SYLVAIN SYLVAIN
New York Dolls’ guitarist and true believer Sylvain Sylvain left us on January 13. Friends and bandmates David Johansen and Glen Matlock pay heartfelt tribute.
He was the beating heart of the New York Dolls who never gave up on their rock’n’roll promise. Marking his death, close conspirers David Johansen and Glen Matlock remember their friend Syl.
“From the first moment I met him, I loved this guy,” says David Johansen, whose sense of loss is tangible eight days after Sylvain Mizrahi lost his three-year battle with cancer. “If you’d taken Syl out of the New York Dolls it would have been crap. He had so much energy, passion and enthusiasm. It just went on and on and on.”
Sylvain was this inestimably influential band’s heart and soul, its rhythm guitarist, girl-group-loving backing vocalist and eternal cheerleader, fashion an essential passion. Lighting the fuse for CBGB’s punk explosion when they emerged out of New York’s Lower East Side in 1971, the Dolls directly motivated Malcolm McLaren into launching the Sex Pistols after his dry run as their de facto manager four years later, even promising Sylvain a place in the band.
“We were so far ahead of our time we didn’t even realise it,” Sylvain told this writer in 2006. “We never sat down and worked out a masterplan to dress up as girls and shit. It all just happened. We were young and screaming our generation’s next move. Everybody else took notes and took it to the bank, but we fell and broke our legs because we were running so damn fast. We were inventing it all, not even knowing what the hell we were doing.”
Born Sylvain Mizrahi in Cairo on Valentine’s Day, 1951, his family were forced to escape Egypt after the Suez crisis, spending two years in Paris before landing in New York through a Jewish resettlement scheme in 1961, eventually moving to the migrant melting pot of Jamaica, Queens.
The Beatles’ invasion propelled Sylvain into teaching himself guitar, and by 1965 he and Colombian émigré school-friend Billy Murcia were checking out Greenwich Village clubs, jamming on Ventures tracks and dreaming of their own band. After Sylvain was expelled from school for hitting a sadistic gym teacher, the pair formed the short-lived Pox. Working at hip Lexington Avenue boutique Different Drummer through 1968 nurtured Sylvain’s interest in the fashion business, while The New York Dolls Hospital toy repair shop across the street provided a future band name.
Starting their Truth And Soul brand selling groovy sweaters sewn by Murcia’s sisters, the pair became teenage entrepreneurs. They still rehearsed in Queens, and in 1970 were joined by Italian-American Johnny Genzale – soon renamed Johnny Thunders – who Sylvain taught to play guitar, their T.Rex covers motivated by a punk-presaging hatred of stadium rock.
While Sylvain spent summer 1971 in Europe, Genzale and Murcia rehearsed with Village scenesters bassist Arthur Kane and guitarist Rick Rivets. Joined by charismatic singer-harmonica player David Johansen, the band played their first gig as the New York Dolls at a nearby welfare hotel’s Christmas party.
On returning, Sylvain was incensed to find his band name appropriated and soon replaced Rivets, clicking instantly with Johansen, who recalls, “It’s rare, but you know when somebody’s got good taste in music, rather similar to your own. When he was a kid in Paris he was into that yé-yé stuff. Maybe it’s kind of twee, but he got a kick out of it. Through his ears, I got to appreciate that.”
The Dolls’ Mercer Arts Centre residency through 1972 started a serious buzz, attracting press, music business and a visiting David Bowie. Debuting in the UK that October, the band supported the Faces at Wembley’s Empire Pool. Future Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock remembers it well; “It was such a sea-change moment for me. I’d just met Steve [Jones] and Paul [Cook] and there were the New York Dolls! Sylvain, with his girlie hair and big bow tie, is roller skating around the stage! I thought, Who is this guy?”
Tragedy struck when Murcia accidentally perished at a London party. Sylvain never got over losing his childhood friend, who had already named Jerry Nolan as his replacement.
Promoting October 1973’s self-titled debut album, that November the Dolls played The Old Grey Whistle Test. The appearance is often credited with igniting UK punk, abetted as it was by host Bob Harris disdainfully describing the group as “Mock Rock”. The Dolls’
“If you’d taken Syl out of the New York Dolls it would have been crap.” DAVID JOHANSEN
two shows at Biba’s Kensington High Street department store that month marked their UK peak, this writer’s teenage mind blown by the feral onslaught of hoodlum apparitions in six-inch platforms. Sylvain pinballed around the stage, wrangling his Gretsch White Falcon in cowboy chaps and holster.
