the New York Dolls

the New York Dolls, American band whose raw brand of glam rock revitalized the New York City underground music scene in the 1970s, foreshadowing punk rock by half a decade. The members were lead singer David Johansen (b. January 9, 1950, New York, New York, U.S.), lead guitarist Johnny Thunders (byname of John Genzale; b. July 15, 1952, New York—d. April 23, 1991, New Orleans, Louisiana), drummer Billy Murcia (b. 1951, New York—d. November 6, 1972, London, England), guitarist Sylvain Sylvain (byname of Sylvain Sylvain Mizrahi; b. February 14, 1951, Cairo, Egypt—d. January 13, 2021), drummer Jerry Nolan (b. May 7, 1946, New York—d. January 14, 1992, New York), bassist Arthur Kane (b. New York—d. July 13, 2004, Los Angeles, California), and guitarist Rick Rivets (b. New York—d. February 19, 2019).

Formed in 1971, the New York Dolls first gained notoriety in 1972 for their outrageous performances at the Mercer Arts Center and Max’s Kansas City in Lower Manhattan, where they appeared in their signature attire—women’s makeup and bizarre clothing. Their glam rock androgyny belied an unpolished musical style that combined British Invasion-influenced rhythm and blues with the guitar distortion and booming backbeat of proto-punk bands such as the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges. The drug-related death of Murcia during the band’s tour of England in 1972 further fueled their reputation. The following year they signed with Mercury Records and released New York Dolls, produced by Todd Rundgren. Their 1974 follow-up, the aptly named Too Much Too Soon, gave title to the band’s dissolution as its members struggled with drug and alcohol addictions. Notwithstanding their lack of commercial success, the irreverent Dolls had a lasting influence on a generation of bands—most notably the Sex Pistols, whose founder, Malcolm McLaren, managed the Dolls briefly before their breakup in 1977.

Johansen remained active in the New York music scene, but he enjoyed his greatest commercial success when he reinvented himself as the pompadoured lounge lizard Buster Poindexter. As Poindexter, he crooned pop classics and sipped dry martinis, and his lighthearted tribute to the big band sound anticipated the swing revival of the late 1990s by a full decade. Johansen scored a crossover hit with the party anthem “Hot Hot Hot” in 1987. He also branched into acting, scoring a number of memorable film and television roles throughout the 1980s and ’90s.

In 2004 Morrissey, former front man of the Smiths and onetime president of the New York Dolls fan club in the United Kingdom, arranged for the surviving members of the Dolls to reunite for a performance at a New York music festival. The set was well received by fans and critics, and the band was preparing for a full tour when Kane died of complications from leukemia. Kane’s distinctly unglamorous post-Dolls life and the reunion are at the centre of the film documentary New York Doll (2005).

Johansen and Sylvain, with a collection of accomplished musicians filling in for their departed bandmates, entered the studio to produce One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This (2006), the first collection of new Dolls material to appear since 1974. The tour that followed demonstrated that this second incarnation of the Dolls had the same sort of energy as the first, and the concert album Live at the Fillmore East (2008) captured a band that embraced its place in rock history without succumbing to the nostalgia that characterized so many high-profile reunions. The new lineup of the Dolls showed their range on ’Cause I Sez So (2009), produced by Rundgren, while the well-received Dancing Backward in High Heels (2011) harkened back to 1960s pop. However, after 2011 Johansen and Sylvain went their separate ways again, and the New York Dolls gave no further performances nor recorded.