by Dick Porter
Both Debbie Harry and Chris Stein had experienced the birth pangs and growing pains of the sixties underground movement at close quarters, but were too young and unworldly to be anything more than peripheral contributors. Their trajectories had often taken them into one another’s social orbit, but had always narrowly missed the eye contact that would eventually ignite their relationship – and give birth to Blondie.
It would require another subcultural upheaval to bring the two of them together and unleash their creative personalities.
The scene which sprang up around The New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Centre was one of those rare, magical instances when a random collision of unique personalities hits the same place at exactly the right moment. The soiled glamour personified by the Dolls and their exotic followers was inextricably linked to the Warhol crowd – who’d been behaving this way for years in the back room of Max’s – and, in terms of shattering taboos, the gay scene – which had remained underground for decades.
The brief blooms of liberty in the second half of the sixties garlanded the path for the outrageous sartorial styles and behaviour that became almost the norm by the mid-seventies. Although not quite the milestone in gay liberation/disco history that it’s often credited as, the 1969 Stonewall riots had played a key role in broadening New York’s horizons.
Despite the lifting of laws against serving alcohol to homosexuals in 1967, the Stonewall Inn remained a target for homophobic police looking to hassle the clientele. It was also one of many Mob-controlled Village venues which owed its unhindered existence to a weekly payout handed over to the police. When this failed to happen during the week that culminated in the riots of June 17, 1969, the bar was raided and the more flamboyant drag queens herded into meat wagons. However, rather than disperse meekly, the bar’s patrons retaliated with bottles and other missiles. This conflict continued across several nights, becoming symbolic of the new age of gay liberation – although gay bars would continue to be raided for years. As renowned disco commentator Vince Aletti put it, “Stonewall was more mythological than real.”
In time Blondie would be accepted by the disco crowd, with Debbie becoming an enduring gay icon. Subsequent to Stonewall, many of the characters around the downtown scene (many of whom would find a new focal point at the Mercer Arts Centre) saw the riots as a turning point that provided militant motivation to their chosen lifestyles. Now the gay underground came into the open, with discos like The Sanctuary providing a countercultural nexus similar to that which had hovered around Andy Warhol and The Factory.
In terms of personal freedom, the early seventies can be viewed as benefitting from the social upheavals of the previous decade – although, in New York, the tide of tolerance would meet banks of resistance once the Dolls appeared. As influential as The Velvet Underground, the Dolls embodied the incoming zeitgeist in a city that had lost the momentum established in the sixties. Greenwich Village’s status as a trail-blazing, folk-oriented cultural hub, traversed by busker Chris Stein, had deteriorated to a kind of post-Dylan tourist trail soundtracked by drab singer-songwriters. As for rock, although Bleecker Street now boasted a freak-friendly bar called Nobody’s, many major venues had closed by the turn of the decade (including Steve Paul’s Scene and The Electric Circus at the old Dom on St Mark’s and Fillmore East).
Where Hendrix had once ejected solar flares of virtuosity into the New York night, now legions of lesser talents bored their ever-dwindling audiences with sonic masturbation. The city needed a return to rock’n’roll basics, spliced to a pioneer spirit of loud exhibitionism and decadence.
Enter The New York Dolls. By taking the flamboyant sass of Jagger/Richard(s) to the outrageous extremes of raw, dirty, rock’n’roll, the Dolls set the agenda for the seventies. Uncontrollably rebellious and fuelled by almost every known mind-altering substance, the gender-bending quintet cut a swath across America, Europe and Japan, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Five years later, the rest of the world would still be trying to catch up.
In addition to being the five-man rock’n’roll Babylon that defined glitter rock and laid the foundations for punk, the Dolls exerted an irresistible pull upon hip young New Yorkers desperate for new kicks. Chris Stein – who first noticed the omnisexual quintet leering out from a flyer at the School of Visual Arts – found their louche appeal impossible to ignore. “I just saw it going on and it just seemed like a cool thing,” he recalled.
