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The New York Dolls’ Sylvain Sylvain: Back to Beauty School

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By Bob Hill

Originally published in Crawdaddy! Magazine during March of 2011. 

“Don’t you destroy the song/Cause when the song is gone/You’ll be gone too.”
-New York Dolls, “Plenty of Music” (2006)

Generally speaking, rock and roll reunions are not a good idea. 

Let’s face it: There was a reason the band broke up in the first place. Maybe it had to do with drugs or money or personal differences. Maybe it had to do with a megalomaniacal frontman or an overbearing Asian girlfriend or a fervent desire to preserve what was beautiful and special about the band all along. 

The bottom line is, things ended badly. Otherwise, they wouldn’t end.

The bigger the break-up, the more tempting it becomes for band members to put aside their differences and hit the road together one last time. Call it ego. Call it one last fading shot at glory. Call it an inability to pay one’s bills, because – more often than not – that’s what it boils down to.

All of which is kosher, provided both the band and the audience recognize the reunion for what it is – a half-hearted victory lap, during which the group plays a boilerplate set of agreed-upon hits with half the verve and intensity.

Fortunately, the New York Dolls (Version 2.0) do not fall into this category. 

While money may have played a significant role in the band’s original decision to reunite for the Meltdown Festival back in the summer of ’04, it has very little to do with what the Dolls have managed to accomplish since then. Seven years and three critically-acclaimed albums down the line, the 21st-century Dolls have officially outlived, outsold, and perhaps even outgrown the original.

Gone are the pancake make-up and the platform heels. Gone are Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, Arthur “Killer” Kane and Billy Murcia. Gone are Max’s Kansas City, the Mercer Arts Center, and the Factory boys who made the Dolls such an underground success.

What’s left is the heart and soul of the original Dolls – Sylvain Sylvain and David Johansen, both of whom stuck it out for months after Thunders, Nolan, and Kane first left the band back in 1975. What the two of them have managed to accomplish more than thirty-five years after the fact isn’t only a testament to the Dolls’ enduring legacy, some might argue it’s nothing short of remarkable.

“I don’t want to mention specific names, but there are some other bands out there that broke apart years ago, then got back together again, and maybe it didn’t go so well,” Sylvain Sylvain, (AKA Sylvain Mizrahi) explains during a recent telephone interview. “But I think a lot of those bands looked at it as nothing more than a revival. They didn’t go into the studio. They didn’t write anything new. As a matter of fact, they just kept on playing the same songs over and over again. Who knows why? Maybe they didn’t want to do it anymore. Maybe they didn’t have the balls. Maybe they couldn’t do it anymore. Maybe they tried again and it just sucked so bad that they said, ‘Well, that’s the end of that.’ I’m not sure what it was … In our case, we created really strong bonds, not only to the music, but also between ourselves. I’ve always believed you had to have guts and ambition to succeed. You needed to take chances, whether you failed miserably or gained something out of it. That’s the approach we’ve always taken. It’s the approach we continue to take.”

From the outset, The New York Dolls’ career trajectory has followed an uncharacteristic arc. In the early seventies, they were all the rage among diehard critics and fans. But their failure to launch on any mainstream level eventually led to them being dropped by Mercury after a disappointing two-record deal (The Dolls’ debut album was reported to have sold just over 110,000 copies during its initial run). 

By the time the second, more recognizable wave of punk hit in the late seventies, The New York Dolls (along with several other seminal punk bands, including the MC5 and The Stooges) had long since called it quits. 

But then an odd thing began to happen. Fervent fans of The Sex Pistols, The Ramones and The Clash (among others) started mining for punk’s early influences. It didn’t take long before they discovered the link between The Dolls and Malcolm McLaren; the link between The Dolls and The Ramones; the link between The Dolls and just about every worthwhile rock, punk or blues band that came after them. 

As a result, the initial clamor for a New York Dolls reunion began to surface. There was only one problem: By the early- to mid-eighties, the New York Dolls – or at the very least, three-fifths of them – had very little interest in revisiting the past. 

