New York Dolls is the 1973 debut studio album by American hard rock band the New York Dolls. By the time of the album's recording, the band had developed a following by playing regularly in lower Manhattan after forming in 1971. However, they were unappealing to record companies because of their onstage cross-dressing and vulgarity, while most record producers were reluctant to work with them. For shock value, the group was photographed in exaggerated drag on the album cover.
After signing to Mercury Records, the New York Dolls recorded their first album at The Record Plant in New York with producer Todd Rundgren, who was known for his sophisticated pop tastes and held a lukewarm opinion of the band. Despite stories of conflicts during the recording sessions, lead singer David Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain later said Rundgren successfully captured how the band sounded live. Their music on the album incorporates carefree rock and roll, Brill Building pop influences, and campy sensibilities, while Johansen's colloquial and ambiguous lyrics explore themes of urban youth, teen alienation, adolescent romance, and authenticity.
New York Dolls was released by Mercury on July 27, 1973, to widespread critical acclaim but sold poorly and polarized listeners. The band proved difficult to market outside their native New York and developed a reputation for rock-star excesses while touring the United States in support of the album. Despite its commercial failure, New York Dolls was an influential precursor to the 1970s punk rock movement and has since been named in various publications as one of the best debut records in rock music and one of the greatest albums of all time.
In 1971, vocalist David Johansen formed the New York Dolls with guitarists Johnny Thunders and Rick Rivets, bassist Arthur Kane, and drummer Billy Murcia; Rivets was replaced by Sylvain Sylvain in 1972. The band was meant to be a temporary project for the members, who were club-going youths that had gone to New York City with different career pursuits. As Sylvain recalled, "We just said 'Hey, maybe this will get us some chicks.' That seemed like a good enough reason." He and Murcia originally planned to work in the clothing business and opened a boutique on Lexington Avenue that was across the street from a toy repair shop called the New York Dolls Hospital, which gave them the idea for their name. The group soon began playing regularly in lower Manhattan and earned a cult following within a few months with their reckless style of rock music. Nonetheless, record companies were hesitant to sign them because of their onstage cross-dressing and blatant vulgarity. In October 1972, they garnered the interest of critics when they opened for English rock band the Faces at the Empire Pool in Wembley. However, on the New York Dolls' first tour of England that year, Murcia died after consuming a lethal combination of alcohol and methaqualone. They enlisted Jerry Nolan as his replacement, while managers Marty Thau, Steve Leber, and David Krebs still struggled to find the band a record deal.
After returning to New York, the New York Dolls played to capacity crowds at venues such as Max's Kansas City and the Mercer Arts Center in what Sylvain called a determined effort to "fake it until they could make it": "We had to make ourselves feel famous before we could actually become famous. We acted like we were already rock stars. Arthur even called his bass 'Excalibur' after King Arthur. It was crazy." Their performance at the Mercer Arts Center was attended by journalist and Mercury Records publicity director Bud Scoppa, and Paul Nelson, an A&R executive for the label. Scoppa initially viewed them as an amusing but inferior version of the Rolling Stones: "I split after the first set. Paul stuck around for the second set, though, and after show he called me and said, 'You should have stayed. I think they're really special.' Then, after that, I fell in love with them anyway." In March 1973, the group signed a two-album deal with a US $25,000 advance from Mercury. According to Sylvain, some of the members' parents had to sign for them because they were not old enough to sign themselves.
For the New York Dolls' debut album, Mercury wanted to find a record producer who could make the most out of the group's sound and the hype they had received from critics and fans in New York. At the band's first board meeting in Chicago, Johansen fell asleep in Mercury's conference room while record executives discussed potential producers. He awoke when they mentioned Todd Rundgren, a musician and producer who by 1972 had achieved unexpected rock stardom with his double album Something/Anything? and its hit singles "I Saw the Light" and "Hello It's Me". Rundgren had socialized at venues such as Max's Kansas City and first saw the New York Dolls when his girlfriend at the time, model Bebe Buell, brought him there to see them play.
