Forewarned
Johnny Thunders didn't just flirt with death, he courted it. Even so, his eventual demise in New Orleans on 23 April 1991 still came as a terrible shock. All of the false alarms and embellished whispers of his passing over the years had somehow managed to make Johnny seem both vulnerable and invincible, until the dread inevitable was finally substantiated.

When I first began working on In Cold Blood in the early eighties, Thunders wasn't a memory and I wrote in the present tense, hope clinging to the ledge, Johnny nine-lives defying the odds. Now it's all consigned to the past.

Johnny Thunders created an almost unique situation, in that it was next to impossible to separate the man from his reputation. When reality had finished reporting on drug problems, police busts and deportations, rumour picked up the story, erasing the fragile line between cold fact and neurotic fantasy. Then you had to separate the man from himself: Johnny Genzale - the shy sweetheart, and Johnny Thunders - the sleepy-eyed gutterpunk. Looked upon as the pale spectre of rock 'n' roll immolation, Thunders qualified his image every time he staggered into the mile-high headlines of the press. He lived a dangerous life and eventually came to represent what most people would rather forget when it comes to popular entertainment. Sure, they may want to read William Burroughs or go and see Trainspotting but media tourists rarely want to tangle with the real deal, choosing instead the darkness of the cinema or the printed word, so they can walk the same streets without having to cross through the shadows that exist there. Johnny didn't set out to be a dope fiend artiste ruling the roost of slum city rock, the needle haze as much a part of his performance as the guitar playing. He wanted to be as great as Presley before the army, or Sinatra in his prime, and sometimes he was. Sadly, and perhaps obviously, for a great many of Thunders' 'fans', one of the main pulls seemed to be the progression of the guitarist's mental and physical anguish, the tolerance of his body and the levels of his nihilistic, self-destructive motivations. As the condemned man of rock 'n' roll, Johnny wasn't always as oblivious as casual observers might have believed or critics presumed but he wasn't strong enough to escape, either.

He once said, on stage: 'OK. You got it. I'm gonna die tonight. I'm gonna die up here .'

And the audience cheered.

In time, the junkie mythology overshadowed Thunders' innate abilities; the unique rock 'n' roll sense of finesse, sharp wit and a singular guitar style. A legion of musicians have attempted to emulate his stance and attitude but haven't come close and never will. It's not too hard to play the way that Johnny did and guitarists have tried and will go on trying but they can't make it sound the same: a pact between persona, warmth and power that built to an extraordinary crescendo. When Johnny was on form, he could charm a snakepit of a crowd, snapping out of drugged lethargy to deliver all that rock 'n' roll ever promised to be: Freedom, Subversion, Style and Release. Johnny Thunders was the last embodiment of a broken perfection that was true rebel culture before commerce married creativity and stifled the bride. A miniature classic that assumed legendary proportions, Johnny Thunders had a way of moving through it all that told you he knew everything, even though there were some things he'd rather forget. Nina Antonia August 1999

1 A Jukebox Made Of City

Before the fifties died of an exquisitely painless form of cancer and fear, blood cells tingled to Dion and stolen Lucky Strikes. Leather jackets boasted turf designs stitched on the back like pirate flags as warnings to wanderers in the wrong parts of town. Baseball bats swung in alleys, while high above the shadows someone played a Paul-and-Paula tune. Drive-ins became the official shrines for swift sex, popcorn and B-movies, and Sal Mineo turned capped-sleeved vests into an art form.

On the outskirts of the city, where ivory was still the colour of soap not the polished handle of a switch-blade, a little kid with heavy black hair lay in bed listening, when he should have been sleeping, to the music that came dancing across the landing from his sister's room. The teenage romance and ruin of The Shangri-Las, The Crystals and The Angels seeping into his dreams. 'I grew up listening to music. My sister Mariann was five-and-a-half years older than me and she played all those girl groups, that's how I heard all that stuff.'

