By Bob Hill
Originally published in Crawdaddy! Magazine during March of 2011.
“Don’t you destroy the song/Cause when the song is gone/You’ll be gone too.”
-New York Dolls, “Plenty of Music” (2006)
Generally speaking, rock and roll reunions are not a good idea.
Let’s face it: There was a reason the band broke up in the first place. Maybe it had to do with drugs or money or personal differences. Maybe it had to do with a megalomaniacal frontman or an overbearing Asian girlfriend or a fervent desire to preserve what was beautiful and special about the band all along.
The bottom line is, things ended badly. Otherwise, they wouldn’t end.
The bigger the break-up, the more tempting it becomes for band members to put aside their differences and hit the road together one last time. Call it ego. Call it one last fading shot at glory. Call it an inability to pay one’s bills, because – more often than not – that’s what it boils down to.
All of which is kosher, provided both the band and the audience recognize the reunion for what it is – a half-hearted victory lap, during which the group plays a boilerplate set of agreed-upon hits with half the verve and intensity.
Fortunately, the New York Dolls (Version 2.0) do not fall into this category.
While money may have played a significant role in the band’s original decision to reunite for the Meltdown Festival back in the summer of ’04, it has very little to do with what the Dolls have managed to accomplish since then. Seven years and three critically-acclaimed albums down the line, the 21st-century Dolls have officially outlived, outsold, and perhaps even outgrown the original.
Gone are the pancake make-up and the platform heels. Gone are Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, Arthur “Killer” Kane and Billy Murcia. Gone are Max’s Kansas City, the Mercer Arts Center, and the Factory boys who made the Dolls such an underground success.
What’s left is the heart and soul of the original Dolls – Sylvain Sylvain and David Johansen, both of whom stuck it out for months after Thunders, Nolan, and Kane first left the band back in 1975. What the two of them have managed to accomplish more than thirty-five years after the fact isn’t only a testament to the Dolls’ enduring legacy, some might argue it’s nothing short of remarkable.
“I don’t want to mention specific names, but there are some other bands out there that broke apart years ago, then got back together again, and maybe it didn’t go so well,” Sylvain Sylvain, (AKA Sylvain Mizrahi) explains during a recent telephone interview. “But I think a lot of those bands looked at it as nothing more than a revival. They didn’t go into the studio. They didn’t write anything new. As a matter of fact, they just kept on playing the same songs over and over again. Who knows why? Maybe they didn’t want to do it anymore. Maybe they didn’t have the balls. Maybe they couldn’t do it anymore. Maybe they tried again and it just sucked so bad that they said, ‘Well, that’s the end of that.’ I’m not sure what it was … In our case, we created really strong bonds, not only to the music, but also between ourselves. I’ve always believed you had to have guts and ambition to succeed. You needed to take chances, whether you failed miserably or gained something out of it. That’s the approach we’ve always taken. It’s the approach we continue to take.”
From the outset, The New York Dolls’ career trajectory has followed an uncharacteristic arc. In the early seventies, they were all the rage among diehard critics and fans. But their failure to launch on any mainstream level eventually led to them being dropped by Mercury after a disappointing two-record deal (The Dolls’ debut album was reported to have sold just over 110,000 copies during its initial run).
By the time the second, more recognizable wave of punk hit in the late seventies, The New York Dolls (along with several other seminal punk bands, including the MC5 and The Stooges) had long since called it quits.
But then an odd thing began to happen. Fervent fans of The Sex Pistols, The Ramones and The Clash (among others) started mining for punk’s early influences. It didn’t take long before they discovered the link between The Dolls and Malcolm McLaren; the link between The Dolls and The Ramones; the link between The Dolls and just about every worthwhile rock, punk or blues band that came after them.
As a result, the initial clamor for a New York Dolls reunion began to surface. There was only one problem: By the early- to mid-eighties, the New York Dolls – or at the very least, three-fifths of them – had very little interest in revisiting the past.
“For years, I wished it [would happen],” Sylvain recalls. “I remember me and Arthur Kane moved out to California in the early 90s. We used to get crazy offers to reunite back then. At the time, there was no way because everyone was under contract or had their own commitments. We were all successful, in our own way.”
After the Heartbreakers broke up in the late seventies, ex-Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan continued to tour together on and off for more than a decade. David Johansen, on the other hand, had reinvented himself during the late eighties as black-tie lounge lizard Buster Poindexter, the persona under which he recorded an iconic version of the Arrow classic “Hot Hot Hot” (a version Johansen now refers to as the “bane of his existence”).
For a while, things seemed to be going OK for the erstwhile Dolls. That is until the early nineties, when matters took an unfortunate turn.
In April of 1991, Johnny Thunders was found dead under mysterious circumstances in a New Orleans hotel room. Although the official cause of death was unclassified, an Associated Press release published three days later claimed Thunders’ hotel room was “littered with empty methadone packets” and “a syringe was found floating in the toilet tank.”
Eight months later, in January of 1992, Jerry Nolan died of a stroke at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City. Shortly after, Arthur Kane was hospitalized for several weeks after being beaten with a baseball bat during the L.A. riots.
With each passing incident, the possibility of a New York Dolls reunion seemed more and more unlikely, especially for Johansen, who had carved out a niche for himself as a popular blues performer and occasional character actor. Johansen did maintain one connection to the past, however – his ongoing relationship with ex-bandmate Sylvain Sylvain, who was busy working on his own material at the time.
