Review: '1973: Rock at the Crossroads'

While it may not ring the cultural-epoch bells of 1955 (beginning of Rock & Roll era), 1964 (British Invasion), 1977 (punk invasion), or 1991 (cue opening riff of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), 1973 was actually a watershed year for pop music. Iconic releases included The Dark Side of the Moon, Quadrophenia, The Harder They Come, Court and Spark, Raw Power, New York Dolls, Band on the Run, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and Innervisions. In fact, in his new book, 1973: Rock at the Crossroads, Andrew Grant Jackson deems the year “the zenith of classic rock,” referencing a FiveThirtyEight.com analysis concluding that classic rock radio plays more songs from that year than any other. He further argues that it was also the jumping-off point for such near-future genres as punk, disco, and hip-hop.

Review: 'Playground: Growing Up in the New York Underground'

Armed with just a trio of cheap-ass cameras (a Polaroid, a Brownie, a 110 Instamatic), Paul Zone was fully equipped to chronicle his fellow revelers in sleazy late-seventies NYC. Zone’s main gig was lead singer of The Fast, a band well covered in his new book Playground: Growing Up in the New York Underground, though not quite as legendary as a lot of the people he snapped. Along with the usual scene suspects (The Ramones, New York Dolls, Blondie, Suicide, Patti Smith, a very long-haired Lenny Kaye, Suicide, Tom Verlaine, etc.) there are some of the hugest rock stars of the day. Zone’s lo-fi approach to photography makes Ray Davies, Iggy, KISS, Alice Cooper, and Marc Bolan seem as gutter-bound as Wayne County. Not surprisingly, Debbie Harry’s natural luminosity makes all her pictures seem much more professional than the rest.

With Chris Stein, Harry also provided a short foreword for Playground, but the big text comes from Zone, himself, who tells his own story with all-appropriate rawness intact. There’s child abuse, drugs, serious health scares, and death, as well as love, generosity, and sex Tupperware parties. It gives a valuable glimpse of the guy behind the camera, though his pictures have so much personality that you can almost get his biographical gist without reading it. And most impressive of all, I’ve never seen a single one of these shots before.

November 1, 2009: ‘I, Doll: Life and Death with the New York Dolls’

The Rock & Roll autobiography is a pretty tricky venture to pull off. A great songwriter cannot necessarily make the transition to prose, as Bob Dylan’s Chronicles and Dave Davies’s Kink bear out. The only truly great Rock autobiography I’ve read is X-Ray by Dave’s brother Ray, which finds the lead Kink perfectly adapting his highly literate lyricism to a book that is creative (the Kinks’ early history is framed in an Orwellian sci-fi parable), informative, and witty.

Having said all this, it’s no surprise that the memoir of bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane—who wasn’t even among the New York Dolls’ chief songwriters (according to the credits on their albums, not Kane’s widow Barbara who contends that he co-wrote much of their material)—is poor. By many accounts, Kane was a lovely fellow (well, not when he was drunk or griping about his band mates), so I get no joy out of writing that the majority of I, Doll: Life and Death with the New York Dolls is basically unreadable. Kane’s cutesy delivery makes this tale of drugs, womanizing, and touring read like the diary of a Rock & Roll Howdy Doody, and it keeps him from fully conveying why the Dolls were such a unique group—and they were extremely unique in their groundbreaking, drag-queen stage dress and straight-from-the-gutter attitude that inspired legions of punks. Stories about the boys being hassled for their outrageous attire or the death of original Doll Billy Murcia are rendered as consequential as long, dull descriptions of shopping in vintage stores because it’s all delivered with the same silly, punning language. A saving grace arrives about three quarters into the book when Barbara Kane takes over her late husband’s narrative. Barbara’s writing is clearer than Arthur’s, and her stories are far more interesting—she dishes on memorable run-ins with Dee Dee Ramone, Pete Townshend, and Sid Vicious. She also details her relationship with her husband after he became an alcoholic, and it’s a pretty terrifying portrait of the man, even as she continues to profess his sweetness and her love for him. Barbara’s portion of I, Doll will make it essential reading for Dolls fanatics. Others should probably just check out Greg Whiteley’s documentary New York Doll.