NEW YORK DOLLS: Make Up to Break Up

Over-huge original draft of MOJO piece, June 2006

Photo by me

NOVEMBER 26, 1973. In the Rainbow Room restaurant of London's Biba fashion store, five exotically coiffured young musicians in six-inch platform heels totter onto a small stage. Although adorned in a riot of silk scarves, pantyhose, snakeskin and rubber, they exude the sussed style of '50s street hoodlums.

After a brief pause to survey the seated audience of London scenesters, they blast into some of the rawest rock'n'roll the capital has heard since the Rolling Stones at the Marquee some 10 years earlier. Top-hatted lead vocalist David Johansen struts and preens like a Cro-Magnon Jagger while rhythm guitarist Sylvain Sylvain — cowboy holster, Western shirt, chaps and White Falcon guitar — hops and points like a demented cheerleader. As bass mountain Arthur Kane — clad from head to toe in yellow lurex — stands adrift like some camp, sleepy lion, panstick-and-satin hoodlum Jerry Nolan hits the drums like he's beating skulls, while the lead guitarist, Johnny Thunders (black bikini-top, knee-garter and exploding Keef coiff), grinds out discordant trash riffs.

It should have been the perfect UK launch-pad for the New York Dolls but the crowd remain subdued. Or maybe they were just stunned. But for this 19-year-old, it was a rock'n'roll epiphany. At a time when the Stones had lost their Exile-era edge, Bowie had killed off Ziggy and Mott The Hoople were soon to crumble, here were a bunch of painted NY street-kids carrying on the raw three-chord mantle of Iggy & the Stooges. Suddenly, being in a group didn't seem so far-fetched. It felt like a music revolution.

MARCH 9, 2006, Selfridges, Oxford Street. Another day, another department store. The reformed New York Dolls are playing the launch party for "Future Punk At Selfridges", an awkwardly titled festival in the London store's basement, presenting punk groups old and new amid new-wave workshops and punk-tat stalls. The surreal incongruity of the set-up is offset by Don Letts spinning a reggae warm-up set similar to his 1977 Roxy sets. "It's like a youth club for old people," laughs Glen Matlock, the only ex-Pistol present.

After a rabble-rousing introduction from Letts, the new Dolls blast into 'Lookin' For A Kiss' like it's 1973 all over again. David Johansen is still bushy of mane and strong of voice, Sylvain Sylvain still leaps about, carrying on the name and spirit of the Dolls, with more attitude and energy than men half their age. Two days later, Malcolm McLaren will explain to a Selfridges audience how he invented punk rock...

Mclaren's whole world tilted one day in late 1972 when the New York Dolls piled into his Let It Rock boutique on the King's Road. "It was the first time I've fallen in love with a group," he later said.

Changing his shop's name to Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, the 26-year-old boutique owner and clothes designer, revamped his teddy boy fashion stock to incorporate the Dolls' swastika arm-bands, rubber gear, garter-belts and DIY ethic. The subsequent rise of the Pistols would echo the Dolls career to an uncanny degree — press and TV outrage, incendiary clothing and the primal roots idealism of a band accused of incompetency and vilified for their appearance.

"The 'No Future' concept that spawned punk started with the Dolls," says former manager Marty Thau. "They paved the way and, in the process, made all the mistakes."

"We were so far ahead of our time we didn't even realise it," says Sylvain Sylvain today. "We never worked out a masterplan to dress up as girls and shit. I mean, Johnny was homophobic! It all just happened. We were young and screaming our generation's next move. Everybody else took notes and took it to the bank, but we broke our legs because we were running so damn fast. We were actually inventing it all, not even knowing what the hell we were doing."

The Dolls were spawned in early '70s Manhattan, a pressure-cooker city saying goodbye to the Summer of Love and hello to overspending, poverty and drug crime, streets awash with hustlers, junkies and Vietnam vets. It was a period of extremes and opposites — the survival tactics of the city's gang culture, juxtaposed with the hedonism and preening of the 'elite'. Glamour and excess were perpetuated by Andy Warhol's crew, who still ruled at The Factory, on Union Square West, and their nightly knees-ups at Max's Kansas City.

