird piece of musical equipment of ours was broken, David and Billy told the people keeping us “on hold” at Escape Studios that it was of major importance to get to a music store somewhere in London for a replacement part as soon as possible. Well, our gatekeepers also had to go to London for some reason and so, without any of the other Dolls’ knowledge, David and Billy managed to

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get a ride. (Don’t get me wrong, there were some nice people at Escape Studios.) Tension had been mounting. The barn wasn’t exactly a rehearsal studio, but a recording studio. This meant that another couple of weeks had elapsed without any music rehearsals for our upcoming gigs. Who was in charge of everything? Our chops were way down. How were we supposed to sound when we were finally allowed to re-plug? Rusty, rustier, and rustiest! Who was planning our future or nonfuture— behind the scenes and without our knowledge? So off they silently went one afternoon. Was this an example of teamwork or the beginning of a new every-man-for-himself philosophy? Dead End Kids running amok abroad? Well, our Dolly studs made it to London but somehow never made it back to Kent with the driver and his pal. It seems that Billy and David just weren’t at the designated meeting place at the correct time for the return trip, and must have gotten “lost.” Was it The Caine Mutiny? Not really, since I, Kane (no doubt nursing a wicked hangover), was still back with the rest of the captives at the all-you-can-drink-but-nothing-else Oasthouse Ranchero. I believe that just three Dolls and two roadies plus Syl’s paramour Valerie remained. And, for some strange reason, Billy and David couldn’t be located the next day either. They must have accidentally lost the telephone number of Escape Studios. Whoa! That was it—show over! Good-bye geese, ave Londinium! The escapee Dolls were on the lam and weren’t coming back, ever. We knew that it was time for us to finally leave the farm to join in the search for the disappearing Dolls. Had Scotland Yard been alerted? Should they have been on the lookout for two New York femmes who were suspiciously MIA during the Bentwaters UFO flap the same year? Probably not, and just as well. Anyway, to this day, only David Doll knows where he and Billy spent the night or where they went or what they did after their dramatic escape from Escape Studios.

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Now, as I write, I am reminded that being a New York Doll back then wasn’t really like a job at all, but rather a never-ending roller-coaster thrill ride. Forget about Pirates of the Caribbean, the celluloid fantasy collage. We were real-life punk-rock pirate outlaws at large, not a mathematical configuration of computergenerated dots on a screen that could be conveniently stored on a disc. Doll-Men! Stimulating, perhaps, but not simulated! We Dolls weren’t so much into breaking the law but rather breaking new ground and breaking old taboos. The Dolls were chaos agents by choice. Sometime between when Billy and David had escaped from the boring endless isolation of Escape Studios and when they reappeared in London somewhere, the rest of us Dolls got moved into London as well. It’s a bit foggy, but at some point our managers told us to go to a certain hotel and just check in—it had been prearranged and would be all taken care of later when they arrived. We had been reunited with Billy and David and all together we arrived at this beautiful all-white art-nouveau hotel where Napoleon himself would have fit right in with the rather ornate architectural decor. Très Louis the Fourteenth—could powdered wigs be far behind? When we walked into the lobby, we noticed that it was even more ornate on the inside, with crystal chandeliers and marble and brass staircases, goldleaf-trim antique mirrors, paintings and artwork everywhere. Whoa! We were all amazed that someone had enough clout to let us have the privilege of staying in such a classy and romantically palatial residence

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with visuals straight out of a happy fairy-tale movie (since we weren’t exactly the Beatles). The people behind the desk asked us if we intended to stay at their truly magnificent hotel. We said yes, that our manager told us to just come here and register for some rooms, and that he himself would drop by later to take care of everything. Is that OK? Well, the desk people then asked for the name of our manager and where he was staying. I guess they called and spoke to someone right then and there. And for a very few moments, everything was coming up roses, or so it seemed. We, however, looked like a motley riff-raff crew that the cat must have dragged in. It never occurred to us that we presented such a strange sight of disarray. We probably thought that we were dressed for anything, but in fact we didn’t have anyone to help us with our wardrobe, or washing and ironing our clothes. After getting drunk and falling asleep in them on several occasions, they had seen better days. We all looked completely disheveled, but didn’t really care. We were tired and just wanted to settle into our fantasy hotel for a few minutes to wash up, so that we could then go out shopping for new clothes. Well, more than a few awkward silent moments passed as we awaited the keys to our rooms. Then the desk clerk finally said to us, “Gentlemen, I regret to tell you that there’s been a mistake. There are no more rooms available in the hotel. We are totally booked up. Sorry, but your company will have to seek accommodations elsewhere, thank you.” In other words, our hotel is too fabulously great to allow the likes of Les Miserables. We certainly went from a Fantasy Island mentality to the local trash heap in an instant. To tell the truth, the employees themselves were lucky that we didn’t get really angry, turn on them, and trash their posh hotel lobby New York Doll style! Who said that we would take no for an answer? We five Dolls could do a hell of a lot of damage in a very short time. “We simply can’t have the likes of those filthy New Yorkers dangling from our crystal chandeliers, darling! What if they had tried the Grey Poupon?” I guess they were afraid that deranged crude and lewd musicians along with our flea-bitten entourage would be sliding down the golden bannisters of their marble staircases in an evil unrestrained drugged orgy au naturel at escape three a.m. Heaven forbid corrupting usurpers disrupt the to london gold-leaf status quo of the upper-crunch universe. It was

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at this point that we also became hip to the fact that the British, with their superior knowledge of their English language, can tell someone to “drop dead” so politely that you don’t even know you’ve been insulted. Well, touché, baby! Anyway, we were politely refused and must say that the next place was considerably less royal and reeking of old coin, with no fabulous nothing, just some adjoining plain rooms sans the Marie Antoinette trappings. Oh well, it was a nice twenty-minute fantasy while it lasted. Had we been armed with fencing swords and Three Musketeer outfits, however, I believe we would have given the staff at the first hotel a run for their money. The fact is, the Dolls were all frustrated swashbucklers, and in this dispensation were equipped with electric guitars and drums. So it was now evening in London, and us native New Yorkers had to find somewhere to eat and were thrilled that there was actually a Jewish Deli–type place where we could all chow down on something lovable and familiar to all New Yorkers—a place that had pastrami sandwiches on rye and matzoh ball soup, knishes, etc. We felt that we were once again grounded in reality—that reality having now been confirmed by some good old New York deli food. I think we called it a night early that day as the Dolls were about to be set free or at large in the city of Londinium on the morrow.

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The very first time that the Dolls were allowed some free time in London at night we went to a large underground club called The Speakeasy. And I’ll be darned if it wasn’t the very same place that I had seen Slade when they were skinheads in 1970. I felt happy that it was such a small world and that I had already been there. I liked this club because it was just the right size. All the Dolls felt right at home there—it had a great rock-and-roll vibe. You felt as if you were personally starring in a rockand-roll movie just by being inside. It probably had a great history of great performances and great bands. I remember it being pretty glittery also, maybe with a sparkling silver metal-flake bar and lots of mirrors with silver-foil decorations. Incidentally, silver was the precious-metal color of the seventies, affordable, beautiful, and unpretentious. I must also mention at this point that the TV show Live at the Marquee Club was very popular in Britain at the time. One afternoon out and about in London, we were taken over to the Marquee Club at our own insistence. We would get to see what a rock-and-roll club that had been transformed into a glittery stage set for a TV show looked like, and satisfy our own communal fan desires—it was the launching pad of such famous bands as the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. Well, it was very quiet inside the TV studio/club in the daytime and not at all lit up. We were led through the darkened club and then through a door

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that led to some offices in the back. Our guide had told us in the car on the way over that we were about to meet one of Britain’s more eccentric and colorful rock-and-roll managers. Through another door, all of us New York Dolls came upon him. And even before being formally introduced, we already kind of liked him. Why? As the door swung open, we saw a short stocky man, extremely well dressed, with a huge cigar in his mouth and a drink in each hand. Right on! Way to meet the Dolls! I’m sure I thought, Here’s a real two-fisted drinker after my own heart. He had a bit of an Edward G. Robinson vibration about him, a oneof-a-kind character out of a gangster movie. We immediately thought that this guy wants to show us he’s ready to party. Let it rip! Let’s toast the queen! Here he was, in all his glory, the famous promoter Tony Stratton-Smith! We were impressed with his devil-may-care Dean Martin–ish old-school Rat Pack charm. May God bless and reform you in heaven, dear late Tony! Back at The Speakeasy, we Dolls were pretty happy just being in London and having our first club outing together. We were of course doing some semiserious drinking since it was our day to goof off and we didn’t have any engagements anywhere that night. Lots of pent-up testosterone was pumping away for five horny guys. We were told, however, that London birds weren’t ready for instant sex with total strangers like we were used to back in the Apple, and that, if we were attracted to any, we should first find a way to get properly introduced through mutual friends. No instant pick-up lines were allowed—too barbaric! In other words, it would take at least two weeks of getting acquainted before you might presume to ask them out for a date. Whoa! Better get our visas extended! Just why we were told this utter nonsense is way beyond me. Maybe tales of our die-hard female fans back in the Apple were disconcerting to our tour benefactors. Our whole thing was about having instant sex with females who were as attracted to us as we were to them. Youth was on our side and was the biggest factor to our instant love-ability. No years of courtship rituals for us five instant-action GI Joe Jet-Boy Dolls! We were a bunch of Stud City rockers! Our now-or-never approach to women was a big success back home. High mutual attraction called for immediate action/satisfaction. Call and speakeasy while smashed response fulfilled! Alpha and omega both happy!

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This now brings me to tell a silly old joke about the band. “What happens when (not if!) the New York Dolls drink too much? They get pickled and become New York Dills!” Well, it was our night off and we were starting to get a little pickled, mainly because there was nothing else to do. We were told to leave the birds alone unless we were prepared to spend a few weeks to chat them up. This sad news was totally discouraging, to say the least. Of course, some of us had to start immediately chatting up some birds since if it was gonna take two weeks just to get a silly date anyway, might as well get started. Ho hum! Our drummer in particular was always on the prowl for instant-gratification-minded wayward young libertines, preferably bisexual babes. He had a knack for spotting consenting female adults. The only problem was that we were told not to behave as if we were back in Manhattan. We were wondering just where the term “Swinging London” had gone. However, that was probably just some gay propaganda from some men who wished that the Dolls were a lot fruitier than we really were. After an hour or more of drinking mingled with a bit of proper socializing with a few birds who we thought required several more weeks of ancient courtship ritual to become user-friendly enough, we had managed to get quite smashed, tipsy, and silly. Of course, only under these circumstances would the ravings of five madmen almost sound like a good idea. And just what was this good idea? To jump onstage and play an impromptu set for fun and profit. We would treat the select few people in the club to a couple of Doll songs. The Dollfully uninitiated of London (it would be nearly another year before we made a record) would hear us play and be thrilled to death (or possible suicide). They would then go home and tell all their friends about seeing a really great rock-and-roll band from New York. We’d be instantly popular. Then we’d take home all the attractive girls in the club that evening, and word-of-mouth among their friends would make us the instant underground New Kids on the Thames. These alcoholically grand ideas were great, but what about the facts? Once again, we were all getting a bit too tipsy to do much else but talk about the idea of playing. However, after foolishly inquiring about the feasibility of jumping onstage for a couspeakeasy ple of songs, we were told that yes, it was possible. Whoa, Nellie! A large decision at half past three in while smashed

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the morning! With that news, we started to get excited. For the Dolls, just being in a rock club wasn’t enough, and the urge to play was overwhelming (again, with no rehearsals whatsoever). And so we decided, what the heck, let’s have some fun and turn ourselves into pop icons at the same time. Then we could pull talent (more birds). What would we have to lose? The only glitch was that they couldn’t turn on the stage lights for us as it was too late at night and we weren’t officially playing The Speakeasy. However, the five-blind-mice Dolls were so drunk that we had to hang onto the walls just to walk in a straight line. Equilibrium shot. But the show must go on, especially after we had told everyone how great a band we were. So we were led in the dark over to the unlit stage. Well, it wasn’t just dark in that corner, it was pitch black to me. Just climbing onstage was an effort worthy of Edmund Hillary’s first attempt on Everest. Thrilled to be up there, we were virtually incoherent and groping around in the dark, struggling in a tangled web of guitar cords and mike stands, etc. What a silly idea! How does one play electric guitar inside a cave? Upside-down from the ceiling, of course! Well, it was so dark that bats had to wear headlights. Talk about playing in a London Fog! Dangerous curves lay ahead! One thing about a musician getting drunk is that the fine muscles in your ears are the first to become disabled. It becomes harder to hear, so everything gets turned up to overcompensate. At this point, you can forget about any hope of tuning up properly without a mechanical tuning device on hand, which of course was nowhere in sight. I was so screwed up I couldn’t even find the neck on my own bass. So even if we all had perfect-pitch hearing, the effects of the alcohol would still make correctly tuning up with each other just a lucky shot in the dark. We did know from trial and error, however, that if we could manage to get in tune with each other, we could play anyway and sound OK. Even if the whole crew was a little sharp or flat it wouldn’t matter, just as long as we were all a little sharp or flat together. But if we couldn’t get in tune/sync with each other, it might become cacophony city on super-high volume. Duck and cover your eardrums, everyone! As most electric musicians know, giving your fans bleeding speakeasy eardrums due to excessive volume is an unprofeswhile smashed sional and unforgivable big-time show-business sin.

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When we were finally ready to play despite all stumbling around on the darkened stage, tripping over guitar cords and speaker cabinets, true terror pierced right through me—we still hadn’t played or rehearsed in weeks! At home, we were used to playing long hours every day as much as we could. We were a brand-new band—we needed all the practice we could get. Now, as I write about this evening, I wonder just why we were all so willing to put our necks on the chopping block when we were always so unprepared. Was it yet another one of the many stumbling blocks placed in the path of the Dolls on this British tour, just to see if our collective morale and team spirit could override and transcend them? So, as undaunted as the original Knights of the Round Table, we bravely began to play. But we found ourselves so drastically out of tune with each other that it wasn’t funny. Just a sonic mishmash of previously unheard unwanted noise! The whole idea was a bombs-away fiasco! Had someone thrown any light in our direction, it sure might have helped us to play better. Then, out of the crowd of people, an equally drunken heckler (whom we later found out was none other than Mick Farren from the Deviants) started shouting obscenities at us from two feet away. He was yelling about how much we suck, can’t play, and should get off the stage. He stood his ground directly in front of us. And I was thinking, aren’t things bad enough already? His obnoxious presence was the proverbial icing on the cake. He kept screaming and cursing at us as we tried to finish one of our songs. He was very loud, totally obnoxious, and completely distracting. Despite everything, we finished two songs and all of us knew it was time to abandon ship. The follies had ended. And, after the initial verbal fireworks simmered down, we all became drinking buddies with Mick and had a big laugh about how horribly we played that night. Our collective undampened good cheer and our ability to laugh at ourselves were well received. All the people present at least learned that we were young and reckless (not to mention restless and horny) teenage troubadours. They also found out that we were serious rock-and-roll troupers—drunk, straight, deaf, dumb, blind, upside-down like bats without radar, or otherwise. speakeasy This was only a portent of what the rest of the tour had in store for us. At least our hosts learned while smashed

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one thing—that when the New York Dolls bombed on stage, they bombed big time, baby! We revisited The Speakeasy several more time, very late at night, after the botched showcase incident. It felt so very comfortable inside, somewhere we might be able to continue our acquaintances with a few birds of London. I think The Speakeasy used to stay open until four a.m. back then. On one of those late nights, after we played and bombed again at a superlarge and superimportant gig at Wembley Empire Pool Soccer Stadium for thirteen thousand uninterested fans, it was very near to closing time and we were having a merry old time regardless of all the ill-fated gigs we had played. We had a new drinking-friend admirer that night partying with us. He said, “Do you guys know that just because The Speak is about to close, the party doesn’t have to end here?” We all wondered just what he might have meant by that statement, so we asked him, “Then what would you suggest?” And he said, “Well, lads, I own my own pub not far from here! You’re all invited! Grab some birds and let’s go!” Then we asked, “Aren’t there laws about what hours pubs can be legally open?” And he said, “Yeah, but it’s my own pub! Nobody tells me when I can or can’t open up! Look—I’ve got the keys right here in my pocket!” We were all kind of stun-gunned into the gleeful shock of doing something totally outrageous. We were also thrilled at the prospect of continuing our great little party. We just had to move our bash somewhere else, since it was past four a.m. and time to split The Speak. Outside the club, someone managed to get us all into whatever type of vehicle and drive across town to our new friend’s pub. This included a couple of stray birds from The Speakeasy. I, for one, was impressed that our new pal really did have his own pub on a street corner somewhere in London. For whatever reason, I was the last to get out of the car. As I opened the pub door, I saw both David and Johnny cutting the rug in front of the jukebox with their two aviary friends. I had no idea that there were so many professional hoofers in the New York Dolls. Eat your heart out, Jose Greco! Maybe we should have been a speakeasy dance troupe. (A secretary at Warner/Chappell Music while smashed thought we were one—an all-female dance troupe!)

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Within seconds after arrival, our New York Dolls after-hour pub party was in full swing, with the beer on tap flowing, dancing females, and the extra-special bonus treat of a few hash spliffs (courtesy of our pub host, thanks) being passed around. What more could a young man want at five a.m. in London? More birds? Fish and chips? Steak and kidney pie? A Yonah Schimmel knish imported from Houston Street? No way, it was too early in the day for food! And why would one willfully sabotage one’s own hard-earned highs that way? We were a-buzzin’ real good! Very Deseret! We had our tea and a couple of crumpets too! I didn’t have a girlfriend myself to chat up or dance with, nor was I the only one birdless in paradise. However, the various types of beers and ales to sample in the pub, along with the spliffs and a few games of darts, almost made up for any lack of lessons in proper courtship rituals of the Victorian Age. The place was a rather beautiful pub with lots of old wood and glass and mirrors, on the corner of some famous London street. I just can’t remember the names. Oh well. But as sure as our private revelry raged on through the hours of the wolf, creeping dawn was also making itself known. Not that the sun was shining yet, but the silence of the night was being broken by the appearance of some street traffic outside. The few people driving by were curious as to why there were lights on in a pub at such an unholy hour as seven a.m. This pub had lots of large windows to the street, and people could look inside. We were like fish in a fishbowl for gawking Londoners on their way to work. In those days, pubs were open for a few hours before lunch and then open again for two hours, reopening in the evening and remaining open until eleven p.m. Pub hours in 1972 were the same as during World War II. So, for Londoners passing by our still raging party, it must have been quite a shock to see a pub full of partiers when nothing else was open yet, not even the Tube. But a little while later when street traffic outside started to increase and men in dark suits wearing bowler hats carrying umbrellas started to angrily gawk at us late-night (early-morning?) revelers, we soon realized that our party would have to end. We were all too smashed to even consider dealing with an angry mob of commuters wielding umbrellas. Luckily, no one called INTERPOL on us. Moments later the pub lights suddenly went dim speakeasy and us party people were soon back at our hotel, falling swiftly into the arms of Morpheus. while smashed

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One of our earliest gigs once we left Escape Studios was to play on an off-night (Monday or Tuesday) evening in a small town where we were completely unknown—just in case we bombed, I guess. I believe that the first of such trial-run gigs was in the quaint town of Hull. We arrived there somehow, but I remember it being already dark. There wasn’t much to see as far as tourist attractions went. It seemed to be a small hamlet with a main street that was several blocks long. I probably couldn’t identify it correctly even if I saw a daylight photo of Hull in a tour book. The night was too dark to be able to see much except for the place where we were going to play and the motel where we stayed down the street. Neither place looked very promising. However, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking that with a wild-looking great rock-and-roll band like the Hullabaloos, there must be some rockand-roll afficionados around somewhere. I actually saw the Hullabaloos play at an all-day rock-and-roll show at the Paramount Theater in New York City. They looked and sounded dynamite—simply together! They all had bleached blond hair with white Edwardian ruffled shirts and black britches, boots, and eyebrows. They really looked like a band when they played. They were also the only band ever to have been “given special permission” to dust off and speed up a couple of great Buddy Holly songs of yesteryear and manage to turn them into new Merseybeat classics for people like me. Unfortunately, I never saw a second Hullabaloos record,26 even though the band had gotten some

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decent airplay and positive fan response in the States. One- or two-hit wonders? Oh well! Today, if you want to play or rerecord (heaven forbid!) a Buddy Holly song, rockabilly purists will protest and insist that the tempo and arrangement be exactly the same as the original version. No new arrangements allowed! So much for musical experimentalists like Jimi Hendrix. We can’t have acid-metal monsters Blue Cheer desecrating Buddy Holly tunes! Heavens to Betsy! Interstellar meltdown of our solar system! The only lights I remember seeing in Hull were the streetlights, and maybe a dim golden glowing sign above the club where we were gonna be playing. But we said, “Oh well, what the Hull, let’s show these Brits how the rockin’ Dollies can ‘Rip It Up’!” And so we piled out of the van with guitars in hand and marched into the club. We hadn’t played together since our last live gig two months ago.27 However, our collective pent-up rock-and-roll energy was gushing through our blood and was about to explode. We were finally gonna plug in and blast off! The Dolls were true rock-and-roll addicts who needed their rock-and-roll fix. Anyone who saw us live would never forget the “night I saw the New York Dolls play.” I would have liked to have seen and heard the Dolls myself that evening! I’m sure I would have been a devotee! Oh well, you can’t be everywhere at once, unless you’re a yoga adept who can astral travel and thus bilocate whenever. Just how that particular show went that evening is difficult to remember, but I know that pent-up energy can be rerouted into some fierce and hellifying rock and roll. We were cruisin’ for a bruisin’ and merrily bashed away our frustrations over being held prisoner at Escape Studios for so long. When we played with a vengeance, watch out! There was nothing more liberating or more cathartically satisfying for the New York Dolls than to cheerfully toss down a few brewskis like it was New Year’s Eve, man our axes, and prepare to slay the audience like Jack the Giant Killer. There was only one problem—what audience? Were we supposed to be playing an exclusive special engagement for the barkeep, a waitress, the sound man, and the bouncer? Oh, brother! Monday night hangover blues? Where were the rest of the people? Where were the ex-Hullabaloos when we needed moral support? So, like many other gigs, we played to to Hull and back amuse ourselves.

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And this is where the New York Dolls philosophically differed from all other bands that came before them. We started a band to play and explore what we wanted. If you like it, great! If not, drop dead! Most artists sit around wondering, “How can I degrade and humiliate myself to please the masses?” If you didn’t like us, we might aggressively detune our guitars and turn up the volume so as to create a sonic air-raid assault with a loud and obnoxious cacophony of pure noise! And if that weren’t enough, we might just jump out into the audience and wrap our guitars around your idiot skull in person! How’s that for a personal appearance? Dorothy, call the authorities and the paramedics—the Dolls are playing in Nowheresville again! But we were in Hull, happily rehearsing in a club on a Monday night. It sure beat the hell out of Escape Studios and the boring oasthouse. Maybe everyone was home watching Monday night soccer? Oh, there’s no one at the gig because our show wasn’t promoted in the local press? No advertising? Too late? Oh well, it’s the town’s own loss! The Dolls never returned to Hull. I’d love to see it in the daytime someday. If you missed that one show, we were gone forevermore. I’m sure we played a give-’em-hell-Harry rockin’ show for the three invisible people and their invisible dog who were invisibly thrilled by it all! After the show as we were leaving the club, a couple of rather young schoolgirls appeared out of nowhere, wanted autographs from the band, and were generally curious about us. They had heard us play some songs and were excited over just what we strangely attired New York City boys were doing in Hull, England, so far from home. We had all been drinking beer to quench our thirst while we were playing and afterwards were behaving silly. We were giddy because we had been allowed to do what we normally do—rock out. Our extraneous anger had been successfully channeled into our music set, and it felt so good to flex our rock-and-roll power muscles once again. But it had been a long day and we were tired too. Lucky for us, our accommodations were right down the block. Anyway, Johnny had a key to one of the rooms where we would spend the rest of the night. I’m sure he was just clowning around, but he grabbed the two schoolgirls and me, pushed open the to Hull door, and then turned around and proceeded to lock it from the inside, thus locking out the rest of the Dolls (Billy, and back

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David, Syl, and a couple of roadies). Maybe Johnny was jealous that Billy and David had escaped to London and met some birds. Maybe this was playful revenge for their lawless-escapee antics. Anyway, it would appear to the rest of the guys that we had stolen the females away from them in order to ensure that we could have our own private orgy without their help. Unfortunately, all of this petty rivalry instantly shifted our group philosophy of all-for-one-one-for-all team-spirit altruism to an I’ve-gotmine-let’s-all-watch-while-you-get-yours mentality, a complete reversal of our original higher spiritual vision. We were now in competition for women as opposed to being an impenetrable fortress of solidarity. Up to that point in time, women did not come between the Dolls. All of our female fans were “property of the Dolls,” as if we were living in an urban version of a hippie commune. Our earliest friends and fans used to hang out and sleep over like we were running an indoor summer sleep-away camp. We would all band together to help each other survive in the big city. On holidays like Thanksgiving, our female fans would go shoplifting for us and then also cook and feed us. Devotion! A communal team effort was the sensible way to go. It was only 1972, and the inner-city hippie movement was decaying and exiting the city for greener pastures, but an urban communal living group actually made sense and was fun. It made life in the city not just a totally depressing monumental solo-effort bound for failure, but rather a team challenge to successfully overcome together. When there’s help, there’s hope! Well, from what I remember of that evening, the girls Johnny had taken hostage that evening were nothing to write home about. As a matter of fact, they were just pawns in a silly macho game of sexual rivalry among friends. It was more important to steal them away from the other Dolls—who they were didn’t really matter. It was just a retarded game of one-upmanship. Since the girls weren’t all that attractive physically and were too naive to know anything about the push-and-pull of the game of love, I simply wasn’t interested. Neither was John. These were not the more mature birds we were after—just a symbolic trophy. The girls were too innocent to be any fun sexually, and so to Hull John and I said, “Oh well,” and told them that they would and back have to leave because we were going to sleep.