Known for having refined pop tastes and technologically savvy productions, Rundgren had become increasingly interested in progressive rock sounds by the time he was enlisted to produce the New York Dolls' debut album. Consequently, his initial impression of the group was that of a humorous live act who were technically competent only by the standards of other unsophisticated New York bands. "The Dolls weren't out to expand any musical horizons", said Rundgren, although he enjoyed Thunders' "attitude" and Johansen's charismatic antics onstage. Johansen referred to Rundgren as "an expert on second rate rock 'n' roll", but also said the band was "kind of persona non grata, at the time, with most producers. They were afraid of us, I don't know why, but Todd wasn't. We all liked him from Max's ... Todd was cool and he was a producer." Sylvain, on the other hand, felt the decision to enlist him was based on availability, time, and money: "It wasn't a long list. Todd was in New York and seemed like he could handle the pace." Upon being hired, Rundgren declared that "the only person who can produce a New York record is someone who lives in New York".
New York Dolls has since been often cited as one of the greatest debut albums in rock music, one of the genre's most popular cult records, and a foundational work for the late 1970s punk rock movement. It was a pivotal influence on many of the rock and roll, punk, and glam rock groups that followed, including the Ramones, Kiss, the Sex Pistols, The Damned, and Guns N' Roses. According to The Mojo Collection (2007), the record ignited punk rock and could still inspire more movements because of the music's abundant attitude and passion, while Encyclopedia of Popular Music writer Colin Larkin deemed it "a major landmark in rock history, oozing attitude, vitality and controversy from every note". Chuck Eddy named it one of the records crucial to the evolution of rock music. In 101 Albums That Changed Popular Music (2009), Chris Smith wrote that the New York Dolls pioneered punk's aesthetic of amateurish musicianship on the album, which undermined the musical sophistication that had developed over the past decade in popular music and had been perfected months earlier on Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). In The Guardian's list of "1000 albums to hear before you die", the newspaper credited the record for serving as "an efficacious antidote to the excesses of prog rock".
In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Erlewine—the website's senior editor—claimed that New York Dolls was a more quintessential proto-punk album than any of the Stooges' releases because of how it "plunders history while celebrating it, creating a sleazy urban mythology along the way". David Fricke argued that it was a more definitive glam rock album than David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust (1972) or anything by Marc Bolan because of how the band "captured both the glory and sorrow of glam, the high jinx and wasted youth, with electric photorealism". In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), Joe Gross called it an "absolutely essential" record and "epic sleaze, the sound of five young men shaping the big city in their own scuzzy image". Sylvain attributed its influence on punk rock to how Rundgren recorded his guitar through the left speaker and Thunders' guitar on the right side, an orientation which he said younger bands such as the Ramones and the Sex Pistols adopted. Rundgren was amused by how the record became considered a precursor to the punk movement: "The irony is that I wound up producing the seminal punk album, but I was never really thought of as a punk producer, and I never got called by punk acts. They probably thought I was too expensive for what they were going for. But the Dolls didn't really consider themselves punk."
New York Dolls has frequently been named one of the greatest albums of all-time; according to Acclaimed Music, it is the 155th most prominently ranked record on critics' all-time lists. In 1978, it was ranked as the 199th greatest record ever in Paul Gambaccini's book Rock Critics' Choice: The Top 200 Albums, which polled a number of leading music journalists and record collectors. Christgau, one of the critics polled, named it the 15th best album of the 1970s in The Village Voice the following year. New York Dolls was included in Neil Strauss's 1996 list of the 100 most influential alternative records, and the Spin Alternative Record Guide (1995) named it the 70th best alternative album. In 2002, it was included on a list published by Q of the 100 best punk records, while Mojo named it both the 13th greatest punk album and the 49th greatest album of all time. In 2003, Rolling Stone placed the record at number 213 on its 500 greatest albums list and "Personality Crisis" at number 271 on its 500 greatest songs list. In 2007, Mojo polled a panel of prominent recording artists and songwriters for the magazine's list of "100 Records That Changed the World", in which New York Dolls was voted the 39th most influential and inspirational record ever. English singer Morrissey named it his favorite album in a list for The Quietus in 2010. According to Paul Myers, the record "struck such a chord with Morrissey that he was not only moved to form his own influential group, The Smiths ... but would eventually convince the surviving Dolls to reunite [in 2004]". In 2013, New York Dolls was placed at number 355 on NME's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