*

THE DOLLS WERE products of the immigrant lineage that settled in New York's outer boroughs. Johnny Genzale (later Thunders)'s family came from Naples and Sicily, settling in East Elmhurst, Queens. The family of Sylvain Mizrahi — later Sylvain Sylvain — escaped from Cairo, Egypt, ending up in Jamaica, Queens. Original drummer Billy Murcia's family had fled the violent streets of Bogota, Colombia, also landing in Queens. Arthur Harold Kane was of Irish descent, like many of his Bronx neighbours, while David Johansen was born of a Norwegian father and Irish mother in Staten Island.

Genzale was brought up by his mother Josephine and sister Mariann, whose record collection included such key Dolls influences as Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Dion, the Ronettes and the Shangri-Las. A Keith Richards fixation would take him to such pivotal Stones' influences as Howlin' Wolf guitarist Hubert Sumlin and Bo Diddley. He'd later cite Yardbirds-era Jimmy Page as his favourite ever guitarist. Over in Staten Island, David Johansen's dad would play him Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music. By his early teens, he was listening to Paul Butterfield, Gary US Bonds, Howard Tate and the ever-present Shangri-Las.

In 1970, after seeing Johnny Genzale around school and gigs, Sylvain and schoolfriend Murcia — who together had been running a thriving knitwear business, Truth & Soul, since 1968 — asked Genzale if he fancied a jam. The trio started working on a blues instrumental, with Johnny on bass. Sylvain had noticed a toy repair shop across the street from the Lexington Avenue boutique he worked at. "It was called the New York Dolls' Hospital. That's when I first thought of the name 'the New York Dolls'. I thought it was a fucking great name."

Sylvain, Billy and Johnny found inspiration in the UK's flamboyant glam rock scene, a welcome alternative to the lumbering behemoths of US rock. "Thirty thousand people in the house and 25-minute solos?" groans Sylvain. "Who the fuck cares? It was boring as hell. They lost the idea of what the song means, the power of the song. Rock became establishment, business, no fun. It wasn't sexy. It was all packaged and repackaged and shoved down your fucking throat. We didn't know it at the time but we were really breaking it down, a stripped-down version of what rock was."

These early rehearsals ceased in July '71 when Sylvain was called to London, where Truth & Soul (which was making Syl around $5,000 every three months) had started supplying Kensington Market. While he was away, the final pieces of the Dolls line-up fell into place. Later in July, when Johnny was standing outside a Bleecker Street pizza parlour, he saw two guys trying to steal a Harley-Davidson. It was Arthur Kane and his pal George Fedorcik — later known as Rick Rivets — on a drunken outing. They recognised Johnny from gigs at the Fillmore East and Greenwich Village bar Nobody's, and wondered if he'd play in the band they were putting together following the demise of previous outfit London Fogg. "He was so good-looking and beautiful," said Arthur, "I said, I don't care if he knows how to play an instrument or anything — I'll teach him." After a few rehearsals, Johnny asked Arthur if he'd swap guitar for bass and suggested his mate Billy Murcia as a drummer.

Around this time Johnny took the name Johnny Thunder (which he swiftly pluralised) from the hero of DC Comics' All Star Western. In September, Johnny, Arthur, Rick and Billy found a rehearsal space at Rusty's Cycle Shop on 81st Street — a bike shop by day and studio by night. The band practised from dusk 'til dawn, fuelled by vodka and Johnny's downers, as Johnny destroyed his voice, belting out new songs like 'It's Too Late'. When Johnny decided he wanted to concentrate on guitar, the group started looking for a singer.

Enter David Johansen. Veteran of local groups like the Vagabond Missionaries and Fast Eddie & the Electric Japs, Johansen had been working on sound and lighting for the ultra-bohemian Ridiculous Theatre Company, based in Manhattan. He heard the group were looking for a singer through a neighbour who'd previously rented one of the Murcias' rooms. One October evening, Billy and Arthur called at David's 6th Street apartment. One rehearsal was all it took. Johansen gave the group a charismatic focal point, plus he played a mean blues harmonica. Now all the group needed was a name. Someone remembered Sylvain's old idea about the dolls' hospital.

