The Fat Angel Sings

In 1972, when rock & roll was all but dead in Manhattan, five cross-dressing glam punks from the boroughs convened and began hammering out sub-Chuck Berry rock for the downtown in-crowd. It took another year before a record company dared to sign them, thus foisting The New York Dolls on an essentially uninterested world. Taking their cue from the band’s guitarist/Keef-alike Johnny Thunders, hardcore Dolls fans pooh-poohed Todd Rundgren’s production as wimpy: twenty-five years after its release, songs like “Personality Crisis” and “Looking for a Kiss” sound more trashily invigorating than ever.

Declared both the Best New Band and Worst Band in Creem magazine’s year-end poll, the New York Dolls were nothing if not polarizing when their self-titled first album hit the streets. Back then they were occasionally crossdressing Lower Manhattan gutter punks that – despite packing such NYC venues their debut, released July 27, 1973.

Today, they are hailed as innovators and visionaries. What a difference time can sometimes make. The album was recorded in eight days at New York City’s Record Plant and mixed in half a day. During the process there was no love lost between the band and the album’s producer Todd Rundgren, who disdained the quintet as amateurish. Their aura of danger, recklessness, flamboyance and decadence was borne out by a trail of death: original drummer Billy Murcia died in 1972 from an overdose; guitarist Johnny Thunders (a longtime heroin addict) in 1991 from indeterminate causes that could have been ill health, drugs and/or foul play; drummer Jerry Nolan the next year from chronic health problems.

They had emerged from a residency in New York’s Mercer Arts Center as both pariahs and icons.

Now considered proto-punks, the Dolls were a bridge from glam and early hard rock to punk (the band’s late-in-career manager was Malcolm McLaren, who went on manage the Sex Pistols). They were an inspiration for Kiss and such later metals bands as Motley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses and Hanoi Rocks. Today such album tracks as “Personality Crisis,” “Trash,” “Looking for a Kiss” and “Jet Boy” are regarded by some as rock classics, and the LP is seen as one of rock music’s great debut records.

In 2004 original members Johansen, Syl Sylvain and Arthur Kane reunited to play London’s Meltdown festival, invited by that year’s curator, Morrisey. Kane died later that year from leukemia. Johansen and Sylvain released a new Dolls album in 2006, and another in 2009 that was produced by – of all people – Rundgren. Sylvain died on January 13th, 2021.

The New York Dolls is a powerhouse of Stones swagger, bluesy attitude, garage punk sloppiness and 60s girl group pastiche. From the opening scream of “Personality Crisis” via the social commentary of “Vietnamese baby” and chronicling of NY’s demi-monde in “Looking For A Kiss”, “Subway Train” or “Bad Girl” it appealed equally to fans of the MC5, glam or heavy metal. No one at this time had combined all this into a single band. The riffs of Johnny Thunders and the bawling of David Johansen gave birth to big hair metal as well as punk and still sounds like the end of civilisation. Their follow-up was so rightly named, “Too Much Too Soon”