Today is the 75th birthday of Elliott Murphy; my favorite rock & roll songwriter of all time. In honor of that milestone I'm running this piece that originally appeared on Pencil Storm, a blogsite to which I now contribute stories. You certainly won't be sorry if you also check out that site.
I was 21 in 1973. I had already been listening to rock & roll for 16 years, thanks to the lucky break of my bother & sister being 10 & 7 years older than me and the fact that my sister Dianne LOVED spinning the radio dial of my sainted Italian father’s Oldsmobile, so that at 5 years old I was already plugged in to the first wave of rock & roll - Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.
I thank the rock & roll gods and especially thank my Dad for buying me my first guitar when I was 16 in 1968. I joined my first band only a few short weeks later. The first song I sang in public was Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” at a classmate’s basement rec-room birthday party. Life was good. By 1973 I had progressed through girl groups, surf music, the British Invasion, psychedelia, nascent heavy-metal, country-rock, sensitive singer-songwriters and prog-rock.
By that time, though, I was itching for a change. From my perspective of the rolling over of rock & roll every 10 years (Elvis Presley 1954 > The Beatles 1964) I was waiting for The Next Wave of Rock & Roll. For me, that next wave’s arrival was Mott The Hoople, The New York Dolls and Elliott Murphy. The Dolls were gonna be the New Rolling Stones, Elliott was gonna be the New Bob Dylan and Mott was gonna be the new Dylan backed by the new Rolling Stones.
That didn’t pan out, of course: Mott and the Dolls had broken up by 1975, and I’m forced to admit that (other than with rock critics and rock aficionados) Elliott Murphy never really broke through in any meaningful way. (Though he remains my most prized & favorite rock & roll artist of all time and continues to record & perform to this day; as does Ian Hunter from Mott and David Johansen from the Dolls, 50 years later. Look ‘em up.)
By 1976 my dream of Rock & Roll Regeneration was over. Lee Abrams & his ilk jammed AOR radio down everybody’s throats; tight playlists came in, corporate-rock (Styx/Journey/Foreigner) flourished, and the soft-rock likes of Eagles and Fleetwood Mac towered over everything. Rock & Roll had gone from Little Richard to Don Henley in 20 short years. Rock & roll was now safe and neat & tidy. It made me wanna puke. (Of course at that point, punk had to get invented, but that’s a whole other blog for a whole ‘nother time.)
Fortunately for me, the producers of the Midnight Special - the early 70’s late-night rock & roll TV show (along with Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert) - fed a steady stream of the great (and not-so-great) rock & roll artists of the day into American television sets every Friday night. Now they have started putting their clips on YouTube. Here are some of my favorites of those clips.
These clips are not drawn from the Midnight Special, but NEEDED to be included here.
This blog originally appeared on the Pencil Storm blogsite, January 23rd, 2021.
Today - Valentine's Day, 2021 - would have been Sylvain's 70th birthday.
Sylvain Sylvain – lynchpin guitarist, songwriter, & fashion mobster of The New York Dolls – passed away on January 13th after a two and ½ year battle with cancer.
After I wrote that first sentence I followed it about five different ways: the biographical route (Sylvain – born Sylvain Mizrahi in Cairo, Egypt on Valentine’s Day 1951, fled Egypt with his family to escape anti-Semitism – jeez, I GUESS you would flee; if you think it was easy being Jewish in 1950’s Egypt you better think again, mofumbo); the musical route (trying to explain how Sylvain and Johnny Thunders worked like TWO guitarists – and I mean this in an entirely complimentary way – with only ONE brain & one set of hands); the historical route (bringing in Sylvain’s post-Dolls solo career, his time in the David Johansen Group, the 21st century resurgence of the Dolls, etc.).
But you could read any & all of those things anywhere on Google, so I decided to tell you how The New York Dolls saved my rock & roll existence and how badly music sucked in 1973, before the Dolls’ first album came out. Wikipedia tells me that first, self-titled album was released July 27th, 1973. I’m pretty sure I bought it the first week it came out, if not the first DAY – record stores didn’t always HAVE every new release the first day they came out back then – because I had been reading about the Dolls in Creem magazine, my Rock & Roll Bible of the time.
First off, the front cover sucked: the Dolls done up in full gay/transvestite mode (teased bouffant hair & platform shoes dominated). I’m sorry, but I was a born & bred West Side of Columbus, Ohio, boy – meaning blue-collar/lower-middle-working class – and that image was JUST NOT gonna fly with my rock & roll brethren. But OH MAN when I dropped the needle on the record that first day and “Personality Crisis” came roaring out of my cheap-ass Sears & Roebuck speakers – keeping every promise rock & roll had made to me throughout the 1950’s & 60’s – I was in fuckin’ HEAVEN. “Looking For A Kiss” came next, was even BETTER a song, and goddamn if there wasn’t one weak cut on the album (a critique I don’t throw around lightly).
