When critics write the history of punk, they inevitable name the late ’60s and early ’70s forerunners TheVerlvetsStoogesMC5andDolls in one breath, but they were hardly four versions of the same band.
The Velvet Underground were an art experiment in minimalist aggression, The Stooges reduced rock to thermonuclear cave paintings, The MC5 were a biker gang with Mao’s little red book in their back pockets, and the The New York Dolls, for many, were everyband.
Every basement guitar player could listen to their records and say, “I can do that,” and be right; nothing in the music required either the absurd technical skill of contemporaries like Yes or Emerson, Lake and Paler, nor did it require evolutionary regression like The Stooges. Reading about themm in Circus, Hit Parader and Creem, they didn’t seem any brighter than the rest of us, but they seemed to have a lot of glamorous fun. Their career wasn’t all silk and confetti though, as Nina Antonia shows in Too Much Too Soon.
Amonia’s book actually addresses a need because the Dolls’ story has remained generally untold. The most some people know is that by the end of their career, they were managed by Malcolm Mclaren, whose next managerial project would be The Sex Pistols. Thar leaves a lot of story left to tell, like how they got Shadow Morron, The Shangrilas’ producer, to come our of retirement to produce their second album.
It also leaves the saddest story left untold, which is how guitar player Johnny Thunders became one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most famous junkies, Antonia addresses these issues and tells who did what, but she doesn’t provide much insight into the band members, which is pretty important in band biographies. Since readers learn little about the band members in the book, the narrative has a history book feel to it; it certainly isn’t the emotionally involving story that Peter Guralnick’s Careless Love is.
Despite this, Antonia does lift the book beyond a simple tale of a band because the Dolls’ story shows how a band lives fast, dies young, and leaves a beautiful cult. They started young and dumb, loved the rock ‘n’ roll life they’d always heard about, then got big locally and drank and got laid like rock stars.
They signed a contract, mistook that for “making it,” then let a pursuit of booze, drugs, girls and good rimes affect all subsequent business decisions. When the Dolls signed with an already nervous Mercury Records, singer David Johansen showed up after drinking all night and passed out at the boardroom table, causing Mercury to put the band on a short leash from the outset. The band further demonstrated Dolls-like business judgment by playing up their cross-dressing glam image on the cover of the first album, looking like a gang of tough girls or perverted guys, and certainly not a band that radio stations in Omaha would want to sandwich in a set with Foghat and Santana. Antonia’s treatment of the controversy that surrounded their image is one of the best things about Too Much Too Soon.
In a Marilyn Manson world, it’s hard to imagine anyone could be outraged by guys in women’s stretch pants, glittery silk shirts and make-up, but as recently as 1971, the people that didn’t love their outrageousness were horrified by the Dolls. At the behest of McLaren in 1975, they found that flirting with Communist imagery was even more inflammatory than sexual ambiguity, and even their New York following turned on them.
Critic Paul Nelson, who originally signed the Dolls to Mercury, defended their red leather jumpsuits and hammer and sickle backdrop, writing, “Somehow all too many people again failed to recognize the Dolls’ nihilistic, riffraff sense of humor.” Today it’s hard to imagine what The New York Dolls outrageous. Eighties metal bands cheaply approximated their look, and since punk, raw bands that live on the edge of musically falling apart are common. Johnny Thunders’ Chuck Berry-on-speed guitar style has become a standard part of every guitar player’s arsenal, and singer David Johansen turned into Buster Poindexter.
In 1971 though, as Antonia tells it, the Dolls were like guests at a party who finagled an invite and, obvious to their unwantedness, drank all the scotch and flirted with all the beautiful women until they were thrown out by their collars and belts. Today that may still be as good a definition of “punk” as any. In 1991, Johnny Thunders O.D.’ed in New Orleans at the St. Peter’s Guest House, and for the last ten years of his career, his solo shows had a grim sideshow dimension. Many in the crowd were waiting for the inevitable last act of his junkie legend — the onstage death — and anything musically interesting was merely okay.
If he had died performing, his story would no doubt have ended in Killer Art, a book by Lynn Powers. Powers compiles stories of artist and audience misadventures, with examples of physically and morally revolting art in a book that celebrates its own outrageousness featuring angry denouncements of the project on the back cover where promotional blurbs usually go.
The critics who charge Killer Art with being exploitative are right. Powers catalogues bizarre art projects, but she doesn’t approach any of the rhetorical or aesthetic issues connected to euthanizing and stuffing five puppies for a piece of sculpture. Instead, she treats each work like one more freaky thing. In her sideshow, there is no difference between a guy shooting half of his face off listening to Ozzy Osbourne, a graffiti artist falling under a subway train, and a performance artist hanging himself superman-style from a rope between two buildings with fish hooks through the back of his naked body to carry his weight.
By stripping away the stories or aesthetics behind each incident or piece of art, she turns each object into a dog-faced boy or an alligator girl — something or someone to be ooh’ed and ahh’ed at before moving on to the next attraction. Sideshows, however are an American institution, even if they appeal to us at our most lowbrow. The accounts of performance art events assembled here will gross out readers who’ll re-read the passage anyway because they can’t believe they read it right the first time.
This is a carnival book, and dressing it up in art book design is an old deceit, like showing nude movies in the guise of public health lectures. The cover and production values announce class and dignity, but the contents are sawdust floors and geeks biting the heads off chickens.
