Other Dead Boys: Notes on David Johansen, New York Dolls, New York in General, Exceptionalism, Punk, Hair Metal, Glam, and the Urge to Make It With Frankenstein

1.

The death of David Johansen, nurtural Poindexter, the lead singer of the New York Dolls, was announced in the early hours of March 1st, first by Morrissey, then by Tim Burgess of The Charlatans, then by Laughing Hyenas/Negative Approach’s John Brannon. Out of the still living, it’s hard to imagine a more appropriate throuple to break the bad news. Three archetypes of three distinct strains born of the hard-edged glam that the New York Dolls both invented and perfected, all three of whom singularly but directly drew from hard glam’s wayward saint. If the through lines between Johansen’s original lipstick killers (of whom, excepting saxophonist Buddy "King Bee" Bowser, the singer was the last) and the works of Moz, Burgess, and Brannon, it’s worth noting that when I say that the New York Dolls were perfect, I mean exactly that. In such a way that their imitators were almost uniformly dreadful, in such a way that the best of whom they directly spawned had to reject them almost immediately just to matter at all and in such a way that, even years later, only those who strayed from the New York Dolls’ template could hope to touch it. With that in mind, even setting aside his own willful shootability, Morrissey was an almost-too-perfect messenger. He was president of the Dolls fan club, author of one of their earliest biographies, and instigator behind the band’s reunion in the 2000s. Even if Moz’s own decline and brain affliction has been spiritual and otherwise antithetical to the sweetness David Johansen exhibited all his life, any absolute denial of The Smiths’ channeling certain aspects of the Dolls is based on absolute caricatures of both bands, and not the work itself. Aside from his intermittently brilliant art, Morrissey’s unabashed love for the New York Dolls has long been one of his redeeming qualities. I suspect that Johansen would prefer it that we allowed it to remain so.

As for Burgess and Brannon, well, the former’s lineage might be less direct. The Charlatan’s take on “Lonely Planet Boy” is typically attached to dancy psych or loping funk of the softcore-album-art era Robert Palmer variety. But few other UK artists can claim such an affinity for the Dolls, Johansen’s solo albums, and the man’s record collection. Maybe the Happy Mondays, if they had the memory or the empathy, which they don’t. In all that, Burgess has more than put in the hours to claim the mantle of Real Rock’s Last Living Witness. I don’t know that any rocker can truly die without his say so.

And John Brannon? Christ on a crutch. Go listen to the Laughing Hyenas. Always a good idea anyway but, for our purposes, just focus on the singing. Hear that? Yeah. What I'm saying. Check it out.

What was aptly dignified/messy in Johansen's death being announced by these three men, was made even more so by the three urchins of the underground posting their RIPs hours before the music press caught on and made Johansen’s death “official." Just as Johansen didn’t need the mainstream to make his life happen, he didn’t need it to make him dead. 

Still, in that interim between rocker-fueled rumor and official confirmation, Johansen could have been anything and anywhere; simultaneously with the Mystery Girls and with the Mystery, girl. Then the press, as we do, had to go and ruin everything. Headline: David Johansen; Out of the muck and into the mire, etc. Funky but chic, now deceased. Currently howling at the moon from an undisclosed location. 

2. 

The late 1980s was not an ideal time for a teenager to discover the New York Dolls. As nascent bohemians (i.e. skateboarders) we were told that everything we held dear came from the collective transgressions of the Stooges, MC5, and Dolls. The Stooges made sense, especially since there was apparently an entire city on the Pacific Northwest that's population communicated through Iggy grunts. MC5 made sense as well, if only because of the Bad Brains/Henry Rollins cover of "Kick Out The Jams" and the fact that we were assured that the Detroit band loved to swear.

As for the New York Dolls? Well, despite the historical record saying that they weren't good at their instruments, by 1989, the standards for not being able to play had been raised (or lowered, whichever) considerably. The Dolls sure sounded pretty muso next to, say, GangGreen. If David Johansen was supposedly shouting, I'd already heard Vince Neil do the same; picking on the poor Devil, and suckily. Fool me once, you know? And despite the Dolls frontman looking like a Micky Dolenz gone to seed, the rest of the band look less like monkeys and more like Pretty Boy Floyd. If they had created punk, the best kind of music ever invented, how come you never heard Fugazi talk about them? Only critics and assholes in incorrectly ripped denim? The New York Dolls didn't even dress in black (hardly), for God's sake! And those who shared the band's proclivity for leapord print were, by and large, a disaster. Just as Ronald Reagan's claim that the Contras were the equivalent of America's founding fathers raised more questions than it answered, so it was with the Dolls' most obvious descendants being the practitioners of hair metal.

