• • •
Some say the 1970s New York rock scene really started in the 1960s with the Velvet Underground. Others think it was when Danny Fields brought the Stooges and the MC5 in from Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1968. Or with Lou Reed’s reconfigured Velvet Underground at Max’s Kansas City in 1970. Or with the opening of CBGB’s in 1973. What really happened is that several things happened, all at once. But what no one can dispute is that in early 1972, when the New York Dolls performed every Tuesday night at the Oscar Wilde Room in the Mercer Arts Center (in the Broadway Central Hotel), the 1970s New York rock scene was born.
In 1971, the lower Broadway area was abandoned at night. We used to joke that it felt like Poland. The Mercer Arts Center (on Mercer between Bleecker and West 3rd Street) was a place where people went, usually after eleven p.m., to hang out, drink, pick people up, and watch avant-garde plays and “happenings.” The appropriately named Oscar Wilde Room was a little theater: there was a stage that was no higher than a platform, and there were seats for the audience. Performers included the drag queen Wayne County and actress/singer Ruby Lynn Reyner. But mostly, everyone went to see the New York Dolls. At this time, there was still such a thing as a “New York sensibility.” Every new thing—whether it was fashion or music or theater or a magazine—was not discovered, or available, or co-opted, or perverted, by everyone. Very few writers wrote about what was still considered “underground.” Before they were the Ramones—whose singer Joey had an early glamrock band called Sniper—the Ramones went to see the Dolls. Patti Smith read poetry as an opening act for the Dolls. Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine went to the Mercer to see the Dolls before they formed their own band the Neon Boys, the precursor to Television. In the dismal atmosphere of the early 1970s, while the rest of the country was lulled by “soft rock,” or numbed by radio rock bands—like Styx and REO Speedwagon—in New York City, every Tuesday night was New Year’s Eve with the New York Dolls.
Charles Barkley has said that in basketball, the statistics don’t always show who had an impact on the game. The Dolls had an impact on the game. With their extraordinarily sloppy, R&B-style songs, funky, glammed-up appearance and sophisticated performances, they were the wittiest rock band that ever stepped on a stage. Ultimately misunderstood, unsuccessful and self-destructive, they were initially the house band for those who loved the nightlife, and what was left of the Warhol set. To see the New York Dolls in the midst of the rest of the rock world at that time was like seeing Miles Davis in a roomful of Wynton Marsalises. They were immediately appreciated by a handful of rock critics—James Wolcott, Ellen Willis, Robert Christgau, and Paul Nelson, who signed them to Mercury Records. Still, there were the predictable music snobs who said they “couldn’t play”—that they were a low-rent version of the Rolling Stones. In fact, “couldn’t play” is a description that certainly had once been levelled at the Rolling Stones. And “couldn’t sing” was most definitely a term that had been applied to Bob Dylan. Comparisons to the Stones were understandable given lead singer David Johansen’s androgynous sex appeal. But the level of wit was on another planet. Jagger, albeit more successful, never sang anything like “I ain’t no golden shower queen.” (The Dolls certainly appealed to David Bowie, who loved them, and for better or worse, we certainly know who he wound up influencing. And there would have been no Sex Pistols had the Dolls not come first. But that comes later.) In an early interview, David Johansen asked me, “What is all this talk about being musically proficient? I saw Monterey Pop and if you look at the Who or Janis Joplin at that stage of their careers, well, we’re just as musically proficient as they were then. Besides, we know in our hearts that we’re hipper than anybody else.” The New York Dolls never had a confidence problem.
In 1971, the New York Dolls—David Johansen, Johnny Thunders, Sylvain Sylvain, Billy Murcia, and Arthur Kane Jr.—came to my apartment for the first of what would be many interviews. They collectively wore: platform wedgie shoes, hot-cha green-trimmed sunglasses, sequined hot pants, transparent chiffon blouses, and pink denim overalls covered by a dragon-appliquéd apron. (My father, a lawyer and a judge and a serious man who re-read Proust every summer, lived across the hall from me at the time. He found my life amusing. When the Dolls came to visit me, my father phoned me later that night to say he had seen “my friends” in their full regalia in the elevator. It was just assumed that they would have been visiting no one else in the building.) “When we formed our band, we knew we had the best rock and roll band,” David told me. “When the record companies come to see us, I think they get turned on. Their wives get drunk and start dancing and they go crazy. But then they think about their kids . . . and that’s what stops them. They start thinking about their kids.”
