Sylvain Sylvain - There’s No Bones in Ice Cream: Sylvain Sylvain’s Story of the New York Dolls

Foreword

Whenever anybody asks me about the New York Dolls, what we did and why we did it, the first thing that comes to mind is a Bugs Bunny cartoon I saw when I was small.

Bugs and Daffy Duck are vaudeville performers, but they are clearly at very opposite ends of stardom. All Bugs needs to do is walk onto the stage and raise his arms in the air, and the audience will go nuts. Daffy, on the other hand, can juggle, ride a unicycle, juggle while hes riding the unicycle, and he barely gets a single clap.

Bugs comes out again, whistles two notes, and the place goes crazy. Daffy returns and nobody makes a sound. This time, however, he knows what to do.

First he drinks a generous portion of gasoline. Then he downs a bottle of nitroglycerin. He swallows a box of dynamite, washes that down with a goodly amount of gunpowder, adds some uranium-238, and then jumps up and down while instructing, shake well.

Finally, he lights a match.

He holds it in his hand for a moment, and the audience is paying attention at last a long, drawn-out oooooh of anticipation. Girls, youd better hold onto your boyfriends, he warns, and then he swallows the match.

There is a massive explosion, and feathers fly everywhere. The audience, too, erupts in a shattering standing ovation, the biggest ever heard. Even Bugs is impressed. They want more! he shouts, but Daffy, ethereal and ghost-like, floating up towards the sky, can only sigh, I know, I know. Its a great show, but I can only do it once.

That, for me, was the story of the New York Dolls. Not that we could only do it once, because reincarnations of the band have had several lifetimes since then. But we knew from the outset what Daffy only realised at the end. When you take the stage, no matter who youre sharing it with, youve got to promise to die. To detonate. To fly as high as you can and then, like the Fourth of July, explode like a sky full of fireworks. And that is all you need to know about showbiz. The audience wants blood, and you have to provide it.

Caligula would have been proud.

Hell. Caligula would have wanted to join in.

Many people have told their stories of the New York Dolls; their recollections of the first time they saw us, the first time they heard us. You can go online and study virtual encyclopaedias of every concert we played, every song we recorded, every review we received. Even today, there are people out there who werent even born when the group broke up, but who know more about us than we Dolls ever could.

Keep searching. You can find testimonies from musicians who say we changed their lives, and damnation from rivals who thought we were terrible. You will find sneers and cheers, fact and fiction, rumours and lies, and pie in the sky.

And why? Because, while we may not have sold many records nor racked up any hits, in terms of the stain that we left on the sheets, the New York Dolls were bigger than a lot of the people who did.

That is not what this book is about, because those things are only visible from the outside. Inside the storm, in the heart of the beast, you arent even aware that there is a storm, or even a beast. Youre just a rock nroll band, doing and playing and dressing in all the things you ever dreamed of, and if we were famous for being infamous, as some people like to insist, both the fame and the infamy were mere by-products of everything else.

We never sat down and mapped out a game plan; there was no round table in some bunker-like headquarters where we spent hours with strategists, consultants and their ilk, and brainstormed the outrage that would win the next headline. Nobody told us to behave like we did. We did it because that was who we were and that was what we wanted to do. And when it was done, we did something else. Other people turned the New York Dolls into legends. We just went along for the ride.

And yet when I look back on that three-year span in which we held the world in the palm of our hands, and then had it snatched away again; and the years since then, when we were reborn as an historical precedent, year zero of punk, the Roanoke colonists of the new waves new world (check your history books youll see what I mean); when I compare our fate and fame with those of so many of the groups who once outsold us, one famous saying keeps coming back to mind, a phrase that you used to see a lot on the streets of Paris, daubed on walls, or spray-painted on placards.

vaincre sans pril, on triomphe sans gloire To vanquish without peril is to triumph without glory.*

Like Daffy Duck in that cartoon, we vanquished, we triumphed. And we wanted to give them a killer show every night. Lead, follow, or get out-of-the-way; its a rich mans war, but a poor boys fight.

*Pierre Corneille, 1606-1684.

One of my earliest memories is of my homeland being bombed by the British.

First the sirens, shattering the evening with their banshee howl, and the panic on the streets as people ran for whatever shelter they could find. Then the blackout, plunging a city of three million people into darkness. And then the bombs.

They were not falling directly on us, which was why, after a while, I would be allowed to stand on the balcony overlooking the darkened city, staring out past the towering tops of the mosques as they were silhouetted against the moonlight, towards the horizon.

Even from eighty miles away, though, I could see our searchlights struggling to pick out the enemy aircraft. I could see the glow of the flares that lit the bombers path, and I could hear the rhythmic crumpf crumpf crumpf of each successive bomb blast.

Behind me, my father would be crouching beside an illegal radio, a big, brown Bakelite contraption, listening into the news as it broke across the shortwave networks, telling us to hush if we so much as gasped or spoke. He was taking no chances hed even broken the little light that once lit up the radio dial, to make sure no-one knew what he was doing. And we would hush because who knew what technology was raging against us? If the bombers could see the tiniest light, then perhaps they could hear the softest murmur. At any moment, the bombers, British Valiants and Canberras, might turn their attention away from the airfields that were their supposed target and seek out the child who had just spoken too loudly.

In fact, the next day you would hear that they had, that Cairo Radio was reporting that the outskirts of Cairo had been hit with incendiaries, and charred bodies still lay where they had fallen amid the ruins. The British and the French, who fought alongside them, denied the rumours, of course, insisting that their only targets were our airfields.

But when youre five, you dont know who to believe.

You just know youre being bombed.

Egypt in October 1956 was a land in turmoil. Almost precisely four years earlier, in 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, a lieutenant-colonel in the Egyptian army, had masterminded the overthrow of the monarch, King Farouk. He installed a new government and proclaimed Egypt a republic, shattering the centuries of foreign power and influence that had ruled the nation until then. First the Ottomans, then (briefly) the French, back to the Ottomans, and then the Brits. Five hundred years of outside occupation were ended, to be superseded by what?