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This is another story of how the New York Dolls continued to be the naive recipients of many unknown mystery surprises while on tour without a record contract in England, 1972. In fact, at every turn, there were more and more new surprises for us unsuspecting and uninitiated foolish young lads. Our daily trials by fire just kept a-rollin’ at us nonstop. Under siege? Yes! Paying our dues? Yes! Well, this time, our story begins with the Dolls going for a rather long train ride up north to the city of Liverpool, once home of some other more famous and much more beloved musicians. We were all thrilled that morning when we left London. It was a collective teenage rock-androll dream come true. Most of us were Beatle fans anyway, and were naturally kind of curious about a place that had spawned and also inspired such a great rock-and-roll band. I’m sure we all thought before we left that the people of Liverpool were in for a real treat and would love the rough, tough, and ready raw power of the Dolls’ improvisational kind of rock and roll. We in turn would be thrilled to be able to say that we had played in the Beatles’ hometown. Fans back in the Big Apple would be impressed too. Liverpool, to us, was home of “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields” and one of the world’s most famous rock-and-roll venues, the Cavern Club. Maybe we too could “Ferry ’Cross the Mersey” like in the Gerry and the Pacemakers song? Playing in Liverpool was gonna be a fresh start that would bring us some good luck, we had all decided. We had enough of the mystery

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surprises already! We had high hopes for this gig in particular. What could possibly go wrong with an equation that was so simple? Well, the train we took from Victoria Station was right out of an Agatha Christie novel. It was antique, quaint, very cool-looking, and from another time entirely. And there was a bar car! A bar car that ran out of beer somewhere along the way. Oh well, it was only a minor hassle. Very un-British though! How does one keep a stiff upper lip without a frothy beer buzz? It was a long five- or six-hour ride for the impatiently impaired, however. No wonder that I started carrying my own whiskey flask soon after that. I’m sure we were all over the train like curious kids for the first couple of hours, checking out everything. But toward the end of our trip, I think that most of us had fallen asleep in our seats. Not long after the train had arrived we were driven to a really old theater—it looked like an old-time vaudeville theater. The place looked so old that the last major star performer who played there was probably the pioneering heroine ecdysiast Lili St. Cyr in 1903.28 She would be a tough act to follow, especially sixty-nine years later! Wow, were we sure that the pyramid builders of ancient Tiahuanaco didn’t have something to do with creating this time-worn edifice? We were driven to the rear of the theater where the stage exit was and were told to get dressed. We were late, and would be playing very shortly. Well, no need to worry, we’d gotten dressed and ready to play in shorter amounts of time. Watch out Liverpool, you’re about to see and hear the New York Dolls’ style of wild high-energy rock-and-roll music, and everything’s gonna be all right! We were quite thrilled to be playing at the Stadium, which was a theater and not a club or pub, especially after such a long and hot grueling train ride. I put on the wildest glitter rock-and-roll outfit that I owned for good measure. No man that I had ever seen had the sheer balls to wear as little clothing as I used to wear onstage! Well, maybe there was one exception, the cast of the sixties musical Hair, who were supposedly naked in the finale. Ahh . . . but totally nude can never be nearly as sexy as being almost nude. And you only need one tiny scrap of cloth to be almost nude. We were all practically naked Liverpool when we used to play in the Oscar Wilde Room at Mercer Arts Center. The room would get very hot and steamy or bust!

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from so many people jumping around, and we’d sweat to death onstage under the hot lights if we didn’t strip down a bit. I felt extremely comfortable with no pants, instead wearing pantyhose and boots (just like my favorite feline hero, Puss in Boots). Well, that night I was clad only in a pair of men’s high red-leather one-inch platform boots, opaque purple pantyhose, a gold-and-purple sequined circus trapeze artist leotard, plus optional comedic high-camp goofy bow tie. Lili St. Cyr would have been proud! So would Charlie Chaplin! Not to mention Phyllis Diller! Anyway, I can only guess that I must have thought that I was personally striking a liberating low-blow right in the labonza for both men’s and women’s fashions of the future! All of us Dollies got dressed really quickly in the ancient dressing area (in back of the stage curtain) and lined up to rush the stage on cue. It was all of two inches away from where I stood behind the drafty old curtain. I was so close that I could see the ancient stage’s footlight candle holders, and we were ready to charge. We were literally inches and minutes away from playing. I then heard one of us Dolls say that he thought he heard that Lou Reed was on the same bill with us. So I said, “Do you mean Lou Reed of the Velvets?” And Billy Doll said, “Yeah!” Dear readers, this was a few years before Lou Reed had gone home and listened to our first album several zillion times, reinvented himself to compete with David Bowie’s unisexual allure, and recorded his Transformer comeback album (armed with thousands of new ideas from our New York Dolls albums) with his new big-time image makeover.29 And then our manager (also affectionately known to us Dolls as the Messenger of Death) magically appeared and said, “Forget it, guys! Lou Reed has thrown you off the show. He told the promoter that he refuses to play on the same bill! Show’s over, it’s time to get back in the car and split!” Well, gee, thanks for telling us the bad news first, Dr. Mengele! Needless to say, all of us Dolls were totally stunned, not to mention fighting mad! Had the Dolls played that gig, we would have blown poor Lou’s nonmusic (he can’t sing or play) career to Kingdom Come. That gig also would have made the Dolls the “new superheroes in town,” creating lots of avid new young Doll devotees! Was this any way for New Yorkers to treat fellow New liverpool Yorkers two thousand miles away from home? Hell, no! or bust!

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This was totally unacceptable paranoid behavior on Reed’s part. And so we got re-dressed in the car and were soon cruisin’ around Liverpool looking for something else to do. So where would you go on a Tuesday night after having dinner at a place called the New York Steakhouse in downtown Liverpool? Find a strip club somewhere? Go to the movies or bowling? What was stopping us from becoming “Fairies Cross-Dressing on the Mersey”? Maybe we could find some penny-arcade amusement facility? How about busking in the street for spare change? That would at least involve us playing music in Liverpool! Or check out some local rock clubs? It really was either a Monday or Tuesday evening30 and there was nothing else happening. Except for a Lou Reed gig at the Stadium. How boringly lame can you get? Well, the correct answer for us was to visit Liverpool’s world-famous Cavern Club, where the Beatles used to play. At least it was an idea with some promise, being a historical landmark to check out. So we asked our driver to take us over there for inspirational reasons. I do remember that it was definitely underground, in a basement that you had to go down a flight of stairs to enter. It really was kind of like a cave with the walls painted in black. Too bad it’s now a parking lot.31 The place was extremely dark inside, and we were the only customers. Our sole companions were the bartender, a Flamin’ Groovies poster silently hanging on the wall, and the jukebox—not even any live bands playing that night. I can only hope that since Cyril 32 and the Groovies also traveled that long distance just to get to Liverpool, at least they were allowed to play, unlike us unworthy Dolls. Thirty years later, I’m still crushed that we weren’t allowed to rip it up in Liverpool. And so, bored to death at the very un-happening Cavern Club, after a few tall cool ones we left for greener pastures, or at least to somewhere where there were a few more people. Five musicians looking to express themselves without being able to play their instruments reminds me of an old Twilight Zone TV episode called “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” in which five toy dolls in a Christmas donations bucket are trying to find an exit door. In our case, though, the Dolls were looking for an entrance door. What a drag! Liverpool We got back in the car and went looking for a rock club, somewhere, anywhere, and managed to find one. So or bust!

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we all got out of the car and went inside. This was an almost interesting place in that there were three separate floors with different themes, and that there were supposed to be three local bands. Pretty exciting so far, huh, kids? I think there was a fifties rock floor and a sixties floor, and maybe a floor with tribute bands. In any event, it was all very dark and one-dimensional. We didn’t want to watch amateurs play, but that was about all that was going on that night. I don’t remember meeting anyone or even chatting up some chicks there. Maybe we frightened off the locals with our angry “thwarted again” vibrations. Who knows? Had anyone in that second club been anything at all to write home about for any reason, I would have remembered! And although we pretended to amuse ourselves that evening playing snooker or darts or pinball, we were bummed out big time at not being allowed to make our dream of playing Liverpool come true.

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The gig at Leeds College was one of those way-too-stoned evenings that helped us become very popular really fast, because we were human and the emotions were real and unfeigned. No two New York Doll shows were ever the same. We seldom wrote song lists, and we never dressed the same, even if it meant taking off our own clothes to trade with another Doll—ours was a community wardrobe. And, like many other bands during those days, we were propelled by a variety of alcoholic drinks plus various combinations of available local drugs. Everyone who has ever attempted to go on tour soon comes to the realization that you must be in charge of when to be up and animated as well as when to be asleep and resting up for the next gig. But all the traveling between venues throws another huge curve at your poor body clock. If you could travel and play at the same time every day, you’d get used to it. However, this is not the case for most traveling bands. So for every artist, it all comes down to one question: how do I take control of when I’m gonna be up or down? And yes, the correct answer is Carter’s Little Liver Pills (by Bristol-Myers Laboratories), of course! Somewhere between Hull and Liverpool, the Dolls played at Leeds College (I think!). And although our show went really well, I don’t remember anything outstanding about it. Except that, underrehearsed or not, every couple of gigs or so the Dolls would rip the roof off the joint, take no prisoners, and just plain slay ’em. That had a

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rather large effect on crowds and would actually drive some kids completely nuts! People can say this or that about our early live shows, but we poured out our five rock-and-roll hearts with a fresh and foolhardy barrier-smashing pure and wild no-holds-barred gleeful abandon. In other words, we used to jam live in front of the kids—unfeigned chaos brought under control before your very eyes. Our music actually made us so much higher than any of the drinks or drugs we used to take. It’s a pity that we would be the very last to understand how true that was. Our rock and roll alone was a sexy buzzy high. I can safely assume that the show we played that evening (of which I remember absolutely nothing) must have been one of our storm-theBastille shows and the audience picked up on our “Wang Dang Doodle” message, that message being, “Wake up, or you’re gonna miss the party.” The reason I say this is that when I awoke just about sunrise the next morning, I was sure hungover and desperately dehydrated. I wanted nothing less than a sea (or at least a swimming pool) of ice-cold beer to slake the unquenchable thirst so that I could finally come back down to Earth and calm down after whatever had happened the night before. I was the only one of the Dolls who had woken up. I couldn’t even guess at which deadly combination of poisonous things I must have ingested the night before to have left me feeling so bad. Plus it was Sunday! That was kind of a drag, since pubs or package stores might not open until that afternoon or evening, if at all. However, the search to quench my mighty thirst had to begin immediately, or I just might roll over and croak, immobilized in a coma for the rest of the day. So I got dressed as fast as I could, probably still in my outrageous stage gear from the night before (plus massacred mascara and white powder on my face), and left for a Sunday constitutional through the streets of Leeds in search of my amber liquid breakfast. On my way out, I opened the door to the hotel room and peered into the hallway. Whoa! I was shock and awe! To my utter astonishment, I saw the entire length of the hallway littered with bodies of sleeping fans—both male and female! It was five or six a.m. (I think—the Dolls didn’t believe in wristwatches. Strictly for nine-to-five squares. Who cared what time it was?) They all looked so young and good morning, innocent while sleeping like that. I thought, I guess we must have really laid it on pretty thick last night Leeds

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and had executed one of our raising-of-the-dead hellifying shows. Darn those pesky alcoholic blackouts! Still looking out in the hallway, I got a sudden attack of terror. I was certainly in no shape to do any Q&A interrogation sessions. I needed more alcohol in my bloodstream immediately. I was way too paranoid, shaky, and flaky to deal with it. I had to silently bypass the kids in the hall. Now it was my turn to practice being an escapee. So, tiptoeing through the tulips, I tried not to disturb any of the young fans. However, I woke up one young fellow. He politely asked if he could tag along with me to wherever I was going, so I said, “Sure, but let’s not wake anyone else up! I gotta go find something somewhere to drink right away.” So my new companion and I hit the cobblestone streets of Leeds on a quietly beautiful sunny Sunday morning. The city seemed very quaint and old-fashioned and European-looking (as far as I knew), and I almost thought I was back in Amsterdam, only without the watery canals everywhere. Had I not been so hungover, I might have enjoyed going to church in one of the Gothic cathedrals. Well, I know that my new friend and I must have talked about something—he probably was curious about what our lives were like back in the Big Apple and what we were doing on tour in England when we didn’t even have a record deal. After searching through the empty streets for a few hours, we found a package store that was open. Whatever it was that I was so happily eager to buy—shandy or beer or ale or stout—it was sure like a heavenly elixir in my dehydrated state. With a few cans or bottles of something alcoholic to go, we went back to the hotel to find everyone still asleep. Had I missed some kind of wild party last night? Some of the fans had left, but there were still kids camped out. I must have said good-bye to my friend at that point. I was tired. I then simply went back to sleep with the rest of the band until much later that evening when we all awoke, packed up, and left for another destination. There’s one more footnote to the New York Dolls having visited Leeds. The day before the night we played, we had a chance to walk around the streets of Leeds. At some point we passed a pawn shop. Something in the window had caught my eye: an antique white Vox Phantom Teardrop guitar, just like the one that Brian Jones of the Stones had made famous. I wondered for good morning, a moment, then said to my Doll pals, “Hey, I’m goin’ leeds

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inside to find out how much they want for that Vox Phantom Teardrop.” The three of us went in and asked how much it was, and they were practically giving it away for something like twenty quid (under fifty dollars U.S.). The country’s monetary system hadn’t as yet been switched over to the new decimal system. When we went shopping, we heard expressions like, “That will be two guineas and a shilling please.” Boy, was that confusing! However, I did manage to buy the Vox Phantom Teardrop with a small loan from another Doll. Johnny would use that guitar in 1974 during our videotaped appearance on the BBC rock-and-roll show The Old Grey Whistle Test. In that sense, it has historical value for fans. This particular model had a special removable antiscratch pleated black cushion-pad that was attached by (male) rivets to the back of the guitar, which had the corresponding receptor (female) rivets. Tremendously sexy, from a metallurgist’s standpoint! I can only imagine that this special feature would prevent the back of the guitar from being scratched by one’s metal belt buckle while playing—a pretty ingenious addition to a very uniquely styled guitar. During the sixties, large square metal belt buckles were all the rage, and this was a very practical solution for guitarists who didn’t want to devalue their investment. Many years later, in the early nineties, someone handed me a guitar player’s fan magazine (like Guitar Player) to take a look at for whatever reason. In the centerfold was a beautiful color photograph of a white Vox Phantom Teardrop. I don’t recall ever bringing that guitar to the pawn shop near Eighth Street and First Avenues, but maybe I did. Some time after our second European tour in ’74, I might have left it in some apartment from which I had been evicted. The article explained that this guitar, with the special removable padded cushion, had once belonged to the legendary New York Dolls bassist Arthur Kane. Whoa! Was it the very same guitar? Guess I’ll never know! It had then fallen into the hands of a woman who in turn sold it to a collector. Its price was now an amazing ten thousand dollars! Too bad that I’d lost track of its whereabouts so many moons ago. And not bad for a twenty-quid investment one afternoon in Leeds way back when.

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London’s Kensington Market had lots of rock-and-roll clothes and just about everything else under the sun. But anyone with money could shop there and buy nice stuff right off the rack. Where’s the challenge in that? How could you wear a one-of-a-kind outfit if everyone else could buy it too? When the Dolls went shopping together in London one day, we were probably doing what we did best—window shopping. That is, we’d go have a look around, think about it overnight, then go back and buy some stuff the next day. Who knows if we had any money with us? We were really just browsing like crazy, looking for unusual stuff that no one else would have the nerve to wear in public. At some point, we found ourselves walking along Kings Road, which we had been told had lots of clothing shops to check out. Johnny raced a good block ahead of the rest of us browsing Dollings, then disappeared from view. But the rest of us didn’t notice, still amazed by everything on display. With Mr. Thunders still nowhere in sight, we all perked up a bit when we reached a store whose name was Let It Rock. From the things we saw in the window, this looked like a place where we might actually find something new and different but still very rock-and-roll. After a few moments of staring at the interestingly odd clothes in the window, we walked inside. Everyone suddenly became completely awestruck at what we saw there. And what did we see? No, wrong guess!

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Johnny, dressed in one of the long jackets that we had seen in the store window, was dancing with the sexy shop girl, who had a blond crew cut. Dancing? In the middle of the afternoon? On Kings Road? With the jukebox roaring away some fifties tunes? Oh yeah! And I thought, Since when is Johnny starring in (an unfortunately unfilmed) version of an Elvis Presley sock-hop flick? In London? In broad daylight? And since when did Johnny become the new Rudolf Nureyev of the hoofer set? Anyway, Johnny knew all the fifties dances really well, and the shop girl seemed to be thrilled with the effect of it all. I thought that this was a more romantic entrance than any movie star could ever make in real life. Evidently, when John found the right shop, he walked in, put on a jacket, put some money in the jukebox, and asked the shop girl to dance. Romantic Elvis movie reenactments aside, the rest of us Dolls were happily surprised that some of the clothes in the shop were of the oneof-a-kind variety. In fact, upon much closer examination, we found that all of the clothing had lots of weird little detail features, like t-shirts with tinted plastic window-pane pockets that held small photos, next to a tiny zipper. Or t-shirts with chicken bones attached on the front spelling out the name of some rock band. Or sleeveless t-shirts with pornographic literature printed in words on the front. Or t-shirts with multiple zippers all over. We all wondered at that point, who could have thought up this stuff, and what did it all mean? When the shop girl was through dancing with Johnny, we asked her what kind of shop she was running, and why was it called Let It Rock. She said, “Why, it’s a shop that caters to Teddy Boys, of course!” And we said, “That’s nice, but who and what is a Teddy Boy?” So she explained that they are (not were) hardcore fifties rock-androll fans who continued to get dressed up as if the fifties never ended. Teddy Boys dressed in long drape (zoot suit–style) jackets, wore “winklepicker” shoes and rolled-up Levis jeans, and had long greasy fifties DA hairdos. They were cool regardless of the calendar date, one of the many “Tribes of Britain” (like Skinheads or Mods or Pearly Queens). She said that she and her partner owned the shop and designed all the clothes, and we were impressed. We then asked her what her name was, and she said, “I’m let it Vivienne Westwood and my partner, who’s not here today, is rock! Malcolm McLaren.”

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And we said, “We’re the New York Dolls, a brand-new band playing here on tour. You’ve got to come to one of our shows!” And we all ended up buying a bunch of weird t-shirts. A little later that same day, after the sun had gone down and it was getting a bit colder and windy outside, a young boy right out of a Dickens novel came up to me and said, “Penny for the Guy?” I said, “Penny for what guy?” And he said, “Not some guy, but a penny for Guy Fawkes Day.” Still not knowing what this was all about, I gave him the biggest silver coin in my pocket at the time. Maybe it was a guinea or a pound coin, but it was the largest coin that Britain had minted at the time. I said, “Well, kid, have a very happy Guy Fawkes Day!” He was thrilled, and went on his merry way. Only years later, while watching a TV show about British history, did I discover that at that time of the year, when most Americans are celebrating Halloween, the British are celebrating their own version of our Fourth of July, which is called Guy Fawkes Day. All British schoolchildren are supposed to construct a Guy Fawkes Day doll out of whatever materials are available. Many of these are entered into local contests. So when the boy approached me, he should have been carrying his own homemade doll, because armed with one, you could feel free to go up to people and say “Penny for the Guy” and receive some payment according to how good a doll you had made. When I first replied to the young lad, “What Guy?,” I was correct in asking to actually see the Guy Fawkes Doll. But my poor British waif friend didn’t even have one. He nevertheless did pretty well for himself by asking this New York Doll. In any event, it was an evening long ago, and I fondly recall Guys and Dolls and the New York Dolls and a guy with a doll named Guy . . .

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The New York Dolls were not in the town of Newcastle nor at Newcastle University student lounge, where for years I had thought this all took place. The location isn’t that important. What’s funny about this story in particular is that our singer David, years after the demise of the Dolls, has used it as comedy material for various television talk shows (no other Dolls have ever been allowed on American TV). I know that he told my joke for about twenty minutes on the Johnny Carson show once. It wasn’t even that great a joke, but it took a long time to tell. And I saw David tell this very Newky Brown story on Late Night with Conan O’Brien after singing “Personality Crisis” with the house band. It’s a very New York Dolls story, to say the least. It was October 26, 1972. The scene of the crime in reality was the city of Birmingham, at the Alhambra Rock Club (according to Nina Antonia’s book, The New York Dolls: Too Much Too Soon). I can kind of picture in my mind’s eye what it looked like that sunny day, and that’s why I always thought we were at a university student lounge somewhere. I remember seeing polished hardwood floors that were more reminiscent of a basketball court than a stage. I also recall that it was broad daylight outside. And I don’t remember ever being told that we were performing anywhere that day. It was a blazingly hot morning and not our usual playing hour and circumstance. Who woke us up for what? Why were we there? We should have been out sunbathing somewhere. I thought we were at a daytime

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business luncheon meeting with record executives on our day off. I can also remember a large round wooden table where our hosts requested that we sit, large enough for a dozen or so people, thus reminding me (being an Arthur too) of tales of King Arthur’s court and the Knights of the Round Table. Well, at least we were in the right country for round tables. And our round table was only about ten feet away from the bar. Now that we were seated, our host said something like, “Well, lads, we have our very own favorite brew on tap here at the bar, and we’d love for you Yanks to give it a try and see what you think.” Well, the New York Dolls didn’t refuse anything that might be free, since we never knew if or when we might get to eat or drink again. Before breakfast on an empty stomach? I thought, I’ll just have my secretary cancel my afternoon appointments since I’ll be out to lunch. So we said sure, we’d love some. And the New York Dolls all simultaneously got their first taste of this rich brown ale with a thick-as-a-brick heavy foam head. I loved it; I think we all did. Not quite as medicinal as Guinness stout, but a heavy-duty party-hearty great-tasting very enjoyable macho brew. Well, I’m not sure if we were having a toasting frenzy, but the Dolls downed pitcher after pitcher of this local elixir and we were growing rather fond of this new buzz called Newcastle Brown Ale. That’s why I always thought this story took place in Newcastle! Well, we each had drunk eight to ten pints or more of this new brew in under a half an hour. We were getting pretty tipsy as the Newky Brown Ale kept a-comin’ and a-comin’. I tried to stand up at one point, and then understood that I was dead drunk and my physical coordination was slipping. And we were all in the same condition—blind drunk in the early afternoon and carrying on regardless. We thought it must be someone’s birthday party extravaganza, and kept drinking away so as not to offend our host. Then, as if on cue, our manager slimily crawled in to bring us all down. We happily hadn’t seen him in a few days. He said, “Just what do you guys think you’re doing?” And we all, I’m sure, volunteered vocally, “What’s it look like we’re doing? We’re obviously toasting intergalactic peace!” And he said, “I hope that you’re together enough to play soon. You’ve got less than five minutes to get yourcoals to Newcastle selves together.”