I’ve written elsewhere that previous to the Dolls my favorite “rock & roll” band was Loggins & Messina, and how that was the saddest sentence I’ve ever written, and that is exactly & entirely true. How I could have put the purveyors of atrocities like “Vahevala” and “Your Mama Don't Dance” in the same musical UNIVERSE as the Dolls remains a mystery to me to this day. Except it’s NOT a mystery, it was just the times. In the early 70’s all of my music-loving friends – who had cut our rock & roll teeth on the likes of The Who, The Yardbirds, and The MC5 – were now hippies (or THOUGHT we were hippies, we pretty much all had jobs). And we now all listened to Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Eagles and all that country-rock crap, or singer/songwriter ephemera like Batdorf & Rodney or (God help me) Pearls Before Swine.
Anyway, a picture – or in this case, to be more exact, TWO pictures – is worth a thousand words, so here is Ricki C. (five years before “Ricki C.” was actually invented) before and after The New York Dolls’ first record. If I’ve said it once since 1973, I’ve said it dozens of times: If it wasn’t for The New York Dolls, today in 2021 I would have a gray ponytail halfway down my back and still be listening to Grateful Dead bootlegs on my stereo.
A PRETTY GOOD SEVEN-DAY RUN OF ROCK & ROLL SHOWS IN COLUMBUS; MAY, 1974
“OHHHH MAN, the show must be cancelled,” I whined to Pat as we got out of her orange Chevy Vega. (I didn’t have a driver’s license or a car until I was 28 years old.) We walked up the big stone steps to Vet’s to get our refund – rock & roll shows got cancelled at the drop of a hat back in those pre-Ticketmaster/Live Nation days – and ran into Chet, one of my dad’s old buddies, working the door. “Hey Chet, is the show cancelled?” I asked. “No, it’s not cancelled,” he said. “Then why are there no cars in the parking lot?” I continued. “Because there are no people in the venue,” Chet replied nonchalantly, flipping away a cigarette.
Damned if he wasn’t exactly accurate. I had bought front-row balcony seats for the show as was my custom back then, when I would put a little Panasonic cassette recorder on the lip of the balcony to tape the shows without any crowd noise and to get GREAT sound coming right off the stage. When we got to our seats, there were only two other people in the entire balcony, and that couple moved downstairs during the opening set by Isis – a long-forgotten all-female horn-driven funk/rock band from NYC that the Dolls had brought on tour with them.
While the houselights were up in the break between Isis and the Dolls I counted the “crowd.” There were 151 people – counting Pat & I in our own private balcony – in an auditorium that seated 3172 (an exact figure I knew from all the years my dad had worked there). The first ten rows of Vet’s weren’t even full. I was crushed. I’m not ashamed to admit that I very nearly cried. I was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that The New York Dolls were going to be “The Next Big Thing” and render the likes of The Rolling Stones quaint & redundant. Creem magazine HAD TOLD ME THAT. The media wouldn’t LIE TO ME, would they?
I further believed that Elliott Murphy – who had also debuted in 1973 with the masterful Aquashow album – was going to be the New Bob Dylan and that Mott The Hoople – who I had liked since 1969 but LOVED since “All The Young Dudes” in ’72 – were gonna be the Stones AND Dylan rolled into one. Rock & roll was gonna roll itself over in 1974 and rejuvenate itself just like The Beatles and the British Invasion had done in 1964.
But I was wrong. Within two years Lee Abrams and Classic Rock Radio had ossified rock & roll into truly endless re-plays of the Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd and Bachman Turner Overdrive that PERSIST TO THIS DAY. And Corporate Rock – your Styx’s, your Journey’s, your Kansas’ (or is it Kansai?), your Boston’s, your Foreigner’s – were poured into the arenas of the Midwest & elsewhere to suck up all those stoned-out Teenage Wasteland dollars. (Thank God for Aerosmith: my salvation of one-word-name 70’s hard-rock bands.)
Does any of this mean I love Sylvain Sylvain and that first New York Dolls record one iota less, 47 years later? Does any of this mean I didn’t love Sylvain’s solo ventures with The Criminals following the original Dolls’ break-up? Does any of this mean I wasn’t thrilled when Sylvain turned up in David Johansen’s first solo band in 1978? Does any of this mean the second incarnation of The New York Dolls featuring Johansen and Sylvain from 2004-2011 and the three great albums they recorded are ever far from my CD player? Does any of this mean I’m not gonna miss Sylvain Sylvain and his heart, soul, guitar, piano & songs until I join him, Johnny, Arthur & Jerry? Not on your life. – Ricki C. / January 20th, 2021
ps. By the way; As the Last Doll Standing, I wish David Johansen good health & a long life in our Rock & Roll Universe.