The New York Dolls made their live debut just before Christmas 1971 at the rundown Endicott welfare hotel, over the road from Rusty's, after the residents had heard them rehearsing. With Rick Rivets leaving to form the Brats, the Dolls started experimenting with the cheap glamour image, mixing Syl and Billy's spoils from London with Lower East Side thrift shop discoveries and their girlfriends' clothes; Arthur Kane arrived at the singular pre-Ziggy combination of ballet tutu, sparkly pantyhose and hot pants. Only Alice Cooper had pushed the wardrobe out this far.

In early '72, Johnny and girlfriend Janis Cafasso moved into a loft above a Chinese noodle shop at 119 Chrystie Street, one block east of New York's old low-life pleasure artery, the Bowery. Billy and Sylvain followed and, for the next few months, the loft became Dolls HQ. Surviving on shoplifting, handouts and food parcels from Johnny's mom, once a month the Dolls held a party to raise the rent, playing new songs they'd written to a crowd of friends, dealers and neighbourhood hookers.

The first proper New York Dolls gig was in May at the Palm Room, a basement club beneath the Hotel Diplomat on West 43rd Street. Andy Warhol associate Danny Fields, who signed the Stooges and MC5 to Elektra, was impressed enough to tell Warhol. With the Velvet Underground on its last legs, the Factory crowd, led by speed-freak transvestite Jackie Curtis, came out in strength when the band returned to the venue later the same month. "The Velvet Underground were the older generation," observes Sylvain. "We were the younger generation, club kids, and we were taking over their turf."

The Warhol connection provided the Dolls with their next two gigs at one of Brooklyn's gay bathhouses, where they experimented with the earliest form of Ecstasy, MDA. Rehearsals moved to the Talent-Recon complex, where their friend Jerry Nolan rehearsed with the group Shaker and Nolan's childhood friend Peter Criss was drumming with denim-clad country-rock group Wicked Lester — who, after witnessing a few Dolls rehearsals, would paint their faces, don pantomime costumes and change their name to Kiss.

Casting around for a suitable downtown Manhattan venue, the Dolls found the Mercer Arts Centre, a striking building adjoining the Broadway Central welfare hotel fitted out as a Clockwork Orange-style art-house complex with white plastic furniture and fuzzy blue fabric on the walls.

The Dolls, given a trial evening in a 15-by-60-foot video arts room, made sure the Chrystie Street party people showed up. They were rebooked on the spot for a 17-week residency in the 200-capacity Oscar Wilde Room — a firm fixture in the diaries of every dragged-up and drugged-out New York face. A scene was growing.

"It was the perfect excuse for every freak in New York to come down and play house — dress up in mum's clothes, hear raw music and take every drug known to man," recalls Jayne County, who would usually be playing one of the other rooms. "I remember [noted rock critic] Danny Goldberg saying in a sort of shell-shocked way, 'They are the most significant band to come out of New York since the Velvet Underground'. And they were."

Enthusiastic reviews in Rolling Stone and Warhol's Interview magazine, and ravings from new fans like Lester Bangs reinforced their reputation, focusing on such reference points as Gene Vincent's leather menace, the chemical-driven anarchy of the Stooges, the transsexual melodrama of Alice Cooper and the blues-wailing primitivism of the Stones. The band even made it onto Channel Two News, who called them "illiterate, hostile and deafeningly loud". David Johansen, already becoming master of the rock'n'roll soundbite, told Rolling Stone magazine, "We like to look 16 and bored shitless." Lou Reed and David Bowie, planning Ziggy Stardust's US invasion, started checking them out. "[Bowie] would turn up at Dolls shows," holds Jayne County, "like, you know, with a notebook!"

Having got this far without management, the Dolls were taken on by industry big boys Marty Thau, Steve Leber and Dave Krebs, but found they scared away record companies, who believed the band were transvestites, drug addicts and perverts. After Roy Hollingworth's enthusiastic Dolls feature in the Melody Maker of July 22, 1972 alerted the UK, a fresh strategy was devised by Thau: get a record deal in the UK, where the rapid growth of glitter rock meant the Dolls might stand a better chance of reaching audiences already receptive to raucous rock'n'roll played by burly men in make-up and spangles. However, the Dolls' first UK visit in October was a disaster. As support to Rod Stewart and the Faces at the 8,000 capacity Empire Pool, Wembley, they were heckled and pelted with assorted missiles; in Liverpool, Lou Reed refused to go on if the Dolls played their support slot; in Birmingham and London their set nonplussed fans who'd come to see The Groundhogs and Status Quo.

