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Dolls In The Days Of The Good Old Times*

Am reprinting here my New York Dolls piece from 1997, which because of its length I've broken into three parts, this being the final part. Printed originally in my fanzine Why Music Sucks #11. Thanks to the University of Georgia Press, who published my book Real Punks Don't Wear Black (and here), where I reprinted this, and are letting me reprint this now.

"Actually, if I were a young person I think I'd be most interested in having old folk like me write about what things were like back in the day: what the Fillmore was like, what the crowd was like at a Dolls show in the early '70s, etc." So Lucy Sante wrote me recently [i.e., October 1997]. Good timing, as I happened to already be at work on "Boys in Makeup." But as for what the crowd was like: Despite my having seen the band six or seven times in the space of about ten months in 1973–1974, I find myself unable to say what the crowd was like, at least not with any accuracy. Partly I don't remember, partly I never noticed in the first place, and partly I rarely can come up with the words to describe anything, even when I do have a picture in my mind. As for what people were wearing, I don't know. My defense against fashion while I was growing up was to put up a complete block in my mind, so I really didn't see what people were wearing. I only got vague impressions and such. Since I wasn't going out searching/shopping for clothes or thinking of clothes items as constituting a potential ensemble for me to wear, I never learned a vocabulary, I never learned to see how shirts, shoes, makeup, etc. went together, I never could describe why (or how) a person looked freaky or hoody or glam. I never had a sister, either, so I was culturally deprived in major ways, no knowledge of makeup, magic beauty secrets, hair styling. Also, I was in general (and still am, of course) too busy in my own mind thinking, calculating, imagining, and so on to see what was in front of my nose. I do remember being eventually disappointed that there wasn't a more interesting sartorial response among Dolls fans, that there wasn't more of a visual echo in the audience of what was happening onstage and in the music. Maybe the crowds were fairly nondescript. The way I remember it, the dressed-up girls in the audience weren't looking nearly as glittery, cheesy, slutty, cheap pasted-on glamorous as they could have been (nor were the boys, of course). The look of those trying to make an impression was more a stylized stylishness: I'd say Early Goth, maybe, with a lot of ornate towers and stained glass and flying buttresses and... oh, I went off there, sorry... the look was, you know, black – black clothes, dark eye shadow, pale makeup. At least it was on one young woman whom I remember, first row center in the basement of the Viking Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, who, at the end of the encore, was helped up onstage, along with a woman friend, by Johnny and Arthur and then accompanied the band backstage as it went off.

New York Dolls "Personality Crisis" live (Don Kirshner's Rock Concert)


As for what the crowd was like in its behavior, let's see, first show: I didn't yet like the New York Dolls; I'd heard the record once or twice and thought it was sludgy and lumbering, not all that different from Grand Funk, it seemed, who were hitting at the time with "We're an American Band." So I saw the Dolls in New York at Max's, and Jay and Maureen and maybe Robin (Jay's mother [a real sweetheart, by the way]; I forget if she went along with us) got a table up in front while I stood farther back with my arms folded, having no real response within me and not yet hearing the beauty that was embodied by the sludge or connecting to any of the starts and stops and syncopation that gave the music movement. My arms weren't folded in disapproval, just in nonconnection. Next to me was another boy with his arms folded too. I don't remember the crowd. The people cheered after songs. Afterwards, Jay and Maureen were radiant and ecstatic, saying it was the best concert they'd ever seen. I was puzzled, not having felt anything in the air, in the music, in the event. Not quite true; there was one moment, in the middle of "Subway Train," where a wail attached itself to the melody, like the guy's voice was a train horn, and I got a sudden sense of tunefulness. This is important, because later that night I couldn't get that one song out of my head; so I said to myself, "There's at least one song I like, even if they play like clodhoppers."

The next show was a different story. I'd absorbed the album, memorized the album, knew as much of the lyrics as I could make out (about 65%); what had been sludge now felt like thickness of emotion. I and my friend Steve (not a Dolls fan, but he went along with us) drove from Tolland, Connecticut, where we shared an apartment, to Providence to pick up Maureen from Brown and then headed down south to the University of Rhode Island, in Kingston, where the Student Activities Committee had, for some reason, booked the Dolls. At Brown that afternoon Steve and I had sat in Maureen's dorm room and listened while she – in a monologue I'll never forget – talked about the day her mother had died, and how no one would tell her that it had happened, and (if I'm remembering this right) she was first told to go sit with one person, then another, or maybe she was sent from one house to the next. Her mother had committed suicide – Maureen was about nine when it happened. I'd known there'd been a suicide in her past, I think Jay had told me, but Maureen had never talked about it, never mentioned it, until that day. Down at Kingston we discovered that the Dolls would be playing in a cafeteria. We were second in line. First in line was a young woman and her boyfriend who'd come all the way from Boston – the boyfriend seemed like a regular guy (not that he necessarily was, but that's how he dressed, like the guy in the bar, the guy in the mail room). The woman was dressed more like – well, in a dress, a light-colored dress that seemed interesting on her because it was like an adult person's dress, not a young woman's dress, like a cheap version of something Jackie Kennedy would wear; it wasn't part of the youth uniform and it wasn't glitter. But it did announce a stab at fashion in some way, and the Dolls may have inspired this in her. Nowadays this would be no big deal, someone dressing up at a rock show, but in 1973 it said something. She talked nonstop, too, full of opinions and dissatisfactions, and kept saying stupid things and being real irritating. I think Maureen and I had a common disappointment, that this would be the first person with whom we'd share the potential rapport of Dolls fandom.

