There can’t be much on the Dolls in their heyday that hasn’t been excavated, but I don’t recall seeing this photograph or piece from Lisa Robinson before . . . Disc (November 4, 1972). The band are on verge of heading to England for their ill-planned and ill-fated first trip out of New York. Robinson had a regular column, dispatches from NYC, in the paper.

Robinson rehearses the standard line on the band in their early days – “they almost make you believe in Rock ‘n’ Roll again” but that qualification, ‘almost’, grates. She still needs to put in some practice time . . . Still, she very graciously gives a quote to her friend Lillian Roxon . . . See Here . . . though I’m not sure of its actual source.

Johansen was always on form with the killer quote back then:

When those record people come and see us I think we turn them on. Their wives get drunk and start dancing and they go crazy. But then they think about their kids . . . y’know . . .and that’s what stops them. They start thinking about their kids.

Still feels something of a tragedy that they didn’t deliver on the much made promise to be a great singles band . . .

Seven months later Lisa Robinson is back with a report on the NYC underground, the children of The Velvet Underground . . . Suicide are there in the mix with Wayne County the new star of the scene . . .

One year after Lisa Robinson’s report the Dolls make the paper’s front cover

Here, for your delectation, are two images never before juxtaposed: the New York Dolls and a crowded rock festival that is being used to market jeans, both 1974. You wanna know why the Dolls were so important? I think this juxtaposition says it all.

Landlubber were an American company, the advert is from the back of Creem January 1974. I wasn’t familar with the brand, but they were sold in the UK.

I never owned a pair of bell bottoms but I did wear Skinners . . .

In the January ‘74 issue of Creem, their fashion correspondent, Lisa Robinson, reported on her recent visit to Paris and the city’s obsession with denim, which was generally more expensive and better cut than Landlubbers, she wrote, but Parisians were also wearing good looking but poorly made in Spain Lois jeans. The worst aspect of French street fashion she found was the vogue for U.S. college sweatshirts. Oh well, French taste and all that. Meanwhile, the Parisians had shifted their fascination with decadent Americana in shape of the Velvet Underground in favour of the New York Dolls. Anticipation was high for the band’s December Olympia gigs.

Staying with the denim theme her piece is illustrated with four images from the ‘Denim Art Show at the Serendipity in NYC. Included in the exhibit are the jeans James Dean died in (who knew he wore flares?) that are now owned by Jackie Curtis, David Bowie’s rhinestone codpiece and Bruce Lee’s Death Jacket. Second panel below offers three hand pained denim jackets featuring movie stars. The one at the bottom of the frame, Marilyn, should be familiar to anyone who spent too much of their youth staring at the rear cover (above) of the Dolls second album. In his memoir Sylvain wrote that the image on the jacket is of Johanson’s girlfriend, Cyrinda Foxe, not Marilyn as everyone thinks, but this suggests he’s got it wrong: a one-off either way

I can’t make out the artist’s signature but the date is ‘73.