The New York Dolls - Mercer Arts Center, New York City, December 19, 1972
We were blessed earlier this year with a mostly unheard late '72 tape of the (original) Modern Lovers at the Mercer Arts Center; now, we've got a previously uncirculated New York Dolls set from a few weeks earlier! It was just issued in a very groovy / very limited vinyl edition, but you can also hear it here. And hear it you should, whichever way you please. This is an awesome, essential document of the Dolls back in the USA on their home turf, playing for the NYC faithful, and capturing the debut of drummer Jerry Nolan. Historic!
The man we have to thank for both the Modern Lovers and NY Dolls tapes is the late/great Paul Nelson, the critic who at the time was the "house hippie" for Mercury Records. Nelson was thoroughly besotted with the Dolls and moved mountains to get them signed to Mercury — an effort that would ultimately lose him his job. Worth it? Yeah. Since we're hearing this Mercer performance through his ears, let's give Paul the final word here:
Nelson Says: The Dolls and their early following were those kids who used to sneak into the Fillmore East every Saturday night; years later, when their musical time came, they couldn't wait to build their own homemade rocket ship and send it flying toward the moon on a return trip to innocence. If the fuel was more amateur energy than professional talent — well, one had to make do with what was at hand, surely the primary law of the streetwise. And it was a wondrous thing to see the group play rock & roll with the enthusiasm of five people who felt and acted as though they'd just invented it, hadn't quite worked out the kinks yet, but what the hell? — it was raw flash, honest fun, erotically direct, and seemed to define them to, and make them inseparable from, their own kind. While they invented nothing, they did present a peculiar vision — lost youths roaming the nighttime city "looking for a kiss, not a fix," cosmic jet boys "flying around New York City so high," the teenager as group Frankenstein—and carried the music back to simpler times; there were almost no solos, and everybody played and sang as hard as they could until they got tired. Which wasn't often.