I can’t speak for others my age at the time but one of the advantages of being a teenager is that, being the only person in the universe, other teenagers’ opinions only matter in how they do (or do not) perceive said center of the universe; not how they might feel about the New York Dolls. In the case of my own particular teenage fandango, the hair metal on MTV was terrible enough for its badness to move backwards in time, making the critical adoration of its ‘70s precursors suspect. Rolling Stone assured us that there was an unassailable connection between the New York Dolls and bands like Black Flag, but the Sex Pistols had rejected the lineage in no uncertain but plenty homophobic terms. And it seemed pretty clear to anyone who’d just made it through middle school, with G’n’R’s “One In A Million” regularly being played on the schoolbus, that, whatever the intent behind John Lydon’s “poor little faggot” line, the spandexed grandchildren of glam rock from the decade prior were going to make sure that their hetrosexuality was never called into question. They sure as shit weren’t going to be out-hetero-ed by some punk who sang like a/the Queen (and not a cool, manly Queen like Freddie Mercury). 

I was lucky that my high school had enough of a class divide (between the middle/working class Lanesboro kids and the wealthy Williamstown kids) that those who favored bands like Poison and Quiet Riot considered me, by dint of my being from as south of the Vermont borders as they were, one of their own. At least compared to the more well off bullies one town over who preferred to call kids like me “faggot” while listening to Elton John (the ‘80s were a bit of a mess). 

Not that the heshers were listening to David Johansen. For one thing, hard rockers in my hometown did not listen to music made prior to Pyromania. There were special dispensations granted for (if one had an older brother who collected knives) Black Sabbath and (by general agreement) Aerosmith, but a band like New York Dolls may as well have been disco as far as the kids in the back of the school bus were concerned. Years before “prejudice of small differences” entered the chat, a band like Warrant’s bona fides were established by the jack-off-a-bility of their videos, while any band that dressed the same, but strutted and preened like the Dolls, was very much on the wrong end of the “dude looks like a lady” spectrum. (Faster Pussycat passed the smell test on account of Taime Downe bearing an uncanny resemblance to Judd Nelson, who’d just played a denim-clad bad boy in the Breakfast Club. To reject Faster Pussycat would be to reject the dream of all tortured dirtbags; the dream of catching a glimpse of a popular girl’s panties.)

For those of us who despised power ballads, didn’t subscribe to the notion that God Gave Rock and Roll To All Of Us, and insisted on some material difference between “Girls, Girls, Girls” and “Slip it In,” the notion that the New York Dolls were “punk” was only as convincing as anything else printed in Jann Wenner’s celebrity huffing rag/only game in town. It didn’t help that the only available recorded evidence of these early poodle rockers being actually punk was via the cheap-y ROIR cassettes sold at the Berkshire Mall, most which were usually live recordings and therefore not the best way to hear anything (with the exception of Bad Brains or dub) for the first time. If you want to try to prove that a kid who just discovered Minor Threat should be able to hear the difference between Too Much Junkie Business and some local band sloshing through a set of Fabulous Thunderbirds covers, you and your time machine—fueled on being wrong—can go right ahead and do that. If there were sophisticates my age who could appreciate the subtle differences between the “good” trash rock and roll of David Johansen/Johnny Thunders (and three other guys with names we weren’t expected to know till college) and the “bad” trash rock of Mötley Crüe, they didn’t go to my high school. Even the post-adolescents I knew who who came to the New York Dolls via Morrissey (as opposed to those of us who were moving backwards from Social Distortion and hardcore) still had to contend with the fact that this band that supposedly invented punk rock sure did have a lot of shoo-waps and piano on their songs. Whatever his affinity for the Dolls, Moz—for reasons that would become clear a few years later—didn’t share his heroes’ affection for soul music. 

3.

As I’ve mentioned in other newsletters, teenage Zack was lucky—in my dad’s new boyfriend (and later husband), Joe Weaton—to have a father(ish) figure who was simultaneously a charmer, an astoundingly gifted chef, a firm believer in charity, and a former drug addict with excellent taste. Being somewhat new to having a serious boyfriend with teenage children, Joe’s (correct) idea of bonding was to regale with tales of hard living in the Chelsea Hotel; where he stayed for some indeterminate amount of time in his youth, entertaining a seemingly endless stream of admirers/hanger-ons, drug dealers, and low-level A&R guys who’d drop off promo 7”s of Bow Wow Wow in the expectation that Joe might show up at the Ritz and be charming. Which he, on occasion, did. But more importantly (to my development at least) Joe would, after getting clean and moving to the Berkshires and meeting my dad, give me all of these old records. Partially to smooth out the edges of my dad leaving my mom, partially because Joe had kind of lost interest in punk once house music was invented, and partially because he was/is a solid dude who, when seeing that someone is hungry, he feeds them. . 

