I first discovered the New York Dolls in the mid-to-late 1980s, just as I was beginning to stretch the boundaries of my musical journey. Up until then, my exposure to music had mostly come through my parents, aunts, and uncles. They planted the initial seeds, and those seeds quickly grew, fueled by my insatiable curiosity for new sounds -- and, admittedly, by the limitations of a thin wallet. Back then, LPs were more affordable, and I often found myself trading records just to explore more of the music that captivated me.
My first real brush with punk came through two neighbours who had attended boarding school somewhere in Ol’ Blighty, giving me a direct link to the early UK punk scene. Meanwhile, the radio was dominated by new wave, and I found myself drawn into the infectious energy of The Cars, Devo, Blondie, The Vapors, The Monks, Boomtown Rats, and any other catchy, rebellious sounds that punctuated the airwaves.
But my musical journey didn’t stop there -- it was, in a sense, reborn. I began diving deeper into punk, hardcore and metal, and it was through this exploration that I finally encountered the New York Dolls. From the very first note, I was hooked. Their music struck me like a lightning bolt. I became a fervent, almost rabid fan, hunting down whatever I could afford, to the point where I once seriously considered buying Jerry Nolan’s pink drum stool.
On June 19, 1991, I attended Johnny Thunders’ memorial show in New York City -- a moment I will never forget. I still have the ticket stub and the commemorative button from that night. At one point, I even embarked on a somewhat hair-brained mission to start a petition to get the New York Dolls inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The support came quickly, but I soon realized that the true essence of a band like the Dolls couldn’t be contained within four walls of bricks and mortar; it lived in the hearts and souls of their fans. I let the petition fade, especially after learning that David Johansen had joked he’d attend “if they paid him” -- Ha!
Time, of course, marches on. The last man standing, David Johansen, passed away on February 28, 2025, marking the end of an era. Yet the spirit of the New York Dolls endures, immortalized in their timeless musical contributions and in the hearts and souls of their fanbase.
I took the initiative to reach out to a few musicians and writers over a period of months, curious to see if the passion I feel for the New York Dolls resonates with others, asking the question "Why were The New York Dolls important to you?"
When I say, “I’m in love, you best believe I’m in love, luv,”
C’mon boys / When I woke up this mornin’, boys I was gone.
New York Dolls
- Billy Murcia (drums): 1951-1972
- Johnny Thunders (guitar/vocals): 1952-1991
- Jerry Nolan (drums): 1946-1992
- Arthur “Killer” Kane (bass): 1949-2004
- Sylvain Sylvain (guitar/vocals):1951- 2021
- David Johansen (vocals): 1950-2025
Brian Young
Rudi / Sabrejets
The New York Dolls changed my life. Liz and I met all of them down the years, apart from Arthur, and were never disappointed. We first saw David & Syl onstage when they tore the roof off The Venue in London in '78 and had the pleasure of catching David perform many times after, both with the reformed Dolls and the Harry Smiths, who played Auntie Annie's here in Belfast back in 2001 and were truly amazing. David sang like Howlin' Wolf on steroids, was charming, erudite, and always much more intelligent than the average bear. Here he is in Belfast 2001, surrounded by two fawning fanboys, yours truly on the left and fellow Dolls aficionado and Undertone Michael Bradley on the right -- heartfelt condolences to David's family and friends. For people of a certain age, this is truly the end of an era.
Peter Jesperson
Twin/Tone Records / Manager of The Replacements
The Dolls were important to me because when that 1st album came out in the summer of 1973, they were unlike anything we'd heard or seen before -- it was like an outrageous, good-humoured take on British glam but with a foreshadowing of punk rock.
Rob Moss
Former bass player: Artificial Peace / Government Issue // Current: Rob Moss and Skin-Tight Skin
What was more important to the New York Dolls? The image or the music? I'm going to say image, although songs like "Trash," "Personality Crisis," and "Frankenstein" were a kick in the pants in 1973. But their look was their strong suit, and they made the most of it. As much as I would've loved to project a visual vibe like the New York Dolls, trying to compete with them on that score would be a joke. Instead, I made the most of what I got and applied that lesson to all the music I ever made. In the early 1980s, we dressed like skate punks. Because we were skate punks, not rock stars. Since getting back into making music in 2016, I embraced my sloppy guitar playing and talk-like-Lou-Reed (and occasionally Iggy Pop) vocal style and focused on what I do best: songwriting. To make up for my limited playing abilities, I enlisted great lead guitar players to record on my songs. So far, I've worked with 37. (See my Bandcamp page to see what I mean.) The takeaway is that the New York Dolls taught me to make the most of what you got. And that's why they're personally such an important band to me.
