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Sunday, October 3, 2010

29. Personality Crisis by New York Dolls 1973

In 77 I was in a dismal coffee shop/pizza parlour band called Subway. We played my songs but they were mostly dirges and lent towards Dylan. Driving home from a gig by Bleeding Hearts at the Tiger Lounge in 77 I was with the drummer Vic and we pulled up alongside another car when the passenger yelled out "Are you in a band?" "What kind of music do you play?"
I answered New York Dolls. We didn't play that stuff but I listened to it and I was ready to make a leap into the kind of scene happening in the UK. As coincidence would gave it the guy in the other car was Bruce Milne (founder of Au Go Go records) A few weeks later an ad appeared in the Swinburne Newspaper asking if Subway really existed could they contact Bruce. So I sacked my girlfriend who sang with us and Subway was now a punk band. We only played one gig as a punk band. Someones party in Hawthorn where we cleared the room in one minute. The bass player didn't even bother to turn up. I rang Bruce up which lead to meeting other people in the scene, changing the band name to The Fiction and being on Au Go Go Records
Personality Crisis was the first track on the New York dolls album. I bought the album during the Brashes sales, like a lot of my albums. I bought it because Bowie had said good words about them in an interview. Then I read the NME article by Nick Kent. Later I would see Radio Birdman perform the song at the Tiger Room. A wild start to an album , it completely sets out their territory.

1 comment:

  1. Written as a glam song, but certainly ended up as a punk anthem.. it has that les paul sound that steve jones loved, and set a style for punk just like the opening of King Tut's tomb set the style for art deco in 1922..

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