Sylvain Sylvain Mizrahi (69) – The New York Dolls – was born in Cairo, Egypt on February 14, 1951. His Syrian Sephardic Jewish family fled Egypt because of the Suez Canal crisis in 1957, initially moved to France and then the USA in the late 1950s. They first settled in Buffalo, New York and later in New York City.
Sylvain, who grew up with dyslexia, attended Newtown High School in Queens and Quintano’s School for Young Professionals in Manhattan, where he met future New York Doll bandmate Billy Murcia and together they ran a clothing company called “Truth and Soul”, which helped define his fashion sense and would play a role in the band’s groundbreaking look. His early musical influences were the Who, MC5 and Iggy Pop.
“Billy Murcia and I had our own line of sweaters called Truth And Soul. That’s basically how we started, with that little company. We started getting successful and doing boutique shows. As a matter of fact, that’s how I met Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. We were doing a boutique show in 1970 at the Hotel McAlpin. There was this English gentleman there with his woman, and they had (the store) Let It Rock, and they were doing all the Teddy Boy stuff. At the end of the show, I introduced Johansen and Johnny to Vivienne and Malcolm. And we bought some of their samples, because that’s what you did at those things.”
When I first got into music, me and Billy always had these bands since we started going to school together. We were very young. We had our amps in his mother’s basement, and that’s where we learned how to play. Johnny Thunders was another guy in school who was a bass player. He had a lot of girlfriends. We thought, if we play with this guy, maybe we could grab some of his chicks or something (laughs). Billy’s family were also immigrants, from Colombia. We got along, maybe for survival reasons, in New York.
When he was a teenager, he formed The Pox with future New York Dolls bandmate and fashion partner Billy Murcia. The pair also featured in Actress, where they were joined by Johnny Thunders and Arthur Kane, and they morphed into the New York Dolls as singer David Johansen joined the band. Sylvain Sylvain always seemed like the centre of the band. It was him that came up with their name, after a toy repair shop called The New York Doll Hospital, located across the street from the clothes store where he and the band’s original drummer Billy Murcia worked. He came from a family of tailors, bolstering the band’s unique approach to clothing, which bore the influence of New York’s glitter-bedecked queer fringe drama group the Theatre of the Ridiculous and which Johansson described as “very ecological”: their penchant for reappropriating female garments was “just about taking old clothes and wearing them again”. He played rhythm guitar for the Dolls from 1971 until the group’s official dissolution in 1977. He also wrote several of their most famous songs such as “Funky But Chic”, “Frenchette”, “Cool Metro”, “Frankenstein”, “Trash” and more. His rhythm guitar playing was the one rock-solid thing about their sound, which otherwise had a wilfully sloppy, flailing quality that was thrillingly at odds not just with mainstream early-70s rock but also their glam rock peers. It bore little resemblance to the virtuosic guitar playing of Bowie’s foil Mick Ronson, or the taut precision of Chinn and Chapman or Mike Leander’s productions, which was part of their appeal: one of the ways the Dolls presaged punk was that aspiring musicians saw them and thought their limited musical proficiency was no barrier to achieving something similar. And it was Sylvain – relatively abstemious by the band’s standards – who appeared to take on the job of keeping the show on the road.
It proved a thankless task: the New York Dolls had an unerring ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They quickly provoked a vast amount of press interest – less than six months after their first gig, Melody Maker was calling them “the best rock’n’roll band in the world” – which led to an invitation to come to England and support Rod Stewart, unthinkable for an unsigned artist. But during the trip, Murcia died after overdosing on downers and drowning in the bathtub. It was left to Sylvain to call his mother.
After the first dissolution of the Dolls, he frequently played with Johansen on some of his solo records. Sylvain worked on a number of projects, releasing two albums under his own name, one with Syl Sylvain and the Teardrops, and two with Sylvain Sylvain and The Criminal$. He started The Criminal$ with another ex-Doll, Tony Machine, and continued to play the New York club scene and toured the US and Europe. In downtimes he even resorted to driving a cab, being an insurance investigator and started a cap manufacturing company. He landed a solo recording contract with RCA, and released one album with Lee Crystal (drums; later of Joan Jett‘s Blackhearts) and Johnny Ráo (guitar). He moved for a while to Los Angeles and in 1996 to Atlanta, Georgia and kept himself and his family alive with writing songs.
It’s ironic in a way, because the band was never a commercial success, but when the Dolls broke-up, all members were successful individually. Some were very successful, some were not so, but they still had work and could provide. The question really should be: “Why didn’t they just do it for the damn music?” But David Johansen, the most successful out of the Dolls, at the time did not really thought of it as his best option for a career move.
In 2004 the surviving members of the Dolls (Sylvain, Johansen and Kane) reformed to perform at the Morrissey-curated Meltdown festival in London. Kane died just weeks after the show, but two years later came a third Dolls album, One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. This was followed in 2009 by Cause I Sez So and Dancing Backward in High Heels in 2011.
Later in 2011 Sylvain Sylvain formed Batusis with Cheetah Chrome of The Dead Boys and played SXSW. Sylvain had moved to Nashville in 2015. He announced in April 2019 that he had been diagnosed with cancer.
Sylvain Sylvain was the next New York Doll to leave us on January 13, 2021 from cancer. He was 69 years old.
Sylvain’s later in life fantasy: My fantasy would be that I could put my arm around Johnny Thunders, in my dreams somehow. And The Dolls could be together as we once were, without all the junk and shit that destroyed us. That’s what I wrote my song “Sleep Baby Doll” about. It was an accident – trying to put the kid to sleep, and there it was. It helped me make peace with it all. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper to write a song than to see a shrink. It’s a hell of a lot more fun, too. I always tell people – there’s a time for everything. When you demand answers immediately and you can’t get them, that’s what fucks you up.
David Johansen wrote: “My best friend for so many years. I can still remember the first time I saw him bop into the rehearsal space/bicycle shop with his carpetbag and guitar straight from the plane after having been deported from Amsterdam, I instantly loved him. I’m gonna miss you old pal. I’ll keep the home fires burning. au revoir Syl mon vieux copain.” (David Johansen passed in February 2025).