John Anthony Genzale was born in Queens, one of New York's outer boroughs, on 15 July 1952, a heady mix of second-generation Neapolitan and Sicilian heritage. His father, Emil, should have been proud but he was prouder still of his lady-killing charm and good looks, leaving his wife Josephine to fend for the family. Mariann Bracken: 'We lived in East Elmhurst, Queens. It was always just the three of us, my mother, Johnny and I. My father was a womaniser and he left when Johnny was an infant. We had little or no contact with him. He never gave my mother any support, financially or otherwise. She had to work at whatever she could and while she worked I took care of Johnny. We had a hard life but no matter what, Johnny had everything.' Except a guitar. By the time Johnny Genzale was four years old, he'd seen Elvis Presley personify what rebellion was on television and wanted some. He hadn't had to plead too much for his Ma to bring home a plastic guitar from the toy store, and although no melody could be plucked from the strings, it felt right. A year later he had his first brush with the law and audience approval. Mariann: 'He had to have his tonsils out and he kicked and screamed all the way to the hospital. He wasn't going in. We walked in one door, he ran out the other. A police officer brought him back. Although it was only one night in the hospital and home the next day, we were worried sick. When we went to pick him up the nurses told us that he had entertained them, he'd been imitating Elvis Presley the whole night!'

Although little Johnny Genzale was usually shy outside of his impromptu performances, he was a live wire and all of the esoteric disciplines of the Catholic church and his role as an altar boy did little to curb the wild streak that ran through him. It was baseball that mopped up his energy, hitting the ball as high as the stars, and even though he was kind of petite, he was strong enough and fast enough to make the neighbourhood team. 'I used to play baseball from eight in the morning till eight the next night and loved it.' Queens, after all, does boast Shea Stadium, where the legendary Mickey Mantle, the sporting hero of Johnny's childhood, brought the New York Yankees to baseball glory.

If Johnny Genzale progressed through his schooling in a deluge of bad behaviour reports that followed him from Our Lady of Fatima in nearby Jackson Heights, to New Town High, his passion for baseball remained a constant feature, something to excel in. Eventually scouted by the Philadelphia Phillies and several other teams including the Boston Red Sox at the age of thirteen, a future in the sport might have been on the cards for Johnny except for one Little League ruling that insisted upon the presence of the junior hopeful's father. Johnny Thunders would later tell journalists that he quit baseball after a coach demanded he cut his hair, evading not the truth but the hurt. While baseball lost a star in the making, rock 'n' roll gained one on the rebound when Johnny traded his bat for a bass guitar. Mariann Bracken: 'After he couldn't play baseball, he really started on his music. He formed a band with a bunch of kids in junior high school. I'd got a job in a small catering firm and they'd play there for bar mitzvahs and things like that. My mother says that at one time Johnny worked in the candy store on the corner, in the ice cream parlour, but the only thing I ever remember him doing was playing music.' Starting out as smart little princelings in their matching nylon no-crease suits covering the latest chart hits, they soon abandoned both the uniformity of their clothes and material, evolving into a short-lived rock band called The Reign. As they developed over the course of some nine months, Johnny began oscillating between playing bass and guitar. In the winter of '67, when the group entered Associated Studios in NY to cut a track with a psychedelic pop slant entitled 'Zippered Up Heart', little Johnny Genzale was credited as the lead guitarist, alongisde vocalist Don Bruce, drummer John Pisapia, organist George Boyd, and bassist Frank Sardelis. However, once Reign disbanded, little Johnny seems to have reverted back to bass.

Even though a place at Bryant High, a regular neighbourhood school, awaited Johnny, he managed, in what was by all accounts a heart-rending turn, to persuade his mother that he would be better suited attending a private, liberal establishment called Quintanos. Tucked behind Carnegie Hall and within easy reach of Central Park, Quintanos aimed to groom their students for success in the performing arts. However, no form of education, no matter how laid back, was going to corral Johnny Genzale and he bolted at the age of sixteen, to play in a city shaped like a million stone jukeboxes. Becoming familiar with the wash of noise and neon, he started hanging out at Nobody's Bar on Bleecker Street, a groupie haunt and pitstop for English bands passing through town, and the Fillmore East, renowned for its live rock acts.