Yet drugs, internal ructions and music biz hostility were already gatecrashing their endless party, often leaving only Sylvain’s irrepressible pep binding the band together. “Absolutely,” agrees Johansen. “Syl was such an integral part of it. He kept me happy. I don’t know how long I would have lasted in that conglomeration if it wasn’t for him.”
The Dolls entered 1974 with a second album to record. Sylvain felt his old hero George ‘Shadow’ Morton, now washed up, was “a bad choice” of producer. Too rushed, with no time even allowed to record Sylvain’s title track, In Too Much Too Soon suffered, helping derail the momentum.
1975 saw a surreal turn when a visiting Malcolm McLaren attempted to resuscitate the Dolls, outfitting their doomed “red patent leather” phase. After a Florida tour, heroin habits sent Nolan and Thunders to New York and the Heartbreakers. Sylvain drove McLaren back to New York via New Orleans, the manager promising he would fly him to London to join the band gestating at his SEX shop as he took Sylvain’s guitar and Fender Rhodes piano. The plane ticket never came, leaving Syl believing, “The Sex Pistols were supposed to be my band.” McLaren’s seven-page letter declaring just that is in Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Still, Sylvain still had unfinished Dolls business. “They were a pretty big part of his self-identity,” says Johansen. “After the band broke up, we still did a lot of stuff, including a stadium tour of Japan. There’s so many different episodes, you could write a new book about it every two weeks. There was never a dull moment with Syl.”
Sylvain co-wrote and played on the singer’s two 1978 solo albums. “He wanted to do stuff even after that, but I was saying, ‘You should only stick with this stuff we’re doing until you figure out exactly what you wanna be doing,’” says Johansen. “I was always encouraging of his solo pursuits, so there was never a moment where we broke up.”
After forming the Criminals in 1977, Sylvain released his self-titled solo debut in 1979, its sprightly powerpop led by Teenage News, the last single he’d written for the Dolls, followed by ’81’s Syl Sylvain And The Teardrops, then 1997’s (Sleep) Baby Doll. His catalogue is full of one-offs, including 1984’s electro-pop single as Roman Sandals.
Sylvain’s good nature always allowed him to share stages with former bandmates, but he was overjoyed when the New York Dolls returned to play Morrissey’s Meltdown festival in 2004 (shortly before bassist ‘Killer’ Kane succumbed to leukaemia).
“We didn’t have any plans beyond that show,” says Johansen. “I thought, ‘This’ll be fine,’ because I get to see Syl, who was living in Atlanta at the time. Then we just kept doing it. It wasn’t some masterplan; more like we hopped a freight train with no idea where it was going! We were having so much fun.” By 2006, the new Dolls had recorded the robust One Day It Will Please Us To
Remember Even This. In New York to hear the album with Johansen and Sylvain, MOJO witnessed the pair’s full-bore double act; a cascade of banter, piss-taking and affection born from love and trust. They could have gone out as a comedy act. “Absolutely!” laughs Johansen. “We were both natural comedians. Syl’s use of malapropisms every third sentence… I would just be laughing my ass off.”
After the Dolls finally rested after seven years and three albums, Sylvain played with the Batusis, at his own tribute shows, and did Sex Doll tours with Glen Matlock. “We go back a long way and always got on,” says Matlock. “We did a couple of US tours; a two-man show. He was just a lovely, lovely guy. He had quite a Zen-like quality, a really up vibe and encyclopaedic knowledge of music and fashion. He talked about how the Dolls never had financial success, but said, ‘We had success in that we were groundbreaking, everybody thinks we were cool, looked great and started everything.’ He could have been bitter, but he wasn’t, and that’s what attracted me to him, and him to me, because I could possibly be accused of being unhappy about the Pistols. But I’m not; you did what you did, and that’s how the cookie crumbles sometimes.”
Johansen overcame a social media aversion to see it light up with tributes to Sylvain. “It’s amazing. I’ve been thinking how it’s a shame he didn’t get to see how loved he was.
“I couldn’t possibly pick one memory of Syl,” he concludes. “We had so many adventures, so many laughs and wrote so many great songs. We animated each other. Most of the time we were totally non-judgmental about each other; we were there in the moment, and it was beautiful.”
“He could have been bitter, but he wasn’t.” GLEN MATLOCK