Today I’ll be meeting up with Kajsa in PA and so I’m
dedicating today’s track to her. Yeah, the New York Dolls. She got into them in
her college years and so I finally heard them after only hearing about them for
so long. See, the Dolls were only an existing band in the early Seventies, and
recorded two albums, released in 1973 and 1974. They were a New York sensation,
but if you blinked you could easily have missed them. I was aware of them once
they started making records because of a certain amount of hype and a certain
amount of infamy that surrounded them, but to me, at the time, they just seemed
the most shambolic and over-stated version of Glam to yet surface.
David Johansen, though, was quite a character and one had
the sense that he was simply a showman, that there was little that was authentic
or sincere about his role and, sure enough, as soon as Glam and pretty tights
and sequins and lipstick had had its day, he was off to invent a new persona.
The rest of the Dolls pretty much got stuck being ex-Dolls. The
possibility of re-inventing themselves was slim. And of course drugs and bad
choices and the whole bit. But that all seemed to go with the terrain, as if
the point of forming a band like the Dolls was to exploit yourself shamelessly
and just rage on for as long as you could make it work. Which means, have
people pay to see you.
So I didn’t seek this stuff out. And when Kajsa starting
bringing around the Dolls and the Stooges and Them and The Small Faces—all bands
that could be considered background to the likes of The Libertines, who were
hot then—I got a lesson in garage rock. And the Dolls were great at that. Their
first album though, which is the one I know, was produced by Todd Rundgren and
shows a neat grasp of how to make chaotic rock come off. Rundgren is someone I
have begun to listen to a bit of late, picking up used copies of his LPs to have
a better idea of the studio wizardry and musical omnivorousness of the dude. He
may have had some scorn for the Dolls as musicians but he got good stuff on
tape. It’s an album that gets better the better you know it.
Today’s song I picked after first thinking I’d go with the
lead-off song “Personality Crisis”—because that bit about “you’re a prima
ballerina on a spring afternoon / Change on into a wolfman howlin’ at the moon”
seems to capture the essential spirit of the band, with their trappings of
glamor and their outrageous energy. Then I thought I might go with the one
that is probably my favorite—because it’s a bit reflective—“Lonely Planet Boy,”
which has a showy glumness to it that generally suits my mood, and is even a bit Smiths-like.
But “Private World” won out because it was
co-written by Johansen and Arthur Kane, whose fat bass opens the song, and I
listened to none less than Moz on a video chat about Kane, his untimely death,
his bitter life, and his happiness to get to play to a great outpouring of
admirers at a Dolls reunion gig that Morrissey was instrumental in making
happen in 2004. Kane, who died in 2004, less than a month after that gig, is
the subject of a touching song by Robyn Hitchcock called “N.Y. Doll.” And,
while were on the subject, the bands who owe something to the Dolls include,
not only The Smiths and Hitchcock’s early band The Soft Boys, but also Nick
Cave’s Birthday Party, and the Sex Pistols, and the Runaways, and the Ramones,
and many others no doubt.
Anyway, I like the lead guitar riff on this song, and I like
the way Johansen keeps shouting “Shut that door!” It’s a song that, I guess, is saying
something about the perils of a public life, of being on stage and on show, and
wanting to somehow have a world of one’s own in the midst of it all, even as
one uses one’s private life for one’s songs. “Well, I just lost a lover, who
done found something else / I get cool and lonely feeling sorry for myself.”
The spirit of the song seems to be a kind of “fuck off” to
everyone, except that it seems to invite everyone to jump in and get with the
vibe. “How many called, called my name / I’m trying to explain that I’m not the
same.” The people who know you via “the public” don’t really get it, and the
people who know you privately can’t really take it, all that show biz. It’s a
gaping maw to be crammed with bits of flesh. But that’s OK, so long as it “keeps
moving, at least I’m moving.”
Energy is what the Dolls offer, a cranked up, party-time,
devil-may-care sense of rock as a balls out affair. By 1973, stalwart bad boy
rockers like the Stones and The Who and The Faces were starting to feel a bit
staid, a bit too secure in their career moves. Though I have to admit that, Moz’s
enthrallment with the Dolls on the Old Grey Whistle Test notwithstanding, I see
in Johansen someone who has the nerve to take Mick’s preening and vamping to
the next campy level, while Sylvain and Thunders, on guitars, look like
second-string stand-ins for Keef and Ronnie. Oh well, guess I’m just showing my
allegiances. “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before.”
You got to keep it
confidential
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