“For years, I wished it [would happen],” Sylvain recalls. “I remember me and Arthur Kane moved out to California in the early 90s. We used to get crazy offers to reunite back then. At the time, there was no way because everyone was under contract or had their own commitments. We were all successful, in our own way.”

After the Heartbreakers broke up in the late seventies, ex-Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan continued to tour together on and off for more than a decade. David Johansen, on the other hand, had reinvented himself during the late eighties as black-tie lounge lizard Buster Poindexter, the persona under which he recorded an iconic version of the Arrow classic “Hot Hot Hot” (a version Johansen now refers to as the “bane of his existence”).

For a while, things seemed to be going OK for the erstwhile Dolls. That is until the early nineties, when matters took an unfortunate turn. 

In April of 1991, Johnny Thunders was found dead under mysterious circumstances in a New Orleans hotel room. Although the official cause of death was unclassified, an Associated Press release published three days later claimed Thunders’ hotel room was “littered with empty methadone packets” and “a syringe was found floating in the toilet tank.” 

Eight months later, in January of 1992, Jerry Nolan died of a stroke at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City. Shortly after, Arthur Kane was hospitalized for several weeks after being beaten with a baseball bat during the L.A. riots.

With each passing incident, the possibility of a New York Dolls reunion seemed more and more unlikely, especially for Johansen, who had carved out a niche for himself as a popular blues performer and occasional character actor. Johansen did maintain one connection to the past, however – his ongoing relationship with ex-bandmate Sylvain Sylvain, who was busy working on his own material at the time.      

“David and I probably appreciate our relationship with one another more now than we did back then,” Sylvain, who has known Johansen for more than four decades, explains. “Over the years, he’s worked on my solo albums and I’ve worked on his. Even on the new album, we included a version of ‘Funky but Chic,’ and we wrote that song back in 1977. We’ve continued to work together, and – one way or another – we’ve always maintained a relationship, whether it was as friends or in a more professional manner. In fact, I think the relationship’s gotten better over time. I think all relationships sort of dissolve to a point where there’s no real need to think about it anymore. It just arrives at a certain place where you realize you’ve grown closer. Just like any other relationship, you’ll have your ups and downs. Sometimes when [David and I] are down, we’re really fucking down.” 

Sylvain eludes to the fact that one of those “down” periods occurred recently when guitarist Steve Conte and bassist Sami Yaffa, both of whom have toured and recorded with the Dolls for the past six years (with Yaffa coming aboard after Arthur Kane died of Leukemia, only three weeks after the initial reunion shows in 2004), decided to leave.

“We asked them to do the new record and they passed on it,” Sylvain explains, rather candidly. “They had other choices and gigs they wanted to pursue. And that’s cool. David and I just kind of buckled up our jeans and started making phone calls. We eventually wound up with [ex-Blondie guitarist] Frankie Infante, and our producer, Jason Hill, who agreed to step in and play bass.”

The loss of Conte and Yaffa (both now members of the Michael Monroe Band) was a considerable blow. Above and beyond the duo’s experience and depth, both seemed to fit the modern-day Dolls motif perfectly. Conte, in particular, with his jet-black hair and chiseled features, looked like he had walked straight out of central casting. 

The chemistry between old guard and new was evident on 2006’s One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This – a blistering comeback LP that immediately shot to number two on Billboard’s Heatseeker chart, and number eight on the Independent Albums chart. Rolling Stone gave the album four stars. The Observer called it “a record far better than it has any right to be.” The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau named it his album of the year.       

There was a unique balance to One Day. Deeply confessional songs with names like “I Ain’t Got Nothin’” and “Maimed Happiness” played off of straight-ahead rockers, with names like “Dance Like a Monkey” and “Gotta Get Away from Tommy.” 

The record had grit. It had polish. It had three generations of fans lining up to see if these aged New York Dolls could possibly live up to the androgynous edge of the original. It may have had Sylvain and Johansen wondering the same thing themselves. 