New York Dolls "Human Being"/"Jet Boy" (live)


The performance room – the cafeteria – had been cleared of tables and seats. People were to sit on the floor, or stand. Maureen and I went up front, though Steve stayed back. The place was packed, all these college kids sitting on the floor. Maureen and I and one other person, right by the stage (which was a platform not very high off the floor), stood and danced to the music, made motions to the band, shrieked between songs; in back and to the sides some other people were dancing too, and applauding, maybe twenty-five or so of them. And the rest of the crowd, maybe a couple hundred, sat, immobile, not applauding, not leaving, watching the band and the three of us as if we were space creatures. In my memory, it's all brightly lit, everything's in clear view, the three of us are in clear view. This memory is wrong: It was a show, it was night, it was dark, only the stage was lit. But I felt exposed, which was kind of thrilling. Close to the stage, maybe we were wavering between dark and light as we danced. My shrieking might have been forced – hey, I'd never had the chance to be a teenybopper, had only learned recently to respect teenyboppers, and now at age nineteen I was shrieking. Steve said later that it was obvious that Johansen was playing to the three of us. As the show ended one of the dancers from the side came up and asked me to try out for his band. I explained that I was from out of state. Then Maureen said, "Hi, Mac." It turned out that he was a friend of hers at Brown. He was a tall black guy, halfway between a dressed-up '60s freak and a glitter guy; I think he had Lou Reed shades and Hendrix scarves or at least an air of Hendrix-like flamboyance, but maybe some leather too.

There was tension and excitement in all this: the uncomprehending crowd, the audacity of us standing next to the band. That was a year when a few crucial critics (Christgau, Paul Nelson, Dave Marsh) liked the Dolls, but most others and the music press in general had a general attitude of contempt. "All flash and no music" was what they said. I remember constantly reading putdowns. One jerk I think it was in Rolling Stone joked that the Dolls were really dental students who only dressed that way for the money. This was part of the atmosphere too, part of the event for me, standing up and dancing, withstanding the contempt.

New York Dolls "Chatterbox" (live)


The next Dolls concert was that one in the basement of the Viking Hotel. It was me, Maureen, and Mac. This time those who didn't like the music left right away, leaving forty or so of us who wanted to be there, and it was one of the best concerts of my life. In my memory it looks warm and hazy and dark. As for how the crowd looked and acted, though, I can't remember. Dancing, cheering, being happy. At one point all of a sudden a crazy wild-eyed guy started hitting Mac, and Mac pushed back at him. The band handled this well; the roadies lifted the guy right onto the stage and let him off on the other side, where he was away from Mac. Johnny made a funny comment about practicing his Kung Fu fighting, and the situation was defused. When the tussle had started some people had jumped between Mac and the crazy guy to separate them, and I'd grabbed Mac as if to hold him back; Mac got angry at me, saying that he wasn't trying to fight, he'd just needed his hands free to fend the guy off. I mollified Mac by saying that I wasn't trying to restrain him, I was trying to make the crazy guy feel safe, like the threat was over. This was a quick thing for me to say, but I was probably lying. I didn't know Mac, really, and maybe he was a crazy guy too.

As an intro to "Vietnamese Baby," David said, "This song's about a soldier who falls in love with a whore in Vietnam and then he comes home to his mom."

The band seemed happy. It was a different Johnny Thunders from the one we'd see later with the Heartbreakers; he wasn't sulking, wasn't yelling at the sound man. At the end of the show he gave his arm to the girl in black.

Next show, Orpheum or Orpheus Theatre in Boston. I was in the balcony, and maybe this is why I felt more distant. One guy sitting near me – regular-type guy, again, longhaired hard-rock type – pointed at Arthur Kane, the bass player, and said to me, "I think he's a faggot." This guy was not using the word "faggot" with much precision, since Kane – whatever his sexual tastes – was not at all femme. He had the look of a hulking stevedore, and in drag he was a knock-you-down broad. I don't think the guy was saying "faggot" with any particular hostility, either, but he must have had a sense of the band being foreign to his regular-guyness. I read all this into him, anyway, in a glance; I gave him a shrug rather than an answer.

Before the show we'd stopped off at some friends of Mac's, who were also going. Roxy Music was on the record player. Roxy sounded ridiculous and wooden and put-on – all due to Ferry's voice. This was the first time I'd heard them, obviously, and I hadn't yet connected to the guitar playing. Mac's friends – a couple – were dressed in really stylized stylishness, in deliberately falsified high fashion. Unfortunately, I can't remember more than that. The woman might have had her hair up, and earrings, and maybe an intentionally obvious blonde dye job.

Mac had grown up in Manhattan. There'd never been a rock star from Manhattan, he said. They were all from the Outer Boroughs or out of town. All the Dolls were from the Outer Boroughs. Mac was going to be the first star from Manhattan, he told us.

We got his New York phone number, his parents' number. This was probably when we were in town for Iggy and the Stooges' New Year's Eve show. I never had reason to call him, but I remembered the number for several years after because it spelled out L-U-M-P-Y or W-A-R-P-I-N-K or something. Or maybe we were supposed to dial W-A-R-P-I-N-K and ask for Lumpy, like he had to use Lumpy as his nickname within his family because perhaps his Dad's name was Mac, too.**

ExpandChaperoned and out of place )

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Am reprinting here my New York Dolls piece from 1997, this being the second post in a three-post series. What you're reading today is simply the three original footnotes to the part of the piece that I'd reprinted Wednesday. What's lost in this reprint is the way that, in my fanzine, I'd had the text and its footnotes snaking around each other, as if the parts of the story were in conversation with and against themselves.

At the start of each footnote below, I link its location in Wednesday's post's text, if you'd like to see where the sentence I'm commenting on lives in context. (Am linking to the Substack version because its software allows me to single out and jump from text to footnote and back. The simple HTML I use in Dreamwidth and LiveJournal doesn't let me set that up, so on those platforms you have to scan the pieces to where I put superscripts and asterisks and such. Better off following my links to the Substack.)

Thanks to the University of Georgia Press, who published my book Real Punks Don't Wear Black (and here), where I reprinted this, and are letting me reprint this now.


Footnote 1 (link)

"It'll be pretty hard to explain why this image meant so much to me."