Blag Dahlia
Dwarves
The New York Dolls came along at a time when rock music was overly complicated and progressive. It was also stuffy, polemical, soft, mushy, and often (gag!) acoustic. The Dolls were none of that. They were a rock ‘n’ roll band that came along right when the world needed them the most.
David Schwartzman
A.O.D
The Dolls have been a part of the soundtrack of my life since I was 13 years old. They were one of the first bands I heard when I discovered punk rock. I am lucky enough to have opened for both Syl Sylvain and, later, the New York Dolls when they first reunited. They were truly one of a kind, both in style and substance. A band with that kind of authenticity, grit, swagger, and attitude could never have happened anywhere except New York. They were as dangerous as the city itself.
Reverend Beatman
Voodoo Rhythm
I have to say -- with all due respect and how much they did and changed and created -- that they were never very important. For me it was more like a newer crazier version of the Rolling Stones.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag / Rollins Band
I think the New York Dolls struck a great posture that walked a line between an appearance that may have shocked some of the more rigidly structured and perhaps provoked some of the closed-minded, but the look and the presentation of the members was never violent. It was celebratory. If you picked up on that, you had a great band to be a fan of. The first album, produced by Todd Rundgren, is just an excellent hard-rockin' batch of tunes that works any time. The Dolls were pure rock 'n' roll. There have been a lot of rock bands, and hopefully there will be a lot more, but rarely are any of them 'through and through.' It's a high bar. The Dolls cleared it for sure.
Jayne County
Jayne County / Wayne County &The Electric Chairs
They were important because The Dolls made me realize that straight or gay or trans or anything, a person could change history just by standing there dressed in clothes otherwise meant for one gender and making raw music that tore at the very fabric of our sick twisted society! It was a form of liberation of the spirit wrapped in raw rock ’n’ roll! It made The Rolling Stones (And I Love Them!) sound like classical music! I was thinking that maybe things were changing for the better! It was a release of my stressed-out being! They reminded me of the first time I saw The Stones! They were important to me because they reminded me of the days when rock ’n’ roll was a rebellious and wild experience and it gave me hope that music was, once again, breaking down barriers and giving a big "Fuck You" to the entire music industry.
Richard Barone
The Bongos
Without the New York Dolls, would we have had Ziggy Stardust quite the way we did? Would we have had the Ramones? The Heartbreakers? Punk? I think the Dolls were one of those rare bands -- like the Velvet Underground before them -- that influenced innumerable others and inspired entire movements. It’s impossible to know when it’s happening, but it is so obvious now.
Stephen DePace
Flipper
I loved the raw sound of the New York Dolls! From David Johansen’s vocals and lyrics to (what I called) the "junkie guitar style" of Johnny Thunders, the New York Dolls were original and unique. They also took the glam rock image to another level, which inspired the spandex-wearing hair metal bands of LA in the '80s. The Dolls were amazing! Long live the New York Dolls.
Michael Magrann
Channel 3
The Dolls became the template for every band after: on both sides of punk and/or rock. To think that they influenced KISS just as much as the Pistols boggles the mind. And to realize what they were doing in the context of the times makes their presence all the more remarkable. They embodied the true spirit of "anything goes," a tenet that punk rock was founded upon, though eventually (and sadly) lost sight of. RIP to all those brave pioneers, long live the Dolls!
Sam Hariss
Ravengers / The Dead Boys
I think the Dolls were like a variable for people with a blank space to fill -- solve for X, ya know? -- You could see what you needed in them. Comic book characters for crazy people! I guess 'cause it was so pure and honest in the beginning, it was dangerous and cool without any pretension. That shit doesn’t happen often. Finding them gave a lot of context to me. There was a whole new colour in the spectrum.