“We’ve always been very romantic in terms of what we’re about,” Sylvain explains. “There’s sex in it, sure, in much the same way fashion plays a significant role in what we do. It was never particularly intentional, but it’s become an important part of who we are. For us, we took all the things that we loved – back in the early days, and then again today – and we blended them with all the influences we’ve always loved so much … I mean, keep in mind, this harkens back to a time when if you loved an album and you couldn’t afford it, you probably went to Woolworth’s and stuck it down your pants, cause you felt like you couldn’t live without the damn thing.    

“In terms of what we choose to write about now, when we really feel as if there’s a song in there somewhere, that’s what we go with. Sometimes it comes in quarters or halves, like part of a song’ll come from here, or over there, or maybe I’ll bring in the hookline … The line “Dance like a monkey, dance like a monkey, child,” was what I brought to the table in terms of that song [From One Day It Will Please Us]. And David decided to keep that. It just depends on how it arrives. It’s really all about inspiration, and it’s become kind of a natural process. When all the ingredients come together, we hope you’ll say, ‘Wow! Now that’s a song.’ And while we never want to directly copy from anybody else, you can definitely hear our influences blended in there as well.”

Those influences – eclectic as they may be – have never been more apparent than they are on The Dolls’ latest LP, Dancing Backward in High Heels (March 15th, 429 Records). The album includes (among other things): an island version of the classic Dolls’ song “Trash,” a harp-heavy original called “I’m So Fabulous,” a Spector-esque cover of Leon and Otis Rene’s “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman,” and a ramped-up redux of the aforementioned “Funky but Chic.”

That’s right: In classic Dolls’ fashion, there’s something old, something new, something borrowed, and something used. But there are also horns and keys and a trio of backup singers. There are traces of the Brill Sound, The Wall of Sound, the girl groups, the Beach Boys, classic rock, proto-punk, funk, doo-wop, pop, and – most importantly – the Blues.

“Really, when you come right down to it, what you’ve got with the New York Dolls is the Blues,” Sylvain says. “We’ve managed to stay true to our original ideals, many of which came naturally, of course. Back then, there was never any round table discussion to decide which way we were going to go with it. We were just mundaned by what was going on around us. We had this Little Rascals approach to show business, y’know … ‘C’mon, guys. Let’s go put on a show.’ In the years since then, we’ve grown with the music. I think music is something you continue to learn every day. The minute you stop growing or you don’t appreciate it anymore, maybe that’s the point where you should consider doing something different.”  

In that spirit, the New York Dolls have already booked a string of dates throughout the spring and early summer, the first of which is a CD release show at the Bowery Ballroom on March 16th. After that the band will head over to Europe for a month, before returning to the U.S. to join Motley Crue and Poison for a slew of shows throughout June and July. Long-time Bowie guitarist Earl Slick will join the Dolls on the road.  

David Johansen still plays the occasional solo gig, and has recently expressed interest
in recording another solo album, although there aren’t any immediate plans for such a project. Sylvain Sylvain, meanwhile, looks forward to hitting the road in support of the Dolls’ new record. He claims one of the biggest differences to being on the road these days is that the audience ranges from very young to very old. Some fans attend the shows out of a sense of nostalgia, others out a sense of respect, and still others as a matter of sheer curiosity. 

Regardless of the reason, the important part is the New York Dolls’ fans are still out there, eager to see the band perform. Only these days, the Dolls are packing venues from Barcelona to Beijing – a feat the original Dolls never would’ve dreamed possible.

“Life is a beautiful thing,” Sylvain admits, when asked if he’s surprised at the way things have worked out. “You can’t write it. You just gotta live it.”

The New York Dolls, it would seem, still have plenty of livin’ left in them.

Suze Rotolo: Every Picture Tells a Story

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By Bob Hill (Originally published via Crawdaddy Magazine in May of 2009.) 


