Overlooked Albums #17: New York Dolls - New York Dolls

It’s pointless to wonder why this record didn’t sell back in 1973. You just have to look at the cover: five flamboyantly-dressed dudes made up to resemble drag queens, all slumped on a sofa after a night of revelry and excess. Yet when my big sister came home with the album under her arm it was a cause for celebration. Impressionable kids that we were, we had read about the Dolls’ shenanigans in Creem magazine. The furore of the live gigs, the excitement and hipness of the Mercer Arts Center glam scene—it all had taken hold of our imagination. All this wouldn’t have meant much if the album didn’t deliver. It did - in spades.

At the time of recording their eponymous first album, the group was under the pall of losing drummer Billy Murcia, who had died in London from an overdose of alcohol and Mandrax. New drummer Jerry Nolan had learned the songs just in time for his first gig on December 19, 1972 and the recording sessions that came after.

The album was produced by Todd Rundgren within the span of one week. By no means was it an easy session. Rundgren could be as mercurial as the band, but he was then on company time, in charge of people who behaved like the Marx Brothers on speed. Nolan and guitarist Johnny Thunder were specially at odds with him. Complaints aside, Rundgren still managed to capture the group’s raw energy, his production skills targeting on vocal harmonies and the sound mix.

Like the Stones before them, the foundation of the Dolls’ sound was Chuck Berry riffs, but that’s where the similarities ended. Along with rock ‘n roll tradition, the main motivation was to break the sound barrier. Even David Johansen’s vocals show this intent, opening the record with a long shriek on Personality Crisis, a barrage of sheer energy that will be replicated throughout. Crucial to the sonic boom is Johnny Thunders’ lead guitar. On a song like Subway Train, it squalls, roars, and squeals, going all across the fretboard for some lost chord.

Johansen’s lyrics brought something new to the mix. The Dolls’ universe was informed by B-movies, tabloid headlines, comic books, cheap romance novels, obscure doo-wop groups, glossy adverts. Like Pop Art, images of a consumer society were combined, fragmented or collided. Songs like Looking For A Kiss, Lonely Planet Boy, and Trash are not just camp; what is pursued here is a higher ground of tawdry glamour. 

There is humor and allusion throughout the record. Johansen quotes from other songs at the drop of a hat. The Dolls’ were readily dismissed as punks at the time, but they saw themselves as purveyors of a rock ‘n roll tradition that was fast disappearing from the charts to make room for bland pop and disco. Their version of Bo Diddley’s Pills is a thing of beauty, turning the original’s complaint into a celebration of the music.

That classic Dolls line-up would only make one more studio album, Too Much Too Soon (1974), a title that would become an apt epitaph for a group whose heyday came and went in the blink of an eye. The Dolls were besieged by manager and money problems, infighting, and drug and alcohol addiction. Malcolm McLaren took over managerial duties only to lead them astray, cajoling them into wearing red patent leather before a communist flag. His tricks would work better for the Sex Pistols, but to the Dolls they led to a career nadir. Thunders and Nolan soon left to form The Heartbreakers, Johansen and Syl Sylvain moved on to solo projects, and bassist Arthur Kane would lose himself to alcohol and religious fervor. The Pistols ended up nicking some of the Dolls’ gear and a great deal of their sound.

With the deaths of Thunders and Nolan, the story of the Dolls seemed to be over for good. It took Morrissey’s intervention to bridge the gaps between Johansen, Sylvain, and Arthur Kane, who played their first concert after so many years on June 16, 2004. Kane died soon after from leukemia, so it was quite shocking to see a new Dolls release in 2006. 

It can’t be said that the Dolls have picked up where they left off; some may even argue that all that remains of the group is the name. It will never be the same. 

That special group chemistry can’t be recreated. I believe, though, that the intent is to honor it. Johansen and Sylvain can’t dwell on the past; to do so would be to negate the years of experience that came after. In exchange, the current Dolls give us the wisdom of survival. The humor is still there, sometimes with a touch of sadness.

The Dolls’ place in our culture is well earned. Lesser bands have shot to fame and fortune borrowing from them, and pissing off the bourgeoisie has become a hackneyed path to the top. Looking back, that was never what the Dolls were about. They didn’t need to topple anyone’s world because they had their own. It’s all there on their first record: life and movement in every song, a perpetual party where everyone is invited.