(This blog is meant to serve as an intro to Ricki’s review of the Martin Scorsese documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only that will be upcoming on Pencil Storm this weekend as our Saturday Night Special. Buckle up, boys & girls, Ricki C. loves him some New York Dolls and he’s got a LOT to say.)
First off, let’s get the worshipful fan stuff out of the way; In 1973 The New York Dolls saved my rock & roll life. (They didn’t save my ACTUAL life; that would have been The Rolling Stones in 1965. Some of you know that story, if you don’t you can read about it here…..The Bathtub.)
The New York Dolls saved my rock & roll life by jolting me out of that early-70’s quagmire of singer/songwriters (James Taylor, America), prog-rock (Yes, Styx), lunkhead metal bands (Black Sabbath, Grand Funk Railroad) and country-rockers (Eagles, Linda Ronstadt). This is as horrific a sentence as I have ever typed, but my favorite “rock & roll band” prior to the Dolls was Loggins & Messina. (Gods of rock & roll; please forgive me that sin.)
When The New York Dolls blazed onto the scene in 1973 they single-handedly rendered useless everything I had been listening to before them. And I do mean BLAZED; it was Scorched Earth Policy rock & roll. From the first SECOND my record player needle touched down on that record and “Personality Crisis” roared out of those cheap-ass speakers it was EVERYTHING I wanted out of rock & roll, everything I didn’t even REALIZE I had been missing. It was The Yardbirds and The Music Machine from 1966; it was The MC5 and The Stooges from 1968; it was Brownsville Station from 1970.
It also changed all of my notions of Personal Style. Below are two pictures that are worth many more than 2000 words. In 85 words or less: 1) Before The New York Dolls I was a fuckin’ sixties hippie listening to ephemera like Pearls Before Swine and Batdorf & Rodney. 2) After The New York Dolls I was once again an Acolyte of The True Religion of The Rock & Roll Rama-Lama. The Dolls were my gateway drug to Blue Oyster Cult, the Raw Power incarnation of The Stooges, Elliott Murphy, The Dictators, and later to Patti Smith, The Ramones, The Clash and all the rest of the Punk Class of 1976.
I saw the Dolls live on Sunday night May 19th, 1974. It wasn’t pretty. At that point I had been waiting to see David Johansen & the boys for almost a year, since their debut album in July, 1973. Their second record, Too Much Too Soon, had come out the week before (May 10th) so I hadn’t been able to digest it, but I kinda already knew it wasn’t as good as the first one. Still, the national rock press (especially Creem magazine, my Rock & Roll Bible of the time) had been touting the Dolls as Contenders and a Major Force in rock & roll, so when I arrived at Veteran’s Memorial here in Columbus that warm summer evening and found the parking lot almost empty my first thought was that the show had been cancelled.
Rock shows routinely got cancelled on a moments’ notice back in those early-70’s days; missed flights, sick (meaning possibly drug-addled or OD’d) band members and equipment truck breakdowns being the main stated causes. As my wife & I walked dejectedly up the steps to get our ticket refunds I was surprised to find a full complement of doormen & ushers hanging around the lobby of Vet’s. “What’s up, Chet, why is the show cancelled?” I said to one my dad’s old co-workers at the Central Ticket office.
“The show’s not cancelled,” Chet replied, casually checking another couple’s tickets as we conversed. “Then why are there no cars in the parking lot?” I asked. “Because there are no PEOPLE in the venue,” Chet replied cooly. Long story short; in an auditorium that held 3172 patrons, there were 110 people – exactly – in Veteran’s Memorial that night. (I say “exactly” because I counted them from my front row balcony seat. In those days I always bought front row balcony tickets and recorded the shows with my portable Panasonic recorder. Front row balcony seats were the best because you got the sound really clearly off the stage and minimal crowd noise.)
I was crushed. There were only two other people in the entire balcony and they moved downstairs when it became clear the main floor wasn’t going to fill up. Between the opening act (ISIS, an all-female horn-driven funk band from NYC the Dolls brought with them on the tour) and the Dolls I dejectedly counted – one by one – the 110 paying customers below us. The first ten rows of Vet’s Memorial weren’t even full. (By comparison, in 1974 I had seen Aerosmith sell out Vet’s TWICE since 1972 when I first saw them bottom-billed to Mott The Hoople and Robin Trower at Columbus’ Mershon Auditorium.) What had happened to all the talk of the Dolls being The Next Big Thing in rock & roll music? What had happened to their World Beater status? Was it possible the Rock Press had LIED to me for that entire year? It was a genuine eye-opener to the power of the Rock Hype Machine to my naïve Ohio notions.
Worse yet, the Dolls were WEAK as a live act. All the fire & brimstone POWER of the first album was reduced to a kinda lame walk-through. David Johansen and drummer Jerry Nolan were the only two members willing to (or capable of) giving the meager audience ANYTHING approaching their money’s worth. It was a debacle. At one point during “It’s Too Late” from the new album the band tried to go into an extended jam between guitarists Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain, but they got lost in the middle and couldn’t find their way back into the song to save their lives. Finally, they gave up and everybody stopped playing entirely and just looked at each other. Jerry Nolan had the good sense & wherewithal to count them back in (“1-2-3-4”) and they limped through the rest of the tune. It was THE MOST embarrassing rock & roll moment I ever witnessed on the Vet’s Memorial stage.
And though it pains me to say it, and put it in writing, the set never got any better. The only song I remember them doing any justice to, that they played with any COMMAND was “Looking For A Kiss” early in the set. At one point in my tape of the night you could hear me yell, “DO SOMETHING AMAZING!” from my balcony perch. They never did. (When Willie Phoenix and I met four years later in 1978 the first band we bonded over was The New York Dolls. Willie loved them as much as I did. I loaned Willie my tape of that show and he lost it within a week. So goes rock & roll. Never loan a musician anything you want to see again.)
It took me YEARS after that to realize that the Dolls were a small club band; that they were meant to play Max’s Kansas City or The Whiskey Au Go Go, that they weren’t destined or designed to play auditoriums or enormo-domes of The Great Midwest. Does that mean I love them less to this day, 50 years later? Nope. – Ricki C. / April 17th, 2023.
ps. I later had personal interactions with two members of The New Yorks Dolls; both in 1979, one definitely more significant than the other. If you are so inclined, you can read about both of them here…..Exchanging Pleasantries With David Johansen / I Was Pissing Next To Johnny Thunders.
That’s right, cats & kittens, our little hometown of Columbus, OH. hosted THREE major rock shows in a 7-day span that week in May, 1974.
And not ONE of them cost more than $5.50. (The New York Dolls show was $4.50.)
THE NEW YORK DOLLS ON A BETTER NIGHT THAN I SAW THEM
(By the way; If you think it was an easy thing to be a New York Dolls fan on the West Side of Columbus, Ohio in 1973, you’d best think again, mofumbo.)
Ricki C. turned 70 years old in the summer of 2022. His first favorite rock & roll song was Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” when he was five years old, riding in his sainted Italian father’s Oldsmobile. He figures his last favorite rock & roll song will be by either Elliott Murphy or Ian Hunter, sometime in the future.