A Glam Survivor
Looked at in the cruelest light, Sylvain Sylvain is a footnote member of a failed band.
The New York Dolls had their brief, outrageous, androgynous moment of glam-rock notoriety in the early ‘70s, when they pouted with made-up faces and strutted in platform heels and tight stretch-lame pants.
Their two albums flopped, and they were gone--all too gone in the case of lead guitarist Johnny Thunders and drummers Jerry Nolan and Billy Murcia, the three Dolls who died drug-related deaths during their Dolls tenure (in Murcia’s case) or years after. That’s a horrendous, Grateful Dead-like mortality rate of 50%, with rhythm guitarist Sylvain, singer David Johansen and bassist Arthur Kane the survivors.
But in addition to failed hopes and druggy wreckage, the Dolls left a legacy of satisfyingly raunchy, sloppily careening and wittily rebellious rock ‘n’ roll that made them an honored influence for the punk rockers who came along a few years later.
During and after his Dolls days, Sylvain was overshadowed by Johansen and Thunders. After the Dolls’ breakup, he played as a sideman for Johansen, made two albums of his own and then disappeared from the record racks, often forced to fall back on his teenage trade as a clothing designer. At 47, Sylvain has ample reason to sound embittered and aggrieved.
Instead, speaking over the phone recently from the Hollywood apartment of a friend who was putting him up while he prepared for a West Coast tour (including a show Friday in Costa Mesa), Sylvain bubbled with enthusiasm.
He remains smitten with playing rock ‘n’ roll, is largely reconciled with the past and sounds aggrieved only with Johansen, who, according to Sylvain, has turned his back on his New York Dolls chapter and vetoed lucrative offers for a reunion tour or album by the surviving members.
Sylvain’s continued passion for rock ‘n’ roll is obvious on “(Sleep) Baby Doll,” his first album since 1981. Singing in a free, expressive voice, he borrows from British Invasion sources including the Beatles, the Yardbirds and the Animals in a tuneful and varied cycle of songs culminating in the title track, a doo-wop lullaby to his dead bandmates.
The album also include remakes of “Trash” and “Frenchette,” the former a signature rowdy number for the Dolls, the latter a clever ballad that is a highlight of Johansen’s solo career. Sylvain wrote the music for both (Johansen was the lyricist), and revisiting them is a way to underscore the important creative role he played.
In summing up the arc of the Dolls’ career, Sylvain recalled that, 25 years ago, the band headlined a “glitter rock” package tour with Aerosmith and Kiss as opening acts.
“It was like a horse race. We were running so fast that we fell and broke our leg and lost the race. And the next guy behind us went to the bank.”
Sylvain says the Dolls’ reputation for decadence--and Thunders’ legendary, ultimately fatal heroin addiction--probably tarred him by association during the ‘80s and ‘90s as he tried to land a record deal for the songs he never stopped writing and recording.
“It didn’t completely break my whole career, but it came up,” he said. “I tried and did everything, too. What saved me was that my son was born in 1981, and I couldn’t come home stinking drunk anymore. My marriage broke up when he was 3, and I became a single parent. I went back to the rag business, making sweaters and selling them in New York.”
As Sylvain Mizrahi, he was a teenage success story as a clothes designer. Tailoring was a family tradition, first in Egypt, where Sylvain was born, and later in New York City, where his family landed after the second Arab-Israeli war in 1956 made Cairo an impossibly inhospitable place for Egyptian Jews to be.
Making Clothes and Music in Early Days
Sylvain and his school chum Murcia made clothes and music together. The music got them a contract to make a single, as the Pox. It was never released. The sweaters they designed brought in a bundle and financed trips to England, where they took in the exploding early-’70s glam-rock scene and bought themselves Jaguar sports cars.
Another schoolmate, Johnny “Thunders” Genzale, joined them, and the budding clothiers decided they wanted to be in a band more than they wanted to make money selling sweaters. Sylvain said the Dolls’ girlfriends gave them lessons in makeup; the thrift-shop decadent clothes were of his design.
“We did it to be attractive and sexy,” Sylvain said. “I didn’t do it to get picked up by a man. I did it just to be kooky. Johansen played up [the sexual ambiguity] and did a good job of it.
