Stranded in the Jungle with The New York Dolls

My night recording the greatest glam-punk group ever

To honor the death of the David Johansen, here is a chapter from my memoir Never Say No to a Rock Star: In the Studio with Dylan, Sinatra, Jagger and More, about my one night with him and his band. . .

I’m hanging between sessions with Lana, the receptionist, at the front desk of one of the greatest recording studios in the world, A & R, in New York City. In walks a guy about seven feet tall. He’s got hair in that poof-spikey 1974 rock ‘n roll post-Keith Richards mullet-esque style, but it’s blondish and longer and more outrageous than anyone ever. He’s a giant because the soles of his boots must be nine inches high. He’s got a minor gut, but this doesn’t stop him from wearing a skin-tight shirt with the occasional loose sequin, and skin-tight shiny satin gray pants. His scruffy, black platform boots go up to right below the knee.

Like a freaky Frankenstein, he lumbers up to the reception desk, and says, thickly, “Hey.”

Lana says, “Hey. Killer, what’s up?”

In unmistakable New Yawkese, he says, “Yeah. I’m heah fawda session.”

In a history of legendary chicks at the front desk, Lana was one of the best. Some people, they just had the natural cool for the gig. Unflappable, with a perpetual wry smile, she tossed her straight-black hippie hair back, and snuck a raised-eyebrow glance at me.

“Arthur Killer Kane, bass player for the New York Dolls, meet Glenn Berger. Glenn’s going to be assisting on tonight’s session.”

I look at the clock. It’s four in the afternoon, and the session is booked at seven. That meant they probably won’t start till ten.

I reach out a hand. He shakes it limply, and mumbles, “Yeah man, hey.”

Less than two years before, on my seventeenth birthday, October 12, 1972, I went to see The Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center, in the old University Hotel on Broadway between West Third and Bleecker in the Village. The building collapsed to the ground soon after. The Dolls were the band to see in NYC at that time. They were a bridge between glitter, glam, and punk. They were trailblazers, one-of-a-kind, harbingers of the Max’s and CBGB scene to come. They dressed in trashy drag, played ridiculously loud, and blasted onto the scene with the first track on their first record, “Personality Crisis.” This was a free show on a Thursday night, their last at the Mercer Arts before going on tour in England.

After the show, my girlfriend, Betty, who had hair as crazy as mine, gave me the ultimate birthday present. It was a good night.

So I’m looking at Killer Kane, putting it all together with the first time I got laid.

Lana, with a perfect combo of sardonic and compassion in her voice, says, “Killer. The session won’t be starting for a long time.”

He stares at us blankly with his mouth open, looking like he is about to drool. A paramecium had to have a better functioning brain than this dude. He scrunches up his nose, and is silent for a minute. Then says, “Ya gotta TV?”

Suppressing a laugh, and knowing the number two studio rule of never saying no to a rock star, Lana, as if she were consoling a toddler, says, “Wayyyll, let me see what I can do.”

With her usual flair, she got on the horn, and called upstairs to see if we could secure a TV and a place to watch it. For those of you reading this in the twenty-first century, I suppose it is fair to remind you that there were no smart phones, computers, or even cable TV at this time, so a real TV screen hooked up to some antenna was the only thing possible to entertain this empty-headed lunk for the next five hours, and we didn’t just have one lying around.

The thought popped in my head, Hey Killer, if you want I can lend you a coupla bucks and you can check out the Peep Shows on Eighth Avenue . . . But true to my training as an assistant engineer, I followed rule number one: I kept my mouth shut.

The band were cutting their second, and little did we know, final album (with the original lineup), to be titled Too Much, Too Soon. The eponymously titled first album was produced by Todd Rundgren, my teen idol. The album became a cult classic, but didn’t sell too well.

This album was being produced by girl-group legend, Shadow Morton. Shadow had written and produced some of my most beloved hit singles, including “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” by The Shangri-Las, and “Leader of the Pack,” a tragic song, which featured sound effects of a motorcycle crash.

The engineer was one of my favorites, Dixon Van Winkle. Dixon sported a blond walrus moustache and round gold glasses at that time. He was a tuba player who had been spotted by our great leader and resident lunatic, engineer/producer extraordinaire, Phil Ramone, at the Rochester School of Music and was invited to come down and enter the playpen of A & R. Van Winkle was deeply musical. He was tight with the rest of the Rochester crowd some of whom became the elite studio players of the time, including drummer Steve Gadd and bass player Tony Levin. My favorite accomplishment, (besides working with McCartney on Ram), of Dixon’s was the track he cut with Gadd and Levin of the Bacharach/Carpenters tune, “Close to You,” done in the style of Spike Jones, with lots of kazoos, squeals, breaking glass, goofy percussion, and sneezes.

As early as Killer was, that’s how late the rest of the band showed up. With nothing to do but wait, Shadow started hitting the booze early and hard. Though it wasn’t necessarily Dixon’s thing, wanting to bond with the guy sitting next to him at the console, and sharing the same soup of trying to herd these street cats, he tried to keep up.

One by one, the band straggled in with an extended coterie. To the last of ‘em - lead singer David Johansen, guitarists Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain, and drummer Jerry Nolan - these guys were no joke. Like Killer, the band dressed in their satin drag 24/7. They, and their entourage, immediately started trashing the place. As they plugged their instruments in and futzed around, warming up, while I ran around, moving a mic, replacing a broken set of cans, the band coagulated into some kind of congealed mess.

Killer had twin Marshall stacks, six feet high, for his bass set up. When he banged a note on his bass, my legs shook like plucked rubber bands, and they gave out from under me. When I saw Johnny Thunders about to windmill his guitar, I swiftly swooped a pair of unused headphones off the floor, shoved them on my head, and stuck the plug in my pocket. I didn’t want my head to be singing a 1K tone for the rest of the week. It was still awesomely loud, and I’m sure I suffered some permanent damage.

