Looking For A Kiss - the New York Dolls
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
An example of the increasingly frequent phenomenon of the demise of the last man standing of the classic line-up of classic bands is David Johansen who died just over a year ago on February 28th 2025.
Over the years, much has been made of the influence of the Dolls on punk rock although ex Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten is on record as playing this down, eschewing New York influences in favour of British glam rockers such as Bowie, T Rex and Slade and sixties mod bands the Kinks and the Who as inspiration.
Certainly it can't be overlooked that Malcolm McLaren briefly managed the Dolls for two months from February 1975 before heading back to the UK in June to become the manager of the Sex Pistols. And there's no doubt that Dolls' "attitude", their "in your face" delivery and the driving chunky chords of guitarist Johnny Thunders may have been in McLaren's mind, at least, as the Pistols wreaked their own particular musical brand of anarchy in the UK over the next few years. McLaren's influence on the Dolls can only be regarded as negligible, Thunders citing him as the cause of the band's first break up at the end of April, (they got back together two months later in July), but their musical mark had already be made two years before this with the release of their eponymous first LP release in 1973.
It's easy to rewrite history with the benefit of hindsight. While I was a student at Manchester University in the mid seventies, I went to numerous gigs at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, the Palace Theatre, the Albert Hall, Salford Poly and the Student Union gigs at the main hall at Owens, and I can remember all of them from Queen and the Thunderbyrds, all the way down to Gallagher and Lyle, the Pirates and Bedside Manners. I can remember them, because I specifically chose to see the headline act, and mostly can't recall the support band.
I also went to maybe twenty gigs at a dingy, tiny little venue called The Squat, just off the Oxford Road, in the heart of the Owens University complex. I can hardly remember the names of any of the bands that I watched there, because none of them were famous at the time, and I was going, not for the band, but for the late night drinking, the dope, the longshot chance of meeting a girl and the supercharged fun of a dance. Admittance was never more than £1, and I generally only scored on the beer and dance fronts, if you call leaping up and down manically with a hundred others in ten minute stints in a small windowless room, crammed together with only our sweat separating us like vegetable oil in a sardine tin. Just about every band that was on there was high energy and really great. Of the many, many bands I saw there, the only one I can specifically recall was the Fall, because they were so good and, or possibly that, I saw them twice. Among the bands that played their earliest gigs at the Squat were Joy Division. I may have even seen them. I may have been drunk. But I didn't go to see them specifically so I can't remember. That's the real past.
At the time, people talked of punk as the latest thing, and most of the bands at the Squat were termed punk or "new wave" but to me and most of my fellow Squatters, punk was not so much a rebellion against society as a type of music, a style of haircut or a way of dressing. People talked of punk, and indeed there were one or two people with punk hairdos and even punk dress, but most of us in the audience were just drunken blokes, letting it all go. And the bands looked pretty much like us too. Certainly the Fall did. The point being that other legendary bands regularly played the Squat at the time
"New York Dolls" is one of the great albums, sounding better and better as each year passes, somehow simultaneously becoming more knowing and more innocent as each year passes. One of the most annoying things about it is that, track by track, it's so good you can't single any one song out as being inferior to the others. If you play one, make sure you have the time put by, because you have to play the lot.
Produced sparingly by mainstream rocker Todd Rundgren in 1973, many critics at the time condemned "New York Dolls" as being the work of "second rate Stones impersonators" missing the point that the record's relentless attack and artlessness makes "Goat's Head Soup" the Stones offering of the same year, sound positively pretentious by comparison.
I'm going for "Looking For A Kiss" for it's mean, swampy leanness, its intro tribute to the Shangri-las's "Give him a Great Big Kiss",
"When I say I'm in love, you best believe I'm in love, l-u-v"
(the Dolls were to get the Shangri-las' legendary producer Shadow Morton to produce their next album see https://www.unclestylus.com/single-post/2017/12/21/girl-groups-weeks-no-5-the-shangri-las ), and, of course, Johansen's frenetic vocal.
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