A chink of light came when Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp wanted to sign the Dolls to Track Records, home of Hendrix and the Who. On the evening of November 5, while Marty Thau sat clinching the deal, Billy Murcia took up a chance invite to a stranger's party. Quaffing champagne, his system already crashing thanks to a groupie gift package of Mandrax, Murcia passed out cold. Revellers tried to revive him in a bath of cold water while pouring black coffee down his throat. During this chaotic process, Billy suffocated. When he failed to come round, the partygoers fled the scene. Barely out of his teens, Billy Murcia was dead, the New York Dolls first casualty. Oddly, the inquest revealed that no drug traces were found during the post mortem. Official verdict: "Death by drowning".

*

A REPLACEMENT was close at hand. In early December, Jerry Nolan was given the job before he'd even lifted a stick, beating off competition from Marc Bell, later Marky Ramone. "We were like a gang who turned over to guitars instead of guns," Nolan was wont to say.

Actually, he was the only Doll who could lay claim to hardcore gang activity. As a teenager in his native Brooklyn, Jerry had run with legendary street gang the Phantom Lords. "I had to definitely prove myself," he told ZigZag founder Pete Frame in 1977. "Not once, [but] many times... That feeling of proving yourself never leaves... When I'd see gang fights it was very heavy. There was a lot of killings, a lot of people hurt bad... a lot of gunfire, a lot of stabbings. It was really heavy and very, very frightening... You learn to act your role and play your part, how to move and how to be in with the in-crowd. And you accept it. It's almost fun. Once I started getting into music I realised that was a better way to release my frustrations and exaggerate myself than pulling a knife or shooting someone. I got away from it."

"Everybody knew how to dress, but Jerry needed help to become a New York Doll," recalls Sylvain. "It was still taboo and I think he felt a little bit uncomfortable with the whole 'trisexual'... that's what we called our sexual adventures. We weren't bisexual. We were 'trisexual', which meant we would try any sex... to be humorous about it, y'know?"

Now regarded as a glamorous sideshow of sex, rock and death, the Dolls returned barely six weeks after Billy's passing with a record industry showcase at the Mercer. Deprived of their usual scene crowd, they played a sloppy howler, again repelling the labels. However, Paul Nelson, an A&R man at Mercury, finally convinced his bosses to sign the Dolls in March.

By 1973, the Dolls had inspired many of their audience to form groups. Along with the already established Suicide, Magic Tramps and Wayne County came a rash of Dolls-inspired outfits like the Harlots Of 42nd Street, Teenage Lust and Rick Rivets' Brats.

"The New York scene dates back to the Dolls," says Blondie's Chris Stein. Sylvain has no time for modesty. "We invented all [those] bands because before us there were no bands. There was only the Magic Tramps and Suicide. We were nothing like those guys anyway. And we also kicked off the clothes and the style. The New York Dolls kicked off so many things..."

In mid-April, the Dolls began work on their debut album. After being turned down by such dream candidates like Leiber & Stoller, Phil Spector, David Bowie and Shangri-Las producer Shadow Morton, the Dolls were forced to settle for prodigious glam-boffin Todd Rundgren. He wasn't a Dolls fan and didn't get the joke. Rundgren's brief was to spend a week getting an album's worth of hit singles, a plan hampered by the fact that the band had no experience of heads-down studio etiquette and arrived at New York's Record Plant studio intent on continuing their endless party lifestyle. Rundgren would often go home and leave his engineer Jack Douglas in charge. "Todd ruined the Dolls' first album," says Jayne County. "He thought by watering them down and taking away a lot of their raw trashiness, he could make them commercial. What a mistake!"

A triumph over adversity, the album was released in the US in July. Essentially a neutered rendering of their live set, the album survives through the sheer strength of the songs, the force of their playing and the power of that cover image.