But I do want to talk a little bit about how the band sounded, since not only did they play dress-up – you know, like little kids let loose in their big sister's wardrobe – they played music. Really, it was a lot like how they looked. It was tough – it was a hard r&b sound, like the Stones infusing soul with nasty blues riffs – but it was warm too; Johnny played thick guitar, it was almost syrup, with a noisy blues-whine and a way of careening up into the right pitch rather than hitting it head on, and he would play pretty counter melodies or his guitar would harmonize against the singing. The style was influential. The Dolls invented a sound I call "the loud pretties" meaning they'd mix the noise and the hard blues and the ugly yowls with loud beauty, so the clamor and the beauty were inseparable, all one big roil (I'm contrasting this with how, say, the Beatles or Raspberries or Cheap Trick or Sweet would put pretty vocals merely on top of raunchy instrumentals). The Clash and Nirvana played later versions of the loud pretties. Of course the Dolls were about ten times more fun. They brought back a lot of the rock 'n' roll silliness from the pre-Stones days: animal sounds, novelty tunes, shoo-wop shoo-wop oompahs. Rare for the "progressive-rock" era, especially since they didn't seem like an oldies band doing it. They sounded like little kids let loose in their big sister's record collection – but then gone off on a rampage, with the sound attached to their raving ugly beauty. Except I also have to say that they didn't quite do it: They rumbled forward, but their rock sound never quite got a roll to it, though they tried. This is what I meant way back in WMS #5 when I said that the Sex-O-Lettes sounded the way the Dolls looked, really got on record with the rolling in-your-face exuberance the Dolls were shooting for. And I was certainly implying then that disco could do it but "rock" couldn't anymore. This is why the Dolls are only 27 on my albums list, rather than number 1.

New York Dolls "Jet Boy" (on the Old Grey Whistle Test)


Footnote 2 (link)

"As if I just didn't care how I looked."

I realize that this doesn't convey very well how I actually dressed. The fact is I don't remember. Teen popularity/nonpopularity was so traumatic for me that my mind froze and I wouldn't pay attention. And that was part of my rebellion, too, not to pay attention. I liked summers because I could wear T-shirts. All T-shirts were white then. I think I wished that I could wear single-color pullovers in other months, as I'd worn when I was a little kid. I didn't like shirts with collars and buttons. But I always wore them, because that's what my mother bought for me. To buy my own shirts would have taken money that I used for records and books. It did not occur to me to tell my mother what I wanted. As it is with traumatic subjects, I wanted to turn them off, not bring them up. I remember making two fashion decisions in high school. The first was to wear my shirts tucked in, despite the cool trend that said wear them out. I tucked them in because wearing them out made me look heavier. Second, in tenth grade I let my hair grow long, a complicated decision (no matter how I looked, I'd be giving in to someone) that was simplified for me by the fact that it caused great conflict with my parents, who tried to forbid it. My dad said that he was upset that a generation of young men was looking like fairies. This was just the thing to make me resist him.

Given that my mind is blank, I've gotten my childhood friend Jay Carey to describe how I looked.

Jacqueline Carey: You dressed in high school as if your clothes were chosen by someone else – presumably your mother. You wore various colored slacks and dress shirts, patterned but based on the color white. They were generally opened at the collar to reveal an undershirt underneath. This is a look I don't really remember on anyone else except Sandy [her husband]. Eventually (and reluctantly) I took over the job of buying his clothes from his mother, and I bought undershirts with V-necks, thus radically revamping him.

One difference between the two of you is that he often wore blue jeans with dress shirts, and you almost never did. I remember my amazement when you showed up in (straight-legged) jeans one day in high school. In fact, I'm still curious: Who bought them?

Yours was probably a pretty smart approach to fashion; it somehow took you completely out of judging range. I remember Susan Long (much later) saying, "How does he get away with it? He wears polyester, he's not even ironic about it, but he gets away with it."

Frank Kogan: Probably it was my exquisite handsomeness that allowed me to get away with everything. I don't remember who bought the jeans. It may have been me. You'd think I'd have remembered. There were school rules against jeans when we started (also against girls wearing pants). This outraged me in principle, but I can't remember when the rule was allowed to lapse. I don't remember pulling the "undershirt" ploy until after high school, though Jay's memory may well be correct. The undershirts she's referring to are the white T-shirts I mentioned above. In high school I think I only wore – as undershirts, that is – the regular Stanley Kowalski undershirts that my mother bought me, which are as deep as V-necks and so wouldn't have been visible (they used to be called, generically, "undershirts"; Hanes and Fruit of the Loom now call them "A-shirts" or "athletic shirts" to distinguish them from white T-shirts, which are now also called "undershirts"). After high school I was only wearing dress shirts (1) when I had to work at an office, or (2) when I'd run out of clean pullovers – which unfortunately was often, since I was still generally unwilling to spend money on clothes when there were records out there, still unbought.

ExpandFootnote 3, David was asking if you – if *I* – could make it with the monster of life )

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Groucho, as Freedonia's newly installed president, is handed a report from the Treasury Department. "Why, a four-year-old child could understand this!" he scoffs, then quickly turns to an aide and says, "Run and get me a four-year-old child."

So, I wrote this in my early forties in 1997, and fortunately my inner 19-year-old had me by the throat, insisting that it's his 1973 that needs to get told, the truth of his damaged and agonized perception. And maybe I could now add words fore and aft that would help you understand this boy and his world better, but they'd weaken the piece, make it too soft.

Or maybe you in your own perception can hear what's around the story's edges. "The kids in these songs have never heard of the Cool Generation. They are actively, hopelessly involved," wrote Richard Goldstein in 1966 about the Shangri-Las. And to me, 1973 – even before I'd heard the Shangri-Las – was about my failure and my world's failure to live up to those kids. But maybe my prose was good enough to show something more?