Joe’s tenure at the Chelsea was during the brief period when punk and disco would amiably wrestle together in the dark while, still, the 1970s happened around them. So the LPs that came my way could be Ten Years After, a truly alarming multiple copies of Lou Reed’s Rock and Roll Animal, DEVO records that had been clearly rode hard and put away wet, way too many Dan Hartman LPs, the (pre-Paul Simonon) Pearl Harbor & The Explosions record, a novelty anti-abortion 7”, the sole 7” by The Normal and, being the two albums most relevant to my being late to appreciating the New York Dolls’ charm, Buzzcocks Singles Going Steady and the second LP by Cleveland/NYC's the Dead Boys. The former pretty much ruined me (for the next decade at least) for any love songs not delivered via pop-punk and the latter ruined me (for… kind of forever tbh) for any rock and roll that sounded like it could have been performed by musicians with thumbs. 

More accurately, We Have Come For Your Children, even with Felix Pappalardi’s infamously flat production, was compelling enough that I immediately went out and bought the first Dead Boys album, and that fucked me up. Because Young, Loud, and Snotty (beautifully, phat-ly, produced by Genya Ravan) was where the Dead Boys established themselves as the New York Dolls for absolute dum-dums (complimentary). Dead Boys frontman Stiv Bators’ take on David Johansen’s open-souled swagger had two modes; bitching and “bitches, man…” While I intellectually understood the historical relevance of the cab driver from Scrooged shouting out love as “L-U-V,” I still suspected that any band that David Fricke called “important” probably knew the correct spelling. Not so for the Dead Boys, who were catnip to an aggrieved teenage boy in ways that a bunch of crossdressing showtuners who treated rock and roll as though it was (God forbid) fun, were not. 

Not that my preference for a New York Dolls stripped of any subtlety (complimentary) was my dad’s lover’s fault. David Johansen’s first three solo albums were in the offering as well but, frustrated in looking for a first kiss as I was, I just wasn’t ready for a music that, despite bearing the accouterments of Nikki Sixx et al, refused to see girls as the enemy and, even worse, had saxophones on it.

(If it’s any consolation to either the reader or the recently departed, teenage me thought London Calling was some bullshit as well. Pretty good, as far as jazz went, but no City Baby Attacked By Rats.)

All this might seem like either an attempt to make some anecdotal memories of how the New York Dolls were perceived in one small town in Western Massachusetts in 1989 into a larger cultural observation. Or just an unnecessary confession of what a shitty teenager I was. Both might be true. But I do think that my early misunderstanding of the New York Dolls might be more universal than the culture factory might care to admit. After all, the venom which John Lydon spat in “Looking For a Kiss” may have been more broadly directed at everything which came before 1977, but also the New York Dolls, for all their proto-ness, were very much a rock and roll band, and there was a long stretches in certain corners of punk history where rock and roll—as something to dance to, rather than something with which to either dismantle the systems of oppression or just die young to—was distrusted. Romantics may scoff, but just doing the barest of reading of the alt biographies on one’s shelf will back me up. Sophisticates were validated by the Dolls, New York was saved by the Dolls, punk was started by the Dolls, but the kids themselves (with the exception of Morrissey) were more often transformed by the Ramones (and Patti Smith and, for the pre-grungers, the Wipers). And by the time grunge rolled around, cross-dressing debauchery had been (seemingly) forever spoiled by the Decline of Western Civilization 2 crowd. Admitting that hard drug use could actually be pretty fun? Forget about it. Kurt Cobain genderbent as provocation against the jocks and metalheads, not because a house dress showed off his legs.

To be clear, all these people loved the New York Dolls. But, for many years, the Dolls were historically important but not even first among equals. Not on account of any deficiencies in the music (duh), but also not only because of the cultural hangover from nearly a decade of hideously dumb hard rock. The New York Dolls led directly to the first wave of punk but, in the wake of the Ramones, who wouldn’t seem vaguely counter-revolutionary (even with the hammers and sickles of the Dolls last gasps of the '70s)? Sex Pistols accusing the band of being “hippy tarts” was only mitigated, by Steve Jones lifting the majority of his riffs from Johnny Thunders, if one thinks of punk as music more than ideology, which it is and isn’t. Regardless, it’s not a wild claim to say that bohemia had to live through the first half of the 1990’s—experiencing firsthand what a drag the underground could be with all the glam cut out of it—to appreciate again the trash it had so callously, in the name of authenticity or something, tossed aside.