FEAST YOUR EYES ON THESE, LADIES & GENTLEMEN……
“Teenage News” a David Johansen/Sylvain Sylvain co-write, intended as the first single from the never-recorded THIRD New York Dolls album.
The David Johansen Group, featuring Sylvain Sylvain, in all their rock & roll glory. I know the tag says 1980, but I say this was from 1978.
The 21st Century New York Dolls,rhyming “anthropomorphize ya” with “perversely polymorphosize ya.”Let’s see Mumford & Sons try that.
(My buddy Kyle & I saw this incarnation of the Dolls in 2006 at The Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland, and they were KILLER!)
(The June BVF concept is Songs You've Never Heard Before That You REALLY Need To Hear)
This is David Johansen and his first post-New York Dolls backing band, the Staten Island Boys, from German television show Musikladen, circa 1978. (I know it says 1980 on the video, but I'm pretty sure this was 1978, judging from the look of the band.) (And how great was German Music Television? If there is one thing I have learned from YouTube it is that between this and Rockpalast, the Germans made Midnight Special and Don Kirshner's Rock Concert look as silly & stupid as I suspected in my heart they were in their heyday.) Enjoy........
inspirational verse; "Want you to come in my kitchen and not my kitchenette /
Want you to come in my dining room, not my dinette; nyet, nyet /
I can't get the kind of love, so let's just dance and I'll forget" - David Johansen, 1978
(by the way, for those of you scoring at home, that "nyet, nyet" is the greatest use
of the Russian language to express negative emotion EVER in the rock & roll idiom)
ps. Is that Watershed's mid-1990's Sony Music Corporation A&R representative Frankie LaRocka playing drums on this show? Fuck yeah, it is.
pps. For Ricki C.'s real-life encounter with David Johansen in 1979 at Columbus, Ohio's Agora Ballroom, check out blog entry Exchanging Pleasantries with David Johansen, February 7th, 2012.
I've said it many times in the past, I'll say it again here: If it weren't for The New York Dolls, right at this moment I would have a long grey ponytail halfway down my back and be listening incessantly to The Grateful Dead's Dick's Picks series and old Jefferson Airplane retrospectives. I'd probably also be sporting those little round hippie eyeglasses.
The New York Dolls came into my life in 1973 courtesy of Creem magazine, my rock & roll Bible at the time. (By the way, for those of you scoring at home, the 12 issues of Creem magazine in calendar year 1973 were, and are, the epitome of rock & roll journalism now and for all time.) (Come to think of it, a blog entry on the sorry state of rock & roll journalism in calendar year 2013 would not be a bad idea. Watch for it on these pages.)
In 1973 I was still middling away through college, Dave Blackburn had moved to Boston, I was playing in some fucked-up little hippie band whose other main member idolized Pearls Before Swine. (Don't ask, look 'em up on YouTube.) Then that guy, Andy Boller by name, broke up the band by moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan to become a macrobiotic cook. (No joke, although it sounds like a punchline.)
There are very few bands and individuals who have actually changed the way I view the world. The New York Dolls are one of them. (Again, for those of you scoring at home; Elliott Murphy and Jonathan Richman of The Modern Lovers are two of the others, both of whom I also discovered in 1973 courtesy of Creem.) I can't say I ever adopted their fashion sense - you COULD NOT get away with this shit on the mean streets of the West Side of Columbus, Ohio, in 1973 (or possibly any other year, before or since) - but man did I learn a thing or two about writing a rock & roll song with full forward propulsion from these boys.
In this clip the guitars are out of tune in spots, the vocals are at times off-key, bassist Arthur Kane is sporting perhaps the WORST OUTFIT in the annals of rock & roll fashion, and still they're one of the five greatest bands I've ever heard or seen. David Jo, Johnny, Sylvain, Arthur, Jerry; thank you, from the bottom of my pacemaker-driven heart.
inspirational verse; "A little pill for my leg, but that didn't ache /
Got the pills for my heart, but a little too late / Got some pills for my love, to get me at ease /
That's when the rock & roll nurse took me down on my knees!" - Bo Diddley, 1958
In 1979 I was working in the warehouse of a now-defunct catalog showroom called Service Merchandise. Payday was Friday, I didn't work weekends, so by 5:05 pm my thoughts had generally turned to rock & roll. If nothing was going on in Columbus, those thoughts often turned to Ann Arbor, Michigan. I had idolized Detroit bands since 1969 - The MC5 and The Stooges, in particular - and Sonic's Rendezvous Band (containing not only Fred "Sonic" Smith of The MC5 and Scott Asheton of The Stooges, but also Scott Morgan of The Rationals and Gary Rasmussen from The Up!) played a bar called The Second Chance in Ann Arbor all the time all through 1979. Ann Arbor was only a three-hour drive, so a lotta Fridays we pointed a car north and my buddies and I would make the drive up to Michigan. (I mention this partly because I now sometimes find it difficult to travel to The Rumba Cafe or The Tree Bar for shows I wanna see, and those bars must be upwards of six to ten miles from my home.)
