Audio By Carbonatix
As rock-and-roll reunions go, the New York Dolls’ get-together is as unlikely as they come. For one thing, two members of the original quintet’s early-’70s lineup (guitarist Johnny Thunders and drummer Jerry Nolan) were long dead before the outfit’s 2004 reformation, and a third, bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane, succumbed to leukemia shortly thereafter. For another, David Johansen, the Dolls’ frontman and guiding light, has a natural disinclination toward nostalgia. When asked if he had been opposed to resurrecting the group on principle, he laughingly responds, “I still am.”
At the same time, Johansen isn’t shy about acknowledging his affection for the Dolls’ music, then and now. “When we did the original Dolls, I thought we were the greatest thing in the world,” he notes. “There’d be these big think pieces, and they would describe the music very eloquently and say, ‘This is the future of rock and roll music.’ And I would think, ‘These guys get it. They totally know what the hell they’re doing,’ and I would be very sort of smug and satisfied.
“Then we finished it,” he continues. “The years went by, and you’d be in a bookstore and you’d pick up some history of rock and roll and look up ‘New York Dolls,’ and you’d read the blurb, and it’d say something like, ‘They were trashy. They were flashy. They were junkies. They were blah-blah-blah.’ And I think after a while, it starts to almost sink in, and you start thinking subconsciously, ‘Oh, that’s what it was.’ But then, when we got together to play, and I went out and bought the records to listen to them, I thought, ‘This is really fucking good.’ And I started coming around to that original thought I had.”
As well he should have. Although the classic Dolls only put out two studio albums, a self-titled platter in 1972 and Too Much Too Soon the following year, they managed to influence or inspire artists operating in a slew of subgenres, from new wave to no wave and everything in between. One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, which Johansen, guitarist Sylvain Sylvain and their new recruits issued in 2006, isn’t on that level, but it doesn’t bite nearly as hard as most comeback discs by revived combos. Not that Johansen was surprised. He makes writing the first new Dolls ditties in three decades sound like the simplest process imaginable. “All these songs that we’ll perhaps record for the next twenty years or so are already there,” he says. “They just haven’t come out yet, but they’re all in our heads. They percolate, and then they come out.”
Just like the Dolls themselves.
Visit Backbeat Online for more of our interview with the New York Dolls’ David Johansen.