It was quite a drive from their respective homes in Long Island, but the journey to New York City signified the start of the weekend for Janis Cafasso and her cousin, Gail Higgins Smith: 'When the Fillmore East opened in New York, we used to go there every Saturday night. In between acts we'd hang out in the lobby and Johnny was always there with a gang of boys. This was about 1967, when he was living in Jackson Heights. I don't remember how he came up to us but I do remember that by the end of the evening, he and Janis were sitting on the floor talking, which started this great romance. From that point on we'd go to the Fillmore with Johnny and whoever the boy was that I was seeing. The three of us even visited California together. After that, Janis and I were going to live in San Franciso but after New York we felt there was no night life, so we came back and decided that we would move into the city. We went over to John's house, got the Village Voice and found an apartment in the East Village and the three of us moved in. I took a job at Gimbel's department store. Was Janis working? Was John working? I can't remember them ever working while we lived there but we were all chipping in on the rent. I do remember Janis and John fighting, and Janis moving in and out, but in between the craziness, it was great fun. We all used to go to our parents and come back with shopping bags full of food. John would bring these big roast beefs from his mother and we'd cook these huge meals, but we had to eat really fast because John would eat everything that was on the table so if you didn't eat faster than him, you wouldn't get any. He used to sit in the other room with his bass guitar and try to play and sing. I would scream: "Give up John, just give up!" The first song he ever wrote was "Dirty Dusty Dungarees". We went to Coney Island where they have these little recording booths and we said: "Let's go in and make a record." He sung "Dirty Dusty Dungarees", then we sang the "Duke Of Earl" together.'

Costing less than a dollar to make, 'Dirty Dusty Dungarees' has gone the same sad way as the little novelty recording booths, simply vanishing with time. Johnny's future was still misty, but he had already chosen the direction that would engulf him. Gail Higgins Smith: 'Me, Johnny and Janis were big rock 'n' roll fans. We went anywhere to see a rock 'n' roll band and to meet rock 'n' roll people. Somehow, because we were brazen, we'd always end up meeting them. When we went to the Newport Jazz festival we ended up sitting in a hotel room with Rod Stewart, drinking beer. We met Janis Joplin, and the MC5, who were Johnny's heroes. He was so excited when he met Keith Richards. He would talk about him all the time. We met him at a bar on 5th Avenue and 13th Street. People like Jagger, Richards and Lennon used to go there and one night Keith Richards was there. We sat around this table, having drinks and meeting Keith. Johnny used to say: "I want to be a pop star, I want to be like Keith Richards." He even kept Keith's cigarette packet.' *

In 1969, Johnny and a girlfriend (almost certainly Janis Cafasso) took a three-month trip to London to check out the English music scene. Wielding a borrowed press pass, the young couple hustled their way into a plethora of gigs but the stand-out event of their vacation was seeing Tyrannosaurus Rex at the Roundhouse, in the period when Marc Bolan switched from acoustic to electric guitar. Johnny returned home ready to pursue a future in rock 'n' roll. If the finer details of his career were still somewhat vague, he already looked every inch the part with his long, dark, teased hair - akin to Ronnie Spector donning a tiara of raven's wings. Although his quiet manner ruled out any form of verbal self-promotion, his decorative appearance which had been further accentuated by Janis, who would find a future in fashion, drew the attention of most of the boys who would become The New York Dolls.

