"I, Doll: Life and Death with the New York Dolls"
By Arthur "Killer" Kane

It’s hard to believe the New York Dolls remained an obscure but highly coveted rock curiosity for almost three decades. If you listen to the seismic activity in the New York Dolls camp since the surviving members reunited, the amount of media coverage, and the kudos from young kids and their Moms, Dads and Grandpas, you'd think they were the aging glam rock equivalent of over-saturated reality TV stars.

But from the time Morrissey reunited the remaining band members for the Meltdown festival in 2004, the reunited 2York, I mean New York, Dolls have blazed into music consciousness at an accelerated pace that makes up for the initial confusion and shunning they received from the world at large the first time around.

What with two brand new CDs of original music released since 2006, DVDs, concert tours, and renewed interest in the tiniest detail of the band’s heyday. Not to mention indefatigable Johnny Thunders nostalgia, that’s been going on forever. Lech Kolwalski has edited several versions of the unreleased (and heavily bootlegged) JT documentary Born to Lose. Kowalski’s biopic though, deals mostly with Thunders post-Dolls music (and drug) career.

The Dolls original bass player, the late Arthur “Killer” Kane, the sweetest and least flashy member of the band, insofar as a tall, lumbering guy in platform boots, boa and sparkly tube top can be considered unassuming. Kane was the subject of the 2005 documentary New York Doll, and now his posthumously released memoir I Doll: Life and Death With the New York Dolls is now available from Chicago Review Press. As far as I can tell, Arthur wrote the book without a ghostwriter, and he has a breezy, conversational writing style. Some of his recollections are hazy-the passage of time can further dim events that occurred in a drug and alcohol stupor in the early ‘70s. (There are a few pages of editors’ notes at the end of the book to correct factual errors).

It’s refreshing to read a first hand account about the Dolls first 16 months. They go from being an underground hit at the Mercer Arts Center in NYC to play Wembley Arena in London during those 16 months. They rush from a celebrity studded party in London to a hotel and find original Dolls drummer Billy Murcia dead, O.D’ed in a bathtub. They create their first costumes from vintage clothes and even sew some of their own stage clothes from scratch. They get sloshed on Newcastle Ale and ambling drunkenly though a gig on their English tour, getting so loud and obnoxious in their natural Manhattan habitat that fellow bar patron David Bowie skitters away into the night. And of course there are the drugs and groupies…

Arthur’s widow Barbara adds a foreword and an epilogue to the book. Her marriage to Arthur was full of ups and downs; when he was drunk or angry he was physically abusive; once he even beat her up and tied her up with a telephone cord. Arthur died from leukemia in 2005, a few weeks after the Meltdown reunion concert. Barbara notes in the epilogue that Arthur blamed his problems (and the demise of the Dolls, in part, on singer David Johansen Arthur refers to him as "our singer" instead of by name in the book. Anyone who saw New York Doll knows the story of how Arthur was jealous of the outgoing and outlandish Johansen.

Kane’s dislike for Johansen and managers Leber/Krebs overshadows some of the antics and narrative at times. As a firsthand look at the inner dynamics of one of the most infamous and influential bands of all time, I Doll is intriguing. A good read for hardcore Dolls fans and other lovers of early New York punk/pre punk.

"Radio City" (33 1/3 series)
By Bruce Eaton

Bruce Eaton’s Radio City (New York: Continuum, 33 1/3 Series, paperback) is a short, satisfactory study of power pop icons Big Star (Andy Hummel, Jody Stephens, and former Box Top Alex Chilton) and the making of their stellar second LP. Eaton has written a bowdlerized, somewhat bland account. Readers seeking the unexpurgated story will have to look elsewhere. (For a comprehensive, unflinching, warts and all examination of the legendary Memphis band, see Rob Jovanovic’s compelling Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop.) “The story of Big Star has been told from a lot of different perspectives,” Eaton asserts, “virtually all involving a familiar cocktail of tragedy, drama, Southern gothic mojo, mystery, drugs, personal chaos, sex, booze, bad luck, youthful recklessness, mental disorder, dashed dreams, and thwarted ambitions.” Instead, he focuses chiefly on the music (track by track) and the recording process. “My goal in writing this book was to shed light on how the sound got into the grooves…After all, the sound is why we care about Radio City, not any surrounding six-string soap opera.” That’s debatable. Give me the dark stuff! In short, Eaton addresses the sound, but not the fury, of Big Star.

