Jerry Nolan?? I guess an Irish Blood, English heart, glam maniac shy boy in the early 1970s can fall in love with anybody but Jery Nolan???? The Brooklyn born, late to the Dolls and late to the world Nolan (he was 45 years old when he died on 1992), looked like a rough trade transvestite who Morrissey rhapsodised in “Autobiography” as follows: ” Jerry Nolan on the front of the Dolls debut album is the first woman I ever fall in love with, the hussy-slut positioning of the legs is playmate call-girl and the pink drum kit just might be a rock n roll first.”
Moz is suggesting a masturbatory love here and I wish he’d spelled it out but still, something like 20% into the Moz bio and I am thoroughly enjoying myself. He has gotten off television (except for music shows) and is up to his neck in glam. Bowie is God, Roxy Music is the Holy ghost and the New York Dolls, a band that enthrall and bewilder the former head of the NYD fanclub, are exciting him in strange and different ways that girls, who find him attactive but for whom he himself has zero interest, have taken his virginity (well, it implies they have) and but for whom he has no deep affection, indeed any affection at all.
Everything Morrissey writes about sex you and I might write about walking to school, and everything he writes about music, we might write about sex. He is obsessed, bewildered, heartbroken, devoured by music: not unlike the Jimi Hendrix movie I review elsewhere, everything is music and music is everything.
As a music fanatic myself, I quite understand the desire he feels for recorded music and by my reckoning that makes three things he has obsessed about here that I concur with.
1. The UK school system in the 1960s.
2. Children’s television in the 1960s (he is a little later, the early 1970s)
3. Pop music.
I loved glam as well, and essentially the same bands as well: T-Rex, Bowie, Roxy, Mott -you know the rolecall. And Moz writes about them with all the positive passion where until then the passion was seriously negative. 80 pages in and I’m loving it.