The cover of New York Dolls almost poleaxed the band's career at the first fence. The five individuals are shown slumped, preening on a ratty couch. In fetching halter-top, the semi-comatose Arthur Kane cradles a Martini, cigarette dangling. Sylvain sports rosy doll cheeks and roller skates while Johansen gazes into a compact mirror, his hairy legs pushed into a spectacular pair of platform clogs. Thunders sticks to black with his hair teased up like a bearskin, while a heavily painted and bouffant Jerry Nolan strikes a demure pose that suggests he might be needing the gents. This wasn't untouchable superstars in mocked up Bowie glamour. This was degenerate art. To most red-blooded, God-fearing Americans, the Dolls looked downright deviant. DJs wouldn't play the album. They couldn't get past that cover.

"Basically, America was at the crossroads," says Sylvain, "and what really comes out of that is your Aerosmith and Kiss, which had nothing to do with the revolution."

*

AT THE END of August, 1973, the Dolls were booked for four nights at Los Angeles' Whisky A-Go-Go on Sunset Strip. They sold out within hours. For months, the Dolls had been fixtures in fan-orientated magazines like Rock Scene and groupie hotline Star, a topic of conversation among the predatory teenage girls who frequented Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco.

Sadly, two days before the Dolls were due to leave for the West Coast leg of their tour, Arthur Kane crashed out at the apartment he shared with his wild groupie girlfriend Connie Gripp. He awoke to find that Connie had tied his ankles together and was standing over him with a kitchen knife. In the ensuing struggle Arthur suffered a deep cut to his thumb, severing a tendon. He was forced to wear a cast that prevented him from playing bass for two months. Roadie Peter Jordan stood in while Arthur hit the hi-hat and jiggled about behind the amps. Jordan would later repeat his role when Arthur got too drunk to play.

The shows also saw Johnny's immersion in the L.A. scene, thanks to his relationship with 15-year-old super-groupie Sable Starr and her sister Coral. "That was the start of Johnny's heroin addiction," says Sylvain. "It was in L.A. that I saw him change. He was never the same again." As the dope kicked in, the innocence and camaraderie of the early days gave way to back-biting, junkie scams and zero creativity. Thunders and Nolan became needle buddies, Arthur sank further into his booze-stupor, leaving Johansen and Sylvain to keep them afloat.

Unfortunately, next stop for the Dolls was the Deep South Bible-belt, which they hit in the second week in September. The local press were mortified by these "drug-crazed faggots", concerned citizen group the Mothers Of Memphis were up in arms, and David Johansen was hauled off to jail in Memphis for female impersonation. This, along with the band's heroin use, was the beginning of the end of the Dolls career in the US.

New York Dolls was released in the UK on October 19 and the Dolls' forthcoming UK visit was trailed with another Roy Hollingworth Melody Maker feature in which he called them, "the last rock'n'roll band". Thunders sparked a wave of protest by sporting a swastika armband on his black leather jacket. There were hate letters in the music press. "At some of the Dolls shows it became hip to wear swastika armbands," recalls Jayne County. "Not because they were anti-Semitic — they didn't even know what that was — but because it was decadent and fashionable."

The Dolls arrived in the UK on September 20 to start their European tour and recorded their now legendary TV appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test. After the group had careered recklessly through 'Jet Boy', host "Whispering" Bob Harris, normally predisposed towards bland singer-songwriters, could barely contain his disgust. "Mock rock," he mumbled. Others were gripped: Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Steven Morrissey to name but three. If a single event kick-started the UK punk mentality, this was it.

After the UK, the Dolls hit Europe. On arrival in France, Thunders famously projectile-vomited over the press waiting at the airport. Another pre-punk outrage which, Johansen insists, wasn't staged. "It wasn't a publicity stunt. It was because they were sick!" But the incident set a tone of bad behaviour that would follow the band across Europe. French fans clashed with the band and police at Paris's Bataclan, while the German press were not impressed by Johansen's Fawlty-esque Nazi impression. The Dolls' honeymoon period was over. They entered 1974 knowing they needed to record a second album that would improve on the debut's Billboard chart position of 116. With only two new songs written, however, the track listing was padded out with cover versions and original compositions that didn't make the first LP. The band were also divided by the choice of producer: George "Shadow" Morton, '60s mastermind behind the Shangri-Las' teen soap-opera productions. "Shadow was like old school," says Sylvain. "To me he was a bad choice."

