September Record Club: New York Dolls, "New York Dolls"

"Roll up for the Mystery Tour!", "Ty-i-i-i-i-me is on my side.", and "I Need Lunch! FEED ME!"

In their glamourous irreverence a kernel of devotion to bluesy Stones' rock exists. In my odd set of lyric clips I have a theme.

The Early Personal History

I first encountered the Dolls through the magic of cassette tape. It was a brisk summer morning in late July, Canton, NC 1986 - Boy Scouts' Camp Daniel Boone. There was a cool, older guy wearing eyeliner who recognised my interest in punk rock by my terrible haircut. Intrigued and attracted to his mystique, he invited me into his canvas tent. The dangerous, magical noise was delivered via an off-brand walkman. I got to borrow the tape. I had one of my own, so I traded a Dead Kennedys' mix for temporary usage of his tape. There wasn't any sexual experimentation, though the reader may have thought that from how it was set up: Boy Scouts, older teenager, risqué meetings, open transgressive behaviour, and so on. The tape also included hits from Rudimentary Peni, Crass, The Clash, and a few other oddities I had no real reference for.

The Dolls tracks were "Looking for a Kiss" and "Frankenstein". I definitely did NOT groove to the lyrical content. I didn't like Rudimentary Peni, either. I could hear that dude's crazy, even as a 14 year-old. 

The Revisiting as an Adult

I bought this record about 20 years ago, after hearing tracks throughout my Uni years, my travels to Europe, and going to NYC a few times: 1988, 1997, 2001. I knew David Johansen more as Buster Poindexter than a rules-breaking singer in a drag band singing about 'down and out in NYC in the early 1970s'. But, I was feeling hot that day, so I acquired the object on CD. It was not a reissue, not a remaster. Just a dirty old transfer ticket from one age to the next. I loved the record. I listened to it through and through more than 20 times after buying it, before migrating to a serious listening of whatever I purchased the subsequent weekend after. It stayed in my motor's multi-disc CD player for about a month. 


Lunch Time

Maybe I'll have time to input some dry-witted desert island discs words to the songs here. "Vietnamese Baby" is my new favourite track of the record after doing a half-assed listen-through this morning. The whole of the review here was snaking around the idea of: quintessential NYC that everyone fondly remembers - "dangerous, interesting, exciting". Something, something: Charlie Watts was a great drummer, but NY Dolls is a better fit for the theme of this month's record club. It's getting close to lunch time, kids are yelling. I don't have the time to appreciate this respite of remembrance. I don't have the time to enjoy something I have found funny and engaging for the last 35 years. Shit sucks. People die. What you remember enjoying may not endure in the same vibrancy it once had, but sometimes there is a thing you didn't remember enjoying then that you find some joy in now. Hopefully, some of the others might have the time to do that this month.


Lyric clips were: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Dead Boys.

In my teenage forays into glam/proto-punk, I never really explored the NYC scene as much as their contemporaries elsewhere, especially UK and Michigan acts (for reasons I'll get into in a bit). So, this is almost certainly the first time I've heard the Dolls' debut.

It's alright. Distinctive enough that it largely held my interest though I agree with Dellarigg that there's significant bloat. What ultimately gets in my craw about the music (Johansen's singing and lyrics are inoffensive) is that it feels like the penultimate step in NYC rock leading to The Ramones. The Brothers Ramone always bugged me because they felt (even when I was in impressionable teenager) like a Reagan-era co-opting a few years earlier. There's a latent conservatism to them, in that they argued that rock should never have advanced beyond 1965 while also removing all traces of the blues from the music. This record's Bo Diddley cover is instructive: how do you take an artist who's all blues dynamism and shuffle and turn it into a 4/4 trifle?

Obviously, it's not fair to lay The Ramones' sins at the feet of New York Dolls, but I gotta say there's a creeping sense of flattening and commodification here. Johnny Thunders is a great guitarist and his wonderfully nasty tones hold this contraption together, but the rhythm section? Yes, Jerry Nolan is a solid drummer but his work unfortunately is flavorless where even their glam contemporaries could manage some distinctiveness. Meanwhile, Arthur Kane's bass playing is charming to put it kindly. It all adds up to what I would consider one of the Ground Zeros of punk-influenced "fridge buzzing" that Thom Yorke famously sang about.

That said, I did vote for this album and I'm glad to finally hear it. I'll never look at Scrooged the same way.

Not my first time listening to this, but my first time listening to it in many years. I remember it being about half kick-ass classics and half completely forgettable filler. Looking over the track listing, that seems about right. I liked it fine then, certainly better than their second album (despite it containing what is probably their best song in "Babylon")--never bothered with any of their post-reunion albums (a decision I unfortunately did not make with the Stooges). I went to see them on their first reunion tour in 2005--front row right in front of Johansen.

Anyway: the meat of the review.

1. Personality Crisis: The album starts out with two great tracks. I am admittedly a much bigger fan of Johnny Thunders' work post-Dolls and I prefer the version of "Personality Crisis" he did on his own. Yeah, I could do without the piano, but this is a good song. I'll agree there is definitely some proto-glam faux metal in this one. It's no secret they were the band about of Guns N' Roses wanted to be (Use Your Illusion was dedicated to Johnny Thunders).

2. Lookin' For A Kiss: Classic. Possibly could have been a hit, but wasn't.

3-5. Vietnamese Baby/Lonely Planet Boy/Frankenstein: The filler section. Vietnamese Baby and Frankenstein are okay, although never anything I'll want to hear alone again. Lonely Planet Boy sounds like something from a different album by a different band. The worst thing on the album even without the stupid horn.

6. Trash: I feel like this is their best known song? Although I don't think that people know any New York Dolls unless they've specifically sought them out. I like it.

7. Bad Girl: Another filler track. I can recognize it's not bad and it's a good sound, but I don't really like it.

8. Subway Train: It's a little all over the place in what it's trying to be, but I like this one.

9. Pills: The lone cover on this album (their follow-up had four). A fine Bo Diddley take, but you can't help but compare it to the Stooges' uncredited Bo Diddley influence on 1969, and from there it's no comparison.

I went to see Sylvain Sylvain when he did an acoustic set club tour with the great punk rock footnote Glen Matlock in 2014. Between two songs, he pointed at me in the nearly empty room and sent me "backstage" (a corner of the room where the back door was, covered by a thin black curtain) to get him a drink. I don't know what it was, but it was an odd shade of green and served in something about the size of the plastic cap off a cough syrup bottle. One of the greatest moments of my audience member career. Anyway, the story he told leading into "Pills," and of course I assume it's closer to self-started myth than fact, was that the band went to see a Bo Diddley concert after finishing up their own show at another club, with no time to change out of their flamboyant costumes. They apparently stood in the back, shouting out requests for him to play "Pills" . . . and were promptly thrown out under suspicion of being drug dealers. Again, questionable veracity, but it's a good story.

10. Private World: I had absolutely no memory of this song, but listening to it tonight, I don't know why. It's a pretty fun song that doesn't try to hide the fact that it's lifted directly from "Louie Louie."

11. Jet Boy: Great album closer.

All-in-all, I enjoyed it. Great songs, but not enough to be a great album. The first band to answer the question "What if Mick Jagger was a less talented transvestite?" You can hear the earliest version of punk rock guitar in there, but it's certainly something other bands took and improved upon (The Ramones, Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers). An interesting piece of music that certainly has its rightful place in rock history, but it's much weaker than the best stuff it influenced.

I don't have much to add except that it sounds like it would have been fun live. I support harmonica and handclaps. And Munster used to outsource negging.