New York Dolls: Photographs by Bob Gruen
"My life has always been a series of one thing leading to another. Working on a magazine story in 1972, I met John Lennon and Yoko Ono and their backing band at the time, Elephant's Memory. Elephant's Memory was managed by Steve Leber and David Krebs. Tony Machine, one of their assistants, suggested I go see another band they managed, the New York Dolls.
One Evening, after hanging out with the Elephants at the Hells Angeles' headquarters on East Third Street, I stopped at the nearby Mercer Arts Center to see the band Tony had been talking about.
I was shocked at the gender-bending scene around them, but soon came to enjoy the circus of wild characters they attracted. It's hard to express how exiting the scene was -- loose, free, chaotic, wild -- and I knew I wanted to be part of it."
Bob Gruen
New York City, March 2008
Bob Gruen didn't just experience life with the New York Dolls, he photographed it -- a lot. The legendary rock photographer first captured the seminal glam-cum-precursor-to-punk band at a gig at the Mercer Arts Center on New Years Eve in 1972. He continued hitting the shutter right through the band's bright but brief career, documenting their demise in '75 while wards of punk rock impresario Malcolm McClaren, and their resurrection nearly two decades on.
"They were living a decadent life, and I joined right in, but I always knew when to get the photos," says Gruen, who has compiled images of the band for a new book, New York Dolls: Photographs by Bob Gruen. Like the band, the book is clad in glamorous and sexy attire, the pages being bound between hot pink satin covers.
Lying alongside Gruen's gorgeous images are quotes from Joe Strummer, Debbie Harry, Johnny Ramone and Iggy Pop (to name just a few), and interviews with New York Dolls singer David Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain. The Q&As were conducted by Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group, who also introduces the book. Appropriately Morrissey, who persuaded the band to reunite for the Meltdown Festival he curated in 2004, contributes an afterward to the book.
"Although the headless and cruel majority had turned their backs on the Dolls, fame lasts longer than life, and even the most conservative record store in 2008 has its bulging New York Dolls section.
As for me, no fourteen-year-old schoolboy can discover the New York Dolls and not pay the price for it later. With the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, the Velvet Underground, and others, the Dolls are amongst those who have greatly influenced the generations that followed them. In memory, they have out-endured all of their contemporaries, and they are within me forever."
Morrissey,
Los Angeles, December 7, 2007
"
An exhibition of Bob Gruen's work opens on October 11 and runs through November 2 at the Morrison Hotel Gallery in Los Angeles.
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jonasgrumby
Alexandria, VA
April 2004
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