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And we said, “Whoa! What? No one told us anything about playing anywhere today.” Then Jabba said, “Well, now you’ve got four minutes.” And so, blind drunk and with huge amounts of Newcastle Brown Ale sloshing about in each of our bloated stomachs, we tried to get up and walk. Play? Play what? A gig? What’s a gig? Where? Here? It’s too late! You’ve got to be kidding! Did our guitars magically teleport themselves? Oh, really, they did? Well, why weren’t we told anything about this stuff earlier? We’re totally smashed, what did you expect? Well, without the use of wheelchairs or crutches, we Dolls somehow managed to slosh our way over to where the stage was set up, complete with amps and guitars—and, yes, with our guitars, no less. We were lucky that we didn’t fall on our faces just getting to the stage. And how come we never saw a stage anywhere before that? Was it a high-tech stealth stage with invisibility capabilities on loan from Bentwaters AFB? Next thing you know, our incapacitated young heroes were handed their guitars and struggled desperately to strap them on. Just getting the guitar strap around you and your cord plugged into the proper hole can seem to take forever while drunk. And let’s try to not get electrocuted by those Frankensteinian anciently large electrical outlets putting out two hundred twenty volts of direct current, please. So, without so much as a split second to tune up our axes and, again, without any previous music rehearsals, we began to play our rebel-rousing anthem “Personality Crisis” with a drunken nasty vengeance. And for a few precious glorious seconds in the aeons of the cosmos, everything was going great guns because we were about to do what we were born to do—rock and roll! As if on cue, the gates of hell were tore asunder, as Billy Doll regurgitated all over his drum kit. What a Newky mess! He also had turned a ghostly shade of white/green. A sizable pool of disgusting brown liquid and chunky foam was pooled on the skins. However, in the best of show business traditions, Billy Doll never missed a beat and just kept on playing. However, each time he hit his drums, flying projectiles of Newky Brown foamy chunks started bouncing through coals to the air all around the room in every which direction. Was this show gonna be a modern-day reenactment of newcastle

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the terror created by a sneak aerial attack from some of Hitler’s horrific buzz bombs? Well, Lord help us all, but yes! So we were all still playing away in the best of the “carry on, gang” fashion when a chunk of the disgusting Newky Brown splashed onto David’s face while he was trying to sing. Whoa! That was it! Instant nausea as he too immediately tossed his cookies overboard. But the show, of course, must go on! And within the next few seconds or so, the rest of us were collectively barfing our brains out, all sick as dogs while continuing to perform our song. Each of us had been hit by flying projectiles of Newky Brown Ale’s Instant Newklear Nausea Foam, even in places you’d least expect. And the show steadily sloshed onward, with all of us playing and barfing up gallons. Well, could you, dear reader, imagine what people in the audience must have thought while they were watching? Oh, brother! Besmirched be our once good name forevermore! Circus Maximus gone aesthetically awry? I’m sure at some later date we all must have wondered if maybe that’s just what our British fans really wanted from us New York Dolls—that little extra personal touch of authenticity! Well, we finally finished our song, which also ended the aerial blitzkrieg bombardment by Newky Brown foamy chunks. And, as the final ringing chord faded away, we were amazed to be the recipients of a standing ovation, complete with cheers, screams, whistles, howls, and barks from a pre-Newked crowd of brand-new New York Doll devotees! Wow! Our host then came over and said, “That was a jolly good show, Dolls! You guys can take it easy, it’s all over and you’ve passed the test with flying colors.” Well, us jolly Dollies were indeed a jolly mess! Five cadavers in search of some hyperbaric youth-restoring oxygenated chambers in which to sleep it off and perhaps maybe even visit Dreamland near Area 51 in Nevada by remote viewing. We probably spent the rest of the day crashing in a van on our way back to London. Now, years later, dear reader, I am surprised that we didn’t ask our managers for money so that we could rush out to our local underwater dive shop for five wet suits. They surely might come in handy for our next live over-moisturizingly cathartic life-threatening coals to public experience. Truly, we were extremely lucky to Newcastle not have been electrocuted accidentally with those user-

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deadly two hundred twenty volts DC. However, the Jollies had yet to meet up with a certain colorful haberdasher named Malcolm McLaren to find out about his philosophically correct couture: rubber clothing fashions for consenting kinky adults!

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Watching TV news a few months ago I was shocked to see an international newscast showing film of a wrecking ball destroying the landmark soccer stadium named Wembley Empire Pool.33 How completely barbaric, I thought. What a waste! Why didn’t they just detach it from its Earth foundations and blast it into space to replace the aging Mir space station in low orbit? It would have been a much prettier sight in outer space, especially for our fourth-dimension invisible Martian friends. As I continue to reflect upon the New York Dolls’ first trip to London, one question stands out in my mind: did our British host have the Dolls come to London to help us with our careers or to sabotage us out of the music business? And who was really pulling the strings on our tour behind the scenes? So, after Kent and our impromptu drunken disaster gig at The Speakeasy, wouldn’t you know it was time for us to play one of our “prestige” shows, as per our agreements, at no less than the world’s most famous soccer and tennis stadium. Whoa! This is where I started to suspect some flaws in the larger picture. The Dolls first had two weeks off before we left, then spent two weeks in the countryside bored to death, but were never given a chance to rehearse. Just why would our New York managers so carelessly let that happen? Chops are everything when you’re on tour! Didn’t they want to sign a multimillion-dollar record deal? Now, however, we would be playing a benefit for spastic children (not that we

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didn’t fit into that category) at Wembley Pool, second on the bill to Rod Stewart and the Faces, and alongside a version of the infamous Pink Fairies (sans Twink, of course). For some kids from Queens, playing a huge benefit sponsored by the Queen herself was a huge leap in credibility. We didn’t even have a record deal! Before a band makes a record, they don’t even know what they sound like. That’s why you make a record—to define that. This monumentally prestigious gig would dwarf any we had previously played. Once again we were going from frying pan to flame without the slightest warning. Previously we had played in New York for three or four hundred people at most, either at the Oscar Wilde Room at Mercer Arts Center or somewhere like Max’s Kansas City or the Coventry in Queens. Those were our largest gigs to date—not exactly football stadiums! To play those very large shows in front of thousands of people, a band must be properly trained. It’s a completely new ball game, compared to the intimacy of playing in clubs. We were never trained to do either, but we taught ourselves how to play small clubs by trial and error. I am reminded of the story of the rock band Boston, whose members all kept their factory day jobs from fiscal fear, until their single became a smash radio hit. The record company then demanded that a band calling itself Boston had to go on tour and play big arenas. In Boston’s case, they had never played together before, not to mention knowing how to put on an arena-sized rock extravaganza. They had to hire a team of pros to come in and teach them how to perform, what to play, what to say, what to wear, how to move, how to groove, where to stand, and when to roll over and bark for Friskies. For the Dolls, this seemed like a great opportunity to be seen and heard by lots of new fans. But how could we possibly successfully pull it off? With mirrors and smoke? None of this made any sense to me, and I thought it was totally unfair for anyone to expect us be able to compete against one of Britain’s all-time favorite bands—the beloved Rod Stewart and the Faces (we loved them too). This gig promised to be our career-suicide swan song. We also had no idea just how large a place Wembley was gonna be since we had never been there prior to that evening’s show. In the rush and excitement of it all, we Dolls didn’t have any input and cheerfully floating in wembley pool went along with everything. I now feel that the forces

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behind the scenes actually wanted us to look amateurish, too young and too inexperienced, to be able to compete in the big leagues with seasoned professionals. A tall call! End of band! And, truth be told, of course we were too young and inexperienced to play against our own favorite older professionals. The Dolls hadn’t been together a year! We simply weren’t ready to compete with anyone. Why bring unpolished wares to the marketplace? In New York Dolls speak, “Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . oh, no, no, no!” The Dolls spent most of that afternoon merrily trying on clothes. That is, our clothes and each other’s clothes. Since we weren’t allowed to practice any music, we figured we might as well look extra outrageous to make up for lost chops. We were told that sound check would be around six o’clock. When we arrived, our imaginations were completely dwarfed by the sheer size of the building. Where were we? The architectural structure at twilight time was such that I thought that the entire thing was floating somewhere in outer space. Could the relatives of the pyramid builders of ancient Karnak be in the audience smirking? What a breathtakingly gigantic place! Being inside made you feel the size of an ant. And looking at where the bands would be playing was a dizzying experience. Playing where? Atop of a soccer stadium scoreboard, some two hundred feet in the air? Whoa! We were inside a modern Roman Colosseum in Day-Glo white against a darkening winter sky. I should have brought my spacesuit along for those higher altitudes. How many g-forces would we be smashing up against? I soon had to conclude that I had a new disease that I never knew about before—agoraphobia. I really mean it when I say that Wembley Pool was the largest building I had ever encountered. The Dolls were politely brought to our dressing room, and were also shown where the other bands’ dressing rooms were, just in case we wanted to visit, I guess. We were actually much more comfortable tucked away in our own room, though we felt as if we were Christians waiting to be thrown to the lions on center stage in the world’s largest gladiator pit. But then some spiritual/moral relief arrived in the form of the Duchess of Kent, who presented us each with floating in bottles of champagne with our names on the thankyou notes. A bit of the bubbly might help wrinkle out wembley pool

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some last minute jitters, not to mention deep upcoming terrors. But where was the Queen? Well, some royalty had dared to say hello and thanks to us. So thank you once again, dear Duchess of Kent, wherever you may be tonight, darling! Of course, we had to wait awhile before we could do a sound check. But soon enough we were being led through the superstructure onto a stage that was so large that I was half a football field away from Johnny. My bass guitar cord must have been two-hundred-fifty feet long. None of us had ever been anywhere quite so large. I felt like we were on the deck of an aircraft carrier out in the South Pacific. With my bandmates hundreds of feet away from me, how were we gonna communicate with each other? Semaphore? Smoke signals? Pony Express? Remote viewing? And if we couldn’t see each other, how were we ever gonna hear each other in the silence of outer space? Well, we gave it the old college try and, in light of some of the inferior shows we had just recently played, our mutual conclusion was that it was gonna be yet another one of those toss-of-the-dice gigs. We had a fifty-fifty shot of pulling it off. We couldn’t see or hear any better than at any of the other places we had played, so once sound check was over, there was no longer anything to worry about. But where was the audience gonna be? Oh, five blocks away across the stadium? Really? And it was then time to retreat to the safety of our dressing room to await our turn to play. We were second on the bill. I do remember watching a few minutes of the Pink Fairies’ show and thought that they had bit off more than they could handle with only a three-piece. It certainly wasn’t Cream! And if you don’t have any catchy hit songs, then you should go home and write some before you go out and play again. Evidently this version of the Pink Fairies without Twink was a more-or-less makeshift outfit that must have reunited just to play that gig.34 They were all sound and fury and no content. For us Dolly rock-and-roll fans, just being in the presence of such great British luminaries as Rod Stewart and the Faces was an honor. They were like our older brothers. For them, we were probably just some street-punk amateurs with a bit of rock-and-roll spunk. We were certainly no threat to anyone else’s fans at Wembley floating in that evening. And we were up next on the entertainwembley pool ment battlefield.

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And so, as we quietly donned our gay apparel (’twas near the Season, you know) and guitars, the auric hush of deafening silence was so thick that you could slice it with a sword. It was gonna be the Christians versus the Apathetic Infidels (or non-Dollites) in the arena! A duel to the death! But why not bowling for discount bus-pass stickers instead? We Dolls knew from past stage experiences that if we could just stand our ground and merrily dish our musical set for forty-five minutes, it would be all over. Pressure drop—another trial-by-fire baptism done. The Dolls had been overly well-behaved little boys for so many hours already that day, our group patience was being severely tested, and now it was time to show the trendies of London just what we could do with our show—get them up, moving, and dancing. We were breathlessly waiting in the wings of the theater curtain waiting to be announced when out comes this weird-looking cartoonish character, a local radio DJ named Emperor Roscoe, and, in typical British fashion, oh-so-politely sarcastically announces us as “The Fabulous Paper Dolls” (all anyone in England could already know about us came from a single article in Melody Maker). That was it! We were totally ticked off that the Brits were already goofing on us! Right there and then we mutually decided that we were gonna go out and play till their ears bled and they begged for sonic release. Screw you and your spastics too! That was the predominant emotion as we hit the stage. Punk rock lessons administered by pre–punk rockers? Oh yeah! With savage fury, we dove into our signature song whose title said it all: “Personality Crisis.” What these guys were singing about and why they dressed like that wasn’t important to the audience anymore. We were a part of the show, good or bad. However, the British know how to have a good time and were certainly enjoying themselves before and after we played. Their benefit for spastic children was a smashing success and was rolling along right on schedule. We just had to keep the songs a-comin’ and everything would be fine. However, Johnny had a broken-string dilemma a few songs into our set and anxiously had to restring his own guitar in public and tune-up once again before we could play more songs. There’s nothing quite like holding the bag while loitering around onstage in floating in front of thirteen thousand staring impatient patrons waiting to be entertained. Things were starting to get wembley pool

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a bit ugly. Disgruntled fans started throwing things at us and jeering at us, so I’ve been told. We were so far away from the audience that we couldn’t even tell if they were out there somewhere. Then I happened to get distracted upon noticing that there were two huge movie screens in front of the stage and above the band. When you walked past a certain place on stage, your image was then transferred onto the screens. Oh, my God, I thought. Why didn’t anyone tell us that we were gonna be projected one hundred times larger than life above our very own heads while we were playing? What a mind-blowing distraction if you’re unprepared! Another sound check oversight? Next, I nearly keeled over in shock watching Johnny and David both doing double takes as they became aware that their monumental close-up images were now being projected on the giant screens over and above us! I then thought, Hey, if John and David (egos in collision) want to see their faces three hundred feet in the air like the Great Sphinx, wonderful! But I myself am staying away from the video monitors if I can help it. Especially since I had recently acquired agoraphobia. Everything was way too big for me. We managed to muddle through a few more of our local hits and then realized that it was gonna be a losing battle to make anyone like us, so thoughts of revenge were sown amongst our ranks. Good thing our singer had had a couple of acting lessons—he was the ringmaster who held it all together and in control at all times. He was good at exuding self-confidence (be it real or feigned, since actors don’t care). He knew that we were bombing badly, losing the crowd’s patience, and had nothing spectacular to pull out of a hat for our show’s finale, when he got an idea. On our way onstage we had passed a huge box filled with toilet paper. David asked our roadie, his buddy from Staten Island, to bring the box of toilet paper out to him at the front of the stage. This was toward the end of our next and final song of the evening, “Frankenstein,” which we used to play for twenty minutes sometimes. Our roadie friend said that he’d do it, so, in a final act of desperation, we whipped into the song. Positive or negative attention was still attention, our singer must have reckoned. So we were fiercely playing away and it was time floating in for the roadie to bring the box of toilet paper. From wembley pool behind us, he grabbed it and started walking toward

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the front of the stage when what had been affecting me must have also struck him. As he passed the video monitors to see for the first time just saw how huge Wembley Stadium was and what it looked like to be two hundred feet high in the midair blackness of outer space performing in front of thirteen thousand barely discernable ant-people like a swinging circus trapeze artist, the visuals must have gotten to him. Ten feet from our singer, he looked up, saw the two huge movie screens over our heads, and was instantly mummified. I started thinking, Great, now we’ve added the statue of Medusa to our visual finale! Our red-haired afro-sporting roadie had frozen in place from shock. But, dear reader, who could blame him for getting rigor mortis onstage? The view from where we were was frightening, colossal, and devastating. So our singer then had to move back ten feet to the site of our pillar-of-salt roadie in order to grab some rolls of toilet paper to throw out to the crowd. “You want ‘Paper Dolls’? Go make your own paper Dolls—out of toilet paper!” That was our angry message to the crowd. And each time David wanted more rolls he had to go back to the mannequin roadie. You may ask yourselves, “Was it funny?” Yes, it was rather hilarious. Was it musical? It was too late to care. What kind of show was it? It was a once-in-a-lifetime scream all right, especially if you weren’t involved in impressing royalty that evening with silly stage antics while playing for a bunch of bitchy brats on Mandrax.

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Now, even thirty years later, to say that this was the ultimate party would still be a huge understatement. And no one had told me anything about who was gonna be there—or why indeed the New York Dolls were invited. As I look back, I must admit that I must have been in a real “London fog” for our entire trip, like a young somnambulist. “Cadaver delivery service! Just where would you like the body, Madame?” Since I was always drinking, each new event that I was involved in was a completely brand-new “surprise” experience. What do you expect? How can someone remember everything while being so stoned all the time? Evidently, the rest of the guys must have felt that a little bit of truth might go straight to my head and that I might become a dangerous mad scientist as a result. Maybe they were right. So I felt as if I were being led from one unexpected wild dream to another totally unexpected wild dream, ad infinitum. And every time I awoke, I was nursing yet another severe hangover that I would have to live through . . . while moving right along to the next strange incident on our eventhorizon map. And each event seemed to be more shocking and outrageous than the last. I knew nothing about where we were going except that it was Lord Montagu’s place somewhere in London.35 I suppose I should have been paying more attention to our two competing “Jet Boys”—David Johansen versus Billy Murcia—and their unending daily squabbles over control

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issues. The conflict was mainly about just who was supposed to be in charge of the New York Dolls at that time. David had been hired last, by John and myself, but was trying to take control of everything, since he himself had another agenda (a “Buster Poindexter” future, perhaps?). I was off the in-crowd list of battling ego dramas, and therefore didn’t have to know anything about itinerary, schedule, or the shape of things to come. The just-don’t-tell-him-anything policy must have come straight from Sylvain’s preteen mentality. At the time, I was not aware of all the silly little games going on all around me, and my naive solution was to stay as stoned as I could possibly get, and pray for the best. Well, unknown to me, Billy Doll must have thought that our singer had gotten too big for his britches, ego-wise. At some point via telephone, our David informed us that he, Mr. New York Dolls Singer, and he alone had been invited to the Lord Montagu party. This must have infuriated Billy Doll, who felt personally responsible for keeping David’s Hitleresque ego down to size. Billy, Johnny, and I were original core members of the New York Dolls; David simply came aboard later at Johnny’s request, since Johnny had way too much to do as lead singer and lead guitarist simultaneously. It really was “too much, too soon” for anyone not raised as a protege in a show-business family. The New York Dolls lifestyle was befitting that of “Robin and the Seven Hoods” (with cheers to Frank Sinatra, of course!). We were all too busy playing at being outlaws to be prepared for success on any level. Immediate positive reactions were few and far between. “They liked us? You’ve got to be kidding!” Loved or hated, we really didn’t care—as long as we were there and played. Once we performed, like us or not, the patrons would never forget that they saw us. Our gift to them was an outrageous fond future memory of their “Night of the Living Dolls.” It seems that Billy Doll had a plan to mow down our singer’s overinflated power-drunk ego. But what might humble David, who thought that he was off to some party all by himself with the Queen of England at Buckingham Palace? Well, when it came time to get into our limousine and go to the party, Billy tricked David by putting the rest of us into the limo and going to the party without lord montagu’s him! Billy wanted David to understand that it was the New York Dolls as a whole who were “the toast party

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of the town”—and not any individual member of the group. We were a package deal. Our mutual success was to be shared and shared alike. Field teamwork lessons on the road. I, of course, was told nothing about nothing—except that we were going to a party and to get dressed to the teeth just in case the Duchess of Kent might be there expounding upon Victorian courtship ritual applications for the seventies for us damn Yankee heathens. We soon arrived at our destination. When I wondered aloud where David was, Billy told me that “a special meeting came up,” and David would be coming along later in a taxi. And so, venturing in ahead of the party with this disinformation, we exited the limousine and started walking to the huge front door of this old place that looked right out of a Charles Dickens novel. It was open and people were greeting guests there. Suddenly I found myself at the front of the line of the New York Dolls, the rest of whom seemed to be using me as a battering ram to enter an ancient fortress. But where was our singer? Well, obviously, kidnapped by reptilians in flying discs. The next thing I know I’m being pushed through the entranceway, where I am obliged to stop for a moment to receive a bottle of champagne—one was handed out to each and every guest who entered the party. Great, what a cool party, I started thinking. If the pushing in back of me continues, though, I’m gonna end up at the head of the class. Am I then supposed to deliver a speech, or what? And so the pushing propels me ever forward despite the sardine-like congestion until I’m standing in front of some rather good-looking and distinguished League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in a row. It was the party’s welcoming committee, the people who invited us. Well, I was about to go into shock at that point when Kit Lambert— the Who’s late, beloved, and famously flamboyant manager—says to me, presuming I’m the Dolls’ singer, something like, “Greetings, New York Dolls, I’m Kit Lambert and this is Lord Montagu.” Whoa, Nellie! And so I shook Lord Montagu’s hand and smiled, not having any idea as to what to say. And then Mr. Lambert said, “Now, I’d like you boys to meet the World’s Greatest Entertainer, Liberace!” At this point I became both totally starstruck and totally awestruck. Liberace—you mean the world-famous lord montagu’s star that I’ve been watching on black-and-white TV party

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ever since I was a five-year-old kid? Are you kidding? How did we, the Dolls, ever get to this particular space and time? Two weeks ago we were about to be arrested for loitering on the sidewalks of Manhattan! We were definitely “not worthy.” Shaking hands with Liberace was, for me, akin to meeting a celestial godfather Buddha from a parallel dimension. He had always been a hero of mine—a musical and theatrical pioneer. Totally overboard, of course, and completely outrageous, he was the only “alternative artist” years before anyone even invented the term. May God bless you, late, beloved Liberace. Then Kit Lambert turned around to me again and said, “Now I’d like you to meet the American film actor Sal Mineo.” Whoa Nellie again! And so I politely shook his hand and smiled. And that was the end of the summit conference lineup at the moment; the end of meeting all of the important people all standing together. Well, for me, meeting Liberace was the equivalent of meeting Val Thor from Venus. Beyond human ken. Why hadn’t anyone told me anything about this? I could have psyched myself up for such a oncein-a-lifetime experience. But then again, how would one prepare oneself for such an occasion? It was years before I would learn about Dr. George King’s Aetherius Society and the wild possibilities of contacting higher entities through the use of Samadhi yoga meditation. Then I was handed yet another bottle of champagne. Now I too could be a two-fisted drinker like Tony Stratton-Smith. Right behind me of course were Billy and Syl and Johnny, who each met all the same people that I had just met. They too were shocked, awed, humbled, and mind-blown. Meeting our own heroes was an inspirational dream of a lifetime come true—especially for a fledgling teenaged rock band from nowhere. All the pushing forward finally ended. Now that we had met the hierarchy of the entire party, it was time to mingle with the crowd. However, as far as floor space was concerned, it was simply wall-towall bodies. Plus everyone had one or two bottles of champagne each to lug around. And where was the Queen? Or were the queens already there? I am now reminded of a line from a Yardbirds tune called “Little Games” that goes, “Parties in Chelsea flats, mixlord montagu’s ing with kinky cats, are games I want to play some more.” Those lyrics summed up Lord Montagu’s party

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party “fairy-ily,” as the raven soars. It featured somnambulists and vampires alike mingling with the they-only-come-out-at-night crew. The New York Dolls were a mighty powerful magnet for oddballs and outcasts all over the world. Intergalactic Oddball Vindicator Society, unite! Were we there to fulfill the long-awaited prophecy that one day some heroic “gay liberators” (as in the yet-to-be-famous Gay Liberation Movement) would dare to call themselves the world’s first openly gay rock band? Says who, famous homophobe Dick Clark? Well, maybe he thought so (he singlehandedly put the kibosh on our careers), but we Dolls didn’t see ourselves as any such thing. Were the more “normal” inhabitants of planet Earth ready for such a thing as a gay rock band? All this provided lots of deeper stuff to think about— especially for some naive young kids still “wet behind the ears” in a brand-new start-up rock group that had just formed not even a year earlier. For myself, just a kid from Queens, having met my heroes and stars was simply too much to digest all at once. I was still reeling in utter disbelief when I thought that maybe there was another room somewhere without so many people crowding around. Well, I did find another room that didn’t seem to have anyone in it at all—maybe Lord Montagu’s bedroom? Anyways, I was shell-shocked and my poor mind was not ready for more unexpected meetings with real celebrities. I didn’t know what to do but go into retreat mode. And so I took my two bottles of champagne, climbed inside what I guess must have been Lord Montagu’s wooden wardrobe closet, away from all the partygoers, and happily drank to my heart’s content without having to deal with the raging party outside my hidden fortress. Planned or unplanned, I got plastered by myself and fell asleep in the closet filled with clothes. This is also where my recollection of this “party of all parties” comes to an end. Was I the life of the party? No way—I was barely even at the party! Who knows what else might have happened there—the mind wobbles. Years later, I found out that Liberace had also played at the party. How could I have been there and missed that? Oh brother, can you spare a dime for a cup of sobering hot coffee? A nonrefundable opportunity of a lifetime— lost forever over some stupid booze! What a drag! lord montagu’s The results are always the same: tabula rasa. No party