By the end of the sixties, Central Park was no longer a rallying point for hippy experimentation and the nudity and headbands were scorned by a new generation of kids who flocked to the park's Fountain landmark on Sunday afternoons, dressed to the nines. In July 1991, Jerry Nolan told the Village Voice: Out of the hundreds and hundreds of people you'd see at the Fountain, where everyone was profiling, Johnny and Janis stood out the most. You could see them ten miles away. She looked like a Doll, very heavy rouge, wild socks, platform shoes, lots of colours. He was really young then, 15 or 16. I was older, 22. Janis got Johnny into his look. He was wearing high heels, and you remember that teased-hair look, that Rod Stewart look? Johnny's was like that, but even more dimensionalised and exaggerated, teased all the way up in like a crown. It was so long. He would have a platinum blond streak down the back. He would have a girl's blouse on, and on top of that a sparkling girl's vest. And then maybe a cowboy scarf. Mixing in cowboy stuff with glamorous forties girls stuff . and he wore make-up which really set him off.

Originally hailing from Brooklyn, Jerry Nolan had been bounced back and forth between army bases in Oklahoma and Hawaii, after his mother married a military man. At the age of ten, Jerry and his sister went to see Elvis at a local roller derby arena. Already a little too hep to display outright enthusiasm, Nolan was nonetheless deeply impressed by both Presley's original band and his early sartorial splendour. After being taught to play the drums by a young black soldier, Jerry put into practice all that he had learned at a high school assembly talent contest in Oklahoma. The boy who had such a tough time in class suddenly acquired status in the eyes of his fellow students. 'That changed my whole life. I wasn't ashamed anymore. I could finally do something real good.' However, when the family moved back to Brooklyn, Nolan found a new status when he joined a gang called the Young Lords. It wasn't morality or cowardice that made him hold back from full on fighting but the thought of a rumpled suit and the dry-cleaning bill. Violence was a formality but style was everything. It could be said that playing drums eventually got Jerry off the street, but his hard-knock brand of rock 'n' roll was not about salvation. Nolan's career had been as choppy as the bumps and grinds of the strippers, whose routines he'd backed with a heavy hitting flourish after leaving school. By the time he set eyes on Johnny in Central Park, Jerry had just returned from Detroit, where he'd spent the summer playing in Suzi Quatro's band Cradle. Although Johnny was pretty young, Jerry Nolan could spot rocker credential from a million miles, and knew that one day they would be in a band together. If Jerry Nolan was sure of the future, Arthur Kane, a blonde from the Bronx who could have been tagged Marilyn Morose, and his best buddy George Fedorcik, were more hopeful than certain but equally impressed by Johnny's sense of style. George: 'We used to see Johnny at the Fillmore every time there'd be a British band playing. We were totally into the English scene - The Stones, The Yardbirds. We never really spoke to Johnny but we'd always say "Hi" because of the way he looked. We thought he was the coolest thing in the world.' * However, the nascent core of The New York Dolls was formed when Johnny started jamming with Sylvain Sylvain (née Mizrahi) and Billy Murcia. It wasn't like Johnny had to audition to play bass with them; Syl and Billy already considered him to be something of a local legend. Sylvain: 'Now this was the time when Gimme Shelter was playing. Me and Billy were in love with that movie and Johnny is in it. He's fooling around with his hair, sitting on one of his friend's shoulders. It's in the sequence when the lights get turned on the audience and Mick Jagger says something like: "New York, let's look at you, now." We used to see it every other day and we'd go "Hey man, there's that fucking guy we used to go to school with!"' *