One Friday night I was in the bathroom at The Second Chance and a guy stumbled up to the urinal next to me. He had to lean on the wall just to stay upright. The guy was a few inches shorter than me but with his hair teased way up high we were about the same height. I glanced over at him as he hacked up a lung while he was pissing and thought he looked familiar but I couldn't quit place him. Judging by the hair, I thought it might be somebody from either a Columbus or Ann Arbor band.
I made it back out to where my friends were standing. They were digging Fred Smith blazing through a guitar solo and when the guy teetered out of the bathroom I said to them, "Hey, look at this guy, do we know him?" "Jesus, Ricki, that's Johnny Thunders from the Dolls," my bass player said, "How fucked up IS he?" "Pretty fucked up," was my dejected reply.
For the next hour or so I watched as Thunders lurched around the bar, hitting up people for drinks or cash. I later learned he was in town forming a band (which later became Gang War) with Wayne Kramer, also late of The MC5 and also a junkie. I just couldn't get over that this was the same guy I saw live and on TV just five years earlier, cutting great wide swaths of rock & roll guitar noise next to David Johansen in The New York Dolls. My brush with Johansen was still a little ways off (see Exchanging Pleasantries With David Johansen blog, February 2012) but David was an erudite, hilarious gentleman next to the shambling wreck that was Johnny Thunders that night.
I've never really understood the concept of heroin addiction. I think I might be too simpleminded for it. My family always had cats when I was growing up. And since I grew up in the 1960's before spaying and neutering were a big deal, there were always kittens around. One day in 1971, when I was still living in my mother's house, before my ex-wife Pat and I were married, we were in my mom's basement watching the latest litter of kittens playing. It was just starting to sink in to me that almost all of the musicians I admired were fucked up the large majority of the time. I was a very naive young man. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin had already left this mortal coil and I was still very much in the dark. As Pat and I laughed at those kittens rolling around the basement, leaping ferociously on each other in the most innocent version of combat I could possibly conceive of, I said to her, "I don't see how anybody can be addicted to heroin when they could be watching this."
I still can't. I guess that's one reason I've been allowed to grow old with rock & roll.
It was sometime in 1979, I was a roadie for The Buttons, Willie Phoenix's second-best band EVER, after Romantic Noise. (Much more on them in a later post.) Willie & the boys were hot in Columbus right then, they were the go-to band for opening slots at the 1300-person capacity Columbus Agora when the club booked "punk" or "new wave" acts. David Johansen and his band were touring their second album, David was an ex-New York Doll, they were big, it was a great opening opportunity.
We loaded in right before Johansen’s soundcheck and got to stay around. (Back then, not every band would let you watch their soundcheck. Some of them cleared the club entirely.) Johansen and his band were a BLAZING live act during that period. Their SOUNDCHECK was better than 90% of the rock & roll shows I saw in those nascent synth-pop days. First rule at the Agora for opening acts was "Don’t fuck with the headliners." We were pretty much instructed not to even SPEAK to them, let alone try to pass off demos or stump for opening gigs in other cities.
But, as I was setting up The Buttons' gear, David Johansen walked over to me and asked in that foghorn-rasp-Staten-Island-by-way-of-Brooklyn accent of his, "So, we gonna have a rockin’ show tonight?" I told him I thought we were. He said, "These guys any good?" nodding over at Willie, Greg Glasgow, John Ballor and Dee Hunt, who were huddled in the wings, nervously watching me ignore the Agora Management Prime Directive about not talking to the headliners. I told him, "Yeah, they’re great. In fact, they might actually give you guys a run for your money."
Johansen laughed skeptically but graciously at that, so - emboldened by the fact that he had spoken to me first - I carried on the conversation with, "Ya know, I saw you play here in Columbus at Vet’s Memorial with The New York Dolls in 1974." Johansen stopped laughing, got instantly serious, looked me up and down and said, "Really? You don’t look like a faggot." I was pretty taken aback by that reply, but managed to answer, "Uhhh, I’m not, actually." Johansen continued with, "Well all I remember coming back to the HO-tel after the show in Columbus at Vet’s Memorial in 1974 was faggots." We both cracked up laughing at that, he high-fived me, told me to have a great show, spun around and conducted a perfect rock & roll star exit.
I had been a shy, sensitive, book-reading child in the 1950's; I had long hair on the West Side of Columbus, Ohio, in the 1960’s; I played in punk-rock bands on the West Side of Columbus, Ohio in the 1970’s; I was no stranger to being called a faggot. That instance with David Johansen was by far the coolest, EVER.