“The audience believes what it wants to believe,” he said.
“Some kid came up to me [recently] and said there were pictures on the Internet of the Dolls having sex together. Come on. We never had sex together, so how could there be pictures of it?”
Before the band had even recorded its 1973 debut album, Murcia was dead of an accidental combination of pills and alcohol during the Dolls’ first tour of England.
After the band broke up in 1975, froggy-voiced Johansen kept going as a solo act, then found success starting in the mid-’80s as Buster Poindexter, a humorous lounge-singer alter-ego. Thunders and Nolan carried on playing Dolls-like rock ‘n’ roll in the Heartbreakers, then Thunders went solo and turned his drug addiction into a selling point.
“Part of the act was his heroin thing: ‘Is he going to be [messed] up tonight? Oh, great.’ It was really sad when I saw that part,” Sylvain said. “But as stupid as he was to promote himself as a ‘Catch me before I die’ kind of thing, Johnny had a great heart.”
Sylvain said he last saw Thunders a few months before his death from an overdose in 1991.
“He knew he was going to go. He had bad cancer in his whole body. He said, ‘Sylvain, man, I wish I would have done two things in my life.’ I said, ‘What is that?’ I thought he did everything. He said, ‘I wish I would have pursued my baseball career [he had shown promise as a high school player], and I wish I wrote ‘Trash.’ ”
Sylvain pays tribute to his old friend on “(Sleep) Baby Doll” with a cover of a plaintive but defiant, alienation-steeped Thunders ballad, “Your Society Makes Me Sad.”
Sylvain says Nolan wept on his shoulder at Thunders’ funeral and wondered if his death might somehow bring the surviving Dolls back together; Nolan died the next year and was buried next to Thunders. “They had a love-hate relationship. They drove each other crazy, but they were a team.”
After Thunders’ death, Sylvain said, the former Dolls presented enough of a united business front finally to reap some royalties from their old recordings. He says he used the $4,000 he got to buy a Volkswagen and move to Los Angeles. He spent the early ‘90s playing on the L.A. scene and trying unsuccessfully to get a deal for the songs he kept writing and putting on cassettes for his own enjoyment.
Born Again With a Low-Budget Career
Sylvain moved to Decatur, Ga., (his wife’s home state) when his son fell in with a gang crowd in Los Angeles and started getting into trouble; he said proudly that the boy is now college-bound and has qualified for a state-funded scholarship.
Last year, Sylvain finally hooked up with a record label, tiny Fishhead Records of Cleveland, which released “(Sleep) Baby Doll.” His rock ‘n’ roll career is still low-budget (he augments his income by making and selling guitar straps and other leather items), but for the first time in his life, Sylvain is renting a house instead of an apartment.
He has no regular band, relying instead for live backup from Dolls-savvy bands like the L.A.-based Streetwalkin’ Cheetahs, who will open for him, then accompany him on his tour. For his record, Sylvain was able to enlist such strong players as Blondie’s Frank Infante and former members of the Misfits, the Fuzztones and Generation X.
With platform heels back in style and glam-rock enjoying a revival, there have been offers for a Dolls reunion, Sylvain said, including a $40,000 payday for four dates in Japan, and a proposed album-tour deal that he said could have yielded $250,000. Sylvain said he and Kane would relish a reunion, but without Johansen, who still has his Buster Poindexter act, there isn’t a chance.
“To me, David is such a different person,” Sylvain said. “I can never believe today that he was once a New York Doll. He said, ‘Man, the money’s [no good].’ ”
Maybe Thunders was a seer when he wrote his signature solo ballad and called it “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.”
But, as Sylvain notes, he at least gets to reap some goodwill from the fond memories his music has created for fans of the Dolls and their offshoots.
Among them is R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, whom Sylvain met in Georgia.
“He said he saw me and Johansen play in 1978: ‘Man, you were great.’ I said to him, ‘I had no money, and if it weren’t for the occasional “Hey, you were great,” I wouldn’t have nothing.’ ”
* Sylvain Sylvain, Streetwalkin’ Cheetahs, the Injectors and Doom Kounty Electric Chair play Friday at Club Mesa, 843 W. 19th St., Costa Mesa. $10. 10 p.m. (949) 642-8448.