The control room was barely better, with the monitors cranked to eleven. But loud was what these speakers were for. Out of the noisy mess something started to happen and we chaotically worked on that old doo-wop novelty tune, “Stranded in the Jungle.” I loved that song.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle . . . the lyrics went, and these monkeys were throwing their banana peels all over the place. Lana stayed late at the front desk, but gave up trying to be an agent of control, and joined the debauchery. (She had a kinky streak anyway. At a party at my loft in Tribeca, (2500 square feet for $550 a month!) she and my girlfriend of the time, another A & R staff member named Ellen, invited me for a threesome. Unused to such invitations, and feeling an obligation to host the party, I foolishly demurred.) Broadway Max, the studio majordomo, would be chagrined when he came in the next AM to see the mess and destruction, but what were any of us to do? This was rock and roll apotheosis, The Who squared, you’re not nobody unless you’re playing it to die, and most of the Dolls ended up doing just that, too much, too soon. (Billy Murcia, the original drummer, died in 1972; Johnny Thunders died in 1991; Jerry Nolan in 1992; Arthur Killer Kane lasted pretty long, fulfilling his obligation in 2004, and sadly, now the last original member, David Johansen, has gone to the grungy basement dressing room of heaven.)

At about 3:45 AM, Shadow and Dixon, after flying in jungle sound effects of chimpanzees and screeching birds, unable to create any more order out of this mess, drunk as shit, decided to bail. They turned to me and sloshed, “You take over. We’re outta here,” and weaved their way out the control room, out the studio, and onto Eighth Avenue into the New York middle-of-the-night spring circus circa 1974.

I didn’t really have much of an idea of what I was doing at that time, but no one seemed to give one flying crap, and I had no choice anyway, so I took the big seat at the console, and manned a few guitar overdubs and a background vocal or two. I was feeling puffy anyway, having done a few toots in the downstairs girl’s bathroom. I needed it for sustenance. Who could even guess what the band was sticking up their noses.

It was all a bit of blur, as sessions at four AM could prove to be. Getting to sit behind the board for The Dolls, though, did contribute to the development of my chops, and the caché (to say nothing of access to cheap studio time as an up-and-coming post-schlepper) that led me to record a few seminal pre-punkers of my own. Perhaps the coolest was when some sleazy chap named Seth, with a few dollars that I wouldn’t want to know where they came from, shmoozed me into cutting tracks for a band called The Harlots of 42^nd Street, who sometimes opened for The Dolls.

To chisle me down on the price, Seth invited me for a “production meeting” at the Continental Baths. I thought, cool, I’d never been, and had always wanted to check it out. The Continental Baths was a gay bathhouse in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel, an ornate gem of a building on 73^rd and Broadway. The place put on shows, and Bette Midler ( . . .that’s another chapter - buy the fuckin’ book) and Barry Manilow, among many others, built their fan base there. At that time, the Upper West Side of Manhattan was fairly raunchy. You just wouldn’t walk between Columbus and Amsterdam at all if you wanted to live. The Ansonia, long renovated, now earns a pretty penny. Then, you could live there for the cost of a sesame bagel in 2016 dollars.

I descended the stairs, and entered the post-Roman decadence with everyone hanging in their towels, and searched for the Harlots’ manager. I saw a guy with hair in a ponytail down to the middle of his back. He was fully dressed in this den of near and total nudity. As we had a drink, I checked out the scene, and scrutinized this guy. He seemed like an innocent-enough low-life music biz sleaze-bag. Whatever his scam was, when he was done, he convinced me to talk Broadway Max into giving us a “weekend rate,” so we could record the band.

Seth put out a single, with “Cool Dude and Foxy Lady” on the A side, and “Spray Paint Bandit” on the B side. I did a decent enough job I suppose, considering that The Harlots sucked in just the right way and so did I. Nothing happened with the track and the band faded into oblivion until being resurrected on the internet, where anything can find 50,000 fans, even people who like to have sex with furry stuffed animals. Seth and I are now social media buddies. Too bad he turned out to be MAGA. How the mighty have fallen.

We didn’t do a lot of punk stuff at A & R – our studio was too expensive. One exception was Television, who cut their great first album, “Marquee Moon” in studio R-2 with Andy Johns at the helm. It wasn’t easy to impress me, jaded a-hole at nineteen though I was, but it was quite clear to me that their leader, Tom Verlaine, was the real deal. My total punkish career ended with mixing a single for a band called Harry Toledo, and then cutting a single for Harry’s girlfriend’s band, Janis and the Bumble Bees, with a cool tune called “B Movie.”

Meanwhile, back in the jungle of the Dolls session, everything fizzled as the sun began to cut through the pollution over the East River. Some groupie shook Killer awake, who had crashed out on the couch in front of the console, and everyone stumbled out, leaving me with the killer mess. That was my job: cleaning up the crazy artists’ shitshow.

There was no point in going home. Once I broke down, maybe I could crash for an hour or two on that couch where Killer lay, before I’d have to start setting up for the next morning’s session. Another twenty-hour day. No REM sleep, a little closer to psychotic. The coke had left me grinding my teeth, unable to remember what sleep even was. As I lay on the couch, staring at the big monitors on the wall, everything getting dark, having my own personality crisis, stranded in the jungle of my frazzled brain, I thought, we’re all on that M-60 to nowhere, exploding like glitter in the night sky, too much, too soon, big bang, quick fizzle, star at nineteen, washed up at twenty-two. Nothing a little more blow wouldn’t get me through.