“They were so much better live than on record,” Gene Simmons says about the outrageous rock ’n’ roll band from New York City who were rivals to Kiss in the early ’70s.
In a new interview with Track Star podcast, Simmons and his Kiss bandmate Paul Stanley discuss a broad range of music – from their biggest influences such as The Beatles, Slade and The Who, to the stars of the New York rock scene from which Kiss emerged.
Some of their comments are bluntly dismissive. At one point, Stanley says of The Velvet Underground: “The music sucked!”
But both Stanley and Simmons have kinder words for the New York Dolls.
The Dolls’ self-titled debut album – produced by Todd Rundgren – was hugely influential, inspiring generations of rock ’n’ roll bands from the Ramones and the Sex Pistols to Guns N’ Roses and Poison.
The group’s classic line-up featured singer David Johansen, guitarists Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan.
Referring to the Dolls’ debut album, Paul Stanley tells Track Star: “I hated the cover, because they looked like housewives on the cover. But live they just exuded this flamboyant glittery rock ’n’ roll.
“Look, they weren’t the best band in the world, but they really put it across. They were stars.
“We would see them [play] in New York. They would show up late. They were never on time. They’d tell jokes on stage.”
But he says admiringly: “There was a camaraderie about them and that’s what I think you look for in bands. ‘Boy, I wish I was a member of that club.’ The Dolls were the club that every other band and everybody in the audience wanted to be in.”
Simmons recalls: “We did some shows together but it didn’t last long. We opened for them. We did about three shows together and that was it. After that, we exploded and the Dolls did not.”
Stanley adds: “I remember being at the Crystal Room – which was at the Hotel Diplomat where everybody did shows off Times Square – and I ran into Sylv Sylvain. I said to him innocently, but I had ulterior motives, ‘We should do some shows, we should play together.’ And he said, ‘You’d kill us!’ So he was pretty sharp.”
As for why Kiss made it big and the Dolls ended up splitting in 1976 having failed to make a hit record, Stanley suggests: “The Dolls were very much a New York band and when you went into Ohio or Indiana it was completely lost. We were going for something more universal. It wasn’t designed for a small clique of an area.”
He explains: “I think what happened was so much of what these bands were doing had no relevance or connection to middle America. We were Anglophiles. We loved Slade, we loved the Stones, The Who. And I think what we were doing was much more universal.”
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