The new "Dolls": Is America's greatest cult band back (in any meaningful sense)?

The Good Old Days


Let’s finally just say it. The New York Dolls by the New York Dolls is a Great Record. I don’t mean a great record as in a condescending 225th out of some panel of critic’s 500 best. I mean it’s one of the Great Records, impertinently elbowing its way in among British Royalty like the Beatles and Stones; cheerily bumming smokes off their own countrymen from places like Tupelo, Mississippi and Hibbing, Minnesota.

Other records may have gone deeper into soul and spirit, but for sheer screaming, nuts, up the walls, electrifying, testifying, snake-handling, wave your arms in the air like you don't care, bringing all the noise, white light/white heat, once in a lifetime, out on the far careening edge rock and roll ecstasy, I've never heard its equal, in four decades plus of listening to rock and roll.

Seeing the Dolls was--I have to use what is now a rock cliche--a religious experience. The wave of energy and charisma that came off the stage left you feeling that you had had an encounter with the essential heart of the music, that you had been given the chance to know what it was like to see Elvis singing off of a flatbed truck in Memphis in 1954, the Beatles at the Cavern Club, the Stones at the Marquee, Robert Johnson in a Misissipppi juke joint. The Dolls made me more interested in the roots of rock and roll, in tracing it back thru gospel music and field hollers and back to Africa, to find out what was the nature of this power, what was its source, and how do you wield it.

The exta edge in the Dolls music is the realization that it could all fall apart. That’s what makes the music feel so shockingly alive.Taking the stage, for the Dolls, was taking a dare. It was like watching a high wire act every night. The sense that the musicians are actually risking something, are taking a gamble, jaded my palate, giving me less patience for other, safer musicians, who make up, after all, the vast majority of what gets on record.

Well now, a band in 2009, having the nerve to call themselves the New York Dolls, has put out a record. The second under that name in fact. Who has such nerve? The two still-breathing New York Dolls, never lacking for nerve, of course. Singer/songwriter David Johansen and second lead/rhythm/songwriter Sylvain Sylvain. Is it a piece of crap, as you might assume? No, strangely enough. 'Cause I Sez So might be the only reunion that has actually captured a little old magic in its sails, and worked up some new at the same time.

I am reflexively skeptical of reunions, solo albums, partial bands struggling under an old name, etc. When it comes to rock & roll, I believe in magic, and I don't think magic rings twice, or can be forced. This goes double for bands that I loved. I had zero invested in whether this "New York Dolls" album was going to be any good or not, and I didn't even buy the first (re-union) one. But lo and behold -- something really peculiar has happened.What it sounds like is that, instead of being backing guys for Johansen--which is how his solo bands always seemed to me--a pretty tough rock & roll band with some interesting ideas and more chops than they need recruited Johansen to sing for them and pitch in on the songwriting. Or, from another angle, to this Dolls fanatic, this sounds like the best post-Dolls project Johansen's ever been involved with. The kind of thing we wanted him to do from the beginning. And strangely, while being a very good band in their own right, these "Dolls" are good in ways that remind you of the original band, without ever making any conscious hommages to the old days. Something of the Dolls sashay and sneer are there in the title cut, and the last, "Exorcism of Despair." And "My World" is not what I was looking for on this record--one for the all-time Dolls greatest hits line-up. If you've ever wondered what the Dolls might have done had they been able to keep on making records, this suggests an answer: A kind of Bo Diddley maracas shuffle taken from its its earthy roots and set against a turbulent sky. With little oriental-sounding scalar hooks, and a perfectly conceived wah-wah(!) break that cracks open the song in the middle.

David Johansen is as distinct a presence on a record as Tom Waits, and it takes some real group-first, me-second solidarity to deploy his larger than life New Yawk eccentricities to add color and character without having him take over the record. Ego's are being submerged toward the greater good here, and maybe that's what makes this different from so many of its ilk.

By the way, don't miss the great new book, New York Dolls, Photographs by Bob Gruen,. The legendary rock and roll photographer and Dolls maniac chronicles the band in all their brief but blazing glory in over 230 great photographs, most never published before.