Tav Falco
Tav Falco’s Panther Burns
Somehow one night in the early '80s, the New York Dolls ended up onstage at Poet's Music Hall on Madison Avenue in Memphis. Between shows at my gig at the Antenna Club down the street, I tipped over there to watch. It was a glitzy, noisy, high-stepping, high-energy affair. Their number, "Personality," brought the house down in a flourish of lurid effrontery laced with seductive innuendo. The song had a life of its own and reeled out from the stage in such a way that the high rage of the delivery inked the mind of the beholder. Indelible and never to be unseen. Sometime later in New York, at an audition for a guitarist in an East Village rehearsal studio, someone in the room had just come from another rehearsal room where Johnny Thunders was working with his group. I was told JT was urging his band to play it like Tav Falco. Not long afterward, before a gig in the Mudd Club, I approached the stage from the audience. Among the celebrants, I noticed Johnny Thunders standing there in the middle of the room. I walked over and gave him a love punch to the stomach before leaping up onstage.
Tramps on 15th St. became a hangout and a solo venue where I played acoustic guitar. Twice, I opened for Big Joe Turner, but I wasn't very good. From his tenure in New York Dolls, David Johansen morphed into a suave, tuxedo-clad incarnation known as Buster Poindexter. He and his Banshees were the really hot show at Tramps. Yet from these paragons of 3-piece suits, silken cravats, and golden tones, there were no shrieks of howling banshees. Au contraire, mon frère, their show was the embodiment of uptown kool jazz crossed with Dixie-fried jump blues. An impeccable and irresistible concoction that invariably packed in an abundance of pretty girls. Their rendition of "Mohair Sam" was truly the finest of any light-skinned troubadours in town. From high steppers to low-down stompers, bodacious style suspends time, transcends trends, and heightens our belief in those who still loom larger than Fate. R.I.P, gentlemen.
Iris Berry
Publisher – Punk Hostage Press
The first time I heard the New York Dolls and saw what they looked like, my jaw dropped and I just stood there. It was one of those moments when you know your whole life will never be the same. New music, finally! It wasn’t my parents' music or my older brother's music. It was my music. The world was changing, and I was excited about it!
Mike Edison
Author / Musician
In all my years of playing in New York City and far beyond, I have never met a single person who plays convincing rock ’n’ roll that has not been directly influenced by the New York Dolls.
Steve Conte
New York Dolls / Michael Monroe Band / Hanoi Rocks / Company Of Wolves
The New York Dolls were important to me because…well…I played in the band for 6 years and 4 albums! Perhaps they weren’t the most commercially successful artists I’ve ever worked with, but they were one of the most infamous, dangerous and groundbreaking -- and that is saying something. I mean, how many legendary rock ’n’ roll bands from NYC could a guitar player just step into like that? None. I was fortunate to get the call and to have been able to make those records and write those songs with David and Sylvain. When I was a kid, I didn’t really know a lot about the Dolls, but later on I realized that many of the bands I was grooving on were directly influenced by them: Aerosmith, Kiss, Starz, Angel, Ramones, The Clash, Sex Pistols, Pretenders, XTC, etc. At 16 years old, I started wearing my hippie mom’s knee-high boots and belly shirts, tights, makeup and glitter onstage -- not realizing where it all came from at the time. So being a Doll is something I will carry with me till the end…PROUDLY!
Pete Holidai
Radiators From Space
They were the template for most punk bands with their focus on high-energy songs with street-style lyrics plus a cohesive band dynamic. They were a gang on the corner dressed to kill.
Dave Barbarossa
Adam and the Ants / Bow Wow Wow
The Dolls were a great band, much revered at the time I joined the Ants in 1977. At the height of their fame, I was still what they'd call here a "Soul Boy," untutored in the way of the punk sound and culture. Of course, I became aware that my erstwhile manager, Malcolm McLaren, had dealings before putting the Pistols together. So, apart from appreciating their music when I heard it and, of course, today, I can't pass any insightful comment. Thank you for the music, it's all. Ta Dave.
Craig Surgent
Autistic Behaviour / LapJaw
New York Dolls meant the world to me. They were sometimes labelled as a thrift store Rolling Stones, and I don't consider that to be too unfair or as an actual slight. They only made two LPs in their original run, but between those, there is an immediacy and an honesty without a bum track throughout them.
While I had only heard their name from a cousin around '73, who was telling us about David Bowie as well, we really didn't have much to go on for lack of any serious airplay where we could be better informed outside of "Space Oddity." After my brother and I filtered through the original media condemnation about the Sex Pistols and realized for ourselves the sheer power and joy of that music, we wandered back to check out their music as well as The Heartbreakers' Max's Kansas City live record, to our great joy! There was not only an unabashed freedom that could be felt in songs like "Human Being," "Jet Boy," and "Frankenstein," but they brought forth the goods with their reverence for especially important Black music, which we had already been peripherally exposed to all of our lives up to that point. They, more importantly, gave us the keys to the merits of continuing to discover more and more of those musics through covers such as "Stranded In The Jungle" (The Cadets), "Pills" (Bo Diddley), "Don't Start Me Talking" (Sonny Boy Williamson)! They even shone more light onto a one-funky-assed-hit wonder group called Archie Bell & The Drells with "(There's Gonna Be A) Showdown" as well as Thunders covering one of the rawer hits from the Motown empire, The Contours' "Do You Love Me."