David was swagger personified. He wore pumps. Or a tube top, shorts, knee-length leather boots and a cowboy hat. Apropos of nothing, he’d burst into “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in the middle of some rock number. Or he’d introduce a song as “inspired by Batista, who used to run Cuba.” Once, onstage at the Whisky in Los Angeles, he pointed to a table and shouted out, “At the celebrity table over there—[Manson girl] LINDA KASABIAN!!” He’d dedicate a song to Kitty Genovese—a girl who screamed as she was stabbed to death in Queens while no one came to help. In the South, or even west of the Mercer Arts Center, David’s onstage patter sailed above the heads of the audience, much of the press, and, quite possibly, his own band. “I’ll say something fantastically funny, like I can’t believe I said it,” David told me once in Los Angeles, “and maybe I’ll get a snicker from the fifteenth row. I think maybe the ones who get the jokes are too stoned, and the rest of them are tourists. I guess I’ll have to go to a Grand Funk concert and see how they relate to the masses.” I said it was different in New York. “It’s really different in New York,” he agreed. “The audience at the Oscar Wilde Room is so fabulous, we’re just a reflection of them. That dance floor . . . well, all my favorite people were out there, so we had to be incredible. I’m still doing them. I’ve taken them on the road.”
*
In those days, no one went to a gym. We all smoked. No one went to Brooklyn; there was no reason to. We didn’t talk about money except to bemoan not having any. No one—ever—mentioned, or cared about, the stock market. I wore huge sunglasses. I wore black and maroon nail polish and carried Bakelite pocketbooks. Along with others, I imitated the campier styles of the 1940s. Platform shoes were the norm and, at 5'2", I loved being tall. Well, taller. No matter what time of day or night, if I had to call a musician, my opening line would be, “Did I wake you up?” I never went to sleep before four a.m., woke up around noon, and spent half the day on the phone discussing what had gone on the night before and what was planned for the night ahead. We hung out. We didn’t use the term “rock star.” Of course, because of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the concept was there. But the use of the term—the way people use it today to refer to the likes of Bill Clinton or Oprah Winfrey, as if it was the highest thing someone could be—was unheard of. To be a musician was not considered a good career choice. Most of them went into it because they felt they had no choice. And to the rest of the world, to be a rock musician then, was still thought to be one step above a criminal.
*
On August 9, 1973, my severely asthmatic friend Lillian Roxon died. After not hearing from her for twelve hours—an unheard of amount of time for people who spoke four times a day—I broke into her apartment with the police and discovered her dead body. I arranged her funeral, and packed up her belongings to ship back to her family in Australia. I was devastated. I needed to get out of town. I decided to join the circus and accompanied the New York Dolls to Hollywood. The band drew stares at the airport. They were considered freaks. I was writing an article about the Dolls in L.A. for Creem and for New Musical Express, so I hung out with the band for most of the week. They were booked into the Whisky on Sunset Strip, and it was a scene. The groupie grapevine had been buzzing for
weeks about the imminent arrival of the Dolls. The girls from Star magazine were out in full force. David Johansen was bored and lonely and too sophisticated for this bunch. In New York, he was living with Cyrinda Foxe, who was a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, one of the inspirations for Bowie’s song “Jean Genie,” and a role model for her contemporaries Angela Bowie and Debbie Harry. But she was having a moment as the “trois” in the Bowie ménage, and did not accompany the Dolls on this trip. I recall David drunkenly calling her, imploring her not to run off with the Bowies. She did anyway. (Years later, she permanently ran off with what, at the time, seemed to her a much better offer, and wound up as Steven Tyler’s wife—but that’s another story.) David and I just sort of gravitated towards each other. It was a like-minded sensibility, nothing sexual, and it didn’t hurt that I was staying in a patio room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, as opposed to the