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recollections and no memories for Memory Lane. “The night before” remains a mystery, irretrievably lost. However, dear reader, I represent only one-fifth of the New York Dolls, and we had two roadies and two managers as well. David did come later in a taxi but I was already passed out and was therefore impervious as to what was happening in the realm of the fully conscious. To this day, I truly regret missing the greatest party of my life— even though my body was physically there that night. But my story isn’t quite over. When the alcohol that I had consumed the night before wore off, I awoke to find myself still in the wooden wardrobe closet. I definitely got the impression that if anyone had found me crashed there during the evening, they must have just let me be so that I could sleep it off. I actually felt much better the next morning, having gotten some solid sleep. I did wonder what must have happened at the party the night before. I got out of the closet, went to the washroom, tossed some water on my face, and tried to straighten out my hair. I was still dressed to kill and ready to continue the party that I had missed. However, all was not lost. As I ventured into the main room, I saw a clock that said that it was eight a.m. But to my amazement and sheer delight, there was a bartender still serving champagne. Hooray! I was one mighty parched hombre. I popped over for several big glasses of the bubbly stuff that had knocked me out the night before. Wow, I thought, life is good. Champagne yet flowing—the elixir of the gods at eight a.m.? I must be in Shangri-La! As a future alcoholic, I was truly impressed. These British really knew how to party beyond the break of dawn. Only I was the only one there. Lonesome Art, the Lonely Planet Boy, alone again, as usual. I assumed that our hosts were asleep. So, after a little solitary chuckling over what had happened the night before, I kept drinking even more champagne before I started to not feel so good about resuming a party that was already over by myself. Time to split. I wondered where everyone had gone. So I bade my gentleman friend a good day, and marched off outside into a cobblestoned street near an old bridge. A foggy mist floated about the ground under a cloudy British winter sky. The fresh air made me feel woozy, but I was able to hail a Britlord montagu’s ish taxi and return to our hotel to sleep it all off once again. party

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This party in London was yet another one of those teenage rock-androll dreamlike fairy-tale adventures. We were human Dolls for sale at that point. Maybe our managers were around somewhere, but at least they weren’t spending lots of time with us. What a drag they were anyway, as they weren’t very good at pretending to like us or act like our older-brother patriarchal guides. They were supposedly each busy on their own, in different parts of town trying to drum up some intense interest in our band for a multimillion-dollar record contract. They evidently had no idea what they were doing, except amateur playacting. I don’t particularly remember that they were at the Halloween bash, but who cared anyway? I do know that behind it all was our favorite Swinging London rockand-roll personality Kit Lambert, the Who’s manager, who had just purchased a new house in London. However, since he hadn’t had the time to move in quite yet, the place had no furniture and was therefore the perfect place to hold a Guy Fawkes Day/Halloween party. And we were told that various members of both the Who and the Rolling Stones might show up. Great, like the Dolls needed yet another excuse to continue getting smashed. Our singer had received some money from one of our managers to go shopping. We were all to go with him to find something outrageous but more elegant for the big event. Our chicken-bone T-shirts from Let It Rock were just too informal. Our singer got totally ticked off

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when I was merely thinking about looking at a long black formal evening dress (strictly for shock-and-awe value). It would be completely unexpected for me to be wearing a dress over my red Lurex trousers and red boots. This look was definitely an homage to Jackie Curtis (our multitalented pioneering gay playwright and inspirational daring hero of daytime street drag). At the time, we were inside a woman’s posh clothing store. What we were doing in there I don’t know, except that Billy had more than likely spotted some ultra-attractive birds inside, grabbed me, and walked in. I had no idea how much the dress was gonna cost, nor was I given any time to decide about it, before it was all boxed up, charged to someone, and in a box ready to go. All this happened before I had the chance to finish making up my mind about whether or not I liked it enough to even consider spending my money on it. Speed-shopping was never my forte. Were we at an auction? I was the window-shopper type who must at least sleep on it overnight, taking advice from that old Roman saying, “Night brings counsel.” I was hoping that the ultrawomen who worked in the clothing store would be impressed enough to tell all their other ultragirlfriends that a couple of oddly dressed characters from a macho New York rock-and-roll band had just popped in and bought a dress. I, Arthur Doll, was thinking in terms of free word-of-mouth street publicity and shock value, but our singer was more interested in counting silver, of course. If the New York Dolls were a run-of-the-mill group, we could have shopped in Kensington Market just like everyone else in music. However, we were trying to look different with a twist: not men in drag, but men in both men’s and women’s clothing at the same time. Very dangerous territory, that sex barrier! Our Dolls motto was “Keep ’em guessin’, baby!” And “Just like Puss in Boots . . . I hope you don’t get shot for tryin’!” All of us Dolls had made the scene at The Speakeasy every chance we got to go hang out at night, and though the formalities were beginning to wear thin, us love-starved Dolls had done our homework: we all met girls and got to know a few of them well enough to qualify to ask them out. Well, what better excuse for a first date than a Guy Fawkes/Halloween bash hosted by the Who’s manager? So those of us who were so inspired had actually arranged to who’s guy fawkes bash bring dates to the party. I too had a date lined up. And

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since our hotel was so close to the bash, we made arrangements to meet our dates there. It was that correct social etiquette. The ground-floor room of the house was totally decorated with Halloween stuff (fake cobwebs, bats, spiders, skulls, etc.) and also bathed in orange pumpkin lighting befitting the occasion. The atmosphere in general was happy but low-key. There was lots of polite chatter going on in all of the many rooms, not noisy and rowdy like your average pub on soccer night. It was another civilized party experience for us Dolly rockers. I know that Keith Moon was seen cavorting about outside in the garden setting off fireworks. I reckon it was his way of letting off steam on the holidays. Our ever-curious roadie buddy Peter Jordan followed him around the whole evening, even though the dark side of the Moon wouldn’t speak to him. Oh well! This was also one of those affairs where people stopped in to say hello, hang out for a while, and then maybe go on to other such affairs. Social etiquette of the nocturnal spooky kind in haunted Londinium. And all guests, without exception, had to wear masks (available were simple Lone Ranger–style black masks at the door, courtesy of our host). We remained in the reception area so we could see everyone who was arriving. Once again, Billy and I must have been already slightly bent out of shape before we arrived. The New York Dolls was a collection of fans who were so inspired by their own music heroes that they had to start a band to celebrate and add to their bone-deep collective love of rock-and-roll music. For the Dolls, being in London at that point was like some kids had won a radio contest to meet their heroes in person. My musician buddy Rick Rivets and I used to study the Stones and the Who musically—it’s how we learned to play the blues, before going back and hearing the original black American sources. Rick encouraged me to learn much of their earliest R&B material since it was essentially American music in the first place. But at this point in our careers, the Dolls were practically fans who just happened to stumble into the stars’ dressing room by accident—only to be mistaken for a real (as in well-seasoned professional) band. It’s not that we didn’t know how to play, because we really did. Our “sloppy” sound didn’t come about by accident—it’s how we wanted to sound. But we hadn’t spent years and years who’s guy bonding together laboriously, overpaying our dues, and honing our hovercraft for public consumption, fawkes bash

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as it were. We were instantly famous just for being what we were— five reckless teenage sonic rebels hell-bent on breaking all the rules at once. Our under-rehearsed sets made our early shows a dangerously unpredictable chaotic celebration of being human. Anything could go incredibly wrong or incredibly right, and usually a little of both happened. This was not your average band by any means! We prided ourselves on being able to sound like a New York subway car careening off-track, or an out-of-control jumbo jet ready to crash. Meanwhile back at the party, after a few more drinks Billy and I were still hanging out in the reception room with our masks on. Then in walked a very famous couple (at the height of their international jetsetter fame)—Mick and Bianca Jagger. Whoa! When I saw them, it was heart-pumping action! Thoughts raced through my mind, like How did us street punks ever get here?, and We’re not worthy. Was it all an unbelievable fantasy come true to life, a protracted ever-changing 3-D dream sequence? I used to like to get sloshed and stoned, but would often just quietly watch and absorb everything going on around me and on the sidelines. I would later get together with the rest of the crew and get stoned on pot or hash to goof on the experience once it was all over. However, a slightly more sloshed and aggressive Billy Doll grabbed me around the neck in a headlock and said, “Look, it’s Mick and Bianca! I’ll introduce you to them!” And I thought, Whoa, Billy’s already way too stoned! And how could he be preacquainted with them? I thought that Mick and Bianca were just gonna get insulted by Billy’s drunken “Free the Chicago Seven” punk-rock etiquette. Let me outta here! I told Billy, “We should at least wait to be properly introduced to them by Kit Lambert—wouldn’t that be more civilized?” But alas, it was too late as I was already being dragged against my will across the room with all the guests watching. So we finally arrived and stood right in front of this world’s most famous celebrity couple. Then Billy says, “Hello, I’m Billy Doll from the New York Dolls! Arthur, say hi to Mick and Bianca Jagger!” Thank heavens he didn’t add insult to injury by asking them for autographs! It was all a rather tacky yet innocent but overstimulated demonstration of normal fan behavior. who’s guy So I politely said hello to both of them and absofawkes bash lutely nothing else. I was ready to keel over. I had no

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idea what to say! I became lost in space and barely regrouped myself (fan-wise). And I remember thinking over again, What are we doing here? We’re definitely not worthy! Bianca was a truly beautiful worldclass goddess and sensual visual treat, mentally magically delicious. Anyway, they both seemed pretty underwhelmed with our unsolicited drunken intro. They quickly managed to politely get away from us (foot-in-mouth speechlessly deranged teenage hoodlum punk fans run amok). Good for them, I thought, as I saw them move right along and disappear into the crowd. Well, the feline of the aviary species that I had invited to the party had also arrived, along with several other people, the usual four or five coed friends traveling from party to party in search of whatever. I remember greeting her and her friends, but she seemed more preoccupied with the little clique of people she had arrived with, and simply wasn’t biting and scratching and demanding immediate sex right then and there in the hall closet. Lack of spontaneous enthusiasm can be a real problem in today’s modern society. She was evidently underwhelmed by my long blonde locks, svelte sexy unisex body, makeup, and expensive designer upscale dress. Somehow, my new gear wasn’t the big hit that I had anticipated. There’s no fool like a young fool. Take it from me, the only guy who had the balls to pioneer hip-hugger bellbottoms and Beatle boots and Tom Jones shirts in Martin Van Buren High School. Believe me, that was a death-defying (a la Evel Knievel) fashion statement in a polarized hawks-versus-hippies 1966 world. Anyway, I didn’t feel particularly encouraged by a femme who wasn’t going to make it easy for me to get to know her. My sparkling white horse and gleaming armor must have been at the dry cleaners. What I wanted was instant sex with the nearest available consenting adult nymphomaniac—like with our female fans back home in the Apple. We were spoiled but desperate. I personally was never interested in the chase whatsoever, which reminded me of a dog chasing its own tail. If you’re attracted, then please admit it! You can keep the hearts and flowers and romance shtick. My 1972 instant love philosophy went something like this: If two people are physically attracted to each other, then why not surrender to the moment and go with the who’s guy natural flow? Why fight it, darling? It may be bigger than both of us put together! My views about chivalry fawkes bash

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and romance in general were that these were lofty but dead concepts, outmoded ideas from storybook legends. Which still left me wondering, well, what about true love in the modern world? Is it merely a phantom? So I ran into my party date several more times that evening and politely said hello, but nothing more. Evidently, the magic spark between us just wasn’t happening. And I wasn’t going to get broody about it anyway since there were lots of other people at the party and other birds to chat up. However, many of the partygoers were total strangers to us misplaced New Yorkers. As much as we tried to fit in, we were still oddball fish out of water. We tended to live in our own concentric Doll universe no matter where we were and had gotten used to relying on each other for support in all things. This was changing. Where we once had each other as comrades and confidantes, our group unity was being chipped away by our personal desires to have individual identities above and beyond it. My buddy Rick Rivets should have been there too. He used to collect Rave, a British rock-and-roll magazine from the early sixties that contained hundreds of beautiful color photos of Mod bands all dressed and coiffed to the nines, like the Herd or the Move or the Small Faces. He may have been a help in identifying any of those people who might have been at the party too! I think that I recognized Andy FairweatherLow from the band Amen Corner, but that was as far as I got with the name-the-stars game. Star identification kits should have been made available at Kensington Market for threepence. Day-Glo name tags certainly would have helped us fans. We were all quite thrilled just to be there in such stellar company, but ready for a lot more physical attention than we were getting. The singer of the Rolling Stones was there with one of the world’s most beautiful women, whereas we, as fledgling traveling Kama Sutra–philes the New York Dolls, had been in Jolly Old England for what seemed like aeons (three weeks?) and still couldn’t get no satisfaction. A large part of our general group-morale personality crisis hinged on this: that on our very first tour ever, we were suffering from a lack of real fan physical love, emotional support, and devotee reassurance. People telling you you’re great all the time is a great confidence builder, who’s guy but that’s nothing compared to a desirable female fan’s fawkes bash willing total surrender to her idol.

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A room at the top of the stairs was filled with foam chips. Motivated guests could dive into the foam-chip sea and do their very own cetacean impressions like a muddy mud-shark (if that’s what turned you on textiledelically speaking). One never knows how exciting it can get at some of these rock-and-roll affairs, especially if you’re still conscious. After the Lord Montagu party, I promised myself to at least try to remain awake. But like frustrated horny goat-weed growers waiting for harvest time, we were getting nearly despondo. The question was no longer from whom, but when would relief come? What about that cute cleaning lady back at the hotel? Where did the British hide their nymphomaniacal porno stars such as Koo Stark when we needed them most? Why weren’t they at the party too? Our beer nuts were becoming the feared cotton balls already. I was ready for some plain old-fashioned, American-style self-flagellation, if nothing else. Whip yourself into submission—it’s very cathartic! This particular party was way too civilized and low-key for action heroes, except for the knowledge that Keith Moon was somewhere outside in the garden trying to blow up the place. And that’s just about as exciting as it got for us Dollings that evening. It was a good party, but not quite our New York Doll “Endless Party.”

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After all the parties and weird places we had played during the British tour, we were finally given a couple of days off for some well-earned R&R (in our case, rest and recuperation) back at our hotel. We (five Dolls and two roadies) were still hungover from all the drinking out of boredom we did at the Kit Lambert Halloween bash, under the impression that our prescheduled gigs were over and we’d be going home soon. (So much for being well-informed— what about the status of our two managers’ behind-the-scenes business affairs?) We had been partying and drinking nearly every day and night in England, and needed a little time off if only for health reasons—in order to sober up and try to fly right once again. And just what was one of the Dolls’ favorite group relaxation activities? Yes, that too! But we all loved to go shopping and bargain hunting, second nature for us Dollmen. It was a Saturday, and we all wanted to go to the world-famous Portobello Road antique shops to see what different or unusual items they might have. We took a London taxi, merrily jumped out, and ran for the shops that looked exciting. You must remember, dear readers, that we were living and starring in a self-created make-believe Doll universe unscripted and unfilmed street-punk version of A Hard Day’s Night. Well, there were antique shops galore with lots of furniture, artwork, collector stuff in wood and ceramics for people redecorating their mansions in the country—but what about antique clothing

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items, I wondered? Well, oddly enough, each antique shop also seemed to carry a few odds and ends of clothing as well. I felt that I had already gotten way too much use of my trusty gold-and-purple-sequined trapeze-artist bathing suit, boots, and bow tie look. I needed something new to wear on stage. Then I spotted something strange hanging on a wooden coat rack. It was made of velvet with a gold and brown animalprint design and had an orange cloth border around it—but what was it? Taking it off the rack, holding it upright, and turning it over a few times, I could see that it was a king-of-the-jungle Tarzan outfit. Very “High Camp in the Low Sierras,” to say the least. The fabric was cut in such a way that it fit over one shoulder only and tied together at both sides. Whoever might wear this little outfit would also have to be prepared to be nude in public playing rock and roll. It wasn’t very large, material-wise. For either sex, this item was pretty much as scanty as it got, in or out of the boudoir. Both sides of this “pardon my sarong” outfit were completely open and held together only by some flimsy cloth tie-strings. Could such a thing bear up under the brute force of a Killer Kane cascading bass cadenza? Oh, I suppose I could have found a flesh-colored leotard to wear under the Tarzan suit—but that would go against our New York Doll “danger is my name” philosophy. So I thought that this item was truly perfect for me and paid the sales lady, who was surprised that I could be so excited over a useless piece of cloth. I was in thrift-shopping ecstasy. Serendipity strikes again! How great, I thought, that for seven whole bucks I had gotten a very nice brand-new gimmicky stage outfit to wear for our next show (strictly for Cro-Magnon visual shock purposes only—and no extraneous treeclimbing monkey business). When our shopping adventure was over, we returned to our hotel only to be informed that we had one more show to do. It was at the request of Mick Jagger and was going to happen at London College. We were going to be “auditioning” for the benefit of both Mick and Keith. The Rolling Stones at that time had been considering starting their own record label. But the two main Rolling Stones wanted to see for themselves what the fuss over the New York Dolls was all about. They arranged to put us on the bill at London Colhis majesty’s lege so they could check us out in person. This was only the biggest opportunity of our lifetime! It was request

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now our job to prove for all time whether or not we were good enough to be considered for the new label. Mick and Keith had talked to our managers about this stuff, and immediately the pressure was on us. It was now make-it-or-break-it time! Luckily, this audition was coming up right away, that very Monday evening, just a day away.36 That was good because it didn’t give us lots of time to sit around and worry. And we should have been worried—that is, our managers should have been worried! We still had never rehearsed in a rehearsal studio the entire time we were in England. And now we were auditioning for very own rock-and-roll inspirational heroes? Too much, too soon, as usual. What about having some rehearsals? How could our managers have forgotten something so vital to putting on a great show? Could they care less about our future lives/careers? Wouldn’t that simply defeat the Dolls’ whole purpose for being in England, on tour, and playing for future fans in the first place? Wasn’t our tour about attracting a record deal? How utterly kamikaze! Well, soon enough, it was time to play our big gig at London College. We were on the bill with a band that I had seen two years earlier, maybe at the same place, that no one in the States would really ever get to see or hear as they were a rather nondescript bunch calling themselves by the swell name of Capability Brown. This is exactly where the New York Dolls parted company with most other rock musicians. We weren’t trying to impress our audience with superior musicianship. To tell the truth, we didn’t give a hoot! If you wanted to witness that, you could go to a classical string-quartet recital and watch four people sitting still while reading someone else’s sheet music for hours on end. What a snoring-boring exercise in self-discipline and restraint in public! I spent my classical clarinet years doing that nonsense. I wasn’t falling for that musical torture stuff anymore. I once fell asleep in the tenth row of the Fillmore East while watching a Who concert. They were concentrating so much on just playing the music that they forgot to put on a visual show for the audience! Did Jimi Hendrix put his fans to sleep because he was too busy reading music? How much musicianship do you have to know in order to play a three-chord Chuck Berry song? Just the name Capability Brown dredged his majesty’s up visions of some longhairs in suits sitting in chairs and reading sheet music. What does that have to do request

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with Jerry Lee Lewis setting his hands on fire for the hellifying finale to his show? We, however, dished out our particular type of rock and roll like you were being rudely served at a late-night New York diner: “Would you like your food on a plate, or would you prefer to wear it on your head?” As usual, we found ourselves in a cramped dressing room somewhere. At this point in our tour, we were all starting to show signs of too much of everything. We were all feeling a bit tired, hungover, overworked, underpaid, homesick, out of our element, out of sorts, disgruntled, and confused. We felt that we had been in England long enough, and were somewhat happy to be getting this final show.37 We somehow had also gotten disconnected from each other. As our touring wound down, our group solidarity began to unravel as well. That night, I decided that I might as well break in my new one-of-akind cure-all one-piece orange Tarzan outfit thing. That, coupled with a pair of either panty hose or tights, a few arm bracelets, and a silly bow tie, was the extent of my outfit. Just as we were about to go onstage, our manager’s wife said to me, “Is that all you’re wearing tonight?” And I said, “Yeah.” So she said, “You mean you’re not even wearing any underwear?” And I said, “This is all I brought with me from the hotel tonight.” So she said, “Well, here—you can wear my panties. Just so you won’t be naked!” And I said, “OK, thanks, Aunt Betty.” When the time came, we rushed the stage and probably dove straight into our crash-and-bash first song, “Personality Crisis.” Sometimes it worked to hit the audience full-throttle right out of the bin with a cardiac-arrest-tempo tune. However, as much as we used to love to dive into that song, it also could have been more prudently saved for a killer encore. But that’s not what the Dolls were all about. Overindulgence, overkill, and over-the-top were our trademarks. Sometimes it worked, but that night it didn’t. We sounded sluggish, out of time, out of tune, and even more underwater than usual. Hearing problems again? It was just like being back at Wembley. We his majesty’s couldn’t hear each other or ourselves either. And, just like Wembley, all we could do was to stand our request

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ground and keep grinding out our “hits” until we finished. When a show is not happening like that, there’s not much a band can do about it but pretend that everything’s just ducky and press forward. We were paying our musical dues live all right, but just couldn’t get the plane off the ground. But repeated bombing in public can be cathartically therapeutic, if nothing else. It helps one to develop that armadillo skin that comes in so handy when you’re a snobby idolic celebrity. When we finished our last song, we knew that our show was way below our usual standard. We just couldn’t unite and gel. We could only pretend that we were having fun, which wasn’t very easy when we knew that we bombed big-time—before the very eyes of our lifelong heroes, no less. Well, we didn’t need to read the papers the next day to find out what the Stones must have thought about our show, and never actually got to meet up with them in person that day. David then heaped much negative attention upon Billy, who was being blamed for a collective failure. It wasn’t just him, it was all of us. But even during a bad show, there are always some bright spots, you say? Unfortunately for us, not that evening. Our lengthy stay in England had become wearying and had started seriously screwing up our generally jovial Dead End Kids morale, normal urban good cheer, and bounce-back resilience. Later that night, back at the hotel, I wondered just how many more rolling stones in our path we would have to endure for the remainder of our British sojourn. Next day in the press, though, we found out what the Rolling Stones thought: that we were an immature high-school band that need a few more years of experience and therefore weren’t musically ready to be on their prestigious record label. Well, that was it. Dream over! Time to pop those last-resort cyanide capsules, kids! And, unlike the film business, no retakes! We then began to wonder just what other impossible challenges awaited us on our now endless open-ended incredible torture tour. What else could possibly go wrong after bombing in front of the world-famous Rolling Stones? Could we, as a band or individuals, possibly feel any worse about ourselves? This sad news was a very powerful blow. Trashed by our idols? How depressing is that? We’d ruined our own future. We could have surely used a team his majesty’s of psychiatrists to help us sort out our problems. But instead, there was the ever-present Whiskey Man request

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in the form of a multitude of various beers and liquors with which to drown our sorrows. On the brighter side, though, we didn’t have any more auditions to pass or fail, and the fact that the pressure was finally over was a relief. It was the perfect time for group discussion and reflection. Maybe we could at least get some rest before any more ego-shattering surprises could occur.