While many discredit the Dolls as not really being able to play that well, I simply don't agree. They played and wrote with a passion which easily surpasses the efforts of the much more technically proficient musicians of their day, just for the heart that they displayed. They were also fearless in the way that they went for it all with their flamboyant nod to crossdressing and style outside of mainstream society, even covering a girl group classic from The Shangri-Las, "Give Him A Great Big Kiss," live. The long and short of it was that, for a group of dudes who dressed in the influence of drag for the length of their succinct career, they had balls!
David Quinton
The Mods / Stiv Bators Band
I was a kid when the Dolls emerged. I had never seen or heard anything like that before…They destroyed all the rules. They were fun, funny and dangerous.
Terence Hannum
Locrian / The Holy Circle / Axebreaker / Brutalism
In my house as a kid, my mom would listen to a lot of doo-wop and rock 'n' roll. There was a station positively locked on these American classics in our Dodge minivan. Being into guitar music in the 1980s, and also having MTV on all of the time, kind of meant you were exposed to a lot of hair metal. That is how I learned about the New York Dolls -- some lines in Kerrang or Circus or Metal Edge or something contextualizing hair metal with T. Rex, Bowie, Slade, and the New York Dolls. I made a note. Sometime later, when punk entered my world, I was a pre-teen, and I wanted to understand what punk meant, so I went out searching record bins for the scent of punk, and I stumbled into the New York Dolls. The first self-titled record somehow took what I was familiar with and dragged it through a glittery gutter like a deep sea trawl of American popular music: at the time it entered my life, I wanted to run as far away from glam -- I hated Aerosmith and cut my hair -- but this wasn't a record of weak double entendres and guitar wankery. It felt honest, blunt, and catchy as hell. It is an album I listen to often decades later, alongside Television's Marquee Moon or the first few Ramones albums. Just a classic, what a time in a city sounded like, an era in a record. RIP David Johansen.
John Catto
Diodes
Why were the New York Dolls important to me?? Well, they ARE a constant in my musical life. The very first time I heard of the Dolls was in early 1972. Warhol’s Interview[/i[ magazine ran a one-column review of one of their first Mercer Arts Center shows. One small grainy photo where they appeared to be playing in the middle of the audience, and it got my attention. This is kinda that dawn period of glam rock where all the contenders were still English, and my attention was already drawn away from the regular blues rock sort of thing. I mentally went, "That looks interesting," filed it away, and saw maybe a couple of mentions before the announcement that their drummer had died on tour. After that, instead of disappearing, they were all over Cream magazine, early []iRock Scene, and most interestingly, Star magazine, which centred them with that LA groupie thing. So push forward 'til Oct. '73, and they finally played Toronto at the Victory. And yeah, I was there along with most of the main players from the Toronto punk scene yet to come. I was right up at the front taking photos, which are now one of the links to that time. They became one of the main bands I was interested in.
By ‘75 I read they broke up, but then I went over to the UK in the summer and searched out SEX on the King's Road (I’d read about it in Caterine Milinaire' Cheap Chic book). I hung out for a bit, chatted to McLaren (unknown at that point), asking him about a full-colour "red patent leather" Dolls photo he had framed on the wall. "I just got back from managing them. They’ve broken up, but I’m keen to get Syl over here and do something," which of course never happened, but the next year the reformed Dolls were playing the Queensbury Arms for a week!! And again I was down there, seeing them along with my friend Rob Sikora from OCA. This time, we were hanging out with them and heading into Queen Street speakeasies, drinking with them.
A couple of months later, and we have the genesis of punk; it was around already, of course, for maybe a year or so in New York, but then it wasn’t called that and was just seen as a continuation of glam with an evolved image. After that, they were never far away. The Heartbreakers, of course, I’d see Syl in New York at Max’s and CBGBs and come 1981, we played with him at the Peppermint Lounge. Then it seemed everyone moved to the UK again!!! We were there, Syl was there, and of course, so was Thunders. Syl, I hung out with them all the time. He then disappeared for a bit (his cab driving days), but a few years on, I get a Sunday morning call from a friend: "Hey, I pulled this guy last night at the Marquee, and we were working out who we both know, want to come for Sunday lunch?" …it was Syl.