In spite of the fact that all three had been raised in the same neighbourhood, and had attended New Town High and Quintano's, it actually took Syl and Billy longer to hook up with Johnny than might have been expected, due to a detour into the fashion industry. Although Sylvain's family had been forced to flee from Egypt during the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, while the Murcia clan made a similarly hasty exit from Colombia after Billy's father got embroiled in a business deal that turned hostile, both boys looked as if they'd been cut from similar cloth, sharing the same wilful corkscrew curls and slight build. They cemented their friendship after a playground scuffle in junior high, and became virtually inseparable. It seemed only natural for Billy, who had once been described as 'a cool drink of water with a hot head', to start playing drums, while Syl reached for the guitar. By 1968, they'd joined forces with an older, more accomplished guitarist called Mike Turby, who had gained neighbourhood notoriety with The Orphans - Queens' retort to The Rolling Stones. Declaring themselves to be 'The Pox', the trio whose influences included The Who and The Stooges, cut a demo for Harry Lookofsky who had been responsible for the grandiose production on The Left Banke's stateside top-ten single, 'Walk Away Renee'. Unfortunately the public remained immune to The Pox and Turby quit. Having failed to make a significant gesture with their music, they devoted themselves to what was then rock 'n' roll's second-in-command: fashion. As they began to weave psychedelic sweaters on hand looms, Sylvain learned the details of retail when he started working at a trendy men's boutique called A Different Drummer on Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street. Across the road in an old brownstone building was a hospital, yet no ambulances ever screeched to a halt outside. The victims might have been too small for stretchers but they were better cared for than the peeling façade over the entrance which read 'The New York Dolls' Hospital'. Billy thought it would make as great a name for a band as Sylvain did. As their fashion outlet, Truth & Soul, expanded, orders started coming in from Betsey Johnson's ultra-happening boutique, Paraphernalia, and they began to receive press attention. After being made a lucrative offer by a large knitting mill in Brooklyn, they sold their designs and went to Europe for the best part of a year. Like a down payment on their future, Sylvain purchased an impressive stack of Marshall amps while in London, which were shipped back to New York. Gathering dust in Billy's mom's basement, the amps lay dormant until the dandy duo returned from their travels, nabbed Johnny and finally activated The Dolls as 1970 drew to a close.

With all the pent-up energy of a freshly lit fire-cracker, Johnny Genzale was not cut out to be a bass player. Recognising this, Sylvain began to pass on some of Mike Turby's guitar licks. 'When it really started between us three, we became like a family. Johnny started coming down to the basement and I taught him all the riffs I had learned from Mike and the things that I had picked up on my own. I basically said, "Look, if you know those scales and you go like this, instead of doing the whole fucking bar chord, just hold it with two fingers and you make a little power chord." Johnny took to that, baby! We'd all sit on the bed with these cheap guitars and do Marc Bolan songs, as well as some blues and instrumentals.' * However, the opening phase of The Dolls lurched to a full stop after Syl went back to London.

Even if Johnny had in fact closed the door behind him, it always felt like it got slammed in his face when it came to girlfriends. Although he was never short of female attention, his closest relationships were doomed by his volatile neediness and by the age of nineteen, he had already written the song that many consider to be his finest moment, 'You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory'. Inspired by Janis, with whom he was embroiled in a typically intense saga of reunion and despair, the song takes its title from a throwaway line in one of his favourite television shows, Jackie Gleason and The Honeymooners, and plunges the depths of dejection. Gail Higgins Smith: 'Before he started taking drugs, his adrenalin level would make him high. I remember one time he got so crazed because of a fight with Janis, he started banging on this steel door that we'd had built because the flat was on the ground floor. It moved two feet out with the sheer force of him. It was emotional turmoil, not temper, that made him like that. The drugs didn't make John crazy, he was like that before he started taking them. He was still insecure.' While they would remain life-long friends, the overwrought nature of Johnny's relationship with Janis, combined with a disregard for boring stuff like coming up with rent money, led to Gail penning a polite 'Dear John' note in which she asked him to move out. After finding and losing a place on Avenue A, Johnny resorted to crashing at the Chelsea Hotel, before he got back together with Janis. If life wasn't already crazy enough, they turned their new 14th Street apartment into a mini-zoo. Aside from Johnny's dogs, Pretty Girl and Onion, they installed a snake and a pet monkey. Mariann, who had by now married her boyfriend Rusty Bracken and just started a family, got a typically frantic call from her little brother after the monkey escaped. A chase ensued on rooftop and fire escape until the runaway monkey was talked down from doing something desperate by Johnny and Rusty.

