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Sylvain Sylvain of the Proto-Punk Band New York Dolls Dies at 69 - The New York Times
Jan 17, 2021 1 min, 54 secs

Sylvain Sylvain, a key member of the New York Dolls, the influential though short-lived proto-punk band whose outrageous shows at Max’s Kansas City and other venues paved the way for the era of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, died on Wednesday at his home in Nashville.

His wife, Wanda O’Kelley Mizrahi, said the cause was cancer.

“Across the street was the New York Doll Hospital, a toy repair shop,” he told Lenny Kaye in an interview for the Bob Gruen photo book “New York Dolls” (2008).

The New York Dolls were brash and glam, gender-bending and unapologetic, qualities that were still a few years away from becoming commonplace in clubs like CBGB in the East Village.

David Johansen, the group’s lead vocalist, said Mr.

Johansen said by email.

The band made a quick splash but within a few years had dissolved, leaving only two albums from its heyday, “New York Dolls” (1973) and the prophetically titled “Too Much Too Soon” (1974, the title borrowed from the autobiography of the actress Diana Barrymore).

Johansen after the Dolls dissolved.

Johansen and the other surviving member of the Dolls, the bassist Arthur Kane, reunited for the Meltdown Festival in London, but Mr.

Sylvain Sylvain Mizrahi was born on Feb.

They formed a loose-knit band, and other future members of the Dolls were drawn in.

“I got upset at that and gave them a little bit of my French,” he said in an interview for “Too Much Too Soon.” The group was rehearsing in a bicycle shop uptown at the time, and one of the guitarists “didn’t seem to have a lot of enthusiasm,” as Mr.

Johansen put it in an interview for the Gruen book.

Sylvain replaced him, playing opposite his old schoolmate Johnny Thunders, and the New York Dolls took off.

The band played a Tuesday night slot at the Mercer Arts Center near Washington Square for weeks, as well as at Max’s and other spots, and toured the United States and Europe.

Johansen said.

Sylvain said the Dolls had put him in mind of a Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Daffy Duck, tired of being outdone by Bugs in a stage show, seeks the audience’s applause by ingesting a toxic brew of explosives and blowing himself up

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