“David and I probably appreciate our relationship with one another more now than we did back then,” Sylvain, who has known Johansen for more than four decades, explains. “Over the years, he’s worked on my solo albums and I’ve worked on his. Even on the new album, we included a version of ‘Funky but Chic,’ and we wrote that song back in 1977. We’ve continued to work together, and – one way or another – we’ve always maintained a relationship, whether it was as friends or in a more professional manner. In fact, I think the relationship’s gotten better over time. I think all relationships sort of dissolve to a point where there’s no real need to think about it anymore. It just arrives at a certain place where you realize you’ve grown closer. Just like any other relationship, you’ll have your ups and downs. Sometimes when [David and I] are down, we’re really fucking down.”
Sylvain eludes to the fact that one of those “down” periods occurred recently when guitarist Steve Conte and bassist Sami Yaffa, both of whom have toured and recorded with the Dolls for the past six years (with Yaffa coming aboard after Arthur Kane died of Leukemia, only three weeks after the initial reunion shows in 2004), decided to leave.
“We asked them to do the new record and they passed on it,” Sylvain explains, rather candidly. “They had other choices and gigs they wanted to pursue. And that’s cool. David and I just kind of buckled up our jeans and started making phone calls. We eventually wound up with [ex-Blondie guitarist] Frankie Infante, and our producer, Jason Hill, who agreed to step in and play bass.”
The loss of Conte and Yaffa (both now members of the Michael Monroe Band) was a considerable blow. Above and beyond the duo’s experience and depth, both seemed to fit the modern-day Dolls motif perfectly. Conte, in particular, with his jet-black hair and chiseled features, looked like he had walked straight out of central casting.
The chemistry between old guard and new was evident on 2006’s One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This – a blistering comeback LP that immediately shot to number two on Billboard’s Heatseeker chart, and number eight on the Independent Albums chart. Rolling Stone gave the album four stars. The Observer called it “a record far better than it has any right to be.” The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau named it his album of the year.
There was a unique balance to One Day. Deeply confessional songs with names like “I Ain’t Got Nothin’” and “Maimed Happiness” played off of straight-ahead rockers, with names like “Dance Like a Monkey” and “Gotta Get Away from Tommy.”
The record had grit. It had polish. It had three generations of fans lining up to see if these aged New York Dolls could possibly live up to the androgynous edge of the original. It may have had Sylvain and Johansen wondering the same thing themselves.
“We’ve always been very romantic in terms of what we’re about,” Sylvain explains. “There’s sex in it, sure, in much the same way fashion plays a significant role in what we do. It was never particularly intentional, but it’s become an important part of who we are. For us, we took all the things that we loved – back in the early days, and then again today – and we blended them with all the influences we’ve always loved so much … I mean, keep in mind, this harkens back to a time when if you loved an album and you couldn’t afford it, you probably went to Woolworth’s and stuck it down your pants, cause you felt like you couldn’t live without the damn thing.
“In terms of what we choose to write about now, when we really feel as if there’s a song in there somewhere, that’s what we go with. Sometimes it comes in quarters or halves, like part of a song’ll come from here, or over there, or maybe I’ll bring in the hookline … The line “Dance like a monkey, dance like a monkey, child,” was what I brought to the table in terms of that song [From One Day It Will Please Us]. And David decided to keep that. It just depends on how it arrives. It’s really all about inspiration, and it’s become kind of a natural process. When all the ingredients come together, we hope you’ll say, ‘Wow! Now that’s a song.’ And while we never want to directly copy from anybody else, you can definitely hear our influences blended in there as well.”
Those influences – eclectic as they may be – have never been more apparent than they are on The Dolls’ latest LP, Dancing Backward in High Heels (March 15th, 429 Records). The album includes (among other things): an island version of the classic Dolls’ song “Trash,” a harp-heavy original called “I’m So Fabulous,” a Spector-esque cover of Leon and Otis Rene’s “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman,” and a ramped-up redux of the aforementioned “Funky but Chic.”
That’s right: In classic Dolls’ fashion, there’s something old, something new, something borrowed, and something used. But there are also horns and keys and a trio of backup singers. There are traces of the Brill Sound, The Wall of Sound, the girl groups, the Beach Boys, classic rock, proto-punk, funk, doo-wop, pop, and – most importantly – the Blues.
“Really, when you come right down to it, what you’ve got with the New York Dolls is the Blues,” Sylvain says. “We’ve managed to stay true to our original ideals, many of which came naturally, of course. Back then, there was never any round table discussion to decide which way we were going to go with it. We were just mundaned by what was going on around us. We had this Little Rascals approach to show business, y’know … ‘C’mon, guys. Let’s go put on a show.’ In the years since then, we’ve grown with the music. I think music is something you continue to learn every day. The minute you stop growing or you don’t appreciate it anymore, maybe that’s the point where you should consider doing something different.”
In that spirit, the New York Dolls have already booked a string of dates throughout the spring and early summer, the first of which is a CD release show at the Bowery Ballroom on March 16th. After that the band will head over to Europe for a month, before returning to the U.S. to join Motley Crue and Poison for a slew of shows throughout June and July. Long-time Bowie guitarist Earl Slick will join the Dolls on the road.
David Johansen still plays the occasional solo gig, and has recently expressed interest
in recording another solo album, although there aren’t any immediate plans for such a project. Sylvain Sylvain, meanwhile, looks forward to hitting the road in support of the Dolls’ new record. He claims one of the biggest differences to being on the road these days is that the audience ranges from very young to very old. Some fans attend the shows out of a sense of nostalgia, others out a sense of respect, and still others as a matter of sheer curiosity.
Regardless of the reason, the important part is the New York Dolls’ fans are still out there, eager to see the band perform. Only these days, the Dolls are packing venues from Barcelona to Beijing – a feat the original Dolls never would’ve dreamed possible.
“Life is a beautiful thing,” Sylvain admits, when asked if he’s surprised at the way things have worked out. “You can’t write it. You just gotta live it.”
The New York Dolls, it would seem, still have plenty of livin’ left in them.