the appeal of Jerry Nolan

I recently listened to the New York Dolls first album again, for the first time in at least a couple of years. Something about their brand of kitsch menace – like being stabbed in the face by an amusing half-hearted transvestite for a few quid – was appealing to me in these times of chronic unemployment. I was glad to hear that it still sounded pretty good. I remember first listening to the song “Personality Crisis” in Bristol, when we drove there as three in a tan Ford Sierra, which felt better than it was because of the Fargo reference. When I first heard David Johansen screaming I was really excited, and for a while music became all about dirty New York shit like that, and I idolised the dead man Johnny Thunders and listened to the Velvets first two albums all the time and wore sunglasses at night and bought a bag of heroin from a bum called Tim (who down on his knees played a Fender Telecaster through a little amp and sang songs about having no dough), which we flushed down the toilet before we took it because we were pussies. A guy in a pub said “you lot smoke cigarettes like joints”. I thought it was an amazing compliment.

When I looked inside the sleeve I saw this picture:



which I must have forgotten about, paled as it is into insignificance by the classic cover:



I was surprised to see how little effort Jerry Nolan, drummer (far left), is making in the first photograph. On the album’s cover photograph, Nolan (far right this time) looks pretty hot for the circumstances, probably because he has quite a small, neat face. But when you compare that to the Nolan of the first picture it’s a different story altogether. In that photograph he looks like a regular man forced into a skirt and blouse and not at all happy for it, or like a guy who woke up at a party and had been involuntarily dressed in drag while he was asleep on the sofa. His neat face is hard and unimpressed, he is a noticeable distance away from the impeccable Thunders and his feet are a good shoulders width apart. While the rest of the band pout their arses off, Nolan just puts his hands on his lips and looks like a man at a football match whose team are losing badly. Interestingly enough the same bum who sold us the heroin also told us that he was friends with the Dolls, and said that Jerry Nolan was the bands hairdresser as well as drummer. We never really corroborated this evidence, but the tag of ‘hairdresser to the band’ certainly seemed to stick amongst my friends. I don’t know what he was thinking in this photograph though. He looks like someone who is unsure about which toilet he should go into in a busy restaurant. He must have just wished he was in a pair of jeans, I suppose. I can imagine being punched by the confused, psychotic Nolan of the first picture, seduced by the Nolan of the second. That was probably the appeal of Jerry Nolan.