By 1972, Chris had abandoned his earnest folk inclinations as his freak antennae homed in on the possibilities of the nascent glitter scene. “I used to be Alice Cooper a lot. I used to wear make-up all the time. You go through periods with archetypes. If you wear make-up people think you look like Alice Cooper,” he recalled. “I used to wear eye make-up every day and I’d have people looking at me and completely freaking out. I mean, I thought that was my role in life – to make people crazy on the subway. It’s part of the psychology of wanting to be different.”
The Dolls were billed to perform at the Mercer Arts Center, an extension built onto the former Grand Central Hotel (then the Broadway Central Hotel). Once notorious as a gangster hangout in the previous century, by now it was little more than a flophouse. The Centre, however, had been the dream of air-conditioning millionaire Seymour Kaback – who loved the theatre and wanted to build the perfect complex to realise his cultural aspirations. He’d acquired the old building and divided it up into smaller performance areas named after famous figures such as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. There was a jazz lounge, a cinema for art-house movies, a room for Theatre of Cruelty performances (such as Arrabal’s And They Put Handcuffs On The Flowers) and a bar in the foyer.
“It was a renovated place,” recalled latter-day Dolls drummer Jerry Nolan. “It was a cross between Victorian-looking design and a really spacey modern Clockwork Orange type of place, yet it had some of the old things still left, like chandeliers in certain parts of the walls. It was a great combination of old Victorian and modern.”
Although it was the outsider allure of the Dolls that drew Chris to The Mercer, it was that night’s opening act – Eric Emerson & The Magic Tramps – that initially ignited his enthusiasm. Familiar to Debbie from their encounters at Max’s, Emerson would also play a pivotal role in Chris’ musical development.
Born in New Jersey in 1945, Eric had been sent to ballet school by his mother and was later spotted by Warhol dancing at The Dom in April 1966. He subsequently appeared in Chelsea Girls, Warhol’s split-screen movie centred around 23rd Street’s Chelsea Hotel, becoming a Factory stalwart and later appearing in Lonesome Cowboys, San Diego Surf and Heat. Emerson came to wider attention on account of the use of his image on the back cover of The Velvet Underground’s debut album. In need of money he attempted to sue, which resulted in his face being obscured by a sticker before a new edition airbrushed him out entirely.
Eric travelled to Los Angeles at the invitation of an experimental rock group called Messiah – house band for a Sunset Boulevard club called Temple Of The Rainbow – whose guitarist, Young Blood, he met during the filming of Lonesome Cowboys. Messiah were steered by drummer Sesu Coleman and violinist Larry Chaplan, but only began writing songs after Emerson joined. In early 1971 he suggested they relocate to Warhol-world in New York. Upon arrival, Mickey Ruskin gave the group (now renamed The Magic Tramps) the key to the upstairs room at Max’s – unused since The Velvet Underground played their shows there the previous year. The group were immediately embraced by the Warhol crowd, contributing musical backing to Jackie Curtis’s horror movie-dialogued show Vain Victory, with Emerson dancing from head to toe in glitter alongside Ondine, Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling. (A 1975 production of the play also featured Debbie Harry in the role of chorus girl Juicy Lucy.)
After gaining a reputation via their Friday-night residency at Max’s, The Magic Tramps were offered a gig at the Mercer Arts Center by jazz pianist Michael Tschudin and also played Warhol events with the likes of Jackie Curtis and G
eri Miller. The Tramps helped renovate the Mercer, converting the ballrooms into theatres in exchange for rehearsal space. They were the first rock band to play at the venue, participating in an art-video event with Tschudin. By the time the Mercer officially opened in November 1971, the Tramps were playing nightly cabaret sets with him in The Blue Room.