Released in March 1974, Radio City boasted such sonic gems as “Daisy Glaze,” “Way Out West,” and Chilton’s pop masterpiece, “September Gurls.” Big Star’s influences included garage rock, Memphis soul, the Beatles, T. Rex, the Beach Boys, Todd Rundgren, the Kinks, and the Byrds. Although it dates from the early Seventies, Eaton correctly calls Radio City “the last great rock and roll record of the 1960s.”

Initially, Radio City probably sold less than 10,000 copies. But over time, it became a genuinely significant album. “If influence could be measured,” Eaton contends, “Radio City would have gone platinum many times over.” Big Star acolytes include the Bangles, R.E.M., the Replacements, Matthew Sweet, the dB’s, and Teenage Fanclub.

Eaton is to be commended on his research. Besides spending time in the Ardent Records archives, he interviewed every key participant in the disc’s creation: Hummel, Stephens, the normally reticent Chilton, and recording engineer John Fry. Indeed, this volume is essentially an oral history. While it is intriguing to hear the story from the musicians themselves, additional analysis by Eaton is needed.

Eaton’s book is carelessly edited in places, and the lack of an index is frustrating. Overall, however, pop enthusiasts will find Radio City a worthwhile read.

"The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution"
By Marc Weingarten

In the engaging The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution (New York: Crown, hardcover), author Marc Weingarten examines the amazing careers of New Journalists Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, Michael Herr, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, and Norman Mailer. He also discusses the contributions of Harold Hayes (Esquire), Clay Felker (New York), and Jann Wenner (Rolling Stone), talented editors who published many of these writers. Weingarten defines New Journalism as writing “that reads like fiction and rings with the truth of reported fact.”

Tumultuous times clearly required a new journalistic approach. The “traditional tools of reporting,” Weingarten contends, “would be inadequate to chronicle the tremendous cultural and social changes of the era. War, assassination, rock, drugs, hippies, Yippies, Nixon: how could a traditional just-the-facts reporter dare to provide a neat and symmetrical order to such chaos?” Between 1965 and 1972, “a group of writers emerged…to impose some order on all of this American mayhem, each in his or her own distinctive manner…They came to tell us stories about ourselves in ways that we couldn’t, stories about the way life was being lived in the sixties and seventies and what it all meant. The stakes were high; deep fissures were rending the social fabric, the world was out of order. So they became our master explainers, our town criers, even our moral conscience—the New Journalists.”

Consider their incredible output: Wolfe’s Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 , Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Sack’s M, Herr’s Dispatches, and Mailer’s Armies of the Night. Impressive stuff.

Weingarten’s text really shines when he lets his literary heroes speak for themselves. Here, for example, is Herr’s trenchant assessment of the Vietnam War in 1967: “As an overwhelming, unavoidable fact of our time, it goes deeper than anything my generation has known, even deeper, I’m afraid, than Kennedy’s murder. No matter when it ends or how it ends, it will leave a mark on this country like the trail of slime that a sand slug leaves, a lasting taint.”

Or take Mailer’s graphic description of the outlandishly attired anti-war demonstrators marching on the Pentagon: “The hippies were there in great number, perambulating down the hill, many dressed like the legions of Sgt. Pepper’s Band, some were gotten up like Arab sheiks, or in Park Avenue doormen’s great coats, others like Rogers and Clark of the West, Wyatt Earp, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone in buckskin, some had grown mustaches to look like Have Gun, Will Travel—Paladin’s surrogate was here!—and wild Indians with feathers, a hippie gotten up like Batman, another like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man—his face wrapped in a turban of bandages and he wore a black satin top hat…They were being assembled from all the intersections between history and the comic books, between legend and television, the Biblical archetypes and the movies.”

One criticism of this book is in order. Disappointingly, Gang contains no illustrations. Photographs of the main players (a dapper Tom Wolfe or a wild-eyed Hunter S. Thompson, for instance) would surely complement the text.

Still, this volume stands as a work of much merit. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Weingarten’s commendable study. Reviewing The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight, critic Chuck Klosterman concludes, “If this book doesn’t make you want to be a journalist, nothing will.” Amen, baby. Amen.