4. 

I will now reveal the undoubtedly very shocking twist that, when it comes to the perverse genius of the New York DollsI most assuredly did wise the fuck up. Eventually David Johansen’s come hither howl hithered me. Eventually Johnny Thunders and Sylvian Sylvian’s bizarro blues hit me where it hurt. Eventually Jerry Nolan’s speedway boogie hooked me. Eventually, I got the point of Arthur Kane’s insistence on getting from point A to point B as brutishly as possible (ok, I always understood/preferred that kind of bassline). Eventually, even (to my credit, thank you very much) before the 1990s came to their thudding, nü horshit ending, I allowed the trash to pick me up. I got right with Frankenstein. I opened my heart to L-U-V (you best believe). I woke up one late afternoon, called in to The Strand to say I wouldn't be coming in, called up my mom and told her: "mom, I've decided that I want to be a barback well into my thirties," and was born anew, alight in the glow of lifestyle shit, also known as "being a New York Dolls fan."

While it wasn't exactly as eureka as all that, it still turns out that all I needed to do, all along, was move to New York City. Well, move to NYC, turn 21, get a drug dealer’s pager number to call my own, and purchase a half dozen pairs of pants that were half a size too small just for starters. (It might have also had something to do with opening for the Trash Brats at Meow Mix, but I think that was a couple years later, so let's put that particular revelation in the Apocrypha category.)

And, of course, I had to get music criticism out of my life. For about a decade, right up until yet another one of my bands ignominiously imploded somewhere between Tulsa and Williamsburg and VICE generously offered me $50 to write about my younger betters, I probably didn’t read a page of music writing that wasn’t directly boosting or destroying someone I knew. No books, no sites, no nothing, I was existing canon free and listening to “Frankenstein” every other day, on its own lurching and gargantuan merits (the rest of the first Dolls album you could hear by going anywhere there might be DJ, or door person or coat check girl, from the  Motherfucker party, or Squeezebox party or, or, or….) 

Anyway, losing the critics was, for me, essential. Because, once you got rid of the middlemen, what had seemed like something I was being taught in school at best and, at worst, a reminder that the past was both irretrievable and untouchably cooler than any life I could dream to approximate, was actually an invitation. 

Of course, the Dead Boys were an invitation too, to which I sincerely RSVP’d. (As was a picture of Todd A. from Cop Shoot Cop in an issue of pre-suck Alternative Press, wearing a t-shirt with a handgun on it and the words “piece, man” scrawled under it.) But all it took was meeting a few other Dead Boys fans in real life to make clear that a Dead Boy party wasn’t the bag I’d hoped it would be. Luckily, by the time that happened, by the time some ex-member of the Murder Junkies asked me if I dug “rape rock,” I’d already been assimilated into the larger flock of New York Dolls diehards.

My way in was unsurprisingly the Johansen/Sylvain composition “Frankenstein,” a Jerry Nolan mudslide showcase with a buried “I Wanna Be Your Dog” morse code played in the plinky-est way imaginable (on either guitar or by Todd Rundgren on synth, your guess is as good as mine), the closest the Dolls would ever come to writing a proto-Sisters of Mercy song, and the most exact that the Dolls would come to writing a proto-”From Her To Eternity.” It’s also the New York Dolls song which is most explicitly that previously mentioned invitation. Come to the big city, it says, have some laughs. In Johansen’s performance, the invitation sounds a lot like a warning. Though that too is confusing, seeing as he’s clearly heavily invested in his roles as warner, warnee, and Frankenstein monster. 

Viewed in the oh-so-clever rearview mirror, one might ask if anyone at the time pointed out to the New York Dolls that “um, actually, Frankenstein was the doctor.” The answer to that is *extreme Deitrich Bader in Office Space voice*: “No, man. Shit, no, man.” People who said shit like that didn’t exist on this amazing planet until, roughly, 2005, or whenever the first podcaster moved to New York. Before that, everyone knew in their bones that a potential romantic liaison with Frankenstein was no time to be pedantic. Anyway, in the cosmology of the New York Dolls, “doctor” was typically a euphemism. 

