TOO MUCH, TOO SOON: The Makeup & Breakup of The New York Dolls by Nina Antonia

Author:Nina Antonia [Antonia, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-673-3
Publisher: Omnibus Press
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

Lipstick Killers & Dolls’ Molls

They were the kind of girls who never took off their make-up before going to bed. They hung out with bikers in black leather and boys in street gangs. At their earliest shows they stripped down to their garter belts, a ploy to pad out a set with hardly any material in it. They were arrested 16 times during their short career and even convicted of gun-running. Along with their producer and mentor, George ‘Shadow’ Morton, The Shangri-Las gave voice to all the sad, bad girls that the other girl groups of the time wouldn’t have dared represent. Tragedy, a sense of drama in every inflection, unhappy love affairs, motel rooms instead of honeymoon suites, all were enhanced by Shadow Morton with an orchestra of effects. He didn’t so much produce as provide a B-movie soundtrack for The Shangri-Las’ four top twenty hits. Between September 1964 and November 1965, the girls peaked with ‘Remember (Walking In The Sand)’, ‘Leader Of The Pack’, ‘Give Him A Great Big Kiss’ and ‘I Can Never Go Home Anymore’. By 1966, they had pretty much gone the way of their songs, back out into the streets. The personnel, originally two sets of sisters, began to change. None of them made any money. One Shangri-La went to heaven and no doubt the others drifted into unhappy marriages.

The Shangri-Las were The New York Dolls’ soul sisters, and with this in mind Marty Thau set out to find the whereabouts of Shadow Morton with a view to asking him to produce the Dolls’ second album. Unfortunately for the Dolls, Shadow hadn’t been sealed in a time capsule since 1965 and the man who wrote ‘Leader Of The Pack’ and ‘Give Him A Great Big Kiss’ was older and weirder. Paul Nelson: “Shadow Morton … talk about a mysterious man. There was no way to contact Shadow by phone ever, except at this little bar. He reeked of Monty Clift and James Dean and he had this philosophical religious thing. He’d go on forever about this Pan religion stuff. It didn’t make much sense but it was fascinating.”

In between The Shangri-Las and the Dolls, Shadow had worked with Vanilla Fudge and Janis Ian before dropping out to pursue a high velocity interest in racing cars. He narrowly avoided the kind of death crash scenario The Shangri-Las sang about, recovered from paralysis and waited for fortune to smile again. Morton hadn’t heard of the Dolls and presumed they were some kind of a girl group until he was invited by Thau to watch them rehearse at the Media Sound Studio on West 57th Street. After a further meeting, Morton agreed to a $10,000 production fee, just enough to buy a Winnebago and live out his retirement dream of travelling around the United States.

Shadow’s appointment was far from a democratic decision. Sylvain: “Shadow Morton was never my pick. He’d been groovy in the Sixties but compared to what we were doing, it was like night and day.

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