funkier Continental Hyatt House on Sunset where the Dolls occupied several rooms. Steve Paul, who had run the rock club The Scene and was now managing Johnny and Edgar Winter and Rick Derringer, was also at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was residing in splendor in Bungalow 5—the 1960s home away from home for the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. Steve had waited all his life, he said, to be able to stay in Bungalow 5, and now he wanted to give a party to celebrate the achievement. He thought it would be chic to serve just chocolate soufflés, strawberries and champagne. We rounded up whoever was in town—John Cale, Cynderella, Jonathan Richman, Danny Fields, Rick Springfield, Rick and Liz Derringer, Lance, Kevin and Delilah Loud from An American Family, and, of course, the Dolls. David, who had impeccable taste, immediately warmed to the pink bungalows and the luxurious smell of the jacaranda and hyacinth on the winding paths of the hotel. So he just sort of moved in to my room for a few days. “Passed out” would be more like it, and, as he put it, it was a way to get away from what he described as the “bitches” at the Hyatt House. “I don’t mind them hanging around,” he said about the groupies, “as long as they don’t get traumatic.” During an interview we did at a cabana above the pool (videotaped by Bob Gruen, bits of which made their way into Gruen’s Dolls documentary), David wore sunglasses, a white bangle bracelet and a red nylon Speedo. I asked if the Dolls’ first trip to Hollywood had met his expectations. “Well, they have a definite style here,” he said. “Low camp. I guess when you’re in New York, everything you get from L.A. is so filtered—so it sounds more glamorous than it really is. Although,” he looked around the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, “I must say this is very nice. This is lovely.” It certainly was a far cry from the Hyatt, where the band’s rooms were filled with opened suitcases, overflowing with shiny outfits strewn about on the floor. Unmade beds. Beaded necklaces, bangle bracelets and bottles of cheap perfume on top of the Formica dressers. Styrofoam coffee cups filled with stubbed-out cigarettes. Empty beer cans. Room service tables with days’ worth of rotting food. Teenage girls. Teenage boys. Drug dealers. “Whenever I go on the road, I feel like Fidel Castro in the Hotel Theresa,” David said. “Remember when they were plucking the chickens?”
• • •
One day, in 1973, for no apparent reason, the Mercer Arts Center (and the entire Broadway Central Hotel) collapsed. As in, the building just fell down. Sometime that year, Neil Bogart called Richard and me and asked us to come to either the basement of the Hotel Diplomat or a rehearsal space to see a band he considered signing to his new Casablanca label. He wanted our opinion. I could not believe what I witnessed in that small, cramped, brightly lit space. Four hairy, sweaty boys, wearing makeup and costumes. It was literally like that line from Spinal Tap: “Do you know how much it will cost to dress the band as animals??” I was appalled that this foursome, dressed as cheap cartoon superheroes, were ripping off the music of the adored New York Dolls. Badly. Without a modicum of wit. I told Neil they should be ashamed of themselves, they’d never make it. That they were, basically, criminals. Richard’s opinion: Kiss would make Neil a fortune.
In 1975, after Transformer and several other albums, Lou Reed asked Richard to have another go-round at producing one of his albums. By now, Lou was signed to Clive Davis’ Arista Records, which was distributed by RCA. Despite the fact that Lou could be difficult, scary, and mean, he was still Lou Reed. The man who wrote “Sweet Jane,” which is, in my estimation, perhaps the greatest rock and roll song of all time. He was the songwriter who told me he just wanted to “elevate the form.” In one of our many interviews, Lou told me, “I’ve been studying Delmore Schwartz for years, and his short stories were incredibly clever and succinct, in a very efficient vernacular. And it makes me think of Raymond Chandler, when he said, ‘You know, that blonde was as pleasant as a split lip.’ They had these amazing images and I just thought, put a drum to that.” Of course, Lou admitted, “It’s interesting, because it’s just a rock and roll song. And you may have contempt for the form, but then you go and stick something into it and expand its horizons, and you get criticized for it twofold.”