We all know the rest of the stuff, lots of appearing and disappearing and the eventual reformation. To me, the Dolls are never far from what I’ve been doing; they are the true icons of modern rock. And always evolving, that look, the one all the Thunders wannabes do was just 30 seconds of the whole; personally, my favourite is the Latino gangster in baggy sharkskin suits and key chains of 1975, but there are loads of them, all different. When I see pics of them in '72 at Wembley, it’s different again!
Anyway, RIP Syl, Johnny, Arthur, Billy (whom I never met), and finally David, the last Doll standing. What a legacy!! Bows.
Steve Vincent
Solo Artist / Paradise Alley
The first time I laid eyes on The Dolls, I was four years of age, and they were dancing across the TV screen on The Old Grey Whistle Test here in the UK. Brought up on a weekly diet of Bolan, The Sweet and Slade on Top Of The Pops TV show, this felt like something VERY different, even to my kid brain. I was transfixed by the sight of Johansen, Thunders and Sylvain. As I started to get into music properly as I got closer to my teens, the Dolls came careering back into my life via Hanoi Rocks, and the first album has been a mainstay in my life ever since. My first tattoo was 'Last of the New York Dolls,' and I've tried to think of that as my mantra ever since.
When The Dolls reformed and toured again, I finally met Syl, and he was the coolest rock star I've ever met. We later became friends on Facebook and remained in touch until his passing, and I genuinely miss him and The Dolls. Without them, I would never have formed the bands I have been in or made the music I do. They will always be my band.
Joey Pinter
The Waldos
Those cats were a big influence. I wanted to play as badly as they did. Of course, the only people who think they couldn't play were the civilians.
Jackie Fox
The Runaways
In the early '70s, while Los Angeles-based musicians were working on technical perfection, there were New York bands that were throwing it away in favour of pure, raw energy. They were experimenting with gender boundaries and performing songs that spoke to us emotionally about something deeper than simple romantic yearning -- though, yes, they spoke to that too. But while some bands communicated anger, the Dolls managed to find humour and joy in being different, fresh and raw. They were the perfect combination of kitsch, pop, power, alienation and joy. It called to something in me that was angry and hopeful and silly and wild, and it made me want to get up onstage in outrageous clothing and make other people smile too.
Frank Secich
Stiv Bators Band / Blue Ash / Deadbeat Poets
The New York Dolls and my old band Blue Ash were signed to Mercury Records in early 1973 by legendary rock critic and A&R man Paul Nelson. While we were finishing our first album for release in the spring of 1973, Paul would come to Youngstown and bring us tapes from the Dolls’ first LP sessions that were going on. We thought they were great, and it was cool that Blue Ash got to hear that Dolls album before it was released.
Chris Klondike Masuak
Radio Birdman
I was a teenager in the Rocky Mountains when that first Dolls album came out. I do remember seeing it in a record store in Nelson, BC. Apart from making me look twice, I wasn't compelled to go further. I was a redneck kid wearing flannel shirts and cowboy boots, listening to Alice Cooper, Mountain, Grand Funk Railroad, Hendrix, and The Doors. When I moved to Australia, I started hanging out with the guys from Birdman; that's when I started to listen to the Dolls. They were mixed in with a nuclear explosion of new music, and that's what mattered... the music. And of course, we covered a few of their songs in the early days: "Personality Crisis," their version of "Stranded In The Jungle"... They made a good noise, but by then I was listening to Buck Dharma and Sonic Smith, and the glam thing just wasn't turning my crank. And, a thing about my own tragic trajectory is that I've never really been one to mimic or "play in the style of" my guitar heroes. I might throw some "homage" into a solo, but when a guitarist has a sound that makes me sit up and take notice, I just don’t want to copy it. Why try? It's sacrosanct. Johnny Thunders is for sure in that department. He had something magical going on, and he was definitely the reason I listened to The Dolls. And now, over 50 years since their first record appeared, he's a big part of the reason that they still sound fresh and alive. That's what I think, anyway.