In June 1972, The New York Dolls started their epoch-making Tuesday-night residency at the 200-capacity Oscar Wilde Room. Johnny Thunders famously quipped, “They didn’t want us at the Mercer Arts Center until they counted the bar receipts.” Electro-punk pioneers Suicide also barged their way into a residency. Despite wildly differing attitudes to music and drugs, they bonded with the Dolls. “The Mercer was an incredible place,” recalls Suicide’s Martin Rev. “The Dolls played, then people would have to come through our room to leave. We were the next generation, living through the realities of war and bringing the war onto the stage. An expressionistic thing. You’d see the Dolls’ audiences dressed up in polka dots and colours. A party scene, it was wonderful.”
“Everything came out of glam rock,” Chris would later assert. “Suicide predated The New York Dolls, and the scene was very exciting.”
Stein and Emerson hit it off immediately Chris – who had arranged for The Magic Tramps to play at the School of Visual Arts Christmas party – scored a gig as the band’s roadie, before graduating to intermittent bass and guitar duties, while Eric moved into Chris’s apartment on First Avenue and First Street. “Chris and Eric were the only freaks in the building, which was full of lower income families,” remembered Debbie. “Everybody thought they were horrible and was terrified the freaks were gonna rape their daughters. Eric didn’t help relations with the neighbours by rushing out and screaming in the halls at 4a.m. or coming round to the back of the building in the middle of the night and yelling, ‘Throw down my drugs! They’re in the drawer!’ … Things got progressively worse. The neighbours hated them, the super was freaking, and Eric was a maniac, although Chris loved living with him because he brought constant excitement into the apartment.”
Although he had many endearing traits, living with Emerson’s lunatic lifestyle was not always straightforward. “Eric was a Warhol Star – one of the originals – he was clever, charming, talented, and had a huge ego fuelled by the hundreds of people who wanted to have sex with him,” explains his partner Elda Gentile. “And he did accommodate them with pleasure. I was only 18, still living at home and naive as can be, and whenever I was in the city he showered all his attention on me. We were madly in love. It wasn’t until after I left home that I became aware that you get the whole package and you have to take the whole package – there is no choosing which part of him to accept or not accept. That package came with an open relationship that I didn’t know I was in for, masses of free drugs along with nights of social and creative experiences and experiments.”
Like Chris, Debbie had no reservations about the Dolls, taking to the band with enthusiasm and making regular trips to the Mercer to catch them live. “She used to come by in her little blue car from New Jersey,” recalled Elda. “Ride around with us, and party with the boys.” Deborah was particularly taken with Dolls frontman David Johansen, with whom she enjoyed a brief tryst: “I was crazy about David. I thought David was the hot stuff! But I was friends with them all, I liked the original drummer, Billy Murcia, but then I became friends with Jerry [Nolan], and Jerry used to play in an early incarnation of Blondie.”
One particular ride with the Dolls led to Debbie almost being busted in her father’s Chrysler. “In the car, I had about 14 of the skinniest people you have ever seen with big hair and platform shoes,” she explained. “I had The New York Dolls and their girlfriends in full regalia. We got pulled over on the Taconic Parkway. It was outrageous. The cop looked in the window and saw that there were about six of us in the front seat. He said, ‘Oh, my God! I can’t believe it!’ Then, he just drove away. He didn’t want to deal with it. He must have thought we were a clown club from the circus.”
The scene at the Mercer Arts Center came to an unexpected and dramatic end when the building collapsed on August 3, 1973. “The centre was integrally linked to the Broadway Central hotel, which had a glorious history but had now become a crumbling structure occupied by welfare recipients,” Debbie explains. “It was so old and decrepit from years of people pissing on the floor and throwing up in the corner that it just caved in.” The collapse of the building’s walls coincided with a Magic Tramps rehearsal. “The band left practice and their equipment and ran,” recalled Elda. “They could see across Broadway. They ran for their lives.”
As Debbie was to discover, disintegrating buildings were not the only life-threatening hazard facing New York’s groovy young things. One night she had a narrow escape from a man she believes was subsequently convicted serial rapist/killer Ted Bundy.