I do need to say, though – the reason for this introduction – that despite what's written here, Reggie and Kerry, for instance, are actually in my mind as happy memories. So part of me at the time must've known more than the official story I was telling myself. (Was I more willing to count their cheer as genuine cheer than my story admits? I feel like a jerk for not thinking that it was genuine when I wrote this, though see "blame" below.) Meanwhile, Fred is damn near the hero of the story. And some of what I wrote about dullards can't be true. ("Some" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.) Still, in case you, or me, in our wisdom, want to go back and counsel 19-year-old Frank, "You don't need to blame everyone so much; you don't need to blame yourself so much," 19-year-old Frank has an answer: "Self-blame is beautiful."

I wrote this for my fanzine Why Music Sucks. It's long, so I've broken it into three parts, the second made up of what had originally been footnotes to part one. In the fanzine original I'd had the footnotes snake around what they were commenting on, so you were seeing words and their reflection looking back at each other. I don't have the formatting ability to do that here.

Parts two and three get posted soon, I hope.

Thanks to the University of Georgia Press, who published my book Real Punks Don't Wear Black (or here), where I reprinted this, and are letting me reprint this now.

In this piece I refer to the one by Liz Armstrong, which came right before it in my fanzine, and contained the following paragraph.


Liz Armstrong: Although absolutely crazy/strange things seem naturally attracted to Sarah [freshman roommate at the University of Missouri] and me, we usually aren't running around all the time. Normally we just sit around and watch television (I'm now an addict, thanks to her), flip through magazines and sigh, sleep, and generally look for excuses not to do homework. At least once a week we play dress-up. Sounds silly, but it's so fun! See, we shop quite often at this really neat vintage shop and buy all sorts of things that we'll never be able to actually wear. My most recent purchase is a vintage linen, lace, and satin prom dress – very Victorian looking. Anyway, we make a mess out of our room with all the clothes. We try stuff on until we find a particularly stunning outfit, and then we spend lots of time on each other's hair and makeup. When satisfied, we decide where we'd fit in in real life. I usually end up in a Calvin Klein ad or a rock video. From there, we adopt a "voice" (sometimes foreignly accented) and make up a line or two. Me (as a CK model) (in a really bad British accent): "Be dangerous. Be careful. Just be." As a rock video chick, I don't say much; I just walk around, dazed, with semi-watery eyes and a slack jaw. Sometimes I'll press a finger near my nose and sniff violently, like I'm all coked-out. After doing little skits for each other, we walk up and down our hall, past the open doors of the hallway gang/slumber party crew, and talk loudly about either stupid stuff that happened or racy stuff that never happened. When back in our room, we make a halfassed attempt to tidy the place, but we always end up leaving ⅞ of our stuff lying around. Finally, we do something overly normal (like homework) while still dressed up. It gives us a sense of excitement while performing a mundane task.

Frank Kogan: I related very well to what Liz wrote about playing dress-up with her roommate. Interesting: When I was a freshman in college my roommates and I would do the exact same thing. We'd go to the clothing stores or thrift shops and buy the tackiest women's clothing we could find, either really sleazy stuff (vinyl was just coming in; so were tank tops) or ridiculously lacy and satiny shirts and dresses. We'd claim they were presents for our sisters or girlfriends. I'm not kidding. We also had contacts in the drama department who got us wigs. And we'd dress in these things and decide what role to play. On one weekend we'd prance around the hallways telling outrageous stories about sexual adventures we'd supposedly had, and we'd address each other as "Bitch" in really loud voices, and argue about Broadway shows that we'd never actually seen. The next weekend we'd be high-school girls from the '50s and carry on loud conversations about "dreamy boys" and about our daddies, and we'd pretend that we were getting high on cough syrup and vanilla extract. I cultivated a really annoying giggle at this time, which I've still got.

All right, I'm lying. We did no such thing. I made it up. But wouldn't it have been interesting if we had done it? —But there's no way I'd have had the courage.

I was really lonely and unhappy freshman year in college. I'd grown up in a university town with a high-powered intellectual dad and mom and older brother, and for college went to an east coast prestige school, so you'd think I'd have been on home ground, but I wasn't. I was very alienated. High school had been very interesting: very traumatic at times but full of life. Since it was a liberal college town with a lot of faculty brats, the freaks were an influential group in the high school, large enough to undermine the status of every other group but not strong enough (or confident enough) to establish their own status, so the social life was very unsettled yet open. And freakdom and hipness there didn't have the same contempt for ideas that one probably found elsewhere. People were very messed-up, but I had the sense that, smart or dumb, everyone was really willing to try things out and not pretend they knew what to do or who they were. I probably romanticized this in my mind and romanticized it even more in my memory, but anyway, romanticized or not, I carried this image into college of what I expected young people to be: people who weren't taking things lightly, people who were really trying, you know? So I got to this prestigious college where everyone was supposed to be the smartest of the smart, and I expected students to be intellectually or emotionally adventurous or something, and they weren't. They were smart but they were dullards. It's as if the top boring two percent were scraped off of every high school in the country and sent to my college. They weren't offensive or snooty, usually; depressed would be a better word, or suppressed or repressed. And no doubt some – but only some – of the problem was me: my not actually being able to see into these different people's different lives. But the atmosphere of the place wasn't inspiring people to express what was interesting in their lives either, it seemed to me.

So after freshman year I dropped out, then a year later I didn't know what else to do so I went back and was actually much happier. My opinion of the place didn't go up, but I'd figured out how to get what I wanted from it. I actually liked a lot of the teachers and a lot of the course work. This was disconcerting compared to my high-school years, to find that I liked the teachers more than the students. But it stopped bothering me that the students seemed so bland, and I made some friends, etc. etc. I still don't really respect that time of my life – it was limbo. But I learned a lot in my classes.