“I believe in his genius. He is an extraordinary writer, but I don’t think of him as an honorable person. He doesn’t necessarily do the right thing. But where is it written that this must be so in order to do great work in the world?”

– Suze Rotolo, Notebook Entry, 1964

People grow old in different ways. 

Some grow roots and others grow wings.

And some people, well, they just grow apart. 

But pictures don’t lie. And it’s a helluva thing to look back on a picture years later and realize how much things have changed; that there’s no accounting for the many detours life takes along the way; that today is – in fact – a crooked highway, and there’s no way of knowing what’s waiting round each bend. 

Just ask Suze Rotolo. Back in February of 1963 she appeared in a series of publicity photos with her then-boyfriend – an aspiring young folk singer named Bob Dylan. Three months later one of those photos ended up gracing the cover of Dylan’s second LP– an album that would help secure his reputation as Grand Poobah of the folk universe.

In the years since, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan cover photo has taken on an even greater significance – representing both the birth of a counterculture and the coronation of one of its most unique voices. In the picture, Dylan – a wiry, 21-year old kid in suede jacket and blue jeans – is linked arm-in-arm with Rotolo, an 18-year old girl he’d later refer to as “the fortuneteller of [his] soul.”  The couple are walking north on Jones Street toward 4th. Both are leaning into one another for warmth, bracing themselves against the oncoming breeze. 

They seem carefree. Confident. Two grains against the tide.

But those were different times. And in a sense, those were different people. Defiant. Idealistic. Unfettered by a world that grinds young dreams to dust. They embodied the spirit of a place and time that would change pop culture forever, rendered all the more poignant considering who (and what) Bob Dylan would eventually become.

But what if you were the person in that picture who didn’t go on to become Bob Dylan? What if you didn’t even go on to become Mrs. Bob Dylan? What if Bob Dylan slowly began to drift away, and you made a conscious decision to let him go? What if you were Suze Rotolo, four and a half decades removed, and you’d built an entirely separate life for yourself only a stone’s throw away from the West 4th Street apartment you and Dylan once called home? What if the world still identified you as “the other person” in that photograph? 

What kind of lasting impact might that picture have on you?

“The girl on the cover became my identifier, but it was never my identity,” Rotolo tells Crawdaddy. “I fought against the image for years, probably a little too defensively (laughs). I saw it as a parallel existence, something that had to do with the past, but remained forever present because of Dylan’s lasting impact as a significant artist. Over time I learned to be more at ease with the holy fascination people have for him and realize that yes, I had lived through an amazing time, and I did so in my own right.” 

Rotolo is the author of A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. The book, which was published by Broadway (a subdivision of Random House) in May of 2008, provides a vivid, first-hand account of Greenwich Village during its heyday … before downtown railroad flats were converted into corporate condos, before the section south of Houston morphed into SoHo, before sky-high rent forced struggling young artists to migrate into Williamsburg. 

It was the age of Ginsberg and Seeger and Dave Van Ronk; The Gaslight, Gerde’s and The Café Wha. It was a time when the Morningside Beats were making their way south, when the record industry was discovering new ways to mass-market folk. It was a time when musicians had to purchase a cabaret card before they were permitted to play in bars, when back-door bakery workers slipped fresh loaves of bread to their bohemian brethren in the wee hours of the morning. It was a time when the true measure of a poet was whether or not he “had something to say.” 

It was a time when Greenwich Village went from section to scene, when young people descended upon the area in droves to be a part of what was happening. Suze Rotolo, a teenager from Queens, was one of them. 

“The curiosity I had in my youth made the search inevitable,” Rotolo explains. “My arrival in Greenwich Village was like the world opening up. It was like finding life … [The book] is about a period that was special because of the cultural changes not only in music, but in all the arts, and maybe more importantly for the upheavals in society overall. Coming out of the 1950s lockdown on anything that deviated from the ‘norm,’ it seemed inevitable that things would change.”

