The average age of the New York Dolls is around 60 years old. SIXTY and yet like some of their contemporaries they are going strong, defying the stereotype. Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger et al – the sag on the bones just doesn’t seem to slow them down. But they’ve never done an advert for butter or insurance. Thank fuck.
With a new record coming out on May 4th and an international tour presently underway there’s no drag on these personalities and certainly no crisis. It seems, at least from our conversation with guitarist and writer Syl Sylvain, that there’s something of an unlikely joy and euphoria that comes with this reinvigorated foray back into the mainstay. And although they never had a number one – in fact none of their albums ever reached into the top 100 – they have always maintained a level of legendry that has seen copy cats and fanatics troll their paths. Which isn’t surprising seeing as they were partly responsible for punk. RESPONSIBLE FOR PUNK. Yes, we should agog with awe.
BCR: So how are you today?
Syl Sylvain: I just came back from South America. I was down in Argentina, then we were in Peru. Just a few shows. We performed in this stadium in Lima alongside the B52s on the same bill. It was really, really cool. First time in Lima, second time in Argentina. We’re getting kinda popular. Strange country. It’s funky, really romantic. Sorta like the Paris of South America. Kind of mysterious. Forget about their politics and regimes and everything.
[BCR suddenly has ’Cause I Sez So blasting from her computer…]
Syl Sylvain: Hey – I like that song, I think I had something to do with that baby.
BCR: I like this new album – it’s a nice meander. All the songs are very distinct and they sound like you’ve picked genres from all the major musical shifts of the last 60 years or so…
Syl Sylvain: Yeah, not that we intentionally try to do anything. It all took a kind of natural birth. We did this baby kinda fast, we were rushed into it. We had about a month to write the songs, to record them and do whatever we did with them.
BCR: That’s no time at all.
Syl Sylvain: One nice thing is we were in Hawaii on the island of Kauai at Todd Rundgren’s [producer of the Doll's first album] home studio. The weather, it was so exotic, romantic and… kinda psychedelic. Remnants of old hippies. Down the road from Todd was somebody from the Grateful Dead… It was that vibe, you know...
BCR: How come you chose to go with Rundgren for the new album?
Syl Sylvain: Again we don’t go to choose anybody. Who’s around, who’s available and who wants to work with us. On any given project. It’s always been like that. It was like that in 1973 when he produced our first album and again like that this time. It was nice to see him and basically work with him again. I think with the short amount of time that we did have I think we came up with a pretty nice, entertaining record if I can say so. I’m proud of it. It’s true - you were saying its all different, not all one bag. We naturally stretched out as musicians and did it pragmatically and did it together - Steve Conte our guitarist and Sami Yaffa on bass.
L-R: Sami Yaffa (bass), David Johansen (vocals), Todd Rundgren (producer),Sylvain Sylvain (guitar) Steve Conte (guitar), Brian Delaney (drums
BCR: Yeah, they’ve got writing credits…
Syl Sylvain: Yeah, yeah – I was actually music director on this so if there’s anything wrong with it you gotta kick my butt. Me and David [Johansen] – even the last record Sami wrote some songs and Stevie wrote some songs. We try to get everybody involved, even our drummer Brian Delaney – they don’t give credits for drummers and they should. We just crammed in together and jammed in this house. We ran with it.
BCR: It’s nice – it sounds like you’ve let serendipity guide you through everything.
Syl Sylvain: Haha... Not intentionally I guess. We kinda work organically after all these years. We are still a bunch of old hippies. What works works and what don’t we just trash it. We don’t think too much about it. You can tell by the swing if it’s working or not.
BCR: So who wanted to do the new version of Trash because it’s pretty different from the original.
Syl Sylvain: Well, I kinda kicked that off. Here we are on the top of this mountain cliff and this was our first week so we’re still rehearsing and putting the songs together. We’re sitting in the living room, it’s the main room where you got the drums and the amps are all over the place – in the closets, in the bathrooms and everything else. So we’re just jamming around and you’re looking at this beautiful ocean; they have whales out there doing their thing…
BCR: Wow, you are a hippy!
Syl Sylvain: Yeah! Hah – It was gorgeous, the vibe was fantastic. So we’re taking a break and all of a sudden I see this cruise ship – which I haven’t seen, usually it’s the surfers or whatever – and I see this cruise ship just cruising by really slowly, it’s sorta like the Empire State Building, I could just imagine the band that’s playing the cruise ship and they’re doing their version of Trash and I just started playing and singing “Oh trash..”, and David comes into the room and Sami came round and started playing a little bass and they all start going “oh man, that’s really fucking cool, let’s try it, what the fuck”. And we did – we had fun with that and we never planned it, we never planned it that way at all. During the little part of Trash it sorta breaks down and after the break down and I started that reggae beat – if I can even call it reggae being a Jewish boy from Brooklyn. I get away with moider!
BCR: It sounds like you had loads of fun making the record – it doesn’t sound like it was a chore at all.
Syl Sylvain: Well, it’s amazing you say that because it was. It’s like having babies, I call it, no matter how terrible they are you still love ‘em. No matter what it takes to make ‘em you know.
BCR: So are you going to be playing stuff from all the albums or is it mainly a showcase for the new one?
Syl Sylvain: Well, we basically play as many of the old ones as we can remember and we give ‘em a little bit of everything. Anything that becomes popular – including the very last one [One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This] we got a couple of fan hits or whatever. But we never really had hit records in the old days, you know - hit hit records. We were a hit and the songs were a hit and what we dressed was like a hit and what we said… But the last album, Dance Like A Monkey was obviously a hit so we had a great time with that. And the other jungle song, Stranded In The Jungle, that’s a sexy baby. That’s how we still keep on going. We came out of an era that was really big stadium rock – the songs were like operas. We found that so boring and so overhauled and made up by the companies instead of a couple of kids down on the corner that just wanna scream because they’re bored shitless. Because they basically wanna get laid. You don’t think about anything else.
BCR: So what do you think of the charge, it’s oft said, that you single handedly kicked off the punk era.
Syl Sylvain: You know what? I’ll take it. I welcome any of that at this point. It’s great and I do feel responsible in a way. The New York Dolls definitely kicked down that door in front of everybody. At that time you had to be like The Beatles or The Who or The Rolling Stones to get a record deal. To make records. So we broke that down – back to the drawing board again. The song was as long as it wanted to be or needed to be which was usually about 2 and a half minutes. And it had sex appeal. Again that’s what we were really bothered by, going through changes or whatever. Like in the lyrics to our song Frankenstein where David basically dares you to have sex with a monster. Which I think is pretty damned good conversation as far as I’m concerned. Everything else was like I said – rock opera – a twenty minute drum solo.
BCR: Wanking or love songs
Syl Sylvain: Yeah, exactly, it was jerking off, honey. And it wasn’t sexy. Rock ‘n roll should be that crazy, wild thing that no one can really control. Of course, the managers and all the people in the business tried to make that wildness into something marketable. That’s their task.
BCR: But you guys have never been out of print…
Syl Sylvain: Those guys didn’t push. They’re the reason we’re still around today. Everyone took it upon themselves – like Morrissey.
BCR: I was going to ask – he seems an unlikely fan.
Syl Sylvain: No, no not really. You gotta think about what we were saying at the time we were saying it. Everyone was not saying anything and he took it upon himself - which I think is a beautiful thing - and became self appointed president of our fan club in the UK. That’s what I mean by true love for us and that’s what’s delivered in many many many ways. Over and over again it’s manifested.
