“I had been reading about this band called The New York Dolls for months in Ellen Willis’ “Rock, etc.” column in my parents’ The New Yorker magazines. There were a few photos, too, as I recall. The band fascinated me, and they seemed to me—then a rabid Rolling Stones fan—to be an updated wild, young, New York City incarnation of that (then) great band.”
“I think I was the first person in Buffalo, NY to buy the LP; I bought it the day it became available. I got the record home, studied the cover—the drag queen thing didn’t impress me all that much, but I liked the art/photo and credits in the field of pink on the back. I’ll never forget putting the LP on the family turntable and the teenage joy I felt when “Personality Crisis” started, blasting me into a new dimension.
The brilliant guitar playing made me smile. (I was a guitarist). It was as if Keith Richard had been transported to planet Anarchy. Those swoops and zooms and achingly poignant bends. And like the guitarists I so admired—Albert King, Mike Bloomfield, Mick Taylor—Thunders had a sound; his sound. I thought: Chuck begat Keith who begat Johnny. It was the birth of a generation of wild, spontaneous primitivism, especially in the context of bloated 1970s self-indulgent guitar rock. Johnny blew it all away. (I didn’t again feel such joy until the Sex Pistols and The Clash and X-Ray Spex blew my mind a few years later.)
The New York Dolls were musical revolutionaries, giving us The Audacity of Dope, the urban life of fey dissipated dandies married to a glittery hard rock of the streets. Johansen/Thunders gave us an updated off-kilter Jagger/Richards with a snide, humorous, tongue-in-cheek nihilism added to the mix.
The lyrics were urbanely urban or maybe urbanly urbane. Magic. This record changed my life. I saw the band perform it live a few months later, got backstage just as the band was leaving the dressing room—Sylvain Sylvain, dressed as some sort Brechtian cowboy clown, had a cassette player around his next and started a Shangri Las track as he exited—and stole a discarded can of hairspray and a small bottle of Coca-Cola as souvenirs.
—Robert Poss
Frozen Flowers Curse The Day, the new release from the former Band of Susans guitarist Robert Poss, is in stores now.
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PHOTO: DEBRA HOCHMAN