Apart from throwing in some gunshot sound-effects and employing female backing singers, Morton turned in a limp, over-separated mix. Too Much Too Soon should have consolidated the group's live prowess and made up for the first album's shortcomings, but the Dolls' power was lost. "I'm not saying that you should always stay the same but it was too much too soon," admits Sylvain. "Perfect — you couldn't have titled it better. It was the most incredible timing of the fucking century."

The failure of Too Much Too Soon poleaxed what chance the band had of winning over the masses, consigning the Dolls to the eternal bar and club circuit. The drug use escalated, particularly with Johnny, who became prone to crystal meth benders followed by heroin comedowns. Meanwhile, Arthur and, to an extent, David, were hitting the bottle. More than half the group would be incapacitated at any given time. Falling out among themselves, still the Dolls crashed on, volatile, explosive, primal. In early April, they honoured their home city with a "Manhattan World Tour" of the five boroughs. But a billed third visit to the UK in July to play the Rock Proms at Olympia was mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. A member of the tour entourage just happened to be a drugs dealer. "The guy used to knock on our door and sell us heroin," recalls Sylvain.

The Dolls' management team had just about given up, although ever-hopeful Marty Thau did manage to line up a third album — until the Dolls blew out the demo session. By October 1974, Mercury had washed its hands of the Dolls and Thau had decided to step down from the constant struggle.

*

SYLVAIN SYLVAIN laughs ruefully as he reflects on the Dolls' next move. At the end of 1974, Malcolm McLaren heard about the Dolls' plight and tried to come to their rescue, living out a personal rock'n'roll fantasy while hoping to publicise his boutique.

"Syl and I wrote a song called 'Red Patent Leather'," recalls Johansen. "It was a kinky song [about] a very finely-honed fetish. We knew Malcolm and asked him to make us some red patent leather trousers. He was never our manager, he was our haberdasher."

McLaren and Vivienne Westwood created an outfit of leather, rubber and vinyl for each individual Doll, personalised with zippers, pockets and chains, pre-dating the Sex/Seditionaries look that would come to be associated with UK punk.

"So we had this whole red thing going on," continues Johansen. "Then we said, Let's have a communist party! We made this flag and Malcolm had the pants. Then Malcolm said, 'Oh yeah, I turned the Dolls into communists'. Total bullshit! We just decided it would be really cheap to have a communist party. We thought it was funny. But, unbeknownst to us, America wasn't that far from McCarthyism, so it became this big scandal: 'The Dolls are Communists'. But we are not now or have ever been."

Maybe, by putting the Dolls under a Communist flag, McLaren realised he could potentially create a moral panic, a dry run for the outrage of 1976. He told journalists that the Dolls were now "a people's communication centre", and started issuing manifestos on behalf of the band. After a high-profile three-day comeback stint at New York's Little Hippodrome at the end of February 1975, McLaren rejected the band's idea of playing CBGB as too predictable, dismissing the place as "too shoddy", and sent them on a set-honing tour of Florida bars. A possible precursor to his decision to send the Sex Pistols around the redneck bars of Texas for their US debut tour, this McLaren move was a red rag. Not the most enlightened US states in the '70s, Florida was unlikely to embrace the Dolls.

"So we were supposed to come out of that?" reflects Sylvain 30 years on. "We're all trying to make this world a better place because it fucking sucks, but this is 1975 and Vietnam was still going on. America is still fighting the Communists. It wasn't the best move. Hanging up that fucking flag in Florida was the death of the Dolls."

Holed up in a trailer park outside Tampa in March 1975, Johnny and Jerry's smack supply dried up. They became hostile to David, Malcolm, the outfits, the whole tour. One night when drunk, David announced he could go it alone. Johnny and Jerry upped and flew back to New York. "We told David we were sick of the Dolls and that we were going back to New York to start again," Thunders told me in 1977. "[David] said, 'Anyone in this band can be replaced,' but when we left, that was the end of the Dolls. The only Dolls."

With Sylvain, Johansen went on to recruit musicians — including the future Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P. — to honour existing dates. Jerry tried in vain for a reconciliation. Instead, Johansen and Sylvain gathered New York musicians to play a highly lucrative Japanese tour in July as the New York Dolls. Buoyed by the tour's success, Johansen and Sylvain tried to start the band again but, stigmatised by the old group, got no record deal and they ended up playing weekend shows for cash. Arthur relocated to L.A. to form Killer Kane with Blackie Lawless. As the Dolls disintegrated, New York underwent another underground upheaval, at a former biker bar on the Bowery, Hilly Kristal's CBGB, presenting a new generation of groups who readily admitted to being influenced by the Dolls. Apart from Television, whose mid-'74 residency started the ball rolling, the Ramones and Blondie both took cues from the Dolls' kinetic trash reworking of girl-group pop.

