Classics, Revisited: Tim’s unpublished CREEM review of the first New York Dolls album!

Yes, the actual copy of that first LP that Mercury sent me in 1973, before Lester dashed my dreams. By the way, do you need a bridge? I have one I can sell you, real cheap!

Celebrating the 53rd anniversary of the Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Album Ever Released, which was Monday, here’s a previously unseen review I apparently submitted to CREEM when I was 7! When I recently found the rejected manuscript, a paper-clipped memo fell out:

Jaan—

This bozo is SEVEN?! We can’t run this! He’s making me, you, Marsh, and everybody else around here look bad. Bury this.

—L.B.

Sorry, Lester. Didn’t mean to make you hypervigilant over your job security. — TIM.

The New York Dolls sound like the entire history of rock ‘n’ roll to date trash-compacted into one handy-dandy little package... and absolutely nothing else that’s ever existed in the name of rock ‘n’ roll. And we’re talking simultaneously. Every band in the country is gonna sound like this by Christmas, and Grand Funk Railroad will be applying for unemployment. [EDITOR’S NOTE: We checked. Grand Funk’s management remains blissfully unconcerned. — Lester]

From the first notes of “Personality Crisis,” where Johnny Thunders raunches in with the rawest guitar tone heard since Ronnie Wood of the Faces plugged into a combine harvester, to David Jo Hansen’s final “maaaaah baaaaay-beh” at “Jet Boy”’s climax, you hear the entire future of rock ‘n’ roll in 43 minutes. Which sounds like its past, just with big, loud, hard rock amps. The Dolls aren’t polished. They’re compressed. Every greasy, dangerous, ridiculous thing that made rock ‘n’ roll fun gets crushed together until it threatens to burst the seams. Under Todd Rundgren’s careful guidance, they swallow everything from Chuck Berry to the Stones to girl groups to the same garage bands you hear all over Nuggets and spit it back out as one glorious mess.

And it’s a loogie you’ll wanna play again and again.

Forget for a second that they look like the Stones breaking into their moms’ closets and makeup cases on a bored, rainy afternoon. And forget all the snorts you may have heard that they are a poor man’s Stones to begin with. Even Jagger has corrected the UK mags: “The Dolls are The Pretty Things reincarnated. Only prettier.” They may look like Lou Reed’s worst date at the ass end of Saturday night [EDITOR’S NOTE: Lou disagrees. About which part changes hourly. — Lester], but they play rock ‘n’ roll like the rowdiest biker gang in the East Village. But maybe only if that gang was called The Max Factors. Besides, Jo Hansen actually looks more like Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits than Jagger. In contrast, Thunders looks more like Ronnie Ronnette walking out of a wind tunnel than Keef, while playing guitar like Chuck Berry after electro-shock therapy. But he sounds like one of three ways God intended man to play the electric guitar.

By now, you’re probably thinking the Dolls only have two members, considering how much we’ve talked only about the singer and guitarist. But clearly, there are five New York Dolls, looking at the sleeve, where they appear on the front like a bad night at The Gilded Grape and like Alice Cooper let loose in a Salvation Army store on the back. Sylvain Sylvain (so nice, they apparently named him twice) plays with slightly less grit than Thunders and a touch more blues, while bopping around like Marc Bolan playing Raggedy Ann on Halloween. Together, they make the best dogfight guitar team since The Yardbirds had both Beck and Page blowing gold from Stage Left and Right, albeit with less virtuosity. Which is great: too much rock nowadays sounds like it’s made by crashing bores slumming after graduating from a conservatory. Thunders and Sylvain remember the joy in three chords and a Chuck Berry lick, played through a Marshall on 10. Kids need that kinda example, in 1973.

Which says nothing about the rhythm section. While everyone else has been busy counting guitar heroes, the Dolls quietly assembled one of the great bass and drum teams in modern rock ‘n’ roll. Arthur Kane‘s bass is fat enough to lean against. It lumbers, shoves, and practically dances with Jerry Nolan‘s gloriously loose drumming. And Arthur does it all while cramming his Wilt Chamberlain-like physique into a kid’s nurse uniform Halloween costume.

Nolan, meanwhile, treats every beat like Charlie Watts after six cups of coffee and a week in Manhattan. He swings like a great jazz drummer happy to play Twist beats, where everyone else in 1973 seems determined to pound. Together, they turn every groove into something that struts rather than marches. And make no mistakes here: The New York Dolls groove. This is an axe murderer’s idea of rhythm & blues, with a swash of Cherries In The Snow across its lips. Nolan’s drumming is a major reason why. While every other Doll is making a noise like The Fugs playing 1965 Stones outtakes during a particularly gruesome subway accident, Nolan is giving the chaos a framework to erupt atop. Every band should have a Jerry Nolan in the engine room.

So, the New York Dolls have all the swing in the world, underpinning the best crash-and-burn sonics this side of Iggy and The Stooges. And Duke Ellington was preaching the gospel when he wrote “It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” (By the way, how great IS Raw Power? And how great is it that the only album that’ll dare touch its hem in 1973 was released just five months later?) But what good is blast and strut if you ain’t got any damned SONGS?!