Back to freshman year, a year when I wasn't dressing in interesting clothes. My roommates Kerry and Reggie hated each other, so each was very cheery towards me – because by being cheery towards me each was proving that he was basically a friendly person not a hateful person and that obviously, therefore, the other guy was at fault, the obnoxious other guy, and deserved to be hated. We could never completely avoid each other, since we shared a three-room suite that was set up so that both Kerry and Reggie had to tramp through my room to get to their respective rooms, and the phone was in my room so they had to come out to take their calls. Kerry was handsome and blond and dressed very well but otherwise was a complete slob and would never pick up the place, and his dirty clothes were everywhere, all over my room as well as his. I didn't really mind this, but it infuriated Reggie. Reggie was persnickety and complained a lot, and he'd go into rages at Kerry, whereas Kerry would just glide in and out like he couldn't care less. He had a few records that he'd play in his room over and over, an Elton John that made me learn to hate Elton for his hamfisted piano playing and oafish vocals. I think there was a Carly Simon record that bored me and a Linda Ronstadt record that bored me and a Bonnie Raitt record that had "Love Has No Pride" and was really quite beautiful. I thought his taste was impossibly square compared to mine. I had Velvet Underground records that I thought of as great hard rock but that completely baffled everyone else. They thought it was awful noise. I'd put on "Sister Ray" whenever I needed to drive people out of my room so that I could work or sleep. My room became a sort of meeting place, actually, mainly devoted to our listening to records. I kept buying old Kinks albums from back when the band was good, and Reggie and I would joke about not being able to leave for class until the side ended (and he'd go and I'd end up cutting the class). The people from next door were often visiting us. One of them, Fred Smith, had gone to my high school. We'd been friends in grammar school but not really in high school; he was politically conservative (actually moderate) and I was liberal, and that had made me uncomfortable, and there were other differences that I don't know how to identify, differences in outlook, and I was often really afraid of differences back then. In college by some awful coincidence (I thought) we were assigned to suites right next to each other, and to my surprise he turned out to be the most interesting person nearby, and we became friends. So he and one or another of his roommates would often be visiting my room. Fred played up his eccentricities – he would go from comically cute to comically gruff, and he'd always answer his phone "Smith speaking!" and then when he was in my room he'd pick up our phone too, when it rang, and say "Smith speaking!" And he got to the point where when our phone rang he'd dive for it, knocking people aside, and say "Smith speaking!" into the receiver. And then his roommate Timothy got into the habit, when he was visiting us, of answering our phone too and saying "Smith speaking!" This must have confused callers. They must have thought we had a butler. Once a friend of mine from my home town called, and Timothy answered and said "Smith speaking!" and so my friend went "Oh, hi Fred," and chatted with him for a while thinking he was talking to Fred, until Timothy identified himself for real. Well, this must tell you how uninteresting my freshman social life really was, that the most vivid thing I remember is how people answered our phone. Once Fred was visiting, and Reggie was visibly depressed about something, and would clomp through my room to his, and slam his door shut, and then come out and go through my room to the outside and then return through my room back to his without saying anything, and slam his door shut after himself. Fred thought this was pretty funny, so whenever Reggie made one of his trips-with-slam, Fred would follow up by opening Reggie's door a crack and then slamming it. After Fred had done this for the third time Reggie came charging out and dived on top of Fred and started pounding him. We pulled him off; the freshman advisers found out and, I think, forbade the two of them to be in the same room with each other. But later, after the ban was lifted, Fred and Reggie became friends and even became roommates the next year, though Fred could get irritated by Reggie's depressions and stuff. Reggie seemed too tired for me, but, as you've gathered, I wasn't likely to look into what was really going on with people.

As for Kerry, he ignored us except when he had to counter Reggie's criticisms. As I said, the place didn't inspire people to display their interestingness. I remember once Kerry was doing acid with his girlfriend and I could hear them having sex in his room and after he'd come he said, "That was fantastic," and the whole thing – acid, sex, and Kerry – seemed totally vacuous. At least from my side of the door.

So I did nothing creative with dress-up. Freshman year my creativity was all in letters, sent to the outside world. Real life was elsewhere, real life was a fantasy, real intensity was a hope or a memory.

Expandboys in makeup changed my life )

*"It'll be pretty hard to explain why this image meant so much to me." (Marking this here for anyone reading the next installment who wants to see the context of the note.)

**"As if I just didn't care how I looked." (Marking this here, etc.)
But anyway, here's Poison.

Poison "I Want Action"


***"David was asking if you – if *I* – could make it with the monster of life." (Marking this here, etc.)

CROSSPOST: HTTPS://KOGANBOT.LIVEJOURNAL.COM/393537.HTML

CROSSPOST: https://koganbot.substack.com/p/new-york-dolls-part-one-boys-in-makeup

koganbot: (Default)
[EDIT: Recently (I'm writing this July 30, 2019) Dreamwidth has been doing weird stuff on old entries; in this instance this post from May 12, 2006 also shows up here; it's actually the very first post I made on LiveJournal and is where it should be on Dreamwidth as well, so I don't know why Dreamwidth also put it here. But here it is, so I might as well keep it here. Comments aren't here, though, so you should go back to the original to see [personal profile] dubdobdee's quips.]



Commentary on Real Punks Don't Wear Black (100% of the reason for starting this journal is so that I can link this post to my MySpace page, since MySpace doesn't really provide a good place to put reviews).

"He writes as if he's dancing, fighting, killing time, and trying to change the world."

"He treats the New York Dolls as his favourite philosophers and Ludwig Wittgenstein as his favourite band." (This link is the same as the one above it; I just felt like pulling two quotes.)

"Probably the best non–Lester Bangs collected-music-writing book I've ever read."

"Frank Kogan's Real Punks Don't Wear Black is a devastatingly good book."

"Frank Kogan's writing changed my life."

"It's painful but it's awesome like an opossum and my teeth, I don't floss 'em."

"Kogan is the ultimate example of the critic as an artist."