Dismayed at the disintegration of the Dolls in April '75, McLaren promised Sylvain he could front the new band he was putting together in London. He'd already given the band's guitarist Steve Jones the first Dolls album to learn from, and now presented him with Sylvain's Les Paul, on "temporary" loan. In the absence of the promised plane ticket, Syl opted to stay with the "Dollettes", as Johansen would call them.

"Yeah, the Sex Pistols was supposed to be my band!" reflects Sylvain today. "We have the seven-page letter which Malcolm wrote to me in the summer of 1975 telling me that I should be coming to England and that this is my band and forget Johansen. He sent me these photos taken in a photo-booth before they looked like the Sex Pistols. There was this guy and it said, 'Yes and we're thinking of calling him Johnny Rotten.' All that's now hanging in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland."

The Dolls themselves have yet to be admitted. "We've been nominated," says Sylvain, "but we've never been inducted. It would have been nice after all this time when they told us we couldn't play or sing and we sucked."

The Dolls were a forgotten band for most of the '80s. Arthur Kane continued with various bands, still fighting the bottle before converting to the Mormon faith in 1991 while in hospital for a fractured skull sustained in the L.A. riots. He later described his spiritual epiphany as "an LSD trip from God".

Johnny Thunders briefly and unsuccessfully tried out as a plumber with his sister's husband, before forming the Heartbreakers with Jerry and Richard Hell. In late '76, they were asked by McLaren to join the ill-fated Anarchy tour, after Johansen refused to reform the Dolls. By late '77, they had imploded with a fearsome drug reputation, leaving Thunders and Nolan to pursue different musical career paths which would cross intermittently until Johnny's death in 1991.

Nolan missed Johnny terribly. Writing about it in the Village Voice in 1991, he said, "I have a rough time getting through the days... I don't like the idea of living without him... He never had a father. I was like a father, a brother to him. It's just not fair." Lapsing into depression, Jerry's health continued to fail. Admitted to hospital with bacterial meningitis and pneumonia, he suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma from which he never awoke. After several weeks on life support, Jerry Nolan died on January 14, 1992, and was buried in the same Queens cemetery as Johnny Thunders. He was 45 years old. After his death, the surviving Dolls were shocked to discover he had left a son whom he'd called Johnny.

By 2004, David Johansen hadn't spoken to Sylvain or Arthur for over a decade. The idea of a Dolls reunion seemed unlikely. However, charged with the task of curating that year's Meltdown festival at London's Royal Festival Hall, life-long Dolls fan Morrissey added the Dolls to his wish-list. Won over by the ex-Smith's gushing enthusiasm, and augmented by Brian Koonin on keyboards, guitarist Steve Conte and Libertines' drummer Gary Powell, the Dolls flew to the UK to play their first gig in nearly 30 years. Arthur Kane had taken leave from his job at the Mormon Family History Centre on Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles and was accompanied by film-maker Greg Whiteley, who was making a documentary on Arthur, New York Doll.

The RFH gig on June 16 was Arthur's night. Syl and David couldn't stop walking over and kissing him. Arthur seemed beatifically happy, standing with quiet dignity in a halo of light reflecting off his white shirt, while holding down his patent bass rumble. The crowd reaction was ecstatic and another show was added two days later. Morrissey had set in motion a full-on Dolls resurrection. Sadly, he'd also provided a farewell gig for Arthur Kane and, quite literally, answered the Killer's final wish. While the rest of the band stayed in England for a July festival appearance, Arthur returned home to Los Angeles, saying he felt tired. On July 15 he arranged a medical check-up and was diagnosed with leukaemia. Two hours later he was dead. He was 55.