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Although we were a traveling rock-and-roll band, the New York Dolls were also a bit like a five-man “dogs of war” military unit out on patrol. But how do you prepare to go out on tour when nobody tells you what to expect! I’m all for the idea of a rock-and-roll boot camp. It would have to teach you to be prepared for the totally unexpected, twenty-four hours a day. Because touring is like being stuck in a nonstop amusement-park funhouse. In our case, though, our Mr. Moneypockets manager was involved with live New York Broadway theatre, and had never had anything to do with rock-and-roll prior to the New York Dolls.38 So we never had the benefit of a warm-up coach or any professional advice. We were all strictly “winging it” while continuing our day-to-day ongoing fantasy adventures in London. Where was my hero Jack LaLanne when we needed him the most? We could have been exercising and juicing our way back to health and prosperity! But drugs and drink were our remedy for the blues. Those things just make you more depressed than when you started. After a brief period of elation, you can then spend the rest of the evening trying to recapture that initial buzz—but it’s not physically possible and it’s strictly downhill from there, buzzwise. When your happy (half-) hour is over, things can get pretty ugly and violent real quick. And taking certain drugs while drinking can be fatal, as everyone should know. We “failed audition” Dolls were relieved that we’d at least have a few days off to rest back at our hotel. We were all tired from the excessive

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drinking we’d done since we arrived. All I wanted was to locate some decent pot to smoke and to shack up with an attractive consenting female bird who was willing to spend a couple of days with me in bed goofing off. Cancel all calls. A Do Not Disturb sign on my hotel door said it all. Go away, world, I’ve had too much shocking reality in my face lately. Would some rest and privacy be too much to hope for after all we had already been through on our endlessly chaste tour of “Man Walking Against Wind Climbing Vertical Wall” gigs? And so the pressure was off and it was time to rest and reflect. My roommate was Peter Jordan, who was the true owner of the now-famous antique Gibson Firebird I’d been borrowing on that tour. (I’ve since sold a good thirty years’ worth of those basses for the Gibson people— but who gets the credit and the “signature model” awarded to him by Gibson? Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe! Thanks, Gibson! I popularize an almost discontinued design of theirs and what do I get? Nada! I’ve even seen rap groups using Firebird basses! I was out plugging Gibson in 1972, and to this day have never owned any Gibson bass—not to mention my own signature model!) Peter was at least a quiet, civilized person to room with, and we were both pot-heads who’d had to endure living without it for a good three weeks or more. Well, lo and behold, Peter managed to get hold of some decent pot from somewhere, and we were both thrilled to get the rare chance to smoke it instead of those very strong, heavy-duty hash spliffs we’d encountered so far in our European travels. Pot was lighter, more sociable, and had more laughs than your average spliff. It was just a more buoyant and happy-go-lucky buzz. Now if only we had some of the local London birds to hang out with, that would be the icing on the cake for a tour that had initially started out as a lark but had somehow managed to become drudgery in a highstakes poker game. Hooray for Pete! As I remember, we’d done much drinking and late-night carousing with little or no time to sober up before our next public appearance. We were all a bit blown out and just plain weary. I don’t recall having the energy to be playing parlor games of one-upsmanship or practical jokes on anyone. It was never my speed in the first place, and this Raggedy Andy human doll was starting to get worn down from overuse. We all were fraying at the edges. some Well, with Pete on the case, something great happened. Gave all He had met some attractive female fans who saw us play

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somewhere, and they wanted to come to our hotel and hang out sometime soon. Just what Dr. Love ordered! Could it be that this was more of our “fantasy tour” coming true or what? We were especially crushed after our last fiasco, when we bombed for the Stones. By then, we were all more than ready for some nurturing female companionship, if only for that refreshingly different change of gender! And those wishes miraculously started to come true. By that time on our tour, I had thought that all was lost already, since we had failed our audition and ruined that big business deal. Hopelessness and depression seemed all that was left of our wasted and fruitless British tour. But now it was late afternoon and our new female fans were calling because they wanted to come over and hang out with us later that evening. So what if we didn’t pass the aptitude test? After our London College date, our singer and drummer were busy blaming each other for our group failure. There was still a lot of fussin’ and feudin’ among the other Dolls about that show. David had threatened to fire Billy, but Billy was an original founding member and therefore couldn’t be fired. From day one, Billy had been a part of finding, meeting, and ultimately trusting in David to be our spokesperson and group leader in public. David had just been hired and was still “on probation” as far as the rest of us were concerned. Our singer evidently had a secret deal with our managers, and was personally responsible for the Dolls signing our lives away for ever and eternity with that horrible “death contract”—the same contract that gave us the grand opportunity to tour England in the first place. However, this was also a band of five Ziggy Stardusts: future music and acting entertainers. We hoped to be a new, junior version of the Rat Pack, as it were. Singing, dancing, and acting—just like Jack Benny or Bobby Darin or Johnny Carson, people who started in show business in the music field (left fielders?) and over time came up through the ranks to become American stage and screen entertainers. There was just too much talent in the New York Dolls to be wasted by glorifying only one-fifth of our collective talent pool. The other four-fifths was a much larger talent pool (four times larger!). It seems that our singer could never accept the idea that there could be five multitalented budding young future stars in our singularly some barrier-busting band. His idea of a band was that he was the star, and the other four people were only there to make gave all

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him look good. Four slaves carrying the king through the streets on a throne? That’s about as totally anti–New York Dolls’ original philosophy as it gets. The New York Dolls never wanted some thieving egomaniac frontman looking to steal total credit for everything that had been ohso-conveniently precreated before he showed up! Share and share alike was the band’s original premise. Launching each and every one of us into long-lasting prosperous show-business careers was the whole revolutionary point. The actual “subway-train” sound of the New York Dolls was a team effort, initially created without a lead singer. We already had four singers and songwriters in the band. But what good is opportunity when one is totally unprepared for success? Just a few hours later, our new female friends visited Pete and me. We were just sharing a few joints and goofing on what was on the telly. This is something people used to do before Mystery Science Theatre 3000 prepackaged the idea and did it for you. People would put on the TV, turn down the sound, get stoned, and make up their own dialogue to go along with the visuals. That is, in the days when humans used to talk to each other. Today, everyone’s wearing their own earphones listening to their own music in their own concentric world. And so Pete and I were finally happy. We had the two things we really wanted and had missed from back in the Apple—good weed plus attractive, readywilling-and-able female fans. We were thrilled to be getting acquainted with our new friends when we got a knock on the door. Who could this be now? Well, it was a drunken, already-flying-at-half-mast Billy Doll. I hoped that he wasn’t upset enough to be using Mandrax on top of drinking—we had all been warned about those dangers. The seriously wrecked Billy managed to say, “Hey, I heard about a party. I heard about it on the party-line on the telephone. I know some of the chicks that are gonna be there. Does anybody wanna come along?” In those days in Britain, they were using “partylines,” a definite must for the eavesdropping voyeur. Pete and I explained that since we already had female guests we had no plans to go anywhere. Why should we go looking for birds in the bush when we already had birds in the hand? So Billy left us to our “private world” revelry. I don’t know how much time elapsed, but we got some another knock at our door. We opened the door to find a Gave all still rather smashed Billy, again asking us if we wanted to

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go to the party with him. We again said no, as we were already partying aplenty right there in our room—we both had beautiful young women in our arms and under our spell. Leaving the hotel room was out of the question—we were having too much fun! We were finally relaxing in England without the pressures of more weird and impossible shows. We thought that our tour was basically over. A few hours later, we got a phone call from one of our managers. I think I answered the phone; I don’t remember whom I spoke to, but I was devastated. I was told that someone had received a call from some people who had been at the party along with Billy. They had said, “You’d better send someone over here, we think that your friend is dead!” And I said, “Say what? Are you kidding me? He was here just a while ago! You’ve got to be mistaken! Is this a post-Halloween joke? You can’t be right—not Billy, no way!” And then right after that shocking call, I got another call. This time it was an official phone call from one of our managers, who said, “Well guys, the party’s over. We’re gonna go over and find out what happened. Say good-bye to your guests, they’ve got to leave right away. We can’t have the police questioning you guys about drugs. And start packing, because the Dolls may be leaving London very soon.” Now both Pete and I were in shock. It had to be some mistake, or mistaken identity. We had just seen Billy two hours ago. He may have been a bit tipsy or on something, but he seemed ready to rumble as usual. How on earth could he possibly be dead? Pete and I had to ask our girlfriends to leave. What a drag! This is my last memory of London—a horrible phone call. My next memory is of being on the flight back to New York. I was wearing Billy’s antique brown checkered winter coat. And we were crying, all the New York Dolls and our roadies, crying and crying until we were physically ill from crying all the way home. And so our first ever tour—our fantasy tour of England, no less—was over. And just how did Billy die? He went to that party and passed out somewhere. Some people then thought that it would be a good idea to undress him and put him in a tub of cold water to revive him. When that failed, they poured hot coffee down his throat and sufsome focated him. Just where did this idiotic wit and wisdom come from? How retarded can you get? He drowned at a gave all

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party! How do you drown at a party unless it’s a swimming-pool party? Should Billy have rented some scuba gear and aqualungs and flippers before going? Maybe he should have arrived in a personal submersible submarine—just in case there was a world deluge of biblical proportions there? One of the New York Dolls had been taken away like a thief in the night by the Angel of Death. Could someone have prevented it all? I could have. Or Syl could have. Or David could have, or Pete or Johnny or anyone. But he was alone. We should have talked him out of going to that party—the fun party was happening right there at the hotel. We were all occupied with new girlfriends. But for some reason not Billy. His death could have been very easily prevented. Had the same thing taken place at a New York party, Billy would have been left alone to sleep it off, and would have been fine the next day. But Fate stepped in and pulled the plug. It was the end of the “Endless Party” (a great song that we never played again), the end of our tour, and the end of that young and innocent version of the New York Dolls. Not only had our mission to get a record deal failed, but now we were bloody and tainted as well. Nothing would ever be the same again. We will always love you and miss you dearly, precious Billy Doll. My sentiments may be summed up in this perfectly apt quotation from John Greenleaf Whittier: “For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: it might have been.”

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Arthur “Killer” Kane, my late husband, is the most recent of the New York Dolls to die. Of the six people who were twentieth-century New York Dolls, Arthur is the fourth to leave us—but the first to have written a book about his experiences. Arthur started writing his book between 1986 and 1989 on a funky little typewriter; he picked up the project again in 1991 and wrote sporadically until his friend Robert Cripps gave him a Macintosh and taught him how to use it in 1996. That’s when he started to really write, and he completed the project in the spring of 2003, though he continued revising it for another year.39 It took a great deal of encouragement from me and others around him to get Arthur to start—and then continue with—the project. Arthur was not naturally a boastful man, and blowing his own horn did not come easily to him. But he was enthusiastic about getting the real story of the New York Dolls out to the public. His head injuries—first from falling out of the kitchen window in 1989, and then from being attacked by thugs in 1992—made it hard for him to collect his thoughts and put them on paper. But Robert and I kept at him—and he kept at it—so that by the time he died, he had written what he considered the first volume of his memoirs. I first met Arthur Kane in the hallway of a Holiday Inn in Los Angeles. It was 1974 and the New York Dolls were on tour for their second (and final) album, Too Much Too Soon. But that first encounter was all too brief, since Arthur was busy with his groupies—six-foot-tall

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women, his type at the time. We didn’t say much to each other, but I remembered him and he remembered me when we met again—for real, this time—the following year. But first let’s rewind a little.

=== I was born as Barbara Garrison on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, five minutes before my brother Paul. Three years later my dad bought a restaurant in Vermont and moved the family there. We grew up in an old colonial marble mansion built in 1772, owned by the local movietheater owners, with scary billboards in the basement. I went to two one-room rural schools built in the 1800s in Old Bennington. Everything was haunted there, from the old first church where the Green Mountain Boys prayed before battling the Brits to the old mansion I grew up in. When I was in high school, my parents and teachers didn’t know what to do with me. As a result, my mother, who worked in admissions at Bennington College, arranged for me to take courses there when I was fourteen so I could receive college credits to help me finish high school. I was fortunate, because Bennington College is known as a good performing-arts school. I always wanted to be a performer, loved movies and music and the arts, loved to sing and dance. But in my early teens I was hunted, tortured, and raped for over three years by a group of high-school boys. In my later teens, I was on a double-date at a party and got raped again. Worse still, I found I was pregnant. I had my daughter Heidi Heather (who was renamed Julie) in what they used to call a “home for unwed mothers.” I gave the baby up for adoption and didn’t see her again until 1996, when she was almost thirty. From there, I went a bit wild. Maybe more than a bit. I was an LSD baby. I took thousands of mg’s of LSD-25 with Timothy Leary at his Millbrook estate in upstate New York. At the terribly young age of eighteen or nineteen, we were awakened up there by exposure to people like Ram Dass and the Dalai Lama. We were among the earliest to learn through this new chemical discovery that there was someepilogue thing greater and bigger than being human.

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When it came time to move to the Big City, the nearest and biggest was naturally New York. Still only eighteen, I based myself in Manhattan. I joined a psychedelic rock band called the Group Image—a family of artists, writers, business managers, musicians, and a light show— thirty or so enlightened creative beings who were to New York what the Grateful Dead were to the West Coast. We threw massive multimedia art-rock shows at the Palm Gardens, and were with Abbie Hoffman in 1967 when he and the yippies threw fistfuls of money—some of it funny money, but a lot of it real American greenbacks—from the roof of a Wall Street office building at noon to watch the people below scamper for it. A few years later, the newly formed New York Dolls would also play a yippie benefit, as Arthur describes in chapter 5. A bit of serendipity between my life and Mr. Kane’s from early on. I’ve had many odd experiences in my life, including UFO encounters and dying several times, leaving my body and then coming back to it. I’ve experienced being outside myself, with no pulse, looking down on my body from near the ceiling. But most of this happened before I hooked up with Arthur. I guess he grounded me.

=== Arthur Harold Kane Jr.’s first word was “record,” because his Aunt Millie used to listen to Elvis records. He was born in the Bronx in 1949, just a few months after me, and grew up in an abusive and not-veryhappy home as the only child. By the time he was in high school the family had moved to Queens, which Arthur considered his true home. His mother lost her battle with cancer when he was seventeen, and his heavy-drinking father soon remarried, to someone Arthur didn’t like. Relations between Arthur Junior and Arthur Senior had been deteriorating for several years. After his mother’s death, Arthur became a little less shy, less reserved—and more likely to argue back. His dad never liked rock music; in fact he hated it, which wasn’t so unusual during that “generation gap” era. His father used to hit him too, so like me Arthur was out of the house and on his own while still in his teens. Arthur had played clarinet in the school band, but he soon swapped that for electric guitar and then for bass guitar, which became his true instrument. Arthur (on guitar) had a band epilogue

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in high school called the Innovation Umbrella with Phil Cohen, George Fedorcik (later known as Rick Rivets), Stu Wylder, and a female singer whose name nobody seems to be able to recall; they rehearsed in Phil’s family’s basement. Arthur was the one who talent-scouted a teenager from Queens named John Genzale—who was then calling himself Johnny Volume but would soon settle on Johnny Thunders—and formed the Dolls with him, Rick Rivets, and Billy Murcia in mid-1971. The Dolls—and therefore rock as we know it today—would never have been born without Arthur striking up a conversation with Johnny outside a West Village pizza place and asking him if he played music. Then, when the big personnel shake-up of the band came at the end of that year—the induction of David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain—Rick Rivets was out. But Arthur was a loyal kind of guy who was good to his friends, even if they weren’t always so good to him, and he kept up with Rick for most of his life.

=== Right from childhood, Arthur was artistic. In addition to music, he’d been interested in clothes and fashion even before the group was. He spent almost a year in Amsterdam, trying to form a band and doing a lot of clothes shopping. But he couldn’t find English-speaking musicians he could click with, so Arthur instead brought back a lot of sweaters and other cutting-edge duds that stores in America just weren’t ready to stock in 1970–71. He brought a bunch of straight-leg jeans back from Holland to New York before anybody else had them. He brought back some hash, too. While Artie was doing his Amsterdam hippie trip, the not-yet-almost-famous Pamela Des Barres and a girlfriend of hers were doing the same thing. This was before Pamela became a supergroupie and author of I’m with the Band, and Arthur didn’t know her. She and her girlfriend wanted to score some smoke and were told to approach this tall American guy named Arthur at the Paradiso, and that he could fix them up. So he did, and they partied with him and smoked his product. A lot has been written about the New York Dolls’ use of radical, eyepopping, “transgressive” fashions as part of their public epilogue image, particularly the cross-dressing and gender confu-

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sion that always surrounded the band. But I think Arthur Kane was the most outrageous cross-dresser of them all. The one who really put on the sequins was Arthur. His little bow ties. Hot pants. One-piece body stockings (solids and stripes). Arthur had been interested in fashion long before the Dolls pulled up their tights. But all the Dolls just loved to dress up, even when they were arguing about everything else. Like Ed Wood, they were hetero guys who liked women’s clothes. Arthur once told me he didn’t want to be a woman (although he did steal my underwear once or twice!) but he liked the glittery clothes that women wore. And women liked it when he wore glittery clothes, too. Arthur used to tell me a lot about his life before we met. His earliest days with the Dolls—even before they started making their records— were the time he chose to begin with when he set out to tell his life story. Almost as if he knew he might not live to finish it, he began by recounting the period that had been the most important to him: the first few months of the band, before Johansen, and when Arthur’s good pal “Billy Doll” (Billy Murcia) was still alive and drumming for them. Arthur also told me that, on David Bowie’s New York stop on the Ziggy Stardust tour, Billy Doll disappeared into David and Angie’s suite (with Cyrinda Foxe) for several days. Arthur took it particularly hard when Billy died just a couple of months later. And Bowie, well, he commemorated the passing of Billy with a line in his song “Time” on the classic Aladdin Sane album the following year:

Time—in quaaludes and red wine Demanding Billy Dolls And other friends of mine

As we all know, the Dolls didn’t last long, either—something that was to haunt Arthur the rest of his life. In late 1974 and early ’75, toward the end of the Dolls’ brief, explosive career and after their record company had dropped them, future Sex Pistols ringleader and all-around evil genius Malcolm McLaren, who had fallen in love with the Dolls, took them under his wing for a few weeks. He couldn’t help them either. But in truth, by the time McLaren came along, nothing was working for the Dolls. The five guys were splitting up into epilogue

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rival factions. David and Sylvain had formed their own little subgroup. Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan had become an inseparable pair of junk-buddies. Johnny already was far gone into the China white and had a junkie circle around him that Arthur was never a part of—thank God! When Jerry Nolan joined the Dolls at the end of ’72, replacing Billy, Jerry didn’t take drugs. He was a tough guy from an Army family and didn’t even drink much. But within a year, the new Dolls drummer had joined their star guitarist in the “Man with the Golden Arm Club.” Arthur shot up only once, to my knowledge. He didn’t like it. Thank God he never got into that stuff or became part of Johnny’s circle. He had enough trouble coping with his life as an alcoholic. In any case, the cliques that divided up the Dolls left Arthur as the odd man out. Arthur was the lone wolf of the Dolls, the one who didn’t quite fit in, the one who always seemed slightly uncomfortable.

=== Just before the end of the New York Dolls, a not-yet-famous name became associated with the group: a young guitarist who was at that time calling himself Blackie Goozeman. But you’d know him as Blackie Lawless, who would later lead the flamboyant eighties metal act W.A.S.P. When the Dolls finally had their bitter break-up on their disastrous final tour of Florida, Sylvain and Malcolm went off to New Orleans, while Johnny and Jerry went back to New York (where they knew they could find heroin). Some of Jerry’s drum equipment was stolen, and Arthur was blamed for it. This was ridiculous, because Arthur was, for all the years I knew him, extremely honest and never a thief. When the split came, the rest of the band and the roadies just left Arthur in Florida, poor guy. The Dolls had been his dream. That was his band, his everything. I know this because for years afterward I dealt with his constant grief over the band’s demise. Stranded in Florida, Arthur didn’t know anybody and had little money, and I guess Blackie soon took him in. Blackie and Arthur made plans to move to California with the intention of forming a new band to be called Killer Kane—which was not only Arthur’s nickname in the Dolls, but also a reference to a campy villain in the old Buck epilogue Rogers movie serial of which Arthur was a fan. So Arthur

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went to California as a scout, scoping out L.A. in advance of Blackie. And that’s where he found me.

=== When the Group Image broke up, I wanted to leave New York; I was nineteen, and it felt like the end. I went to see my friend Linus the Magician (famous for doing mystical readings for the Beatles, Brian Jones, and other rock royalty of that era), who lived in the Chelsea Hotel. He gave me twenty-five dollars, and I bought a plane ticket for Tucson. It was there that I met my spiritual mother and started my spiritual path. We did nine full-moon ceremonies, and a UFO appeared at each one. I was taken by this woman to Hotevilla in Hopi territory, where we encountered a time of prophecy for the tribe. Apparently a young white tribe was going to come to the Hopi shaman, David Monyagui, who was standing alone against the chief, the rest of the tribe, and a false prophet who said he was going to bring some one-thousand-yearold stone tablets back from the UFO brothers. Needless to say, none of this ever happened, but meanwhile David took me into his hogan and shared a lot of ancient wisdom about other worlds. The gift I was trying to give to Arthur was of the same kind. I remained with the Hopi in Arizona for several months, then went to Sedona. But it was only a matter of time before I trekked the rest of the way west to California. In San Francisco, I became friends with Prairie Prince and Michael Cotton, who were developing their act the Tubes (though they were calling themselves the Beans at that point). Then I became involved with Rolling Thunder, the Shoshone medicine man who traveled with the Grateful Dead, and was asked to escort his daughter across America, traveling with Dennis Banks and Russell Means on the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties caravan to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. From there, I went back to San Francisco, and then down to Los Angeles, where I started to sing and act. In L.A. I became part of the underground, off-Hollywood, and Sunset Strip movie and music scenes, working regularly—or at least regularly enough. I had small parts in movies and TV around that time, including a part in Orson Welles’s unfinished The Other Side of the Wind, epilogue

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which might finally be finished and released soon. Looking back, everything about my life was pretty glamorous then: I even had a beautiful gold Mercedes-Benz with a red leather interior and a black roof. Before I got together with Arthur, I’d already crossed paths with the New York Dolls a couple of times. The Group Image once played a show on Staten Island with a pre–New York Dolls David Johansen, who was in a group called Fast Eddie and the Japs. Another time, Sylvain Sylvain and Billy Murcia’s early group the Pox opened for us at one of the weekly “Hippie Fests” they used to have at the Diplomat Hotel on Forty-Third Street. And I remember Johnny from as far back as when he was just a little rocker boy around town who wore great outfits— several years before the Dolls. I was also at the Matrix in San Francisco when the Tubes opened for the Dolls on their ’73 tour. That was when Arthur had his hand and arm in a cast after his maniac girlfriend had tried to cut off his thumb, and his friend Pete Jordan had to stand in for him for most of the tour. When he first hit Hollywood, Arthur was staying with a couple of cool girls from the Detroit rock scene who called themselves the Blondie Sisters. The twins were just friends with Arthur and were really good to him. They were the first goth girls I’d ever seen: tall, huge hair, pale skin, dark eyeshadow, bright red lipstick. They looked like a matching pair of Elviras. One night I went to the old Starwood club on Santa Monica with my friend Stephen (who had also been in the Group Image) for a concert by Silverhead, Michael Des Barres’s glam band. (Pamela Des Barres hadn’t yet married her future husband—although she was already “with the band,” so to speak.) We were socializing in the dressing room when Stephen grabbed my hand and said, “Hey, I want you to meet someone.” I turned around and Arthur was sitting on a chair. “This is my friend Barbie,” Stephen said to him. “I think you should meet her. She’s a fellow rocker from New York—she was in the Group Image.” Arthur said, “Well, hello, Barbie,” in that soft-spoken and rather high-pitched but distinctive rasp of his. He then pulled me into his lap and put his arms around me—and never really let go. I was living in a haunted house on Mount Olympus, on the West Side, a grand old Hollywood palace that was once the home epilogue of W.C. Fields. Arthur and I went home together that night,

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back to the big fireplace and the ghosts of dead movie stars. As Arthur walked through the front door, he said, “I’ve always wanted a house to haunt,” and I answered, “Well, you’ve got it now.” The two of us became very close, very quickly. It was all so much fun; and although Arthur was drinking, he wasn’t yet being abusive. We both had a campy sense of humor—and a campy way of living. What Arthur liked about me was that I was my own person, with my own way of talking. I could “write my own lines.”