Jason Kottwitz
Oxys
The New York Dolls were important to me for a host of reasons. They really bridged the gap between rock and punk without even knowing they were doing so. They took the Stones and Velvet Underground to the next level with a new layer of pizazz. The influence they have had on generations of musicians is remarkable. I was heavily influenced as a child by the guitar playing of Ace Frehley. Let’s be honest, his band wouldn’t have existed if there were no New York Dolls. KISS was able to acquire mainstream attention that the Dolls never achieved because the Dolls were ahead of their time. I heard KISS before the New York Dolls, but once I heard the Dolls, it all made sense to me. The chemistry of the Dolls was untouchable. Jerry, Syl, Johnny, Arthur, David… phenomenal. Johnny Thunders is the poster boy for rock 'n’ roll. Nikki Sixx should be paying Thunders royalties for stealing his haircut. Hell, anyone playing on the Sunset Strip for the last 40 years has stolen some element of Johnny’s look. Without him, what does that picture look like?
The New York Dolls are the most underrated band of all time, and the sooner people figure that out, the sooner we will achieve world peace. My stint playing with Sylvain was a dream come true, and I learned so much from the guy. As a human being, there hasn’t been a sweeter person to walk the earth. The only person I've seen as smooth as Sylvain over the last decade is probably Prince. Syl could pick up a guitar and play a note without looking at it, and ten times out of ten, it would be the perfect note, even if it wasn’t the right note. Know what I’m saying? Absolutely magic. Long live the New York Dolls.
Matt Dangerfield
The Boys
The New York Dolls meant the most to me because I was interested in what was happening in the New York underground music scene but, before them, it was the Velvet Underground that caught my attention. I first came across the Velvets in the early 1970s when a girl I knew told me about an awful album someone had sent her from the US that she only played to get rid of overstaying after-dinner guests. I asked her to play it for me, and I loved it so much. The next day, I went out and bought it from Richard Branson’s Virgin record store, which then specialized in imports.
Joey Seeman
Author: Punk Under The Sun
As a teenager growing up isolated in the suburbs of Miami in the 1980s, learning about the New York Dolls was nothing short of a revelation. I had only been into metal up to that point: Ozzy, Sabbath, Maiden, etc. But when a friend's older brother came home from college with a stack of records, among them Johnny Thunders Que Sera Sera, it put me on a path of discovery that continues to this day. I started trying to find out anything and everything I could about Thunders and the Dolls. The music was unlike any of the classic rock/metal/new wave stuff I’d encountered on the radio or MTV. It was raw. It wasn’t overly produced, and it had elements of girl groups sprinkled throughout. Admittedly, I was first drawn in by the image. I felt like the Dolls gave me permission to wear makeup and tease out my hair. A direction. A challenge even…how do I get my hair to stick up like Johnny’s? And it felt like I had entered a very exclusive club. Only a handful of people I ran into knew the Dolls.
I had heard from my friend in New York that Johnny was going to be playing a show and that Michael Monroe from Hanoi Rocks might be there. So I flew in and got to see Johnny at Irving Plaza in 1986. Sylvain was playing with him. Michael Monroe did pop up for a few songs. The audience was filled with otherworldly creatures that I’d never seen in Miami. It was amazing. Johnny was on that night. He sounded great, and they played a nice, long set. A year or so later, I saw Johnny, Jerry, and Arthur when they came down to Miami to play at the Cameo Theatre, and it was a complete shit show. I was grateful to have seen him on a great night in New York City.
Tom Milmore
Rousers
As high school kids in Connecticut, we had a band. We played Stones covers mostly. We were really just learning to play. We saw the Dolls and realized that they are not only incredibly exciting, entertaining and charismatic, they were also primitive musicians just like us! It was quite an epiphany. We started going to the city to see them.
Alison Gordy
Singer, songwriter, actress
I was not a fan of the New York Dolls. My brother brought home their album. I was 13, and we both thought it was terrible.
I got to hear Johnny do an acoustic show at the Lone Star in 1986. My husband was a good friend of Johnny: he left me a free ticket plus one. I really loved the songs "Diary of a Lover" and "Memory." Anyone who could write those songs couldn't be all bad.
I met Syl on stage at the Limelight at the first show I played with Johnny. Syl was such a sweetheart and a terrific player. I didn't get to play with him until he invited me to join him on his acoustic tour to promote his book There's No Bones In Ice Cream in July 2018. I loved Johnny and Syl and had the time of my life playing with both of them. I told Johnny and Syl that I wasn't a Dolls fan, but I truly was a fan of both of them!