"...using e-mails, diary excerpts, and chat-room postings to vividly memorialise that moment of high-school satori when Kogan realised 'I'm so obsessed with my own mind that I can't think of anything else.'"

"Kogan is piercingly intelligent without ever being pompous, pedantic, or inscrutable." If only this were true.

"References body parts in his reviews."

"Raunchy rap lyrics and free-floating expletives!"

"People should buy it and make Frank Kogan famous."

"looks amazing at a quick skim."

[EDIT: Here are another two raves:

"willing to be seduced by this silly woman"

"Don't even attempt to fuck with Real Punks Don't Wear Black"]

And for those of you who don't want to click the links, here's how the UGA Press summarizes them (the first four are blurbs, not summaries):

"If Frank Kogan had assembled his writing a decade ago, by samizdat or whatever, it would be a cornerstone by now, read by every current and former teenage malcontent."
--Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York

"Doesn't this book at least partly fall into the 'academy is doomed/betrayed' genre (albeit way off on its own wing) vis-à-vis 'closing of the american mind'/'tenured radicals'? Certainly one of the questions it persistently seems to be asking is: 'what is college/knowledge for?' Obviously I think Frank Kogan's answer is a bit different from Allan Bloom's. Isn't it also about restoring the grand ambitions and claims for self of '60s rock-crit culture/counterculture: refusing to settle for a specialist niche, whether ivory-tower cultstud thinkage or leisure-industry enablage? (I am somewhat projecting my own dreams and hungers onto it for sure.)"
--Mark Sinker, author of if. . . . (BFI Film Classics) and The Rise and Sprawl of Horrible Noise

"Kogan is at his intellectual best when annoying academics like me. I would recommend this book to students and expect any self-defined 'popular music scholar' to have read it."
--Simon Frith, author of Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

"Frank Kogan dares you not to listen to music in the context of your life. He knows that dare is impossible, and that in itself puts him head and shoulders above pretty much every other rock critic of the past couple decades. As do his tastes, which are impeccable, even though his format is the farthest thing from a consumer guide. As does the fact that he has more ideas worth stealing than anybody else writing about music; in fact, I kind of hate that this book is coming out, because now everyone will know where I stole all of mine. The book is a mess, full of trap doors, just like the music Frank likes best. He knows none of it is as simple as people pretend."
--Chuck Eddy, Village Voice music editor**, and author of The Accidental Evolution of Rock'N'Roll: A Misguided Tour through Popular Music and Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe

**now deposed

"A devastatingly good book."
--Tom Ewing, Freaky Trigger

"to label Kogan a music journalist understates the philosophical and exploratory qualities of his verbiage ... He draws out pre-conceived notions and puts them under the microscope. It's in this process that Kogan truly shines as not just a critic of music, but of the culture at large ... The voice in his head spills out onto the printed page with both style and substance. Witnessing his words in action as they unfold is at once baffling and alluring"
--Creative Loafing

"Kogan's autodidactic obsession with making a precise point reminds me a lot of the short stories of Woody Allen. With both writers, we are treated to large quantities of self-deprecation that result in humor which makes the traveling through discussions that might otherwise get dry a fascinating trip...an inspired look into the world of sounds we make and the attitudes of those who make them as well as the dances we do because of them."
--Denver Daily News

"Kogan - himself part of a distinguished lineage of committed contrarians which includes Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, and Chuck Eddy - laid the intellectual foundations for the 'Blogging' era with his interactive fanzine...this first collection of his work promises (and delivers)."
--The Independent (UK)

"Kogan is great, for instance, at explaining the dynamics of punk clubs: why the performers have to insult their audiences or else they're 'contaminated' by their acceptance. Unlike most music critics, Kogan's omnivorous, willing to consider music that makes him 'feel things that I don't want to feel, so I have to rethink who I am, where I place myself.'"
--Publishers Weekly

"Kogan's collection ... comes alive in his well-told reflections, where he examines when and how we define ourselves through choices in music. His rockin' auto-analysis shares a quality with his inspirer, Richard Meltzer, though Kogan straddles the line between the gonzo poet and the upper-crust of rock critdom"
--Harp

"Kogan is piercingly intelligent without ever being pompous, pedantic or inscrutable ... Kogan is funny, perverse and contrarian without resorting to shtick or insincerity ... [Real Punks Don't Wear Black] never fails to be an illuminating and entertaining ride."
--Chicago Sun-Times

"the best writing needs to be as sharp, romantic, challenging and catchy as what it's trying to describe, but also willing to be as profane, stupid, noisy and contradictory. And that's why Kogan's brilliant, all-over-the-map collection Real Punks Don't Wear Black has something to offer people who - unlike the author - don't fret much about whether Mariah Carey is great or god awful or what ... you get 'music writing' that's also about the social terrors of junior high school, about the lure and numbness of the suburbs, about how communities are created and threatened, about bohemian self-hatred, about the limits of deconstruction and ultimately about what music writing - in fact, all writing - can and should do ... [Kogan] writes as if he's dancing, fighting, killing time and trying to change the world."
--Frieze

"Kogan has a way with a turn of phrase ... but he can also go the distance, endlessly questioning preconceived ideas and leading the reader to question them herself ... Frank Kogan's writing changed my life."
--Austin American Statesman

Here's the listing at the University of Georgia Press Website. And Amazon.

And you can comment or read comments on Real Punks Don't Wear Black here.

[UPDATE: A couple more reviews linked here.]
koganbot: (Default)
I want you to post here how Facebook ruined your life. You see, my friend Tina (as in "Roger Williams In America" and "The Wind From My Head" in Real Punks Don't Wear Black) started a Facebook group last week called Campus Restaurant Revisited which she's been pressuring me to join. The thing is, I'm not on Facebook, since I don't want yet another social network hijacking my time. The Internet can suck the life out of you, another social network would squeeze me dry, and I'm not nearly caught up with the stuff I need to be doing anyway, etc. These days, a lot of people go to restaurants and coffeeshops so that they can bring their laptops and get the WiFi. Whereas, when I go to these places it's to get away from the 'Net. But...