=== Later, we moved to the Hollywood Flats, to an apartment building called the Nirvana, around the corner from the Magic Castle. Our downstairs neighbor was Bob Roberts, the famous tattoo artist who had a shop on Melrose. Arthur and I partied with Bob a lot, and got our first tattoos from him. The Nirvana was a very rock-and-roll building. All the while, Arthur and Blackie struggled with getting Killer Kane off the ground. Arthur’s reputation with the Dolls helped Killer Kane make some important connections in the industry, at least at the beginning. But after just a few recordings, including the single “Mr. Cool,” the band fell apart. Blackie stayed in L.A., changed his stage name to Blackie Lawless, and hit the big time with the flamboyant shock-rock of W.A.S.P. Arthur and I went back to New York. Blackie had an enormous ego and was an absolute control freak. He told everybody he was a New York Doll, when he’d played only one or two gigs with them. He wanted to control Arthur, and always told him things like, “You can’t have a girlfriend, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you just have to be in my band and that’s it.” Blackie wanted Arthur to be available at all times to go out and groupie it up—but Arthur didn’t want that; he just wanted to be with me. Arthur really couldn’t handle all that wild living any more because he was a drunk. In order for him to survive and get it together, he’d have had to stop drinking. He knew it, too. Arthur’s main problem was that he took the Dolls’ breakup hard, very hard. He was drinking way too much to make music.

===

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The early seventies was, of course, also the early days of KISS. They got together in New York a year after the Dolls, after seeing the Dolls play many times in ’72 and ’73. The members of KISS admit to being directly inspired by the Dolls’ theatrics at the Mercer Arts Center, so there was some crossover between the two bands (although the Dolls did it first!). Just prior to meeting my future husband, I was asked to go the Rainbow with my girlfriend Carol Stephens, a rock-and-roll clothing designer. The guys from KISS were sitting at a table, and when Carol walked by and waved at them, Gene said about me, “Oh my God, you guys, look at her lips!” They asked me for a kiss, so I very graciously gave each of them one. We ended up sitting with them, and when they dropped us off at home later that night, Paul slipped me his number and asked me for mine. When Paul was on tour, he called me regularly, asking me to “wait for him.” We had lots of phone conversations; he started calling me from all his stops. I liked him, and would have delivered on my promise to take him to the beach in my Benz. But I was about to meet my husband. I was never really “going out” with Paul Stanley, but had circumstances been different, it might have happened. The next time I saw Paul, I was already with Arthur. Arthur and I were invited to party with Ace Frehley at the Sunset Marquis. Blackie, of course, tagged along. Arthur had wrapped up a purple lamé jumpsuit as a gift for Ace, and we headed over to Ace’s room to present it to him. Ace really liked the jumpsuit and would later wear it onstage. But then Gene Simmons walked into the room, saw me with Arthur, and got this look on his face. He knew me as a girl he’d seen with Paul Stanley, yet here I was, pretty clearly with “Killer” Kane. A few minutes later, Gene returned with Paul Stanley. It was a very uncomfortable situation, though nobody really said anything; there was no “scene.” We remain friends, Paul and I, and I always say hi to him when I see him. Same with Gene. Arthur, however, was oblivious to the whole thing; he never noticed what was going on or that his relationship with me might be at risk. Because of his drinking, he was unaware of a lot of important stuff that happened right in front of him.

=== epilogue 202

After about a year of living in California, Arthur was getting very homesick for the East Coast. He missed his friends there terribly, and he knew that Killer Kane wasn’t happening the way he wanted it to. So I took him back to New York, where we moved into the Chelsea Hotel. We’d been there just a short time when our belongings were ripped off from our room. They stole Arthur’s money, but not mine. But of course we were a unit, so it affected both of us pretty badly. I had sold everything to pay for the move to New York: my Mercedes, jewelry, clothes, everything. I did it for Arthur, but I never should’ve done that. After being robbed, we ended up moving in with Frenchy, the Dolls’ valet and clothier. One night, for fun, Arthur wrapped me up in a pink bow and “gave” me to Frenchy. We then had a three-way. Frenchy later came on to me one time when Arthur wasn’t around— and the two of us had a two-way. When Arthur found out about it, he was furious. We had a huge fight over that incident. I went to him to try to make up, but Arthur went crazy—he was on either quaaludes or PCP or both—and he smashed my head into an amplifier and beat the crap out of me. Eventually he calmed down, and we later got back together. As we always did. We then got a room in the Commander Hotel at Seventy-Third and Broadway. But it seemed that the same problems that plagued us on the West Coast also plagued us in New York. Everybody tried to control Arthur—whether it was Blackie Lawless in L.A. or Jerry Nolan in New York. They didn’t want him to have a regular girl or a wife. I’d already worked and established myself with the Group Image, and they knew I wanted to work again. They were all very negative toward me because I wasn’t a typical rock-and-roll groupie-wife with nothing to say. I seemed to inspire a lot of jealousy for some reason. Even so, Arthur and I had many quiet, intimate moments together, when he poured out his heart to me. Sometimes our relationship was like When Worlds Collide; other times it was universes joining. Our private world. “Private World”—that was Arthur’s song, his greatest songwriting contribution to the Dolls. He helped write a lot of their songs— which were usually group compositions, even though the credits on the records went to Johansen/Thunders or Johansen/Sylvain— but that one was all his. And it’s very much him. The song epilogue

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is about when the world gets to be too much, and you have to retreat into your own space for a while, get some silence, find some solitude. It’s about getting inside your own head, the inner journey, the life of the mind. Arthur was more bashful and introverted than the other guys in the group. After all, the Dolls were a very public group, who always—and I mean always—had people and hangers-on surrounding them. They were a scene unto themselves. But Arthur’s personality was more a case of “still waters run deep”40—as opposed to a flashy but shallow show-off like David Johansen—and “Private World” expresses that feeling beautifully. Arthur, when he was alone, was an artist. All too often he was very drunk, unfortunately. He would have written more songs if his mind had really been on it, but the trouble with alcoholism is that it makes one focus mainly on getting the next drink. What Arthur showed to the world was not necessarily his true self. He was quite soft-spoken and even shy in private. This is why some folks found him confusing and just never “got” him. Despite looking very much the rock star, he never jumped around onstage—he was called “the only living statue in rock and roll.” He told me that when he was onstage with the Dolls, he would take a deep breath, play a run of notes, and then take another breath. He suffered from nervousness, an uneasiness about being in his own skin—and also some stage fright. He was a very vulnerable man. But I liked that about him. People talked about his open and innocent nature. I liked that about him too. This introversion sometimes led people to believe that Arthur had nothing to say, or maybe wasn’t very bright. It wasn’t that at all; he was very smart and witty. He just had a unique approach to the world. Not everybody could gain access to that part of him, but I did. What I saw in Arthur that other people didn’t was what I loved about him. I guess we were one of those couples that don’t seem to make much sense to others, but make perfect sense to each other.

=== epilogue 204

So we had uprooted our life in Los Angeles and returned to Manhattan because Arthur missed his friends—only to

find he didn’t have many anymore. But he had me, and he wanted to marry me. In the summer of 1977, Arthur told me he had a special surprise for me on my birthday. So when July 30 came around, he took me on an adventure—an inexpensive one, of course, because we never had two dimes to rub together. Back then, being poor didn’t bother us. We had the ability to enjoy every moment together, sometimes with simple things. He was really a very romantic person. So when I saw the sparkling reflection of the sun dancing on the waves, lighting up his eyes and his loving smile, I knew he was happy for that moment, and that these memories would be our happiest. It was a beautiful afternoon as we approached Liberty Island and our country’s most prized symbol of “who we are,” and I thought that this was my surprise. When we arrived, Arthur took my hand (he liked to hold hands). When his big hand was wrapped around mine, I felt secure and loved. But when we reached the crown of the Statue of Liberty, he looked at me and said, “Babzi”—he used to call me Babzi and Babzidoll and Barbie Doll and Barbarella—“we need to go up higher—to the torch.” However, the torch was roped off for repairs. Undaunted, Arthur held up the rope for me to slip through, and we snuck up to the highest point in the Statue. Once there, my love got on one knee, pulled out a plastic bubble from a gumball machine, popped it open, took out a gold plastic ring with a fake diamond, slipped it onto my engagement finger, and asked, “Babzi, will you please be my wifelette?” I said yes with tears in my eyes, kissed him, and told him I loved him. It was the sweetest and one of the most tender moments of our life together. We kissed for a long time, held each other, and looked across the water to the fading sunset. We felt at peace . . . but it didn’t last long. One time when I went home for lunch, he tied my feet up with pink ribbon and wouldn’t let me go back to work. But I managed to escape his boy scout knots. I saved up the money to buy our wedding bands, and we ventured downtown to Canal Street where we knew of several jewelry stores with inexpensive fourteen-karat-gold bands. Only thirty bucks apiece! What a deal! We were so happy to have that little pleasure in our lives. We then went to the Late Show, Frenchy’s store. Frenchy dressed up in drag every day and ran the store like epilogue

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the rock-and-roll pirate that he was. Arthur asked Frenchy if he would help find us a wedding dress. So Frenchy took us to a private room filled with women’s minidresses—all top designer names such as Dior, Yves St.-Laurent, Hermes, Gucci, and Chanel. Arthur dug through the massive pile and found me a Chanel chiffon minidress with rhinestones around the waist. It would have cost only three dollars, but Frenchy gave it to me as a wedding gift. On Christmas Eve of 1977, we were married. Johnny had told Arthur we should go to the same justice of the peace in Yonkers who had married him and Julie. John then helped us set it up. Arthur always kept his connection with John—and John’s reaction to our wedding plans was the opposite of David’s. When we ran into David at the Ritz one night and told him of our plans, in his typically tactless way he sang to us that old calypso song, “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife . . .” What a sweetheart he is. We honeymooned in Vermont. It was wonderful, for a while.

=== Arthur’s Aunt Millie died in 1978, and Arthur inherited some money and an apartment in the Bronx. We moved in there and got a car. Arthur had spoken of his mother’s sister as if she were his only touch with reality, and she really had been. They’d had a rather odd relationship, as Arthur readily admitted. He would call her every Sunday from our apartment in L.A. and have very pleasant chats. He became a different person when he spoke to her, and this was the kind side of Arthur that I wanted to know better. Millie was the driving force that made him want to return to New York. Millie had cancer, just like her sister Erna (Arthur’s mother). She’d had one breast removed already and was told the other one had to go too. For this reason and the fact that he missed his bandmates, Arthur repeatedly implored me to return to the East Coast with him. So I gave up my career and returned with him— anything for the man I loved. Arthur went to visit Millie his first Sunday back. He even bought her a bouquet of flowers. When Arthur’s mom had cancer, he went to her chemotherapy sessions with Millie and brought Millie epilogue home. He told me a story of how his mom made a spaghetti

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dinner and fainted right into her food, face first. His dad started to make fun of her: “Erna, I know the spaghetti’s good, but you don’t have stick your head in it and suck it up! Ha ha ha!” Arthur’s dad was a drinker and a cynic, and when Erna was dying, he was having an affair with his secretary, whom he married a few months after Erna died. He was a cruel man. It was obvious to me which side of the family the sweet, kind, and polite side of Arthur came from, and which side the downright malicious one came from. We went to visit A. K. Sr. in the summer of ’77 because Arthur wanted to announce our marriage and ask if his father would like to attend the wedding. When we woke up the first morning after arriving at Arthur Senior’s, our breakfast was waiting on the table, along with the morning newspaper whose headline practically screamed at Arthur: “The King is Dead, Elvis Presley the King of Rock and Roll is Dead!” Arthur’s face turned white, then red, as his dad said, “Yeah, Artie, it’s all over now. Time to join the Navy! Your fiancee can live here with us while you’re gone.”

=== Around the end of the seventies my husband and I started a rock band of our own: Coup D’Etat. Cheetah Chrome of the Dead Boys wanted to produce us. He said he’d never heard a voice that could raise the hairs on the back of his neck like mine did. But we were sabotaged by jealous competitors at every studio we visited. I’d faced lots of competitors before, of course. Competitors I can handle. But saboteurs are a different matter. You don’t see them coming. People were trying to keep us down, and especially trying to keep me down. One time, we had booked time in a recording studio and stayed up all night recording. I sang for four hours—from four to eight a.m.—before the engineers “discovered” that I had been miked all wrong. We played CBGB and some other places, and a lot of people showed up, including a young rock gal-about-town working in the record industry named Kari Abelman. I met Kari through Bobby Urband, David Johansen’s lawyer, during the probate period after Aunt Millie’s death. Kari tried to help Arthur and me with Coup D’Etat. She also wanted to bring Arthur and David together because, epilogue

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like a lot of fans, she hoped the Dolls would reunite. Except for occasionally seeing David and his wife Cyrinda Foxe (more because of her than him), Arthur and David hadn’t been in contact for years. Kari’s efforts weren’t an official attempt to reunite the band, but just a chance for Arthur and David to check each other out again. So Kari organized an elaborate dinner party at her beautiful Fifth Avenue apartment. David came, and he brought Frenchy with him. We all loved Frenchy. Arthur and I had actually been living at Kari’s for a while, maybe a week or so. At that time, David and the Dolls’ old manager Marty Thau were involved in making a movie called The Loves of Marty Thau. Yeah, I know, who wants to see a movie about Marty Thau’s love life? I guess Marty was paying for it all. And even before his Buster Poindexter period, David Johansen had always fancied himself an actor. So, as unlikely as it sounds, there actually was going to be a movie called The Loves of Marty Thau—and David Jo talked Kari into doing some shooting in her co-op, which turned out to be pretty disruptive. Needless to say, this masterpiece was never finished. But for what it’s worth, if it ever turns up someday, you can see that Arthur and I were in it. And they did shoot a scene of Marty Thau in bed with some woman. When they were done, they just rolled the equipment out, and David never once said thank you—not for the dinner, not for using the apartment for free, nothing. Believe me, it took a lot of effort for Arthur to be friendly toward Marty in light of what Arthur called the Dolls’ “death contract” with him. Arthur also still resented Thau’s opening line to the Dolls after catching them live for the first time back in ’72: “I don’t know whether I’ve just seen the best new band in New York or the worst.” Although Arthur was depressed and angry about the Dolls’ failure, that contract was the focus of his rage. The band never got their own attorney—like a lot of young, naive musicians, they assumed their management would do their best for them. So only the management’s lawyer was present when they signed the contract. Arthur and the guys gave up everything. Leber and Krebs signed up the Dolls as a band and also individually—publishing, everything, “in perpetuity.” But Leber/Krebs not only lost interest in promoting the epilogue Dolls, they were actively grooming Aerosmith to replace

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the Dolls. Just another nail in the coffin of my husband’s band. Steve Leber even sent Steven Tyler to see the Dolls play at Max’s in ’72 to learn about showmanship and stagecraft. Steven wanted to know where Arthur got his silk scarves, so Arthur took Steven scarf shopping and showed him how to tie them. Later on, when John and Jerry were too sick to make a flight to a Midwest gig, Krebs sent Aerosmith, and the plan to replace the Dolls was put into action. Aerosmith were, in a way, a smoother, more radio-friendly and socially acceptable version of the Dolls. Some might call all this bad luck. Others call it “The Curse of the New York Dolls.” Morrissey calls them “the unluckiest group in the history of the world.”

=== The other individual Arthur blamed for the Dolls’ demise was, of course, David Johansen. As Arthur pointedly mentions earlier in this book, Johansen had been hired as the Dolls’ singer after the core of the group had already been established, so Arthur always considered David something of an afterthought—an “optional extra” that he never asked for—to what was already a solid and settled lineup of performers. However, frontmen tend to get a lot of attention and have big egos— and David Jo more than most. In Arthur’s view, Johansen had not only taken over the group and treated the rest of them like his staff, he also was responsible for destroying the group. Yet Arthur continued to enjoy the company of Cyrinda Foxe, the Marilyn Monroe look-alike from Texas who was Johansen’s girlfriend, then later his wife. (And shortly after that, wife to Steven Tyler, who was the subject of Cyrinda’s unflattering book Dream On.) On occasion, Arthur and I went with Cyrinda and David to a diner near where they lived on Seventeenth Street. Cyrinda was bright, very magnetic, and had an effervescence about her. She was very much a character of her own creation. In ’72, David Bowie thought so too: he and his wife Angie had taken Cyrinda and poor doomed Dolls drummer Billy Murcia into their Midtown hotel suite for several days. Angie found a new lover in Billy Doll. Bowie, meanwhile, was so bowled over by Cyrinda that he cast her in his “Jean Genie” video. She always said what she wanted, and she carried herself with class. And epilogue

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she thought I was good for Arthur. She was very impressed that I’d brought him back to New York sober. Like most people, Cyrinda had never seen Arthur sober. The way she treated Arthur was very nice; the two of them had a real friendship. She would pull things out of Arthur that few others could—including some of Arthur’s funniest sly put-downs of Johansen. (Other Dolls remember Arthur the same way: funny, but in a subtle way. He might say something hilarious—but you’d probably have to lean in close to him to be able to hear it.) I was so sorry to hear that Cyrinda later became a junkie, and then died of a brain tumor in 2002.

=== In New York Arthur and I lived for a time in the Chelsea Hotel, not that long before Sid and Nancy checked in. Arthur was in better spirits back in his hometown, where it had all happened for him with the Dolls— and where it could maybe happen again. The two of us got back into the Downtown life, for which St. Mark’s Place was the focal point. We hung out with Dee Dee Ramone and Sid Vicious. There were jealousies and indiscretions and, um, “romantic misunderstandings,” which led to ugly scenes. Some of those incidents centered around Connie Gripp. Miss Connie, as she was known, was an infamous groupie and Arthur’s former girlfriend from the Dolls days. She’d been associated with the GTO’s in L.A., but she was now based in New York. By this time, the Ramones were starting to become a big deal on the East Coast rock scene, and Connie latched onto Dee Dee Ramone—you might say she really got a Gripp on him. Like Arthur, Dee Dee played bass and was somewhat vulnerable emotionally. Also like Arthur, Dee Dee ended up getting seriously injured by Connie. In ’73, Connie had tried—and very nearly succeeded—to cut off Arthur’s thumb the night before the Dolls were due to leave for some West Coast shows. A couple of years later, this same wax-tittied monster junkie-hooker slashed Dee Dee in the butt with a broken bottle. This happened when Arthur and I were living on the fifth floor of the Washington Square Hotel, and Dee Dee and Connie lived on the third. Dee Dee ran to our room, screamepilogue ing, and bleeding from his butt. He eventually got rid of

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Connie, and my friend, the great punk-rock photographer Eileen Polk, became his girlfriend for awhile. A much better choice, Eileen took Dee Dee into her home to protect him from Miss Connie. Connie stalked us. She spent whole evenings doing nothing but banging on our door and then yelling at our windows from the sidewalk. One night, we were having dinner at Eileen’s house and talking about our projects—including the idea of Dee Dee, Eileen, Arthur, and I all living together and also of Dee Dee and Arthur teaming up for a band with “duelling basses”—when we heard a maniacal pounding on the door. Eileen went to the door, opened it, and Connie tried to barge in. You see, at this time she had no Rock Star Boyfriend at all, and it was driving her batty. And Connie was pretty batty to begin with. Dee Dee got to the door moments after Eileen and promptly slammed the door on Connie’s foot. She kept her foot between the door and the doorframe as Dee Dee repeatedly opened and closed the door on her foot. He banged it and banged it and banged it—but it was like she was made of rubber. (In fact, when Arthur was drunk he thought I was made of rubber too.) Connie had an incredibly high pain threshold. Heroin seemed to numb her from pain. I mean, she’d get in knockdown, drag-out fistfights with Arthur where he’d wrap bicycles around her head—and she’d still stand up and come back fighting. She finally pulled her foot out, and Arthur closed the door. Then she started banging on the windows. We could’ve called the cops, but we didn’t. Miss Connie was a monster. She flew into volcanic public rages, trying to destroy everything and everybody. That bitch was a walking X Factor. But she was good-looking enough that people let her get away with the violence. At this time, I was into white magic and the ways of the Wiccan, and Dee Dee thought that I could help him. I had a beautiful antique crystal ball, and I loaned it to Dee Dee to use. I don’t know what happened—maybe Connie used it as a bowling ball—but it came back with a spiral crack running through it. At CBGB, I once pulled a switchblade on Connie. She’d been giving me the evil eye all night, so I stared right back. Then, when she was looking at me, I put my arm up on the bar, discreetly pulled out the illegal knife, sprung the blade, all shiny and new, and said, “C’mon, bitch!” After that, she left me alone. Connie was just bad news, and nobody was too sorry when she finally OD’d around 1990. epilogue

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=== In 1977, Arthur became one of the pioneers of thrash metal when he teamed up with his childhood bandmates from Queens, Rick Rivets and Stu Wylder, to form the Corpse Grinders. The Corpse Grinders were named after a schlocky grindhouse movie, the kind of film that Arthur used to enjoy a lot more than I did. The band members wore fascist-type uniforms with armbands and did songs like “Mental Moron.” Their stage act was even more outrageous than the Dolls’—the kind of blood-splattered horror-movie shock-rock that Blackie would later do with W.A.S.P. When the Grinders played, I’d stand in the front row with my girls (Natasha, Eileen, and Debette) and throw chunks of raw calf’s liver at the band, which would get stuck in their outfits, in their hair, and one time on Arthur’s face. It was pretty hot. Their look was goth gore, and their sound was faster and more powerful than most punk groups. Arthur made that band, but because he was so heavily blackballed none of his projects would ever succeed. Just as the Dolls were ahead of their time with punk, the Corpse Grinders were ahead of their time with thrash-metal and shock-rock. Arthur played in bands that set the template for more successful—and, in the case of Mötley Crüe, infinitely more successful—bands to come. Despite how Arthur kept grinding away with the Grinders, it didn’t go right. It never seemed to for him.

=== Arthur’s next group was the Idols, who, with Arthur on bass and Jerry Nolan on drums, sported the tightest, most dynamic rhythm section of all punk bands of the time. They became Sid Vicious’s last backup band, with Steve Dior and Barry Jones on guitars, shortly before Sid’s troubles with the law. Sid turned around to Arthur at one point and said, “I want you to play bass because you’re my idol and you can play better than me. But I think my socks are stinkier than yours.” The Idols made only a few recordings before they, too, imploded. They played some New York dates at Max’s in late ’78, just a couple of months before Sid died in February of ’79. Dior went behind everybody’s back and put epilogue out the album Sid Sings; Arthur never got a dime from that.

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I had first met Sid’s girlfriend Nancy Spungen at the Late Show, the antique clothing store on St. Marks where Frenchy used to work. Nancy looked cute in a cowgirl outfit and—believe it or not—was very quiet, and very obviously impressed with everyone in the underground rock scene. Just a matter of weeks later, she was a streetwalker working Third Avenue around Twelfth Street with the odious Connie and the rest of the H/Gs (hookers/groupies). Nancy and the other H/Gs turned tricks just long enough to get the money to rent a limo, buy drugs, and find themselves a Rock Star Boyfriend. Shortly before Sid’s death, Jerry had copped some heroin, and then lost it somewhere on the floor of Max’s Kansas City during a gig to raise lawyer’s fees to get Sid out of jail. We were living with Jerry at the time. So Jerry and Anne Beverley, Sid’s mother, went back to Max’s to crawl around the floor to find it. When they came back to Jerry’s apartment, Arthur and I told them not to take it to Rikers Island. Once convinced, the product was quickly consumed. After Nancy died in late ’78 and Sid had been released from Rikers Island, Eileen Polk had a dinner party at her mother’s townhouse in Sheridan Square. Arthur and I both had the flu and were unable to attend. The next day Eileen phoned us to tell us that Sid was dead—he had OD’d at the party. While Arthur never cried much, we both wept for Sid. Our hearts were broken, because Sid and Nancy confided in us, opening their hearts and telling us their fears. Not only that, but the Sid Vicious Band would have been one of the greatest rock-and-roll bands on the planet.

