New York

me too - i've always loved this song. but (for some reason) i have never actually owned a copy of this album, and it wasn't until the other night that i made an effort to track down the lyrics, and of course that then made me start thinking about them... i have read all the comments below and would like to thank wrob in particular for explaining a couple of things.

having mulled it over and over ( = i have played the song again almost ten times, and have had it on continuous loop in my head for the last 36 hrs!) i want to add and/or clarify a couple of things:

1. unfortunately (@ wrob) there is nothing tongue-in-cheek about this song. lydon's contempt and vitriol is (as usual) 100% genuine

2. the target is not the dolls as such, but david johansen in particular (and even there it's not so much what DJ was, as what lydon felt he had allowed himself to become, by 1977)

• once the latter occurred to me i went back through the song and reaIised all the second-person references are in the singular ("an imitation", "hippy tart's hero", "poor little faggot" etc). but the clincher for me is in the very clever phrase "cheese and chalk" - it seems at first as if lydon has just grabbed a readymade rhyme by turning a well-known phrase on its head, but he's done much more than that: in one image he skewers DJ's integrity as an entertainer while caricaturing his physical appearance (long and thin and pale). john was always a much better lyricist than a lot gave him credit for.

i have no opinion on the new york dolls really, so don't side with one or the other, but i do know that lydon would not have turned his scorn on DJ unless he felt sure in his own mind that it was warranted. "nothing in your gut... stuck in a rut" translates/unpacks into the following: "you spent all your money on drugs and now have to toe the record company line, just do whatever they want, which is the same pathetic sideshow day after day". the kiss references later in the song are really vicious, turning one of DJ's most famous moments against him by implying that he's not only been bought and sold, he's allowed himself to be gift-wrapped as if for some horrible lecherous abuser. (many, many artists have felt this way after - or during - careers in the entertainment industry!)

• all this may seem totally savage and unfair, but lydon lived by his own principles and was gone from the band soon enough... meanwhile, this lyric is a magnificently brutal piece of juvenalian satire and is well married to the most ambitious, least predictable songwriting on the album. (fwiw i would bet the real title was "new york doll" but that the record label talked him out of it... in the same way as "john travolta" by mr bungle is known officially as "quote unquote")

a few more observations:

"made in japan" was (back in the 70s) how everybody in the UK described something cheaply mass-produced. (this later, and rather more accurately, became "made in taiwan" and eventually "made in china")

"coming to this" - as in, "that it should come to this"

"hippy tart" will have been some poor unfortunate whom lydon encountered on his first visit to the big apple... someone who insisted that the dolls were still worth seeing cos DJ was her hero, he always messes up onstage, to show that he's not playing the game etc etc - and john is thinking "that's the best you can come up with??" - i'm just guessing here

peace out x

I love this song.

The subject is the New York Dolls. It references specific songs of theirs including "Looking for a Kiss" and "Pills" ("do the sambo" may allude to their more novelty-esqe tunes), and themes such as cross dressing and drug abuse for which they were known. At the time this was written, the Dolls would have been either defunct or in the process of sputtering out.

I like to believe that it was meant as good natured trash talk between groups that weren't that far removed from each other - musically, as has been noted, and socially. However, I can't discount the possibility that Lydon intended it as an attack. It would not be inconsistent with his confrontational nature and notion of artistic integrity.

Max's Kansas City was a hip club in NYC at the time. "Japan is a Dishpan" is a song by Captain Beefheart, whom I believe was a noted influence.

ignore the E.M.I. at the end...sorry

Other than the input of McLauren the Pistols weren't really inspired by the New York scene; the influences go further back accept for maybe Jones' style. Basically McLauren was always telling them about the NY scene and aggrandized it so much that the band got so sick of it that they wrote this song trashing the scene. It was more like taking a piss on McLauren, which I think is proof for the nay-sayers of the band's independent streak which the even the manager could not often restrain.

Its about how Sid was such a tit

sorry phil lynott (from thin lizzy) was irish!

yeah but also check out sad vacation nuthins simple expecially not the pistols of whom who greil marcus said draw a line anywhere and the sex pistols are on the other side of it also jones saying he ripped off johnny thunders in the filth and the furry is a nice moment but still, the dolls never went near as far and were never terrifying nor wierdly gnostic as johnny rotten and i think thats what makes the pistols the pistols and if johnny rotten hated half the people he said he hated he wouldnt be a quarter as funny

Yes, this song is about the New York Dolls, the kissing business is a reference to their song 'looking for a kiss', and the stuff about pills is about the dolls song 'pills', and to clear things up, the Dolls were a pre-punk glam band who wore their girlfriends clothing (they weren't actually...you know) after the dolls came the bands the heartbreakers, jhonny thunders, and richard hell & the voidoids....

i thought he was saying "teddy boy" at the end.

i think it means like fuck off all of you manufactured bands that are out now. Everybody knows the pistols h8 that shit