It was like my little hometown had created its very own East Village* within the four walls of a cruddy downstairs eatery. This was in the Sixties, early Seventies. When the freaks were cutting school, that's where they went, and I get the feeling that for a lot of them that was their emotional home when what was happening in their nuclear family wasn't working for them. Like the East Village, the scene facilitated fucked-up behavior too, amid all the vast creativity, and you can be clingy and neurotic in your adopted families as much as in your real ones; but the freaks being so numerous and charismatic, they cracked open the social map of my entire high school. Wherever you were on the map, you never could settle into a place, because the places kept shifting. This could be rough on some people and it was rough on me, but it worked well for me too, in that it ensured I could never be smug, so it helped to create my brain. And for some kids it created space to flourish they'd never have had in a more steady setting. It also helped there to be a whole lot of interesting people in my world, wherever they found themselves, whether they were the freaks or not at all close to the freaks.

I wasn't one of the freaks; I was more a liberal veering into I don't know where. Didn't go into the Campus Restaurant much, basically 'cause I didn't know if I'd be welcome, though my guess now is that of course I'd have been. A year after I graduated I was back visiting town and I went to meet Tina at the Campus Restaurant, and after the two of us were done talking I saw my ex-friend and ex-nemesis Jeff (see "Junior High" and "Death Rock 2000" in Real Punks) and we had a really good talk, though what I mostly remember from it was that he was being self-derogatory in a way that I hadn't remembered him back when we'd been close; and it didn't dawn on me to see if it was safe to ask him the questions that I really wanted to ask. At one point when I was a senior I remember Maureen saying to me and Jay that Jeff was just a slug, and we gaped at her. Like, didn't she understand? This was JEFF KINNARD! He'd been to social life at Storrs Grammar School what James Brown was to soul. So the question I didn't even think to ask was what happened, how'd he change so that he'd be willing to give the impression to the beautiful Maureen Nolan that he was a slug? Why?

Anyway, Tina has sent me a PDF file of some of the posts from the group. I didn't see anything from Jeff there, though Peter Fish posted a photo of Jeff standing next to Mr. Pride, the art teacher. Most of the people posting I hadn't really known, and a lot of the names I don't recognize. But Tina is there, Tansy Mattingly is there, Steve Nesselroth is there, Tim Page is there, Larry Groff is there, Francesca Holinko is there.

Expandhemming and hawing and the need for a discussion of social class )

So. Tell me about Facebook. Can I avoid friending people, and avoid getting them to friend me? Is it easy to ignore, if, like me, you're fundamentally compulsive and have no OFF switch?

*If I were ever to start one of these groups, it'd be "Strand Book Store, 1977-1980."
koganbot: (Default)
In an exciting and innovative sales strategy, the University Of Georgia Press is conducting a CREATIVE NONFICTION SALE, to create room in the warehouse, no doubt. Titles include:

--Frank Kogan, Real Punks Don't Wear Black, sale price $6.24
--Paul Morley, Words And Music: A History Of Pop In The Shape Of A City, sale price $6.24

Sale ends 12 noon EST (I think they mean EDT, actually), August 1, 2008. Of course, you might want to act sooner in case supplies run out, though my book will not run out, as it does not have legs.

Real Punks Don't Wear Black will make an excellent stocking stuffer, turkey stuffer, and wedding present.
koganbot: (Default)
Just posted this on an old blogger thread that I found via Google:

Bug said: I've read it over thirty times now and am still no closer to understanding what the penman actually meant by this.

"through the process of our appreciating them[, we] turn them into nothing."

What does this mean?
Seriously. It's not a rhetorical question.


Wish you [rmd] had made more of an effort to answer this, as it is an excellent question that I quite sympathize with. In fact, it's what I was trying to understand way back then, and still am.

Anyway, if you're still in touch with Bug (whoever you are, whoever he/she is), I'll try to give a rudimentary answer, just with an example:

ExpandYou will never in a million years guess which current pop singer I use in my example )
koganbot: (Default)
Frank:

We're doing a creative nonfiction special sale on our website offering 50-75% off about 25 titles, including a few music titles. We'll be including REAL PUNKS in that sale at 75% off. I wanted to alert you know so that you could help spread the word and also to let you know that now is a good time to stock up on your own book if you need copies. We cannot offer a further author discount on top of the 75% off price. The sale will likely be up for a few months and should be active with a prominent link off our home page in the next couple of weeks. Please feel free to drive your friends and colleagues there.

If you want to place an order for yourself before the sale is active please just give me a call and I will take you order personally.

Hope you've been well.

Jxxx Mxxxx
Marketing and Sales Director
University of Georgia Press, 330 Research Drive, Athens, GA 30602
http://www.ugapress.uga.edu
koganbot: (Default)
In three months through June 2006 my book moved about 1,450 copies, so I said to myself, "It'll probably top out at about 2,000," which I guess wasn't too bad considering I didn't get many reviews, the most high-profile being Tom Breihan's Pitchfork rave ("Don't even attempt to fuck with Real Punks Don't Wear Black") that didn't even go up until July.

ExpandI got clobbered by returns )
koganbot: (Default)
Interview with me posted here.
koganbot: (Default)
Two more reviews of Real Punks Don't Wear Black (both really great):

Don't even attempt to fuck with Real Punks Don't Wear Black

Willing to be seduced by this silly woman
koganbot: (Default)


Commentary on Real Punks Don't Wear Black (100% of the reason for starting this journal is so that I can link this post to my MySpace page, since MySpace doesn't really provide a good place to put reviews).

"He writes as if he's dancing, fighting, killing time, and trying to change the world."