Suze Rotolo first met Bob Dylan at a Manhattan folk festival in July of 1961. She was 17 years old. He was 20. And for the next three years – with the exception of a summer trip Suze took to Italy in 1962 – the couple were mostly inseparable.

In A Freewheelin’ Time Rotolo uses her relationship with Dylan as the focal point for everything else happening around them. And in that sense Bob Dylan plays a central role. But to her credit, Rotolo never exploits the relationship for her own purpose. And she doesn’t waste entire chapters obsessing over Dylan’s every whim. She describes him as someone who was immensely talented, and, as such, often difficult. 

“I loved him and he loved me,” Suze writes. “But I had doubts about him, his honesty, and the way life would be.” 

Moments like that strip away the Dylan mystique, painting him in more vulnerable terms than any other book has (with the possible exception of Chronicles). Particularly revealing are letters Dylan wrote while Suze was traveling abroad, letters in which he describes mundane things like missing her and how he wishes she hadn’t cut her hair. 

“We were young and living our lives,” Rotolo explains. “There was no way I could think of it as ‘history in the making.’ Nor could I see Bob Dylan as an icon. He was my boyfriend and we were both in search of the poets…In those early years he was one of several performers who were better than average. What set him apart was something many thought was a negative, his voice – you either liked it or you didn’t. His ability to write songs that were good right off the bat – outshining others whose work was fine but more pedestrian – made it obvious he was headed somewhere.”

Dylan was headed somewhere, and he got there rather quickly. By the time the Newport Folk Festival hit in July of 1963, Dylan was already the undisputed belle of the ball. His newfound celebrity, and the overwhelming swell of publicity surrounding it, began to affect his relationship with Suze, most notably when rumors of an ongoing affair with Joan Baez began to surface.

Shortly after Newport, Suze began to distance herself from Dylan, first moving out of their West 4th Street apartment in August of ’63, and later parting ways with him for good on the street one night, Suze saying little more than “I have to go,” and Dylan offering nothing but a slight wave in return. 

For a short while after, Dylan tried to rekindle their relationship, sometimes asking Suze to marry him, despite rampant reports of his other relationships. As the world outside began to demand more and more of Bob Dylan, it seemed a part of him still wanted to be that no-name kid, slushing down Jones Street with his girl – carefree, confident, two grains against the tide.

But neither one could go back. Too much had come to pass.  

It was the beginning of a whole new era for Dylan, one of several reinventions that would keep him in the public eye for years to come. But it was the end of something as well. It was the end of the childlike innocence and blind ambition that brought Dylan and Rotolo to Greenwich Village in the first place. Bob Dylan was an international phenomenon now. And that meant there would always be expectations … expectations and classifications he’d spend the rest of his career railing against.   

Bob Dylan went off to conquer the world and Suze Rotolo remained in the Village, becoming an advocate for civil rights both here and abroad. In the years that followed she would fall in love again, get married, raise a family, and build a career of her own.   

“I live very much in the present,” Rotolo says. “And consequently, I tend to not see the past when I walk around the village today. What I am aware of, however, is the sad reality that most people can no longer afford to live in the East Village or West Village. In addition, stores that serve neighborhoods – shoe repair shops, cleaners, Laundromats, – have to close due to high commercial rents and that kills the essence of community, not to mention the soul of the city. The same stores selling the merchandise everywhere means there is no variety or character to a neighborhood. Eventually, Manhattan becomes homogenized.”

But “living in the present” doesn’t necessarily mean Rotolo forgets about that couple in the photograph, or the lasting significance of some of those early songs Dylan wrote about her (e.g., “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” to name a few). 

“The old songs, from the early time in his life in which I participated, are so recognizable, so naked, that I cannot listen to them easily,” she writes. “They bring back everything. There is nothing mysterious or shrouded with hidden meaning for me. They are raw, intense and clear.” 

Suze Rotolo is 64 years old now. 

Bob Dylan is 67.

They both grew old in very different ways.  

She grew roots and he grew wings.

And that young couple in the photograph? Well, they just grew apart.