One of the last New York Dolls died today, eight years after the group ended its unexpectedly long reunion. I saw the band when it first reunited, at one of the strangest shows I’ve ever been to.
First, I went with my old boss, something that feels normal in D.C. but probably sounds sociopathic to everyone else. Second, the show was at the 9:30 Club, a venue not yet associated with nostalgia acts. Third, nearly no one was there. David Johansen, Sylvain Sylvain, and whoever they’d got to fill out the band were just feet in front of us.
You can see the artist’s ego defense mechanisms go into effect in a situation like that. The band looked old and grateful, didn’t banter about the weak showing, just shrank the show down.
Why did I listen to this band? I was born years after the New York Dolls broke up; I started picking my own music to listen to when I was 14 or so, in the mid-90s. Baby boomers had written a general history of rock, their music, that elevated this pretty fun band into a world-changing one, a link between hard rock and punk.
The music holds up, even if it’s no longer very important to me. The classic line-up had two guitarists with relatively few ideas: Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders. They focused on riffs, and didn’t move quickly up the neck. Johansen was a fantastic, campy singer, which elevated the material. The rest of the band was just there, which, 30 years after they’d broken up, made it easier for them to reconstitute.
The reunion material was fine; nothing by a 70s band recorded after 2000 is better than “fine.” The only two songs that I go back to are “Jet Boy,” which is basically bubblegum pop on downers, and “Human Being,” which sounds as if the band is breaking up as it records it. It’s a mess, and it has to be a mess: Guns ‘n’ Roses covered it 20 years later and turned it into a Jerry Lee Lewis bop. It didn’t click, not like the chaos did.