Free Autobiography by Morrissey Page A

dreams.

The New York Dolls were chaotic because they were themselves; their own creation, and not connected to the glam-rock theatrical puns of Slade’s twinkie-blinks or the Sweet’s Charley’s Aunt winks. Malodorously 24-carat, the Dolls are legless realism – wired and rigged honest trash scraped up off New York’s back alleys, banished from the communities of the living. The flesh awakens with Jet boy , premiered one lunchtime on the Johnnie Walker Show on Radio One. What seems like promotion is actually a Mayday bleep.
    The Spanish arm of their record label are so offended by the Dolls’ appearance that they refuse to show any photographs of the band on their debut LP, and instead release it minus any shots of the most visual and striking band of the modern age. With relief, I catch the Dolls on their now-famous Old Grey Whistle Test television appearance, and whereas both of my parents watch unimpressed, pride and joy electrify my body as the revenge motif dates every other modern pop artist in an instant. Snarl matches visual art and the Dolls were mine. I heard and saw a high-wire act of tough noise and fantastic pop lyrics, and I heard an invitation to anyone man enough to challenge them. Offhand and uncivil, the Dolls were ready to run the game, featuring in a Circus magazine article under the title New York Dolls and what’s it to ya? In comparison, everyone else suddenly seemed like a travelling salesman. The Dolls were a social unit, great fun, grave fun, salty and completely off the deep end. The opposite to polite and antiseptic, there wasn’t actually any visible line to avoid stepping over, and ‘We have new drags for England that will blow the mind off the Queen herself , ’ laughed David Johansen, adding, ‘Oh we love all those queens ... everybody’s alright by us.’ Fast-forward forty years and such comments might not seem so harum-scarum, but this was 1973 – with the Carpenters on top of the world looking down on creation, and with Donny Osmond hanging on as the pickle puss face of America. How could people like the New York Dolls even exist? And as a musical unit! And where exactly did this leave Dr Hook and the Medicine Show? The morning after the Whistle Test , I present 50 pence at Rumbelows in Stretford Precinct and I ask for the New York Dolls single.
    ‘See,’ said one fat assistant to another, ‘I told you someone would buy it.’
    At last I am someone! The 45 purchased has the middle section of the song cut out and fades quickly, in an arrangement I have never since discovered on any pressing of this record. The confusion with the Dolls is that their scumsucker rough-trade drag contrasted with the truth of their wise-guy personalities. The Dolls were actually the toughest band on earth, and their appearance proved it. Unfolding before us, they raised the game one hundredfold so that even Alice Cooper – supremely devilish on his Billion D ollar Babies coup de maître – was suddenly a broad on Broadway to the Dolls’ own Bellevue Hospital. Pomp-rock had degraded everything and left audiences immobilized and horizontal in trench coats and woolly sweaters. The Dolls were the slum of all failures, had nothing to lose, and could scarcely differentiate between night and day. For the Dolls, it could never be dark enough. Their raw existence vibrated with expectations of disaster, yet their organs are not tormented. Mockery and practical defeat may very well be their reality, and musical success doesn’t even appear to be their aim. On an infinitesimal scale, Dolls songs are about life happening against us – never with or for us – and as agents of their own troubles they relate everything to themselves. Their eyes are indifferent. They have left the order of this world. Jerry Nolan might even kill you. Because they feel excluded they have no reason to account for their own actions. Trash scorches the skin. Flayed alive, the Dolls may look beautiful, but they are withering