Fortunately, the New York Dolls (the band) and New York Dolls (the album) have at least 11 great songs. Well, “Pills” is a Bo Diddley cover, and “Private World” kinda sucks. So, nine great songs, and a killer cover. And I’m willing to bet they have 12 more waiting in the wings, even though they only began about 18 months ago.

From the moment you hear “Personality Crisis”’ first violent notes, the Dolls’ compositional bona fides are obvious. Sure, Johnny Thunders’ opening chords sound like somebody kicking open rock ‘n’ roll’s front door because knocking takes too long, and the track — like every track on the record — serves as a reminder to the Stones what they used to sound like before accountants discovered them. But then David Jo Hansen opens his mouth, and what spills out is profound.

He writes like somebody talking too fast on the Bowery after three days awake. His lyrics are crafted. He writes in fragments, punch lines, street observations. He scribbles down conversations overheard through apartment walls, filling his notebooks with the poetry hidden inside ordinary speech. He writes in a distinct New York patois, the language of people who are moving too fast to explain themselves. Which gives you “Personality Crisis,” taking in fractured identity, performance, masks, self-invention, confusion: “Yer mirror’s gettin’ jammed up with alla yer friends/Personality — every scene is startin’ to blend into one!”

Or take “Trash.” It should be a dumb teenage sleaze anthem. Instead it’s almost...romantic. Not sentimental, but seeing the beauty in people respectable society has already thrown away. Then there’s “Jet Boy.” What the hell is a “Jet Boy?!” Nobody knows. Doesn’t matter — it works emotionally before it works literally. Rock ‘n’ roll’s always had nonsense words. Jo Hansen’s gift is making nonsense feel loaded with meaning. Then there’s “Looking for a Kiss,” which is funny, desperate, horny, lonely, theatrical, and heartbreaking, sometimes all in the same verse.

Basically, David Jo Hansen writes like somebody who inhaled Leiber and Stoller, old R&B records, girl-group melodrama, Tennessee Williams dialogue, and the sidewalks around Times Square. Everything’s theatrical, everything’s conversational, everything’s one line away from either a joke or a nervous breakdown. The Dolls’ glorious racket strips away every trace of self-consciousness from his accidental urban poetry. David can write lines full of wit, implication, and character because the band keeps them from floating away. They nail the words to the pavement.

Beneath all the glorious noise, he’s writing songs about outsiders, hustlers, dreamers, lonely kids, people inventing themselves, and people pretending not to be lonely. He just has the good sense to dress those observations in cheap lipstick, high heels, and enough swagger that nobody notices how perceptive they are. They just sound killer between Johnny Thunders’ blitzkrieg guitar fills, the way Chuck Berry’s words sound so killer atop his ronka-ronka raunch.

In 1973, you’ve got cheapjack hustlers from the UK inviting you to squeeze their lemons (Heh! Heh!), turning Da Blooze into some leaden, widdly-widdly nonsense. You’ve got solo warblers making records that sound like graduate seminars with acoustic guitars. You’ve got pompous twits trying to turn fabulous teenage noise into something you have to go to a conservatory to play. And yes, on the positive side, you’ve got Alice, Lou, The Stooges, MC5, Mott, Bolan, and Bowie. Weird isn’t new.

But nobody is playing rock ‘n’ roll with a tenth of the joy the New York Dolls invest theirs with. Nobody else making loud rock in ‘73 sounds like they’re having this much fun. Everybody else is trying to become important. The Dolls could give two wet shits about being important. The Dolls are trying to start a party that might end in felony charges. Their debut album might just get them arrested, or at least have warrants filed for them in maybe 13 states. [EDITOR’S NOTE: We checked with legal. They advised us not to. — Lester] When was the last time rock ‘n’ roll felt this dangerous, and this ENJOYABLE?! And when did it feel so necessary for Murray The K to back-announce it, and Ed Sullivan introduce it “for you youngsters across the US and Canada” on his really big shew?! As his cameras filmed it from the waist up. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Standards & Practices has requested equal time to deny this ever happened. — Lester]

You need New York Dolls in your life, whether you suppress the urge to raid Mom’s handbag for her lipstick or not. In fact, this may induce a stronger urge to paint a Jolly Roger across Dad’s old WWII leather jacket, hotwire the family car, and wreck it. Like all great rock ‘n’ roll should. — Tim Stegall

When they trooped into West London’s BBC Television Centre on the afternoon of 26th November, the Dolls were hardly looking to make friends – they never were, when it came to authority figures. Told by The Rolling Stones’ Mick Taylor the year before they were “the worst high school band [he’s] ever heard” and that they had “just six months to polish it up,” Johansen snarled, “No, they were the best high school band he’d ever heard,” and he could “go screw”. He petulantly sniffed to CREEM’s Ben Edmonds that prior to signing with Mercury, the front rows of their shows were filled with “balding old relics with their polished heads, snorting coke and thinking that they’re so outtasite. I’m supposed to get a record contract outta these people?” he bayed. “It’s like I’m just a prostitute, right, but if I’m okay maybe they’ll give me a Lincoln and make me a pimp.”

