The next step took the form of the New York Dolls (pictured above) in 1972. By adopting an androgynous stage presence with dresses and makeup, and relying on a more raunchy post-Rolling Stones crunch, the Dolls took Richman's innocent exuberance and deflowered it. The Dolls started playing regularly at the Diplomat Hotel and the Mercer Arts Center in the middle of SoHo, which featured a small theater, a cabaret room, a bar and a conceptual art room called the Kitchen. No one knew what to do with the Oscar Wilde Room, so the Dolls wound up performing there. Their audience started with the cast of misfits, drag queens, speed freaks and refugees from the tail end of the sixties Warhol scene who inhabited the Oscar Wilde Room, and Max's Kansas City (pictured below), where they would perform with the Magic Tramps, fronted by former Warhol superstar Eric Emerson, performance artist Alan Suicide and drag queen Wayne County. It became so fashionable to see the Dolls, that people went to be seen seeing the Dolls. Among the celebrities were David Bowie and Lou Reed, watching and learning. The band were mostly inept musicians, yet their act transcended camp. Their earnestness and enthusiasm was inclusive, encouraging their audience to grow with them as they developed. Johansen had the showbiz shtick down pat with his Jagger-like leers. Johnny Thunders' guitar playing was harmonically unstable and unpredictable, like John Cale's viola in the Velvet Underground, resulting in a sound like the screech of the New York subway. "People who saw the Dolls said, 'Hell, anybody can do this.'" said Johansen. "I think what the Dolls did as far as being an influence on punk was that we showed that anybody could do it." While still negotiating a contract with Mercury Records, the band was sent to England to open for Rod Stewart. Having never played before more than 350 people, an audience of 13,000 was quite a shock. The show was a success and they became the toast of the town. A bidding war immediately started. The elation was cut short when drummer Billy Murcia died at a party when he was abandoned in a tub while choking from a mix of alcohol and Quaaludes. The band nearly broke up, but decided to continue, adding Jerry Nolan. Many of the offers for record deals were withdrawn by companies fearful of the band's image as drug addicts. They eventually signed with Mercury. Typically, Murcia's death resulted in the publicity that made the Dolls a smash. "We were living this movie: everybody wants to see it, and we were giving it to them" said Sylvain Sylvain. They quickly recorded an album produced, and slightly watered-down, by Todd Rundgren. Nevertheless, they managed to pound out a few apocalyptic songs of rebellious youthfulness beaten into a realization of a bleak future, like "Looking For A Kiss," "Lonely Planet Boy," and "Pills," which told stories about kids whose only aspiration left is avoiding boredom, yet they don't particularly mind the fact. In August 1973, with several other London King's Road shops, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's clothing store, Let It Rock, was invited to exhibit designs at the National Boutique show at New York's MacAlpin Hotel. They didn't sell any clothes, but McLaren did meet the New York Doll's Sylvain Sylvain. The Dolls had actually been to the Let It Rock shop on their first visit to London, but McLaren wasn't around. Under the Dolls' aegis, the Let It Rock crew were moved into the Chelsea Hotel where they rubbed elbows with celebrities like Alice cooper, Andy Warhol and a young poet named Patti Smith. McLaren had found his celebrity clique, and they made him feel at home. 
When the Dolls returned to Europe in November 1973, McLaren followed them to every date. Many of the Doll's antics would foreshadow the Sex Pistols' publicity stunts, such as taunting the audience of the Old Grey Whistle Test, David Johansen making Nazi jokes, and Johnny Thunders walking off an airplane in front of the entire European press and -- bl-a-a-a-a-g-g-h-h! -- throwing up. McLaren had also encountered Iggy Pop that year, when David Bowie was producing Raw Power in England. "I found Iggy incredibly vain, because he was an incredibly handsome character," said McLaren. "But I wasn't taken with Iggy in the same way as I was with the Dolls. I think one of the reasons was because Iggy was less about fashion. I think it's a stupid thing to say, but it's the truth; I didn't see the fashion about Iggy." McLaren's immediate reaction to his experiences with the Dolls was to give his shop a makeover, selling black fetish wear, abandoning and enraging their once loyal Teddy Boy clientele. He was on the verge of marrying his experience with subcultures, art and politics. In April 1974, McLaren gave his first extended interview for Nick Kent of the New Musical Express. The piece was called "The Politics of Flash." In a May 1974 letter to Roberta Bayley, he wrote, "I've written lyrics for a couple of songs, one called 'Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die.' I have the idea of the singer looking like Hitler, those gestures, arm shapes, etc., and talking about his mum in incestuous phrases." It's largely believed that McLaren (pictured below) prefabricated the Sex Pistols from scratch, nabbing the shoplifting Steve Jones in his shop and sensing a connection like a Fagin to Jones' Artful Dodger. However, Jones was already a rocker who, from 1972-73, methodically stole clothes and equipment from the houses and shows of celebrities like Roxy Music, Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart. The greatest coup came in July 1973, when they made off the entire PA and very expensive Neumann microphones that were to be used for David Bowie's big concert at the Hammersmith Odeon. Ironically, the victims of their thefts were also their biggest influences. The group that formed in 1973 around the stolen equipment were called the Strand, after the Roxy Music song. Roxy Music's greatest innovation was the use of Brian Eno as an untutored synthesizer player. Like the New York Dolls, they made a point to teenagers alienated by inflated prog bands of the era, that style, not musicianship, was important. 
By spring 1974, the band had not yet found its focus. Jones had been hanging around McLaren's shop, and eventually asked him if he knew of a rehearsal space. After a couple months of Jones' persistence, he paid for a room in the Covent Garden Community Centre. A few days later he stopped by a rehearsal, and witnessed disastrous attempts to play "Can't Get Enough of Your Love" and "Wild Thing." But he remained interested. "I had some sympathy with these guys, because they seemed a bit roguish and a bit mad." The one musician who already knew how to play, McLaren later found in Glen Matlock, a middle-class art student who was obsessed with Mod pop. "I never really got on with Glen," said Steve Jones, "I found him a bit poncified, he weren't one of the lads." Still bedazzled with the allure of the New York Dolls, McLaren left for New York again in November 1974. He asked his friend Bernard Rhodes, whom he began working with to print slogans on T-shirts, to look after Steve Jones, meaning, "He's got this sort of group, maybe we can do something," said Rhodes. Before he left, they collaborated on a new T-shirt that was their first manifesto. It read, "You're gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you've been lying on!" with a list of "hates" on the left, including "Television (Not the group)/Mick Jagger/The Playboy Club/Fellini" and other dead culture, pompous rockers and repressive institutions. On the right were the "loves," including "Jamaican Rude Boys/Archieshepp/Iggy Pop/Walt Whitman" and mysteriously, "Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS. By that point, the Dolls were already in their death throes. Strung out on drugs and alcohol, the band was unsure of what direction to take. While McLaren's relationship with the group was never formalized, he enthusiastically took the initiative and checked Arthur Kane into detox, booked some shows, and repackaged the band's look into red patent-leathered Communists, taking language from Chinese revolutionary posters, like "WHAT ARE THE POLITICS OF BOREDOM? BETTER RED THAN DEAD!" It's hard to say how the British weekly music press would have reacted. But in New York, the scene was tiny, and centered around only one magazine, Rock Scene, headed by Lisa Robinson. After a concert on February 1975, Lisa thought Malcolm was mad. When she confronted Johansen, he said it wasn't anything serious, which disappointed McLaren. He was much happier with Johnny Thunders' response to Lenny Kaye, "What's it to ya?" That was the attitude he was looking for. (Click on More Punk To Continue) |