With an unruly menagerie to feed, Johnny began making a buck or two selling acid and pot. Given that potent hallucinogenics can rip the lid off the insecure, he only occasionally dipped into his stash of LSD. While under the influence, however, he managed to summon Arthur Kane into his orbit. Gail Higgins Smith: 'I remember meeting Arthur because Johnny and I were tripping. We'd gone to Nobody's and there was Arthur with these huge platform boots on. He looked like a six-foot tall blonde Frankenstein. Johnny and I both stared at each other as the same thought crossed our minds : "Why do they send people like this when you're tripping?!"'

Outside of being a surreal figment of acid-tinged reality, Arthur had recently been deported from Amsterdam, where he and George Fedorcik had unsuccessfully attempted to get a band together. Back in the city, Arthur found work at the telephone company while George began a stint at the post office. Before New York got its post wired and its lines mailed, they got serious about their music, Fedorcik reinventing himself as Rick Rivets to denote his rock 'n' roll aspirations. Late one evening, in the course of an impromptu attempt to steal a motorbike, they spotted Johnny outside a pizza place on Bleecker Street and decided it was time to get properly acquainted. Arthur: 'We were across the street and I said, "OK, here's that guy, why don't we go over and find out what's going on with him?" I went over and said, "I hear you play guitar or bass or something, do you want to get together?"'

Arthur Kane's indecisive quest to ascertain Johnny's instrument of choice was more prophetic than he could have grasped at the time. Although Johnny turned up for rehearsals with his bass, he was still getting a handle on playing rhythm guitar. After a couple of sessions, Arthur made the crucial decision to swop with him. It was during this period that Johnny Genzale sought a new identity which would reflect his final transformation as a guitarist. While he couldn't have wished for a first name more loaded with rebel connotations than Johnny, an alter ego was required, something that suited the elemental and distorted quality of his guitar playing. After toying with calling himself Johnny Volume, he settled on Thunders, after the DC comic-book cowboy hero, Johnny Thunder - Mystery Rider Of The Wild West. Splendid, childlike and stormy, Johnny Thunders was created. With a drummer in tow, they booked some studio time and riffed through a selection of covers including material by The Yardbirds, Chuck Berry and The Rolling Stones. At Thunders' suggestion, their original sticksman was ousted in favour of Billy and the band began rehearsing in the Murcia's family basement. As Johnny became increasingly adept, Rick Rivets switched to rhythm guitar, allowing Thunders to take over the lead position. Johnny's waning enthusiasm for the journey he had to make from the city to Queens every time the band got together, prompted a search for a more central rehearsal space. They found one in the dingy store room of a cycle shop off Columbus Avenue and 82nd Street. The owner, Rusty, who the band nicknamed 'Beanie' owing to the funny little knitted caps he always wore, took their money but not their word. Fearing that they would liberate his stock if he allowed them to roam free, Rusty locked them in for the duration of their rehearsals. Faced with nightly incarceration, the band members chose their provisions with care, Arthur and Rick making a ritual out of picking up a quart of vodka which they shared with Billy, while Thunders, who wasn't particularly partial to liquor, supplied downers and pot. He also started to bring in some of his own material. Although this stage of The Dolls' development is usually referred to as their 'Actress' phase, after a suggestion by Janis Cafasso, the band never officially adopted the title.

On 10 October 1971, Rick Rivets captured their unruly blues cacophony when he bought his cassette player down to a rehearsal. The Actress session which was released over twenty-five years later as Dawn Of The Dolls is a crucial artefact, almost entirely comprised of Thunders' numbers. Unlike most early recordings of musicians and songwriters, where a glimpse of nascent style might be heard or the glimmer of technique discerned, Johnny is absolutely formed. He is of course very young and the thicker-than-bubblegum New York intonation would lessen over the years, but the nasal mewl of his voice would remain just the same. The unique brand of the painful married to the melodic already infuses his guitar playing while the core of the songs would be scattered through his repertoire for the majority of his life. 'That's Poison' is an undeveloped blueprint for 'Subway Train'; 'We've Been Through This Before' would eventually metamorphose into the elegiac 'Sad Vacation'; while 'I Am Confronted' is a rough sketch for the epic sob story 'So Alone'. Similarly 'I'm a Boy, I'm a Girl' would also be revived. Perhaps the most staggering aspect of Dawn Of The Dolls, aside from the band who probably were, is the sheer sense of loss in Johnny's material, which belies his age.