“It was late at night and I was trying to get across Houston Street from the Lower East Side to 7th Avenue. For some reason there were no cabs and I was wearing these big platform shoes. This car kept circling round and round, this guy was calling out, ‘Come on, I’ll give you a ride.’ Finally, I gave in and got in the car. I realised I’d made a big mistake. For one, it was very hot in the car, and the windows rolled up nearly to the top. The guy had a white shirt and he was very good looking. Then I realised this guy had the worst BO I have ever smelt. Then I looked over at the door to crank down the window and saw there was no door handle, no crank. I cast my eyes around and saw that the car had been gutted. There was nothing in there. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, so I stuck my arm out through the crack in the window and managed to open the door from the outside. I was so lucky.”
“At the time I didn’t know anything about Ted Bundy,” Deborah later reflected. “I just thought, ‘Thank God I got away from that asshole,’ and I just carried on – and years later, after he was executed, I got on a flight and picked up a Newsweek, and I’m reading this story, and it says ‘Modus Operandi’, and it describes how he looked, the inside of his cars, and the hair on the back of my neck once again went out, and I said, ‘Oh my God, that was Ted Bundy.’”
“I’ve been debunked, actually, by those people that debunk you, or whatever,” adds Debbie, speaking nearly 40 years after the encounter. “They say he wasn’t in New York at that time, but I think they’re really wrong, because he had escaped and was travelling down the East Coast. I think that nobody has ever really investigated that. I didn’t know until later who it was. It was pretty scary.”
Outside of her sometimes fraught relationship with Eric Emerson (with whom she produced a son named Branch), Elda Gentile had formed a girl group named Pure Garbage with Warhol ‘superstar’ Holly Woodlawn (herself an ersatz girl/drag queen) and David Johansen’s girlfriend, Diane. “They never did any real gigs as far as I know, but they were well-known on the scene,” recounted Debbie. “I heard about the group and wanted to join, but by the time I got in touch with Elda they’d split up.”
Keen to get back into performing, Debbie remained in contact with Elda. “I had been thinking about doing something in music ever since I had stopped doing folk rock,” she explained. “So I went to see Elda and she said she knew another girl with a fabulous voice, so we called her up, her name was Roseanne, and the three of us got together as The Stillettoes. That’s how I got back into the music business. I had nothing left to lose and everything to gain. Singing has always been an obsession with me. I would wake up every morning with one thought haunting me, knowing that if I didn’t try I would never forgive myself. I knew I had a voice but it was somewhere south of my chin at the time. I knew that trying to satisfy this obsession was the only thing I could do to make me feel right.”
Speaking in 2011, Elda recalls the group’s genesis: “In 1973, when I had Holly Woodlawn’s Pure Garbage, I sold my Andy Warhol Cow (which was signed ‘To Elda From Andy’) for $3,000 to have the funds to rent a loft in the flower district to live and rehearse in. Our show at Reno S
weeney’s, a cabaret club in the West Village, was fantastic. Holly was offered training to develop a cabaret show and I encouraged her to accept the offer. In hindsight I am happy I did, as Holly still performs at underground film festivals and events. Cutting her loose was a gift to her.
“I had made a deal with [transgender performer] Jayne County to allow her PA system to remain in my loft in exchange for free rehearsal time and that allowed me to put together The Stillettoes. Jayne invited a guest singer to rehearse one day. Her name was Rosie Trapani, aka Rosie Ross. I was nuts about Rosie and her great big blues voice and told her about my plan to create a three-girl act that, with original material, would define itself with a modern attitude. I had written songs about having sex in public places, living with men who wore make-up and high heel shoes, and even one about the real Dracula – Vlad Tepes, a connection in reality not yet known about in general in the USA. (I was an assistant art teacher for a special program at the Cloisters, a medieval museum which is a part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it was in their library that I discovered this information.)
“All my lyrics were tongue-in-cheek humour. Rosie drew her material from existing songs but I felt with time we could write for her. With Debbie it was the same – she covered songs but didn’t write. I met Debbie when I was living with Sylvain Sylvain [of the Dolls] in 1971. I saw her in 1973, waitressing at Max’s one night, and also invited her to join. I took her number and told her all I needed to find were musicians.”