*
So in the winter of 1975, Richard and Lou and his then-paramour Rachel (who today might be described as a member of the transgender community) went off to Germany in search of one Manfred Schunke, who had invented “binaural sound”—a process that involved a gray foam head with microphones sticking out of each ear. While in Germany, Lou did concerts that were recorded live, with two of the foam heads hanging above the audience. Lou made phone calls on a daily basis to a New Jersey kennel just to hear his beloved dachshund Baron bark into the phone over the transatlantic wires. He refused to believe Richard’s suggestion that he was, in fact, listening to a tape. After not hearing from Richard for almost six weeks, I tracked him down and arranged to meet him in Paris. I walked into L’Hotel—the hotel where, in Room 16, Oscar Wilde had died—to discover my husband twenty pounds thinner and bursting into tears. Apparently, he had been taking a lot of over-the-counter German speed. It had been a rough trip. According to Richard, whenever Lou would put on his sunglasses at midnight, it would signal the beginning of Lou yelling at his “minder” from the record company that they were doing “nothing” for him. Once, Lou was so incensed that he told Richard that he threatened the president of the English record company with a knife, then called Richard to come and get the knife before the arrival of the police. Of course, again, nobody who was there remembers this the same way. Back in New York, they finished up the recording that would ultimately become Street Hassle—one of Lou’s best albums. Bruce Springsteen and Joe Perry, also working in separate rooms at the Record Plant, stopped by and played on some tracks. The then-president of Arista Records, Clive Davis, who prides himself on his ability to pick hit singles, showed up at the studio once, said, “Hoist your petard,” and left.
*
One night in the mid-1970s, Lou and I walked into CBGB’s before Television was about to play. Lou was carrying a cassette recorder. Television’s Tom Verlaine was, quite possibly, even more paranoid than Lou. He muttered to me, “What’s he doing with that tape recorder? Should I ask him to keep it in the back?” I suggested that he ask Lou to take out the cassette, or the batteries. Tom said to Lou, “Hey buddy, whatcha doing with that machine?” Lou replied that the batteries were run down. “Oh yeah?” Tom said. “Well then, you won’t mind if I keep it in the back.” Lou handed him the cassette, then said, “You’d make a lousy detective, man, you didn’t even notice the two extra cassettes in my pocket.” Tom was not amused. “Okay, then give me the machine, I’ll keep it in the back for you.” Lou handed it over, then looked at me and burst out laughing: “Can you believe that guy?” he asked. I said that there were many musicians who would be thrilled if they thought Lou Reed wanted to tape them. I mean, it wasn’t as if Lou didn’t know how to write a song. Of course, years later, I wondered if Tom would be mad had he known that I gave Bono and the Edge some of those Television tapes that, like some fan of the Grateful Dead, I made nightly at CBGB’s. Of course he would have been. I mean, just listen to U2’s guitar sound
.
*
In 1976, Lou and I had a New York telephone conversation (also the title of one of his best solo songs), and I reprinted it verbatim in one of our rock magazines. This was the sort of thing that you could only get away with if you yourself were editing a small rock magazine. Basically we discussed Clive Davis: Lou said Clive wouldn’t have signed and hugged him for a publicity photo if he wasn’t “white.” Lou thought it would be funny for me to write that, but added that he didn’t think Gil Scott-Heron would find it amusing. I asked him what he would be doing had he not gone into this line of work. He said he’d either be selling shoes at Thom McAn’s or he’d be really bitchy. As opposed to the way he was normally? I asked. We segued onto a discussion of his concerts, and past performances that included his pretending to shoot up during “Heroin.” Lou said, “If they want to see someone make believe he’s shooting up, and they get their rocks off at age fifty, well, at that time in my life I was happy to stand there like a ghoul and do it.” Did he have contempt for his audience? “Certain segments of it, yes. That’s why I’m playing smaller halls. I hope the barbarians won’t be there. I want the show to be for people who aren’t interested in my pretending to shoot up during ‘Heroin.’” Lou told me he had moved apartments several times in the past year, that he’d gotten an incredible bargain on a loft, but then learned that it was an incredible bargain because it turned out to be above a methadone clinic. “It wasn’t a place for me and my dachshund.” He admitted that he took the Baron everywhere. Even to the recording studio. “I brought him down there, but just to take a look, because he gets cranky.”
There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll Page 10