As Thunders was more interested in being the lead guitarist than the front-man, the band started looking for likely candidates, and found David Johansen. The product of a working-class Catholic family from Staten Island, presided over by a Norwegian insurance salesman and his Irish wife, David Johansen had grown up with a tantalising view of the New York City skyline that seemed like a stage set of miracles to him. Biding his time dreaming of a glittering debut, he poured his frustrations into writing poetry and lyrics which came in useful when he started singing with a local outfit called The Vagabond Missionaries before he made it to the city as part of an art rock band, Fast Eddie and The Electric Japs, who played around the Greenwich Village area. Quick-witted and fast-mouthed, David Johansen combined a love of music with theatrical ambitions and would later tell journalists that he had appeared in a couple of skin flicks prior to joining The Dolls, notably Bike Boys Go Ape and Studs On Main Street. While his porno past was just another put on from his lightning repartee, Johansen landed a walk on part as a spear carrier in one of Charles Ludlum's avant-garde Ridiculous Theatre productions. Gravitating to the artistic underground, he met and moved in to an apartment on East 6th Street with a former model called Diane Poluski. Part of the Andy Warhol scene, Poluski had played Holly Woodlawn's pregnant sister in Trash and introduced David to some of the participants in the world of Warhol, all of which put him in good stead when Billy and Arthur made a house call. David Johansen: 'There was a Colombian guy who lived in my building and he was friends with Billy and me. He told me that he knew these guys who were looking for a singer in their band. One day Billy and Arthur came to my door. I'm kind of exaggerating here, but Billy was like four feet tall and Arthur was eight feet tall and they both had these really high boots on and were kind of dressed like Marc Bolan. I just saw them standing there and liked them right away. I thought "Oh God, this is great, what a pair of lunatics!"'

Possessing a voice that could sandblast a city and a contorted harmonica technique, Johansen passed his audition and brought to the band a flagrantly dramatic edge partially copped from Warhol's drag queen muses, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn. When she later described the essence of drag as 'it's not a man or a woman, it's fabulous', Holly Woodlawn could have been introducing The New York Dolls. The band finally reactivated The Dolls' moniker as the end of 1971 loomed, Arthur tagging on the New York prefix: 'I wanted to add the "New York" because in New York you would always be hearing on the radio and television like: New York Jets, New York Yankees, New York Vets, New York this and that - and I thought we'd get an immediate local following if we called ourselves The New York Dolls, and also it sounded like something from a 1930s Broadway show.'

When Sylvain returned from Europe he was understandably piqued, for not only were the band up and running without him but they were also using the name he'd originally suggested. Fortunately, harmony was restored with heels. Sylvain: 'I'd come back from London with all these boots from Johnson & Johnson. There was one particular pair, knee high maroon suede lace-ups with a layered leather platform heel. Johnny went nuts for them. They were a little bit small but he traded half his house for those fucking shoes. Whenever Johnny would move into a new apartment, which he seemed to do all the time, me and Billy would help him cos we had a car. He had so many clothes, it would be like a party.' One party that Syl missed out on was The Dolls' debut at a city-sponsored beggars' banquet. The welfare workers in charge of the Endicott Hotel, a crumbling refuge for the homeless across the street from Rusty Beanies, had been left high and dry when the group they had booked to play at the residents' Christmas bash reneged on their promise. Unable to miss the nightly racket issuing from the cycle shop, one of the welfare workers approached the band. On Christmas Eve, The New York Dolls got a bedraggled crowd up and dancing to a fine selection of R & B covers. However, their official launch was not enough to keep the necessary momentum going for Rivets, who had begun to slack off. The situation was remedied almost instantly. Johnny: 'Rick Rivets started fucking around, coming to practise late and stuff like that, so we canned him and got Sylvain in.'

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