=== Around that same time, which was about a year into our marriage, Arthur exhibited some extremely odd behavior. He’d been ignored by the rest of his bandmates since he’d been back in New York. His other musical ventures weren’t working out. And I think the cold hard facts were starting to hit him about his dreams of a Dolls’ reunion or other big-time music-biz success. He also had periods of paranoia from the drugs he sometimes took along with all the alcohol he drank. One day he made the mistake of taking some PCP, which was often called THC. Since THC is the active ingredient epilogue

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in marijuana, people bought this “THC,” a white powder, under the impression that it would be like “snorting a joint.” But PCP/THC (also known as angel dust) is actually horse tranquilizer—a very dangerous drug that causes heavy, unpleasant hallucinations. Needless to say, anything made for tranquilizing horses can’t be good for humans. Well, Arthur took some of this shit by himself at home one day and got truly dusted. First, he flipped out and dyed his hair green and put on every piece of silver jewelry we owned. Then he decided the little green men, who had been flying in and out of the room all week in their little silver UFO, told him there was going to be a secret meeting of the New York Dolls on top of the Empire State Building. He was also told that the silver L’Eggs plastic containers that my nylons came in were an essential food that he needed to eat to get his superhuman strength. (I later found his teeth marks all over them.) That night we went to visit my girlfriend Anna Kotani in her hotel room on Columbus Circle. I was having a pleasant time while Arthur was progressing deeper and deeper into his angel dust psycho-trance. At one point he suddenly blurted out, “Gotta go,” and crawled out Anna’s window onto the fire escape. I went after him but he was gone. Even though it was starting to rain, Arthur kept going. First up to the hotel roof to see if the lights were flashing over the Empire State Building, and then into the ether. After fire-escaping, my “dusted” husband headed downtown, from the West Sixties down to the Thirties, where he jumped the rope at the Empire State Building. He was going to climb all one hundred floors on foot, but security guards caught him around the third floor. He told them he was there for a meeting, but they grabbed him by his feet and pulled him down the stairs, his head bumping each step on the way. (I learned all of this later. After Arthur disappeared from the fire escape, I walked home—and then stayed up all night worrying.) From there, he met a black woman with red hair and thought it was my doppelganger. He bought her a cup of coffee and walked with her downtown until she “disappeared” (after telling him some very unusual information about the space brothers). When he hit Washington Square Park, he received an inner message that told him to take off all his clothes and flog himself. So he ran around the park in the pouring rain, naked except for silver jewelry and about twenty-five ties, with epilogue the dye from his green hair dripping all over him, flogging

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himself in penance with a branch. I guess he felt that his meeting didn’t go down because he’d done something wrong. The NYPD showed up and very graciously asked him a few questions and made him put his clothes on. The cops took him into the police station, questioned him for a while, and released him. He then walked all the way back to Seventy-Third and Broadway and showed up at my door at about nine in the morning. He was dripping wet, covered in green dye, and had lost all our jewelry, including some irreplaceable heirlooms from my family. “I tried to go to the secret New York Dolls meeting,” he explained, “but they didn’t show.” I hugged him, tried to console him, and put him to bed. What else could I do under the circumstances? What else could anybody do? Getting inside the psyche of Arthur Kane was an exceedingly delicate operation.

=== In 1979, Arthur and I spent a while in London, to see what transatlantic collaborations might be made with British musicians. After all, the Dolls had always been more popular in England and Europe than in the States. On our second night there we saw Ian Hunter and partied with the band after the show. Then Pete Townshend decided he wanted to run off with me. Pete looked at his manager Kit Lambert and said, “She’s got a set of big ones, doesn’t she?” The genius behind the Who then lifted me up (he’s very strong) and carried me to his limo. Arthur went running after him yelling, “That’s my wife you’ve got there!” So Pete had to give me back. That time, Arthur stood up for me and defended me. London was amusing and fun, but also frustrating. We both liked the shopping in Kensington Market and visiting the British Museum, but some people there were really awful to us. One night we were out at a club in London, and a lot of the new wave aristocracy of the time were there: Bananarama, the Psychedelic Furs, the Damned (Arthur and Dave Vanian talked about maybe playing together). We’d been out clothes shopping, and Arthur had on a pair of shockingly bright yellow pants he’d just bought. Well, I guess some punk there thought that wasn’t the right color to be wearing or epilogue

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something, because he deliberately dumped a pitcher of beer all over Arthur’s crotch. Apparently the troublemaker was sent over by Paul Cook and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols—they wanted to “wet his willie.” The beer splattered all over both of us. They were trying to start a row. They then sent three monster goth groupies over to us, who slammed their pitcher of beer down on the table where we were sitting with Mick Jones from the Clash and John Ashton from the Psychedelic Furs. Arthur and I were both furious. I yelled at them so hard I thought I was going to leave my body. We looked at each other, and it was on. We stood up and kicked the table over, the pitcher of beer went flying all over the groupies, and we screamed at them in unison, “So, you wanna fuck around? We’ll fuck around with you.” The whole club went dead; all eyes were on us. Arthur and I were so mad we were visibly shaking. The groupies retreated, out the front door. Then we turned to the rest of the club, looked at Paul and Steve, and motioned for them to bring it on. At that point, Mick and John and Joe Strummer put their arms around us and said, “Come on, you guys, sit down here with us,” and calmed us down. Paul and Steve had wanted to see Arthur’s anger, to see Arthur fulfill his reputation for violence. They hadn’t counted on me. The closest we got to forming a new band during our trip was with some British group who wanted Arthur, but not me, to play with them. Instead of me, they wanted to use some Asian woman who thought she was all that. But we were offering ourselves as a package deal. Arthur resented people treating me like that, but he didn’t exactly rise to my defense either (except for that time with Pete Townshend). On our final night in London, Roy Thomas Baker, the famous producer of Queen, Guns N’ Roses, and Chrissie Hynde, was supposed to take us into the studio to hear our sound, but he fell sick and had to cancel. Back in New York, things were very difficult for us. When we got the rest of Arthur’s money, we spent a lot of it on court expenses. So many people had been attacking us that I felt we had to leave New York before something really bad happened. In ’82, we decided to hit the road, go west again, by car. We felt that we got out of New York City by the skin of our teeth. We headed South first, but Arthur didn’t feel comfortepilogue able there. He was a New Yorker through and through.

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But his mood brightened considerably as we crossed New Mexico and drove into Arizona. Here, I got to share my Native American knowledge with my husband, and told him a lot of stories—both from folklore and from my own firsthand history. Arthur liked hearing about it, but he was not into the same things to the same degree I was. He understood, though, and he appreciated. I showed him the beauty of Mother Earth in ways he hadn’t noticed or thought about before. Arthur was a city boy from the concrete jungles of the five boroughs, so this was all new to him. I know he had an epiphany there, a spiritual awakening amidst Arizona’s awesome natural anomalies. In the Painted Desert we collected samples of garnets, amethyst, and petrified wood, and little rose-colored pyramids. He really woke up out there. We’d already had our alien experience back East—we were followed by a UFO in 1978 while driving near New Paltz, New York, and both experienced an identical “time-loss” phenomenon because it was light when it began and twilight when it ended, so we both believed we were temporarily transported into the craft. After that, he was a believer. Now Arthur was fully ready to “go on the adventure”—and Adventure Girl was going to take him! Arthur soon began the long, spiritual path that would eventually lead him to the Latter-day Saints. Arthur had always been fascinated by UFOs in those old sci-fi movies he loved, so he was especially intrigued when I told him about the possible connection between Southwest Indians and visitors from elsewhere in the universe. In a Hopi village in Arizona, murals with spaceship-shaped objects are painted on the side of a rock. A Hopi woman who lived in the village something like eight hundred or one thousand years ago foresaw the coming of beings from other planets. Arthur was very much intrigued by this idea. He also liked the idea that a UFO would someday come and take him. Arthur’s nickname in music was Killer Kane, but in his extraterrestrial scenario, he expected he would lead the aliens as Commander Kane. It’s funny, I know, but that’s what he used to believe. He loved to hear UFO stories, he did research, and we even had a booth at some UFO conventions. I really believe it was my getting him interested in the supernatural and paranormal that kept him from going totally bonkers during those years of poverty and obscurity. It helped him surrender his ego, the one that announced, “I’m Aww-thur, from the epilogue

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Dolls!” Being a Doll was his claim to fame, but through studying aliens and other paranormal phenomena, he learned that there could be more to his life than just that “star” image he had of himself. Once we got settled in L.A., however, the usual rock-and-roll insanity took over our lives again. We got mired in the ins and outs of trying to make it in the entertainment business, and a lot of the spiritual progress Arthur had been making started to get lost. And he started drinking again. He couldn’t get past that seething resentment for David Johansen and the failure of the Dolls’ dream until the 2004 reunion, in the final weeks of his life. The good news was that when we moved into the Tropicana, we found that our old friend and tattooist Bob Roberts was living there. Arthur again set about trying to put a group together. He was offered the bassist position in other people’s groups, but Arthur wanted to be a creative force in a project where he had some say, not just a hired hand for somebody else’s hair band. And by this time, the first question from the kids in the local music scene was “Who’s your management?” Arthur didn’t even have management. Eventually, though, he got a good rhythm section going with Nicky Alexander, who later joined LA Guns. We were giving the West Coast another try. All the moves I made, I made for Arthur. But again, what we found was mostly frustration. We tried out bands and watched them fail one by one. We watched other bands do things Arthur had done before and become platinum-selling multimillionaires—while we struggled to get by, doing walk-on parts as unbilled movie extras, or appearing in other people’s music videos. To outsiders, our life probably looked like the classic upscale bicoastal rock-star lifestyle. As I said in one of my interview segments in New York Doll: The Movie, “I was in the unique position of being a rock star’s wife with no money.” Arthur and I were starving. We were even on financial aid at one time. Whenever we could, we’d grab work as extras on movie shoots. We had walk-ons in Spaceballs, Innerspace, Fright Night II, Death Spa (or, as it was originally called, Witch Bitch), Modern Girls with Virginia Madsen, and, best of all, an HBO show called 1st & Ten starring O.J. Simpson and Delta Burke (the episode was called epilogue “Easy Come, Easy Go,” and they used our song “Frozen

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Alive Again,” for which we were paid one hundred thirty-seven dollars). Another time Arthur and I recruited three hundred punks for crowd scenes in a teenage vampire movie. And you can clearly see both of us as one of the couples in Bryan Adams’ video “Victim of Love.” But our most humiliating moneymaking endeavor was when we took part in Penelope Spheeris’s The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years. Arthur and I were regarded as just among the cattle, left to our own devices outdoors when cameras weren’t rolling. Our old pal Blackie Lawless—at that time a big deal because W.A.S.P. was at its peak of popularity—walked right past us on his way to Penelope’s trailer, no doubt for some Very Important Discussion with the director. Blackie had All Access. Arthur and I had a boxed lunch and some concrete to sit on. In the late eighties, Hollywood changed. Old agencies went down. Central Casting got replaced by cattle calls. Everybody noticed it. Nobody liked it, but nobody could stop it either. It became clear to me that Arthur was not getting over the death of the Dolls. The years went by, but his bitterness about it didn’t seem to fade—if anything, it got worse. It had really broken his heart. And everybody knew how much he wished they could get back together. As Arthur says in the movie New York Doll, “Those memories, it’s hard to put them away. They’re my fondest memories!” That his old group had never been fairly rewarded—or even fully recognized in their time— was like poison to Arthur’s soul. Because his first and most cherished identity was as Arthur Doll. He watched one after another of his colleagues and proteges get more attention and make more money than him. Blackie Lawless blew up big with W.A.S.P. David Johansen morphed into Buster Poindexter and not only racked up a huge international hit with “Hot Hot Hot,” but also started getting acting jobs in big studio pictures like Scrooged and Car 54. And of course it was impossible for Arthur not to notice that bands like Mötley Crüe, Poison, Warrant, Guns N’ Roses—hell, everybody who ever rocked the Sunset Strip in the late eighties—had “borrowed” their “sleaze-rock” look and sound from what the Dolls had been doing more than a decade earlier. epilogue It drove Arthur nuts.

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Unfortunately, he took out some of that frustration on me, like when he threw me across a room and into a wall. People asked me why I put up with it, why I didn’t leave him immediately. Well, it’s a fair question—but what could I do? I was in love. I was still very young, and this was my first really major relationship. I was Barbara the love bug, willing to try anything in the name of love. Throughout the decade, Arthur’s desperation deepened, as did his dependence on alcohol. It brought out his dark side: a classic Jekyll/ Hyde contrast, a real “Personality Crisis.” He seemed happy sometimes, but would turn crazy, depressed, angry, and more. He’d get the shakes, get jittery, and it would make him very nasty. The continuing crisis that was our lives got worse. Those sickly sweet liqueurs Arthur loved— blackberry brandy and peppermint schnapps—failed to sweeten his mood. On more than one occasion he even tried to murder me. I’m not talking about some tipsy tiff that ends with both parties passing out; I’m talking about a wretched, raging drunkard doing grievous bodily harm. One night in 1985 after he’d downed a quart of schnapps, he went off on me in our place in Hollywood. Our conflicts really weren’t “fights” because I never fought back. He just attacked me. Since he was too big for me to fight off, I’d just roll into a ball to protect myself. The trouble had started the night before, when Arthur saw David Johansen on TV. He was on a slow-burn the next day, so naturally he started drinking. He was obliterated by five in the afternoon and wanted to shut the TV off and crash on the bed. Like most normal people, however, I wasn’t ready to go to bed at five in the afternoon, so I went downstairs to visit our gay neighbor Byron, who was a painter and a bodybuilder. When I got back home, Arthur was awake and in a fury. He not only beat me, but tied me up naked with telephone cord. I managed to dial Byron’s number and cry for help. Byron was six-foot-three and his friend was six-foot-five, so they were strong enough to subdue Arthur and get me to safety. Arthur, meanwhile, made his getaway—with all our money, our weed, and our booze—in our beautiful ’65 Thunderbird. He returned the next day with no recollection of the previous night’s events but some suspicious alibi about “a hooker and a motel and epilogue being robbed and . . .”

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You get the idea. Of course the thrown chairs and the shattered mirrors and the rest of the mayhem only happened when Arthur had been drinking. When he was sober, Arthur was a lovely, charming, beautiful man. For quite a while, I was unaware of the extent of his alcoholism. He was clever about hiding his empty bottles, so I didn’t know just how much of a grip alcohol had on him. Looking back, I don’t know why I accepted this kind of treatment from him. Maybe I did because I had been subject to sexual abuse myself, on an ongoing basis, throughout my teens. And because I had to put my daughter up for adoption and all that. (As for having children of our own, well, Arthur and I would have liked to, but were never able. I knew I couldn’t conceive, as early menopause runs in the family. Arthur himself would have liked to be a father, but was afraid of how his deep-seated anger would affect “a little one.”) Sadly, Arthur’s drinking, which I always hoped would get better, did not. Over the years, on both coasts, Arthur made periodic attempts to dry out, including a stay at the Smithers Clinic in New York, the detox center where Rita Hayworth had stayed years before. Another time he checked into a soldiers’ home. That was a nightmare. The various clinics would send him home clean and sober, but it would never last. And through all this, other, more successful men made offers to me. Other well-known musicians who offered to take me in told me that Arthur was a loser, that I should dump him and be with them instead. I thought about it, but I couldn’t leave Arthur. Although I continued living with him for another four years after the telephone cord attack, my ability to trust him had been severely eroded. I had always tried to pick up the broken pieces of Arthur Doll. But after he hurt me that way, our relationship went into a downward spiral. Although he claimed not to remember all the things he did with the telephone cord, the attack was enough of a shock to Arthur that it did sober him up for awhile. Arthur was genuinely contrite for what he did to me in 1985, but by ’89 his alcohol intake was so bad that I could hardly have conversations with him. I couldn’t make him see what he was doing to himself, not to mention what his violence was epilogue doing to me.

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One night in December of that year I told him I couldn’t live with him anymore. He smashed Byron’s framed painting of our cat Prudence over my head and then jumped out the window. He never admitted he was trying to commit suicide. Instead, he liked to say, “I jumped out the kitchen window and missed the pool.” Sure, it’s a funny line, but that fall put him in hospital from December until Valentine’s Day. It also put a dent in his forehead and a pin in his elbow, removed his kneecap, and added metal to his shoulder and hip. He showed off these unplanned “body modifications” in Greg Whitely’s movie—they left him unable to stand up straight, let alone walk. When he finally got out of the hospital, I told him how sorry I was, but I couldn’t be there for him to abuse any longer. As time went by, I found I still loved Arthur deeply, and couldn’t stay too far away. I paid his rent while he was recuperating, and for years after that I was around all the time. I was there for him in 1992 when he was found in a ditch near his building in West Hollywood. He was walking home after a party for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and might have been mugged by some violent street person, but we’ll probably never know for sure. He suffered grievous injury from the incident and spent a while in a therapy hospital in Rancho Los Amigos. That was followed by many years of care—both by me and by his other true friends—to help Arthur walk and talk like normal again. Once again, I was the one who picked up the broken pieces of Arthur Doll. In the nineties there were rumors that Arthur had drunk himself to death and was already deceased. After his terrible accident in 1992, there were even reports that Arthur had been a casualty of the Rodney King riots. One good thing came from Arthur’s time in physiotherapy and healing: it gave him the chance to reflect on his life and try to make some positive changes. Around 1990, Arthur got involved with the Church of the Latter-day Saints (LDS), via an ad in TV Guide. He responded to an offer of free literature about Jesus, which was personally delivered to him at his West Hollywood apartment by a couple of LDS missionaries. Young, blonde, female missionaries, I might add—which suggests that Arthur’s initial interest in this religion might have been more earthly than epilogue sacred! Had the Mormon “home visit” come via a pair of

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middle-aged males, Arthur’s “conversion” might never have happened at all. He never did lose his eye for the ladies. Anyway, Arthur did start going to their church, and his social circle started consisting of Mormons. (His first attempts at going to church were rather painful for him because his clothes smelled of cigarettes, and the other Mormons would move away from him on the church benches.) Under the Mormons’ influence, Arthur cut way down on his drinking, although occasionally he relapsed. He never lost his love of good pot, however. He used to like to smoke before typing the I, Doll manuscript. I had always worked on giving Arthur his other side, bringing out the essence in him that I knew was there, and trying to lead him out of his darkness and toward the light. Being a healer and practitioner of the white arts myself, I worked on healing Arthur. And from that, I believe he wanted to work on becoming a healer himself. He sought to do so through the LDS. And although Arthur really seemed to accept and believe in Jesus, he still approached the Book of Mormon like some sort of archeaological exploration, a voyage of discovery, a code to be cracked. I guess going under the “guidance” of the Mormons gave him some measure of peace, but deep inside he remained utterly despondent about the failure of the Dolls. He wanted to make music again, but with the New York Dolls, not the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It’s worth noting Arthur’s words when he says that discovering Mormonism was “like a drug experience” and “an LSD trip from the Lord.” I don’t suppose old Joseph Smith would enjoy comparing LSD to LDS, do you? Or, for that matter, Arthur’s appearance in the Larry Flynt video Hustler’s Jail Babes 5. Even though Arthur appeared as a guest star in a “nonsex role,” Hustler’s Jail Babes series is hardcore porn. When Bishop MacGregor confronted Arthur about the video, Arthur replied, “Well, I kind of did that before I came back to the church, and they offered me money, and I needed to eat.” Bishop MacGregor responded, “Well, Arthur, you know you come from an unusual background and your rock-and-roll roots have always been wild, so we’re going to excuse this, and the church loves you anyway.” And he put Arthur very much at ease. The Mormons always found a way of excusing epilogue Arthur’s transgressions.

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=== The last time I saw and held my husband was the night before he left for his New York rehearsals for the Dolls reunion event that would be held in June 2004. I helped him buy and pack his suitcases. He’d received a fateful phone call from the Smiths’ frontman and lifelong Dolls fanatic Morrissey, saying that David and Sylvain had agreed to come together again as the New York Dolls for the first time in three decades, at Morrissey’s Meltdown festival at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The concert—a sensational success celebrated by fans around the world—would make Arthur’s dream of thirty years finally come true. Robert Arche later told me that the reunion was originally going to happen without Arthur because of worries about his head injuries. It was Arche who got Arthur involved. Arthur was alive with excitement, but at the same time anyone who knew him could tell something was wrong. He and I tried to get back together again over the holidays, and I could see he was not well. Neither of us knew it was leukemia, but there was clearly something wrong with Arthur physically. He was puffy, pale, rubbery. But he was so excited about the reunion that he managed to ignore his physical illness. We talked about the possibility of my going with him to New York for the rehearsals, and then to London for the concert. But the main thing on Arthur’s mind was whether he would be able to patch things up with David and Sylvain—mostly, of course, David. Arthur decided that this was something he needed to face on his own, and I wholeheartedly agreed. As it turned out, the reunion with his old nemesis Johansen, whom Arthur usually referred to as “our arrogant loudmouth singer,” went really well. For a spiritual person like Arthur, this was extremely important. The hatchet truly was buried—and, thankfully, not buried into anybody’s head. Prior to their being in the same rehearsal room together again in Manhattan, there was no guarantee that Arthur and David wouldn’t start slugging each other. Arthur was hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. But the two men did manage to put the past behind them, at least long enough to teach the new players like Sam Yaffi and Gary Powell the Dolls repertoire and do the epilogue Royal Festival Hall show.

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After the triumphant gigs (extended from one night to two) in London, the Dolls got offers to play in other parts of England. But Arthur, having achieved peace at last—or so he thought—chose to return to his modest apartment in West Hollywood and to his three-days-a-week librarian job in the Family History Center at Mormon headquarters in West L.A. Having no idea that he had only three weeks to live, he was exuberant. He phoned me as soon as he returned to the States. “Hey Babzi, I’m back!” he said, sounding elated. “Great, honey, how was it?” I asked. “Everything went better than I could have hoped for!” he replied, but added ominously, “I’m tired though.” He didn’t want to be alone and pleaded with me, “Can you come down and see me right away? I want to share this feeling with someone.” I’d had a vitamin shot a week before, and I had a cramping spasm in my left arm that felt like a heart attack. And I was up at Lake Isabella, almost three hours from where he lived. I couldn’t just pop down, so we agreed that I would come down the next day because Greg Whitely wanted to film us together for the movie. Arthur talked about how finally it was our chance to be together. “It looks like I can afford for us to live together again, and finally I can take care of you the way I always wanted to, the way I always should have,” he said. He mentioned living together in L.A., or maybe even moving to Georgia, near where Sylvain and Wanda lived. We thought we might even adopt a child. I called him the next day and he said he wasn’t feeling well; he was too tired. He made plans to visit me at the lake with Greg Whitely and our cat Alta. The next day he still wasn’t feeling well, and the day after he felt like he had a severe case of the flu. I offered to come and take care of him, but he didn’t want anyone to take care of him—it was his time to take care of me. When I went to Ventura a few days later, Arthur again wouldn’t let me visit and started to ramble, saying things like, “Where’s my money? Where’s my cat?” Mentally, he was losing it. Over the next few days, he started cursing me over the phone, even hanging up on me. I finally went to his house with groceries, but couldn’t get in. I left the groceries there. Over the next few epilogue days, he continued to refuse to see me.

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He went to a doctor, who gave him antibiotics, but Arthur wouldn’t let her check his blood. He became more delusional. He called me and said, scared, “Babzi, I feel like I’m dying.” But an hour later he told me he never wanted to see me again, that he wouldn’t open the door if I came to his apartment. Every time I called him, he’d yell at me and hang up on me. A few days later I told him I was coming down no matter what, but he hung up on me. That night, I got a phone call from Greg: “Arthur Kane just died.” I went dead inside. No matter what had transpired in the past, Arthur was so much a part of me, it didn’t matter what he’d said or done—at that moment I realized I loved him more than anything on this planet. Rust Tippett, his home teacher, had taken him to an emergency room. He was diagnosed with leukemia. He died less than three hours later, just twenty-two days after his return to the limelight.

=== Although the Mormons never had as much of a hold on Arthur’s life as they thought, their church did get a pretty good grip on him after he died. Some prominent Los Angeles Mormons, including Rust, took control of Arthur’s estate, did their best to minimize my importance as Arthur’s widow, and prevented me from accessing his body. It led to a lot of legal wrangling, as well as some press coverage. And a lot of bad feelings between myself and them. Upon Arthur’s passing, the Mormons tried to convince everyone that they were the good guys and I was the bad guy. Because they were church people and I was from the world of “the Devil’s music,” rock and roll, they managed to get away with it. The Mormons made themselves executors of Arthur’s estate. They made it very difficult for me to access his body. One night I called David and Syl to tell them I wasn’t allowed to see Arthur’s body. My late husband’s former bandmates were sympathetic but not much help. I was told that Arthur’s body was too badly decomposed. It was a terrible situation. The Mormons also failed to inform me when Arthur epilogue checked himself into the hospital that fateful day. At one

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point, Rust told me that the reason he hadn’t called me when Arthur went into the hospital was because Arthur didn’t want to see me. Later, he admitted that it wasn’t that Arthur didn’t want to see me; it was that he didn’t want to upset me—which is a very different thing! If Arthur had known he was dying, of course he would’ve wanted me there. But I never got the chance to see him because Arthur’s LDS “friends” didn’t call me in time. Rust also tried to tell me that I was no longer legally married to Arthur. My lawyer went to the courthouse and verified that I was. Let’s just say I left these people some answering machine messages that they won’t soon forget.

