Gone is David Johansen, lead singer, AGE 75 for the groundbreaking New York Dolls and an odd musical chameleon when that band broke up. The Dolls interested me as a Detroiter who grew up with the MC5 and The Stooges playing local venues and getting songs played on area FM radio stations.
Those proto punk rockers, on whose shoulders I believe an entire generation of punk bands that follow stand, were rough, splintery, ill-mannered, simplistic, fast, purposefully sloppy, the dumb side of real life that the Velvet Underground never explored (to paraphrase R. Christgau). The New York Dolls, to my ears, were the first to pick up on what the MC5 were doing and made teenage outrage-your-parents music that was similarly chaotic and crashing, hoarsely bellowed vocals over careening guitars and a rhythm section that couldn't decide how fast to play or when to start or end a measure.
I saw the band at the now defunct JJ's on Pacific Highway and found myself enjoying their speed freak-junkie jitters show, and especially liked Johansen, who threw himself all over the venue's cramped stage, sometimes looking like a rag doll caught in the jaws of a crazed hound. I did, though, name the band as one of the worst shows I'd seen in a Reader year-end round up, a hurried listing I still regret. But they were great, a perfect demonstration of everything prudes, priests, and parents thought was wrong with American youth. And it's not the lyrics were in any sense reflective or revealing why teens were angry, confused, mixed up, inflamed by competing emotions and impulses; their music and their appearance shocked scribes, moralists, and meatheads all around, and the New York Dolls gave them no solace , no relief. Comprehension, coherence, manners or maturity as one got older were not the virtues the Dolls sought. Instead, they wallowed in their addled comprehension of world, they were in your face, they didn't give a flat f-bomb what you thought. You dug them or you walked away from them, grumbling under their breath. They were a high-ocatane wallow , in the moment, finding joy in the sensations that adrenaline provided.
Maybe they were Kerouacian in their own way, searching for new experiences, new kicks? Night likely, though one might look forward to someone writing a long treatise on Johansen and the New York Dolls. But be warned if such a squib appears in a bookstore window claiming to explain it all to you. For their Dolls, there was no transcendence. it was all RIGHT NOW, forever, until gravity and human fraility decided otherwise. They were gleeful in their general fucked-upedness and flaunted it merrily. They understood the founding principle of what became punk rock no less than the MC5 or the Stooges or the Who before them, to not have a good time flouncing about to a horrible racket and enjoying the old world as it squirmed in a pool of its own nervous sweat. RIP