"He treats the New York Dolls as his favourite philosophers and Ludwig Wittgenstein as his favourite band." (This link is the same as the one above it; I just felt like pulling two quotes.)

"Probably the best non–Lester Bangs collected-music-writing book I've ever read."

"Frank Kogan's Real Punks Don't Wear Black is a devastatingly good book."

"Frank Kogan's writing changed my life."

"It's painful but it's awesome like an opossum and my teeth, I don't floss 'em."

"Kogan is the ultimate example of the critic as an artist."

"...using e-mails, diary excerpts, and chat-room postings to vividly memorialise that moment of high-school satori when Kogan realised 'I'm so obsessed with my own mind that I can't think of anything else.'"

"Kogan is piercingly intelligent without ever being pompous, pedantic, or inscrutable." If only this were true.

"References body parts in his reviews."

"Raunchy rap lyrics and free-floating expletives!"

"People should buy it and make Frank Kogan famous."

"looks amazing at a quick skim."

[EDIT: Here are another two raves:

"willing to be seduced by this silly woman"

"Don't even attempt to fuck with Real Punks Don't Wear Black"]

And for those of you who don't want to click the links, here's how the UGA Press summarizes them (the first four are blurbs, not summaries):

"If Frank Kogan had assembled his writing a decade ago, by samizdat or whatever, it would be a cornerstone by now, read by every current and former teenage malcontent."
--Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York

"Doesn't this book at least partly fall into the 'academy is doomed/betrayed' genre (albeit way off on its own wing) vis-à-vis 'closing of the american mind'/'tenured radicals'? Certainly one of the questions it persistently seems to be asking is: 'what is college/knowledge for?' Obviously I think Frank Kogan's answer is a bit different from Allan Bloom's. Isn't it also about restoring the grand ambitions and claims for self of '60s rock-crit culture/counterculture: refusing to settle for a specialist niche, whether ivory-tower cultstud thinkage or leisure-industry enablage? (I am somewhat projecting my own dreams and hungers onto it for sure.)"
--Mark Sinker, author of if. . . . (BFI Film Classics) and The Rise and Sprawl of Horrible Noise

"Kogan is at his intellectual best when annoying academics like me. I would recommend this book to students and expect any self-defined 'popular music scholar' to have read it."
--Simon Frith, author of Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

"Frank Kogan dares you not to listen to music in the context of your life. He knows that dare is impossible, and that in itself puts him head and shoulders above pretty much every other rock critic of the past couple decades. As do his tastes, which are impeccable, even though his format is the farthest thing from a consumer guide. As does the fact that he has more ideas worth stealing than anybody else writing about music; in fact, I kind of hate that this book is coming out, because now everyone will know where I stole all of mine. The book is a mess, full of trap doors, just like the music Frank likes best. He knows none of it is as simple as people pretend."
--Chuck Eddy, Village Voice music editor**, and author of The Accidental Evolution of Rock'N'Roll: A Misguided Tour through Popular Music and Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe

**now deposed

"A devastatingly good book."
--Tom Ewing, Freaky Trigger

"to label Kogan a music journalist understates the philosophical and exploratory qualities of his verbiage ... He draws out pre-conceived notions and puts them under the microscope. It's in this process that Kogan truly shines as not just a critic of music, but of the culture at large ... The voice in his head spills out onto the printed page with both style and substance. Witnessing his words in action as they unfold is at once baffling and alluring"
--Creative Loafing

"Kogan's autodidactic obsession with making a precise point reminds me a lot of the short stories of Woody Allen. With both writers, we are treated to large quantities of self-deprecation that result in humor which makes the traveling through discussions that might otherwise get dry a fascinating trip...an inspired look into the world of sounds we make and the attitudes of those who make them as well as the dances we do because of them."
--Denver Daily News

"Kogan - himself part of a distinguished lineage of committed contrarians which includes Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, and Chuck Eddy - laid the intellectual foundations for the 'Blogging' era with his interactive fanzine...this first collection of his work promises (and delivers)."
--The Independent (UK)

"Kogan is great, for instance, at explaining the dynamics of punk clubs: why the performers have to insult their audiences or else they're 'contaminated' by their acceptance. Unlike most music critics, Kogan's omnivorous, willing to consider music that makes him 'feel things that I don't want to feel, so I have to rethink who I am, where I place myself.'"
--Publishers Weekly

"Kogan's collection ... comes alive in his well-told reflections, where he examines when and how we define ourselves through choices in music. His rockin' auto-analysis shares a quality with his inspirer, Richard Meltzer, though Kogan straddles the line between the gonzo poet and the upper-crust of rock critdom"
--Harp

"Kogan is piercingly intelligent without ever being pompous, pedantic or inscrutable ... Kogan is funny, perverse and contrarian without resorting to shtick or insincerity ... [Real Punks Don't Wear Black] never fails to be an illuminating and entertaining ride."
--Chicago Sun-Times

"the best writing needs to be as sharp, romantic, challenging and catchy as what it's trying to describe, but also willing to be as profane, stupid, noisy and contradictory. And that's why Kogan's brilliant, all-over-the-map collection Real Punks Don't Wear Black has something to offer people who - unlike the author - don't fret much about whether Mariah Carey is great or god awful or what ... you get 'music writing' that's also about the social terrors of junior high school, about the lure and numbness of the suburbs, about how communities are created and threatened, about bohemian self-hatred, about the limits of deconstruction and ultimately about what music writing - in fact, all writing - can and should do ... [Kogan] writes as if he's dancing, fighting, killing time and trying to change the world."
--Frieze

"Kogan has a way with a turn of phrase ... but he can also go the distance, endlessly questioning preconceived ideas and leading the reader to question them herself ... Frank Kogan's writing changed my life."
--Austin American Statesman

Here's the listing at the University of Georgia Press Website. And Amazon.

And you can comment or read comments on Real Punks Don't Wear Black here.

[UPDATE: A couple more reviews linked here.]

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