12 Comments
User's avatar
David Watts Barton's avatar

Right on, as usual. I got the first Dolls album the week it came out. Hugely important.

Expand full comment
Songs That Saved Your Life's avatar

Thank you for reading David! I wish the Dolls would've had more staying power because the music was great! I wasn't as into Johnny and the Heartbreakers or David's solo work. The Dolls were an awesome blip in music history.

Expand full comment
David Watts Barton's avatar

Always a pleasure, I love your perspective. As I’ve said before, I was there (well, in Sacramento…but with Creem and Hit Parader, you could feel like you were), and I was open to all of it, but I didn’t have quite as large in context. I was a teenager. But when I think back to just that period of time, starting with Ziggy Stardust and 72 and Transformer and then Alladin Sane and the first Dolls… I knew it was special at the time, even though I was only 16 and 17. But I thought it would last forever. In some ways, I guess it did. And that’s not even counting the even bigger stuff, like Dark Side of the Moon and Houses of the Holy, and on and on…still so happy to have lived it “live” as it were.

Expand full comment
Songs That Saved Your Life's avatar

You're so right! You are lucky to have lived it in real time. It's one of my favorite eras of rock history and I just missed it. So much great music.

Expand full comment
The Twelve Inch (Disco/80s)'s avatar

Excellent write-up as always, Jami. I’m sure some readers will be surprised by this one. It’s yet another reminder of just how deeply the LGBTQ scene in New York shaped the course of music history.

Expand full comment
Vince Roman's avatar

Loved this, thanks for sharing

Expand full comment
Joe Ivory Mattingly's avatar

Interesting analysis!

Expand full comment
Sheila (of Ephemera)'s avatar

This was so good, thank you!

Expand full comment
Mark Nash's avatar

This was excellent, thanks for shining the light on the music’s origins. I’d heard many of the names but hadn’t really connected the dots and certainly hadn’t realized how centered in queerness punk was in its infancy.

Expand full comment
Mark Kureishy's avatar

Erm…Bowie…!?

Expand full comment
Songs That Saved Your Life's avatar

Yes! A lot of Bowie's characterizations were heavily influenced by Warhol and his social circle in the back room of Max's Kansas City. That's where he was introduced to Iggy Pop and Lou Reed for the first time.

Expand full comment
Evelyn Fox's avatar

I loved reading this! I'll have to dive back into my punk catelogue passed down to me by my father. It's wild to me that anyone would believe an aesthetic and ideology such as punk could be heteronormative, but there you go.

Expand full comment