In an era when Bee Gees and Carole King were crowning the charts, New York Dolls were proudly streetwise, brassy, and chaotic. Their music was utterly unconceptual; it was primal. They were camp and sloppy in a way audiences at the time didn’t quite appreciate. As Johansen once told NME’s Nick Kent: “We attract only degenerates to our concerts… We want to be known as the tackiest boys in New York.”
Live, the Dolls stumbled and banged through their setlist. Thunders thrashed his guitar like a rottweiler gnashing a rabbit, his 8-ball eyes large and black; his stage presence was frightening at a time when “frightening stage presence” was still a liability. Johansen, rubber-limbed and cheeky, was the band’s quotable mouthpiece and wellspring of witty ripostes. As noted in Barney Hoskyns’ 1998 book Glam!, Johansen shocked the British press with his progressive take on sexuality:
Everyone here seems to be…homosexual. Kids are finding out there isn’t much difference between them sexually. They’re finding out that the sexual terms—homo, bi, hetero—are just words in front of “sexual.” They accuse me of transsexuality because I kissed [second drummer Jerry Nolan], but I love Jerry. I think boys should kiss boys, don’t you?
New York Dolls, like the glitter gods before them, were experimenting with gender expression without any pretense or agenda. They weren’t meticulous drag performers like Divine or Jayne County; their trashy takes on the era-defining style of Ronnie Spector or Mary Weiss were instinctual, as was the Dolls’ absorption of the 1960s girl group songbook. Their drag had a communal aspect, too. As Rolling Stone’s Ed McCormack once wrote, “The Dolls pass around a Max Factor lipstick the way some bands pass around a joint.”
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After a year of gigging, New York Dolls had become underground royalty, and record labels were flocking to sign them. But industry interest soured in November 1972, when disaster struck on the band’s first UK tour. After a show supporting the Faces at Wembley Stadium, a 21-year-old Billy Murcia took off for a London house party, where he passed out after reportedly mixing liquor and barbiturates. A woman tried to revive him by putting him in a cold bath and pouring coffee down his throat. He died of accidental asphyxiation.
Immediately after the tragedy, the band returned to New York, where drummer Jerry Nolan replaced Murcia. “Nothing ever happened with the Dolls until shocking things took place. People love scandals,” Sylvain Sylvain told Musician in 1981. “When Billy died, all of a sudden the band was playing the bigger room in the Mercer Arts Center. Instead of the 150-person room, we were playing weekends for 500.” Murcia’s passing would be the first of several untimely and unfortunate deaths, including Thunders and Nolan, both of whom died relatively young after years of heroin addiction. Only Kane, Sylvain, and Johansen would make it past their 50s.