=== From the first time Arthur Kane pulled me into his lap at the Starwood in the early seventies, until the day he passed away, we were best friends. If he’d been the typical rock star, interested only in carving new notches on the bedpost, I would never have been able to love him—let alone marry him or stand by him through his darkest and most inebriated years. I still miss him a great deal, and wish I had him back. I’m very glad to have had the opportunity to share our story with you, and also to fulfill Arthur “Killer” Kane’s wish to have his autobiography I, Doll published and available to the public. Many of those who saw the documentary New York Doll: The Movie believe that in the very end, Arthur had humbly accepted that his “monster” mask be put to rest. It was a lesson he learned late in life, but better late than never. I know he used alcohol and drugs only to express a more gregarious side of himself, to release his feelings. Arthur understood this too, which is how he finally broke through his chemical dependencies. As far as I can tell, he was the only Doll who succeeded in finding the strength to finally bury his fears. He had come to realize what it was like to give himself up to something greater than himself. For him it was Jesus. He needed Jesus Christ and the structure of an organized religion. As a result of his humility, he finally was able to receive the gift of his beloved New York Dolls regrouping and playing their final gig. It was a shining moment for him—and shine he did! I believe it was the spirit of the Holy Ghost epilogue

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that gave him the strength to valiantly pick up his axe (Swedish Viking bassman that he was!) and play his instrument with the monster fierceness that he owned. Believe me, from the very depths of my heart, I was extremely happy for him; he’d suffered enough. After Arthur died, I spent three days in blinding shock, holed up in his apartment. A few days later I came to the horrifying realization that I was sleeping in bloodstained sheets. In the days leading up to his death, Arthur’s brain literally had been bleeding out of his nostrils, and had stained his bedsheets. He should have gone to the hospital a lot sooner. His blood was all over the apartment—on his bedclothes, on the doorknobs, everywhere. At first, I couldn’t understand why Arthur wouldn’t let me see him in those final weeks. But I know now that he didn’t want me to see him in that condition. He felt he’d put me through enough pain and didn’t want to put me through more. All I ever wanted to do was take his pain away. Arthur and I spent our years in the same boat, maybe sinking a bit from time to time, but then bobbing up again. Arthur’s smile and campy humor, his devil-may-care, step-if-you-dare, ’cause-here-wego-again attitude was always with me. Living with a man for thirty years, for Christ’s sake—it rubs off on you. Well, kids, we did not get our last leap together. We were beat out of the goods. There was no happy ending, no closure for me. It appears I ended up inheriting the “Curse of the Dolls” from their original founder. My long love affair with Arthur was a dark comedy. Arthur’s cavalier attitude was to rage, rage against the dying of the night—or is it light? Whatever! Just rage! And then by all means relax! Slip into that somnambulistic state and schluffing goot (sleep well), Popi. My love, I will forever miss you. See you in eternity. L-U-V, Your Babzi Doll.

epilogue 228

editor’s Notes

Arthur’s memoir occasionally gets the chronology of events wrong. For the best available New York Dolls chronology, see www.fromthearchives.com/nyd/chronology.html.

1. Birth name: George Fedorcik. 2. Birth name: John Genzale Jr. 3. The Kinks song, from their 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, is “Johnny Thunder.” 4. Janis Cafasso. 5. Sylvain Sylvain (birth name Sylvain Mizrahi), the Dolls’ rhythm guitarist. 6. Marty Thau and Steve Leber, the Dolls’ managers. 7. He was released after serving a year. 8. Marty Thau didn’t actually approach the Dolls until a few weeks after the gig described in this chapter, which took place on May 29, 1972. See chapter 10. 9. In fact, spandex was invented in 1959. 10. Winter’s “Frankenstein” bears no resemblance to the Dolls song of the same name. Winter says that the song was so named because it was the result of stitching together bits and pieces of previously recorded music of his. And while the Edgar Winter Group’s songs had no lyrics, Winter had made three solo albums, all of which featured lyrics and vocals. 11. Arthur seems to have confused the seasons—this was probably in March, and a late spring snow. 12. The actual address was 119 Chrystie Street. 13. Johansen later adopted Buster Poindexter as a stage name.

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14. In fact, he was nineteen, but he needed to be twenty-one in order to sign without parental consent. 15. Kane is referring to Mercury’s UK rerelease of the Dolls’ two albums as a two-LP set with a new cover (on which their five faces look a bit like death masks). 16. Connie Gripp was notorious for deliberately wounding Arthur’s hand with a knife to prevent him from joining the Dolls on their 1973 tour. She was later the girlfriend of Dee Dee Ramone—whom she also stabbed, this time in the buttocks. Connie, subject of the Ramones song “Glad to See You Go,” died in 1990. 17. Fashion model Cindy Lang. 18. Alan Vega and Martin Rev. 19. Steve Leber of the Leber and Krebs agency. 20. Bowie actually played Carnegie Hall on September 28, 1972. He returned to play Radio City in 1973. 21. Actually, they had played Man’s Country, a Brooklyn bathhouse, before this (see chapter 14). 22. Tony Machine (birth name: Krasinski). 23. Dolls managers Steve Leber, David Krebs, and Marty Thau. 24. In fact, the Dolls’ seventeen-week Tuesday-night gig at the Mercer Arts Center lasted until less than a week before their departure. 25. Certainly no more than two weeks—the Dolls began recording on October 15 and played Birmingham eleven days later. 26. Actually, the Hullabaloos released two records, both in 1965. 27. Actually, the Dolls had played the Mercer Arts Center on October 8, and this gig was almost certainly prior to October 29, when they played Wembley. 28. St. Cyr was born in 1919. 29. In fact, Lou Reed had already recorded Transformer by then, and it would be released only two months later in December 1972. 30. It was Sunday evening, November 5. 31. It was torn down in 1973 but rebuilt in 1984. 32. Cyril Jordan, founder, singer, songwriter, and guitarist of the Flamin’ Groovies. 33. Wembley was not destroyed, though it was renovated in 2005. Arthur wrote this chapter in 2003 or earlier, and editor’s it is unclear what he was referring to here. notes

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34. On the contrary, their 1972 album What a Bunch of Sweeties, recorded without Twink, was their most popular album. 35. Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montagu, Third Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, was born in 1926; in the fifties he was imprisoned for one year for the crime of homosexuality—a scandal which later became instrumental in the decriminalization of gay sex in Britain. 36. Arthur made a few errors here. The gig was at Imperial College, which at the time was part of London University, and was on a Saturday afternoon, November 4; also, the Rolling Stones had already started Rolling Stones Records back in 1970. 37. Actually, the New York Dolls had three additional shows scheduled: one that same evening at a London club called the Mile End Sundown; one the following evening, on November 5, in Liverpool (cancelled—see chapter 23); and one on November 9 in Manchester (also cancelled due to the events described in the following chapter). 38. Prior to signing the Dolls, Marty Thau had spent six years working with a large number of rock artists at Cameo-Parkway, Buddah, and Paramount Records, and at Inherit Productions. 39. The entirety of I, Doll was written prior to Arthur being invited to be a part of the New York Dolls reunion. 40. David Johansen has spoken about this—he told Lenny Kaye recently, “Arthur was kind of the heart and soul [of the Dolls]. He was neutral, like Switzerland or something. He wouldn’t get involved in the band discussions, y’know: Are we going to do the song with this intro, or that. He would never comment until it was time for the deciding vote. But he would do it with a lot of feeling. The things he would say would be kind of brief. He’d say something that sounded insane, and then walking home, like two hours later, you would realize what he said. ’Cause he was definitely tuned into the cosmos like nobody else in the band. He was getting stuff from beyond the beyond, like before this universe happened, like one of the Old Ones.”

editor’s notes 231

index Beverly, Anne, 213 Birmingham (England), 153 Blondie Sisters, 200 Blue Cheer, 136 Blues Magoos, 29 Blues Project, the, and Al Kooper, 29 Boston (rock band), 160 Bowie, Angela, 197, 209 Bowie, David, 64, 94–98, 141, 197, 209, 230n20 Bowser, Buddy, 11 Bronstein, Stan, 28

A Abelman, Kari, 207, 208 Actress (recording), 5 Aerosmith, 208–9 Aladdin Sane (recording), 197 Alexander, Nicky, 218 Alhambra Club, 153 Alice Cooper group, 33 Arche, Robert, 224 Ashton, John, 216

b

C

Baker, Roy Thomas, 216 Bananarama, 215 Banks, Dennis, 199 Barr, Roseanne, 7 Beal, Dana, 27, 31 Beatles, 139, 142, 199

Cafasso, Janis, 8, 11, 54–55, 71, 108 Canal Center Rest (tavern): as New York Dolls’ hang-out, 94–95

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Capability Brown, 183 Capote, Truman, 93 Cavern Club (Liverpool), 139, 142 Central Park, 1 Cheetah Chrome, 207 Childers, Leee Black, 108 Church of the Latter-Day Saints. See Mormon Church Clash, 216 Cohen, Phil, 196 Colossus of New York (film), 59 Continental Gents, 64 Cook, Paul, 216 Corpse Grinders, 212 Costume Factory, 23, 41, 45–51 Coup D’Etat, 207 Coventry (club), 160 “Cracked Actor” (song), 98 Cream, 9 Cripps, Robert, 193 Curtis, Jackie, 43, 63, 174

Des Barres, Pamela, 196, 200 Deviants, 131 Devotions, 10 Dion and the Belmonts, 29 Dior, Steve, 212 doo-wop generation, 29 Dream On (Foxe), 209 Duchess of Kent, 161

D

F

Damned, 215 Darling, Candy, 43, 62 The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (film), 219 Derringer, Rick, 11 Des Barres, Michael, 200

index 234

E Edgar Winter Group, 44–45, 229n10 Electric Circus, 78 Elephant’s Memory, 28 Emerson, Eric, 43–44 The End of August at the Hotel Ozone (film), 22 “Endless Party” (song), 58, 192 Escape Studios, 113, 115–18, 121–22

Fairweather-Low, Andy, 178 Farren, Mick, 131 Fast Eddie and the Japs, 200 Flamin’ Groovies, 142 4D Man (film), 50 Fourteenth Street, 71 Foxe, Cyrinda, 60, 197, 208–10

“Frankenstein” (Edgar Winter Group), 45, 229n10 “Frankenstein—Orig.” (New York Dolls), 45, 164, 229n10 Frehley, Ace, 202 “Frozen Alive Again” (song), 219

G gay liberation movement, 171 “Glad to See You Go” (song), 230n16 goth, 45 Granny Takes a Trip (shop), 2, 10, 29, 109 Gripp, Connie, 74, 210–11, 213, 230n16 Group Image, 195, 199–200, 203 GTO’s (Girls Together Outrageously), 210 Guns N’ Roses, 219 Guy Fawkes Day, 151

H Harry Smiths, 70 “Help the Homeless” (song), 115 Hendrix, Jimi, 12, 183 Hoffman, Abbie, 195 Holder, Noddy, 112 Hotel Diplomat, 33, 36, 200

Hotel Endicott, 18 Hotel Ozone, 13, 21–25, 41 “Hot Hot Hot” (song), 219 Houston Street, 53 Hull (England), 135, 137 Hullabaloos, 135, 230n26 “Human Being” (song), 28 Hunter, Ian, 215

I Idols, 212 I’m with the Band (Des Barres), 196 Innovation Umbrella, 196

J Jagger, Bianca, 176–77 Jagger, Mick, 176, 182–83 “Jean Genie” (song), 209 Jeff Beck Group, 4 Jimi Hendrix Experience, 9 Johansen, David, viii, 59, 70, 100, 121–23, 132, 138, 153, 156, 169, 172, 192, 196–98, 200, 204, 206, 210, 218, 220, 224, 226; as actor, 208, 219; and David Bowie, 96; and contract deal, 69, 189; ego of, 168, 189–90, 209; on Arthur

index 235

Kane, 231n40; at Mr. D’s gig, 102–4; Billy Murcia, feuding between, 167–68, 185, 189; nickname of, 60; at Wembley, 164–65. See also Buster Poindexter; New York Dolls Jones, Barry, 212 Jones, Brian, 147, 199 Jones, Mick, 216 Jones, Steve, 216 Jordan, Cyril, 142 Jordan, Peter, 117, 175, 188, 190–92, 200

K Kane, Arthur, 23, 31, 112, 116, 203, 210, 231n40; abusive childhood of, 195; agoraphobia of, 164; background of, 3; bitterness of, 219; clothing of, 79; as cross-dresser, 197; death of, vi, 226, 227; and “death contract,” 67, 208; drinking of, 118, 167–68, 171–72, 201–2, 204, 213, 218, 220–21, 227; drug use of, 90, 213–14, 227; epileptic seizure, use of, as self-preservation technique, 77–78; fashion, interest in, 196; financial struggles of, 218; as fish out of water, 178;

index 236

at Guy Fawkes party, 175–79; head injuries of, 193, 222; illness of, 224–25; instant love philosophy of, 177–78; as introverted, 204; David Johansen, resentment toward, 218; look of, 30, 34; at Lord Montagu’s party, 167–72; marriage of, 206; and Mormons, 222–23, 225–26; as movie extra, 218–19, 223; New York Dolls, break-up of, 198, 201, 209, 219, 223; New York Dolls, forming of, 196; New York Dolls, reunion of, 224, 227–28; nickname of, 60; as odd man out, 198; and Orange bass head, 117–18; at Portobello Road market, 182; role of, 6; and Sex Pistols incident, 215– 16; spiritual awakening of, 217, 227; and Tarzan outfit, 182, 184; telephone company job of, 16–17; and thrash metal, 212; and UFOs, 217; violence of, 203, 205, 220–22; and Vox Phantom Teardrop guitar, 147–48; vulnerability of, 204. See also New York Dolls Kane, Arthur, Sr., 195, 207 Kane, Erna, 206–7 Kane, Barbara (Barbara Garrison): background of, 194–95,

199; financial struggles of, 218; marriage of, 206; as movie extra, 218–19; and Sex Pistols incident, 215–16; spirituality of, 199; and UFOs, 217 Killer Kane, 198, 201, 203 King, B. B., 68 King Creole (film), 35 Kinks, 9, 60, 229n3 KISS, 30, 45, 202 Kooper, Al, and the Blues Project, 29 Kotani, Anna, 214 Krebs, David, 100

L Lambert, Kit, 169, 170, 173, 176, 215 Lang, Cindy, 75 Late Night with Conan O’Brien (television show), 153 Lawless, Blackie, 198, 201–3, 212, 219 Leary, Timothy, 194 Leber and Krebs, 68, 208 Leber, Krebs, and Thau, 67, 68 Leber, Steve, 27, 89, 100, 209 Leeds (England), 146, 148 Leeds College, 145 Left Banke, 29 Let It Rock (shop), 149–50

Lewis, Jerry Lee, 184 Liberace, 29, 169–71 Lindsay, John, 1 Linus the Magician, 199 Live at the Marquee Club (television program), 127 Liverpool (England), 139, 142 London (England), 123–24, 127–28, 129, 215; and Kensington Market, 149; and Lord Montagu’s party, 167 Long Island (New York), 99–100 “Lookin’ for a Kiss” (song), 94 Love Generation, 113 The Loves of Marty Thau (film), 208

M Machine, Tony (Tony Krasinski), 100, 103 Magic Tramps, 43 Marquee Club (club), 127 Max’s Kansas City (club), viii, 88, 115, 160; as Dolls’ hangout, 43, 61–65, 72 McLaren, Malcolm, 150, 157, 197–98 Mead, Taylor, 93 Means, Russell, 199 Melody Maker (magazine), 163 Meltdown Festival, viii, 224

index 237

“Mental Moron” (song), 212 Mercer Arts Center, 86–87, 160; New York Dolls at, 56–58, 85, 93, 230n24, 230n27 Mineo, Sal, 170 Moby Grape, 9 Monyagui, David, 199 Montagu, Lord, 167, 231n35 Moon, Keith, 175, 179 Mormon Church, 222–23 Morrissey (Steven Morrissey), viii, 209, 224 Mötley Crüe, 212, 219 “Mr. Cool” (song), 201 Mr. D’s (club): New York Dolls at, 100–5 Murcia, Billy (Billy Doll), viii, 5, 11, 15, 22, 24, 41–42, 62, 86–87, 96, 107, 112, 116, 121–23, 137–38, 141, 155, 170, 174, 190, 196, 200, 209; clothing, making of, 23, 34; death of, 191–92, 197; David Johansen, feuding between, 167–68, 185, 189; at Guy Fawkes party, 175–76; and Max’s Kansas City, 65; at Mr. D’s gig, 101–4. See also New York Dolls Murcia, Heidi, 34, 109

index 238

N The Naked Prey (film), 47 new wave, 45 New York Doll: The Movie (documentary), viii, 218, 227 New York Doll Museum: New York Dolls photo shoot at, 78–82 New York Dolls, vii, 57, 195, 204, 212; arrest of, rumors of, 56; in Birmingham (England), 153–56; booze, consumption of, 17–18; break-up of, 198; camaraderie of, chinks in, 118, 138, 178; clothing of, 83, 84; clothing of, as custom made, 36, 39, 79, 82; clothing, as legitimate art form, belief in, 63; clothing of, sources of, 82; comeback of, viii; democratic solidarity of, 5; as different, 29, 31; drinking of, as remedy, 187; drug use of, 78–79, 187; “eat and run” survival technique of, 35; England, invitation to, 108; English tour of, 112, 115; at Escape Studios, 113, 115–18, 121–22; fans of, 41–42, 73, 86, 93; fans, relationship toward, 58; first show of, 27,

29; formation of, 5, 196; gay bathhouse gig, 89–92; as gender-bending, 31; at Guy Fawkes party, 173, 175; as homeless, 115; Hotel Diplomat show, 37–38; in Hull (England), 135–37; influences of, 29; influences on, 14–15; and King Creole routine, 35, 63; in Leeds (England), 145–48; in Let It Rock, 149–51; in Liverpool (England), 139–42; live shows of, 59; in London (England), 123–24, 127–29; and loft parties, 54; in Long Island (New York), 99–100; look of, 25, 29–30, 57, 63–64, 77, 174; at Lord Montagu’s party, 167–72; Lurex fabric, use of, as disastrous, 34–40; management deal of, 27, 33, 67–69, 89; managers of, 35–36; men’s platform boots, wearing of, 34, 109; at Mercer Arts Center, 56–58, 85, 93, 160, 230n24, 230n27; Billy Murcia, death of, 191–92; Mr. D’s, gig at, 100–5; music heroes, as inspired by, 175; and Newcastle Brown incident, 154–56; original line-up of, 15; outcasts, attraction to,

171; as outrageous, 5, 28, 77; as package deal, 169; philosophy of, 63, 65, 137, 190; professional advice, lack of, 187; punk rock, invention of, viii; rehearsal spaces of, 13–17, 24, 55; reunion of, 224–25, 227–28; rivalry among, 138; and Rolling Stones audition, 182–85; as rule breakers, 176; shopping adventures of, 109– 12, 149, 182; sound of, 5–6, 175–76, 190; at Speakeasy, 127–32; stage image of, 33, 35; and stage names, 59–60; stereotypes, destroying of, 112; success, dealing with, 107; success of, as unprepared for, 168; and teamwork, 107, 190; touring, attitude toward, 187; at Wembley, 159–65; and women, 138. See also individual members The New York Dolls: Too Much Too Soon (Antonia), 153 New York Mods, 2, 3, 11 Nixon, Richard, 29 Nobody’s Cafe (club), 9–10, 12, 24; and New York Mods, 11 Nolan, Jerry, 11–12, 82, 198, 203, 212–13. See also New York Dolls

index 239

O

R

The Old Grey Whistle Test (television program), 148 The Other Side of the Wind (film), 199

Ramone, Dee Dee, 210, 211, 230n16 Ramones, 210, 230n16 Randy and the Rainbows, 29 rap, 45 Rave (magazine), 178 Reed, Lou, viii, 93, 141, 230n29 rent parties, 54 Rev, Martin, 85, 87 Richards, Keith, 182–83 The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (recording), 64 Rivets, Rick (George Fedorcik), viii, 1, 3–5, 13, 15, 17–18, 95, 175, 178, 196, 212. See also New York Dolls Roberts, Bob, 201, 218 Rod Stewart and the Faces, 160, 162 Rolling Stones, 127, 173, 175, 182, 185, 189, 231n36 Rolling Thunder, 199 Ruby and the Rednecks, 36 Rundgren, Todd, 11 Ruskin, Mickey, 65, 115 Rusty Beanie’s Bicycle Shop, 14–17, 19

P “Personality Crisis” (song), 38, 73, 153, 155, 163, 184 Pink Fairies, 160, 162 Poindexter, Buster, 208, 219. See also David Johansen Poison, 219 Polk, Eileen, 211, 213 Port of Call East (bar), 41 Portobello Road market, 181 Powell, Gary, 224 Pox, 200 Presley, Elvis, 207 “Private World” (song), 203–4 Psychedelic Furs, 215–16 punk rock, viii, 7, 45, 212

Q Queen Elizabeth (band), 36

index 240

S

T

Sex Pistols, 216 shock rock, 212 Sid Sings (recording), 212 Silverhead, 200 Simmons, Gene, 202 Sixx, Nikki: and Gibson guitar, 188 Slade, 112 Smith, Harry, 70 SoHo, 53 spandex, 39, 229n9 Speakeasy (club): New York Dolls at, 127–32 Spungen, Nancy, 210, 213 Stanley, Paul, 202 St. Cyr, Lili, 140 Stephens, Carol, 202 Stewart, Rod, 4 Stratton-Smith, Tony, 128 Strummer, Joe, 216 Suicide, 86–88 Sutain, Valerie, 118 Sylvain, Sylvain (Sylvain Mizrahi), viii, 11, 24, 42, 55, 62, 70, 112, 115–16, 118, 138, 168, 170, 192, 196, 198, 200, 224, 226; clothing, making of, 23–34; nickname of, 60. See also New York Dolls

Teddy Boys, 150 Teenage Lust, 28 “terror trains,” 13, 17; violence on, 14 Thau, Marty, 27, 100, 187, 208, 229n8, 231n38 They Only Come Out at Night (recording), 44 Thunders, Johnny (John Genzale), viii, 5, 8, 11, 15, 22, 24, 57, 62, 67, 71, 108–9, 112, 115–16, 132, 137, 168, 170, 192, 196, 198, 206; arrest of, rumors of, 56; and clothing, 74, 75; guitar sound of, 6–7; influence of, 7; loft of, 53–54; in Let It Rock, 149–50; nickname of, 60; and spider monkey, 72; and Vox Phantom Teardrop guitar, 148; at Wembley, 162–63 thrash metal, 212 “Time” (song), 197 Tippett, Rust, 226 Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (television show), 153 Too Much Too Soon (recording), 28, 193 Townshend, Pete, 215–16

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Transformer (recording), 141, 230n29 Tubes, 199 Tyler, Steven, 209

U Ultra Violet, 43 Uncle Bucks, 28 Urband, Bobby, 207

V Vagrants, 29 Vanian, Dave, 215 Vega, Alan, 85, 87 Vicious, Sid, 210, 212–13 Viva Superstar, 43, 62

What a Bunch of Sweeties (recording), 231n34 Whitely, Greg, 225, 226 Who, 173, 175, 183 Wilde, Cornel, 47 Winter, Edgar, 11 Winter, Johnny, 11 Woodlawn, Holly, 43 Wylder, Stu, 212

Y Yaffi, Sam, 224 Yardbirds, 4, 127 Young Rascals, 29

Z Zappa, Frank, 74

W Warhol, Andy, viii, 43, 61–62, 93 Warner/Chapell Music, 69 Warrant, 219 W.A.S.P., 198, 201, 212, 219 “Watch That Man” (song), 98 Wembley Empire Pool Stadium, 132, 159–62, 230n33 West, Leslie, 29 Westwood, Vivienne, 150

index 242