How the New York Dolls rescued New York City
Music in New York City is like the ravens of the Tower of London. If it ever leaves, the whole kingdom will fall. There has never been a moment where music wasn’t flowing through those city streets like the caustic, fume-infested air ensconcing it. From classical music at Carnegie Hall, musical theatre on Broadway, jazz at The Blue Note, reggaeton and Latin music at Bembe and of course, rock ‘n’ roll everywhere you look, few cities in the world have the rock pedigree the five boroughs have. Yet, most of those bands owe their debt to a band so associated with the city that they have it in their very name: the New York Dolls.
The closest the area has come to being genuinely lacking in great rock ‘n’ roll music was in the late 1960s. This was no accident either. While The Velvet Underground were still active, they were very much a cult concern. An Andy Warhol pet project whose influence was yet to be truly seen for the next decade or so. In the meantime, rock fans were actively being kept from the club scene that had nurtured generations of up-and-coming music talent. The late great David Johansen gave an interview to Uncut magazine, where he elaborated on this.
In the interview, he said, “There was nothing happening in 1971, early ’72. There was no place to play. The scene was still happening on the street. We, the band, sort of fell together and started looking for places we could play. They had these draconian laws that went down in the late ’60s. When I was a kid, MacDougall Street was heavenly, there were so many clubs and great bands playing. Then they passed these Cabaret Laws, and all those places closed. It was like a ghost town.”
It’s not that music wasn’t still keeping the city going; it was more that the truly exciting things were its folk, jazz and Latin soul scene. The rock ‘n’ roll scene, however, was being suffocated, which, fortunately, led to something very interesting. Since the traditional rock clubs and spaces weren’t in action, opportunities for bands to form and play were coming from other spaces. More specifically, they were coming from the arts and theatre scene.
How did the New York City art scene birth the New York Dolls?
The heart of this exciting, flamboyant new rock scene, one as influenced by drag and cabaret as any band, stemmed from the Mercer Arts Center on West 19th Street. In the same interview, Johansen detailed how he and his friend, guitarist Sylvain Sylvain, got their first gig at the Mercer, an experience which speaks to just how out-there and experimental this scene really was.
He said, “I knew this guy, Eric Emerson, who was in a band called The Magic Tramps. He was an Andy Warhol movie star, and he used to wear lederhosen and do the cha-cha dance… It wasn’t a straight rock ’n’ roll band, it was a Turkish rock ’n’ roll band. He said he was playing at this place called Mercer Arts Centre, did we want to play with them? We started playing Tuesday nights at midnight.”
Sylvain and Johansen’s new band had already played a few shows together and had taken their name from the New York Doll Hospital across the road from the boutique Sylvain worked at. Their early gigs at the Mercer served as the NYC equivalent of the Sex Pistols at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. Everyone who was anyone has a ‘Dolls at the Mercer’ story, not least Debbie Harry, who recalled seeing the group go through the venue’s trash and picking out feather boas and corsets to wear on stage one night.
It wasn’t just the incredible music the Dolls were playing that inspired the people there, though. Their influence went much deeper than that. What the Dolls were showing the world was really that you could build a scene yourself. That you didn’t have to stay in the boxes afforded to you and that art could come from anywhere and be anything. That true rock ‘n’ roll goes wherever it pleases and can cultivate from anything.
All of which the city seemed to take to heart. After all, why else would the city’s most notorious punk rock scene operate out of a Country, Bluegrass and Blues bar, whose name was often shortened to CBGBs?
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