The New York Dolls by Nina Antonia

Author:Nina Antonia [Antonia, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-673-3
Publisher: Music Sales Limited
Published: 2011-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

The New York Dolls had become their own fictional image of how they dreamed life in a rock band would be, but they didn’t understand that they were now part of an industry with its own rules and regulations. Arthur Kane: “We had a lot of fun and got to live the fantasy of what a teenager would imagine it would be like to be a young rock star. We lived that, we were that. We were fans that came of age and had their dream come true and that’s what in the end made it so disastrous for us.” As Paul Nelson later explained: “If the Dolls were difficult to work with at times, it was because they understood nothing of the music business and recording, seemed naïve or unable to learn about either, and were rarely encouraged to exhibit any kind of self-control regarding the bankbook or the clock.”

December 3 dawned in a state of crisis and closed in calamity. The day began with the news that Marty Thau and Steve Leber had returned to New York, leaving the group without any funds. The Dolls asked for and received an advance to bail them out but then scurried back into their rooms with their Parisienne playmates when they should have been preparing for an appearance on French TV. For over three hours Patrick Taton handled a barrage of calls from an irate television producer, who eventually threatened to cancel the show and swore he would never again work with any of Mercury’s acts. Once the Dolls emerged, it transpired that the road crew had been dawdling in their duties and were five hours behind schedule in setting up the equipment at the television studio. Finally the show was taped and the Dolls left in a stretch Mercedes for their next engagement, a gig at The Bataclan on the Rue Voltaire. At the gymnasium-like venue there waited a French film maker who was shooting the Dolls for a short documentary that also featured The Who. She very much hoped the band would live up to their reputation, as did the hyped up audience who snaked around the block waiting for the Bataclan to open. The Dolls entered the venue through the back door and were taken upstairs to the dressing room area. Sylvain: “Johnny called me over to look out of the window. He goes ‘Look, The Beatles are here.’ We looked down and there was a fucking pool of people, it looked like something out of A Hard Day’s Night. Johnny loved that, it was really cool to see him enjoying that. Of course, I loved it too.”

When the Dolls came to do their set, however, the stage was crawling with people. On Sylvain’s side, there was a gathering of Dolls’ fans, but where Thunders usually stood, most of the space was taken up with aggressive street punks. Peter Jordan: “For some reason all the bouncers in the Bataclan were either Samoan or Haitian and the whole audience was male.

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