Hence Harris shouldn’t have been surprised, upon showing up backstage to gladhand the Dolls, that Johansen sniggered that he had “bunny teeth”. Equally, Johansen could hardly have been shocked at Harris’ introductory description of the band as “to the Stones what The Monkees were to The Beatles – a pale-if-amusing derivative”.

1973 television cameras apparently loved Johnny Thunders’ back. In both appearances, the camera widens from a tight close-up of whatever adorns his spinal column, revealing him whirling around as he bangs out the opening riff. In this case, it’s a skull-and-crossbones crudely painted on back of a beaten vintage motorcycle jacket, planting his lineage more firmly in rockin’ rebel territory than glam androgyny. Strapped over his shoulders wasn’t the Gibson Les Paul Special he’d played at The Midnight Special, but a Vox Teardrop guitar similar to Brian Jones’, purchased by bassist Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane in a Leeds pawn shop for £20.

“Jet Boy” roared from Britain’s tinny eight-inch TV speakers the following night, lip-synched from the new single – odd for a show that generally favoured live-in-the-studio performances. Was Auntie Beeb implying the Dolls weren’t good enough to play live?

Thunders did his stumbling whirling-dervish act, Sylvain proudly displayed his new Gretsch White Falcon guitar he’d picked up shortly before flying out of New York, and Johansen mugged viciously in a polka-dot chemise. It’s noticeable, watching their movements to the playback – which sounds even clearer than the record – how musical the Dolls were, despite their amateurish reputation. Thunders and Sylvain are not bashing tandem power chords, like most of the punks who followed them. The guitars are arranged, in interlocking parts, with a fully developed dynamic sense. Arthur’s bass locks in with Jerry Nolan’s post-Gene Krupa swing, playing minimal lines that are hardly meat-and-potatoes root notes. This was not The Shaggs.

The song ends with a quick cut to Harris in close-up, chuckling “mock rock”. He likely thought he was condemning this blight on “proper” rock. But that sneering establishment reaction was a dog whistle to a generation of future UK punks watching at home: the old guard hated this thing. Which meant young outsiders immediately sensed life in it. “Fuck you, you old wanker! I’m stealin’ a bleedin’ guitar! Imma be Johnny Thunders when I grow up!”

This is but a fraction of the 2,750 words I spilled on the Dolls’ two television appearances in the wake of their debut LP’s release, for English garage-and-then-some magazine Shindig!’s current issue. I doubt anyone’s seriously considered it before, but the Dolls surely bent a lotta young brainpans on both continents when they appeared on The Midnight Special and then England’s The Old Grey Whistle Test within a few weeks of one another.

Well, now I have. Pick up the current issue, complete with David Johansen’s perfect pout all over the cover, by mashing the button below.

Tim's SHINDIG! Dolls cover issue $9.36

“Oh, I loved it!” Joan Jett recalled of seeing the Dolls at Washington, DC’s American Theater shortly before her family relocated to Los Angeles. “I had their first album, so I knew what I was in for. I mean, I wasn’t going to be thrown by guys in makeup! We were in the front row; we had great seats. I don’t know how I got them. It was just first come, first served…. I remember David Johansen’s empty beer bottle, and I remember Johnny looking like Johnny. It was a great show. They played a lotta songs from their first album, and I think their second album had just come out. So it was probably in support of that record, and they played a lot of songs from that, and it was a lot of fun. They were just great, just what you want to see from a band: Loud, live rock ‘n’ roll; you knew what the songs were from the album. They sounded enough like it. It was great.

There’s also a lotta stuff on bands who weren’t the New York Dolls in Anarchy In The Studio. I still have some copies of just the basic hardback, which you can buy directly from me, including a personal inscription, by clicking the button below.

Signed ANARCHY $100

Some of you probably think I’m obsessed. You wouldn’t be wrong. But maybe you think that’s a mark against me. Maybe that’s why you haven’t gotten a paid subscription yet. Who knows? shrugs

But you may not have noticed I’m also obsessed with a lot of other things. Not just bands and punk rock records, or even old punk rock bands and records. I’m blasting the long-overdue debut LP from Denton’s Oddfellows as I type this crap, a record you should probably own if you ever wanted to hear music that resembles a garage/surf Buzzcocks, played by guys who later ended up in The Marked Men, Mind Spiders, O-D-EX, and High Tension Wires.

Does this sound like someone stuck in the past?

I also read the occasional book and write about it. I’m equally fond of reporting back on TV shows I dig, or movies I enjoy. I’ve also taken to reporting from my adventures in cooking lately.

So, no. I do write about a few things other than the New York Dolls. Even though I do write about them a lot. When I’m not obsessing on The Clash or the Ramones.

But I kid. My ‘Stack is now 4 years old. And I’d love for you to become a paying subscriber. Really, I would. And I’m making it easier now.

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