"I have to thank Morrissey for bringing us back together and giving Arthur his best last moments on earth," says Syl today. "Arthur always wanted the New York Dolls to get back together. Johnny, David and me could always find some kind of gig somewhere, keep on calling ourselves musicians, but Arthur had it tough, poor fellah. When we got back together, he only just made it through the Meltdown thing. He was so sick. It was like mind over matter, like witnessing a miracle. It was love, man. It was like how I would have liked to have gone."

In his tribute on the DVD of the Meltdown gig, Morrissey Presents The New York Dolls, Johansen describes Arthur as "the glue that held all the disparate iconoclastic elements together [in] our band of miscreants... a mystical, almost translucent being."

"We were too young and too stoned to appreciate what we had," explains Kane in New York Doll, "living a life that most people don't get to live on Earth... because of our bad behaviour and the use of drugs, we lost the New York Dolls."

"Arthur was a great guy," says Johansen today. "He was one in a million. The only one."

The death of four members would stop most bands, but not the New York Dolls. Following the success of Meltdown, Johansen and Sylvain, with Conte and Koonin, plus Brian Delaney on drums and former Hanoi Rocks bassist Sami Yaffa replacing Kane, played intermittent gigs in the US, harbouring ambitions to make a third Dolls album. "We were just gonna do one show," says Johansen. "Then one show turned into two shows. Then Syl and I said, Let's keep doing this, as long as we're having fun. It happened very organically."

*

IT'S MID-MARCH, 2006 AND JOHANSEN AND SYLVAIN are holed up in the boardroom of their new bosses, Roadrunner Records, to listen to and discuss their long-awaited third album, cut in January in a New York studio with producer Jack Douglas, the engineer on their first studio album.

Johansen, in tight, faded denim, motorcycle boots and long, brown, fur-collared coat, speaks in a deep resonant growl, his conversation slow, deliberate, punctuated with a rich laugh. Sylvain — be-capped and all in black — is still the ball of enthusiasm that carried the Dolls through their most troubled times. They laugh a lot and, after a few minutes, are battling to get the next word in, still fighting over the tide of the new album. Today Johansen is hellbent on One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This. Sylvain is considering Brain Shampoo.

In 21st century "zero tolerance" New York, the grime, glitter and addictions of the New York Dolls seems further away than ever. The Mercer is a now car park, Max's houses a gym complex and the Lower East Side is home to upmarket residences which sell for upwards of a million. "Look at Times Square! It's like Disneyland!" snorts Johansen in disgust. With New York's dirty underbelly cleaned up, now his inspiration is taken from the twisted modern world, but with dutiful homage to the Beat poets, bluesmen and soulsters who have inspired him since school. Johansen wrote all the lyrics, while Sylvain, Yaffa and Conte came up with the music. Listening to the new album, both seem genuinely amazed and exhilarated by the results and feel they've finally cracked it. Jack Douglas's production brings out the dynamics on a bunch of pungent, brazen songs which live, breathe and banish nostalgia while adding a maturity and sensitivity. A raft of guest stars, including Michael Stipe, Iggy Pop and Bo Diddley, assist.

The biggest surprise, however, comes with two impassioned ballads. Syl's 'A Maimed Happiness' thrusts Johansen's upfront vocals against a piano-dominated backdrop which recalls the Bad Seeds at their most elegiac, while 'I Ain't Got Nothing' is Johansen in the gutter with saloon bar piano and mournful harmonica.

While Syl visits the bathroom, Johansen leans forward and whispers, "I love that guy. When we were in the Dolls we were like room-mates, inseparable, and on the road this guy's like my brother. We'd do everything together so it's just kind of picking up where we left off. People might think, 'Oh, they'll make some quick knockoff record so they can tour.' [We] actually sat down and made a real record."

"I'm so fucking happy," declares Sylvain later. "That's all we really want to do, make something that's important. I don't want to be forgotten or just remembered as that old band that didn't make it. We've made a rock'n'roll album, something that's timeless. Who makes that today?"

In their private world, the two surviving members of the New York Dolls have made the record of their dreams, something they believe Arthur Kane, Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan and Billy Murcia would've loved. "I've learned over the years that it wasn't fake," concludes Sylvain. "It was for real. We didn't go home and take it off and hang it up in the closet and become something else. That was us and still it's us."

On March 28, 2006, the New York Dolls played CBGBs for the first time. The place was packed, the group treated like returning heroes. Deborah Harry smiled. This time they didn't blow it.