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This is people born to lose, who had all the artistic and technical opportunities to be among the best, to stay in luxurious hotels with pools and use the eight-seater limousine with a driver to go to concerts, but instead are damned for the rest of their lives, forced to be photographed on the cover with a one-dollar plastic jacket and drug-addict dark circles under their eyes against the background of the skyscrapers of the Big Apple.
It's the fate of the New York Dolls, who perhaps more than anyone else took that walk on the wild side of the street. Arthur "Killer" Kane was the bassist of the Dolls, who had already lost drummer Bill Murcia to drug problems. By the end of 1974, he was literally in the middle of a street. An accident with his girlfriend had cost him half a thumb, and the "dolls" had gone on tour, replacing him with a roadie.
The beauty is that in the hands of a manager like Malcolm McLaren (on a learning trip in the USA), the New York Dolls broke up on tour just like the future Sex Pistols a few years later. In the Big Apple, their hooker look had a meaning, in the reactionary South of the States another. Especially when a genius like McLaren makes them perform with the hammer & sickle flag as a backdrop... Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan leave to form the Heartbreakers and fly to England to give rock lessons to the incapable punkers, while Killer Kane thumbs (now fixed) his way around his native Bronx where heroin is cheap and where it's difficult for a record label to be willing to put a former Dolls drug addict, and an utterly lost alcoholic at that, on the payroll.
But in 1976 this EP with just three songs made it clear to the kid called Supersoul that rock is magic. The guitar intro of "Mr Cool" is an uncertain and dirty thrill; Blackie Lawless's voice (future frontman of the infamous WASP) can melt the rockiest of hearts. The sonic assault of "Long Haired Woman" with the doubled riff of guitars and Killer Kane's throbbing bass is an anthem to dangerous living. The violent R&B of a track like "I don't need You" reminds so much of the writing of the duo Jagger/Richards finally getting down to the drug-infested American streets of vice with twenty-seven dollars clenched in hand.
In an instant, the stinking, dirty street rawness of three tracks swept away the tired hippie Fleetwood Mac imitation that my balls aped which was the glorious late '60s, which I couldn't participate in for demographic reasons. The Ramones would soon crank up the volume with the three-chords-three of "Blitzkrieg Bop," and everything would luckily change, but let me say thanks to Arthur "Killer" Kane.
Like all losers, he had a life like a novel. After attempting suicide in 1989 dazed by drugs and alcohol, during his hospitalization, he came into possession of the Book of Mormon and became a model adherent. He found part-time work at the Mormon Church bookstore in Los Angeles and seemed happy. Meanwhile, two other ex-Dolls (Thunders and Nolan) leave this valley of tears, and when in 2004 Morrissey, president of the New York Dolls' British Fan Club, reorganizes the survivors for concerts at London's Royal Festival Hall, our Killer Kane is thrilled to play again with old friends Johansen and Sylvain.
Only for a few more hours because in July 2004, he felt unwell and was diagnosed with advanced leukemia which finished him.
"Nothing to do, nothing to say /Born to lose, baby, I'm born to lose"
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