pop art in spandex; Marc Bolan wrapped Chuck Berry licks in elfin rhyme. But the Dolls -- singer David Johansen, guitarists Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan -- captured both the glory and sorrow of glam, the high jinks and wasted youth, with electric photorealism.
Made in eight days under battle conditions -- producer Todd Rundgren's severe professionalism vs. the band's endless-party aesthetic -- New York Dolls is a triumph of compelling disorder. Johansen's scalded-Jagger bark turns melody into scar tissue; guitars lurch and bellow like wounded bears. "Personality Crisis" opens with a volley of punchy riffing and cathouse piano that sounds like the Dolls are trying to play "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Great Balls of Fire" at the same time.
Then again, "Personality Crisis" is about identity meltdown. The Dolls lived what they sang -- original drummer Billy Murcia died of chemical misadventure in late '72; Thunders became one of rock's junkie icons -- and New York Dolls packs the dark wallop of documentary. Johansen's howl in "Looking for a Kiss" has a sharp reportorial edge: "Everyone's gone to your house to shoot up in your room / Most of them are beautiful and so obsessed with gloom." And you can clearly hear the sad truth of glam -- a subculture of homely monsters addicted to makeup and emotional denial -- in the nightmare-guitar sprawl of "Frankenstein" (not the Edgar Winter hit).
Beneath the rouge, the Dolls were saucy pop scholars. Bo Diddley's "Pills" becomes a high-speed, anti-drug blues; Johansen caps the butch-Shirelles effect of the wooos in "Trash" with a sly paraphrase from Mickey and Sylvia's "Love Is Strange" ("How do you call your lover boy? Trash!").
The Dolls, like glam itself, were a crash landing waiting to happen. They ultimately dissolved in a fog of drugs and dysfunction after one more studio album. But New York Dolls remains definitive glitter, the perfect eulogy for a short, spangled era. Next to it, everything else is just glitz. (RS 839)
Further Listening:
New York Dolls, Too Much Too Soon (1974) FOURS STARS
David Johansen, David Johansen (1978) FOUR STARS
Johnny Thunders, So Alone (1978) FOUR STARS
DAVID FRICKE