As for New York Dolls fans in New York City; what kind of asshole doesn’t like pigeons? Because, neglected by history as it might (rightly or wrongly) be, the city in the late ‘90s was very much a New York Dolls town. Even in the wake of DGeneration breaking up, in the midst of bands like Honkey Toast getting signed into oblivion, and in the midst of interloping and drawling garage punk, like Nashville Pussy and REO Speedealer, infecting the town with a perverse need to wear cowboy hats, there wasn’t a rock jukebox that didn’t have “Personality Crisis” playing upwards to a thousand times a shift. Electroclash parties might have been the exception, but you’d have had to have been, not just deaf and blind, but practically headless to not feel an aesthetic suffused with pre-CBGBs glam rock. There might have been organisms below 14th Street who didn’t actively (and I do mean actively) love the New York Dolls but, between 1996 and 2001, prior to the dance punk revival, the only ones I interacted with were maybe some dudes adjacent to Def Jux like Blockhead and the Party Fun Action Committee. And honestly I assume they loved the New York Dolls as well and it just didn’t come up. 

(I’ve never, to this day, met another Cop Shoot Cop fan in real life. When/if that should ever happen, we’ll see how it goes.) 

5.

If it even needs to be said; just because living in NYC was necessary for my own particular way into the Dolls, that’s obviously/thankfully not a universal standard. Averse as I may generally be to “a state of mind” being a substitute for material conditions, I’m not such a blood and soil guy that I believe geography is ever the determining factor in getting free. Far be it from me to suggest that my individual dearth of imagination should imply that the collective must spend their lives paying triple a conscionable amount for rent just to grok the true nature of “Lonely Planet Boy.” Any appreciation for tight pants (especially when worn by second/third generation diaspora boys acting up), coupled with a certain boogie-woogie-ness of spirit, is probably enough. After all, if Johnny Thunders’ accent was 100% inverse-royalty Queens, Arthur Kane’s speaking voice was everywhere else in the universe all at once. 

Anyway, I don’t subscribe to any brand of exceptionalism. Certainly not for America, and just as certainly not for New York. I don’t think New Yorkers are any kind of special kind of rude, or inured to violence, or any more heroic than any other town. If you think New Yorkers are particularly nasty, I’d suggest trying to cross a street by foot in nearly any other city in America. If you think New Yorkers are particularly heroic, why don’t you meet me at the 45 Park Place Cordoba House and we can talk about it there. Accepting the impossibility of either of those things, New York is a very nice town, as lousy with contrasts as anywhere. 

I say this only to make clear that, when I say that NYC doesn't lend itself to producing popular, or even unpopular, hair metal, and never will, for reasons, I’m neither condemning nor applauding any essential characteristic of the city. I am just saying that (not for nothing) there are reasons why neither Circus of Power, Warrior Soul, Toilet Boys, nor even Danger Danger thrived, and why KISS ditching the makeup was concurrent to them sucking even harder than they already did. And, no, it’s not because of our essential “grittiness.” Have you been to the Sunset Strip? SUPER gross. 

No, the reasons that NYC glam metal historically flounders is because, no matter how badly any erstwhile NYC glam rocker might want to “make it,” the New York Dolls must invariably lurk on the edges of their conscience, prodding them, like an anachronistic Godfather averring the heroin trade, to at least try not to suck. Making hair metal is already a highwire act; between bubblegum and tuff-osity, androgyny and masculinity; with the added challenge of threading a needle—between misogyny and libertinage—so finely that teenage boys and barely legal girls both might, correctly or not, feel welcome. Considering the difficulties and stakes involved, even a small injection of neuroticism might be disastrous. Who in their right mind would mount that tightrope—even with fame and riches at the end of the wire—when right behind you was a 50 foot imaginary David Johansen, wolf whistling in contempt every time you try to get away with rhyming “mama’s angel” with “va-jay-jay.” Why do you think KISS wore makeup in the first place? Sure, partially it was survivor’s guilt (for Simmons’ mother making out of Austria, for Peter Criss making out of Williamsburg, for the band succeeding where the New York Dolls failed) and partially it was so, when Gene Simmons looked at himself in the mirror, he wouldn’t be recognized by the miniature David Johansen and Johnny Thunders respectively, better-angel-icaly perched on each of his shoulders. 

6.

There's probably an entire book that could be written as to why and how hair metal was able to snatch the New York Dolls aesthetic away from punk. Or a very short book consisting of "punk didn't want it." But there's something there, about why Johnny Thunder's ineveitable doom held a romantic alure that Johansen's game embracing of a funky butt didn't, about how both AC/DC and Nick Cave were influenced by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band but both opted to skip the flair, about how bands like Redd Kross and Death of Samantha/Cobra Verde did their damndest (with the latter perhaps attempting to make up for how fellow Clevelanders like the Pagans and Dead Boys helped de-glamify the punk project) only to be consigned to novelty and dismissed as nostalgiacs, about how bat cave goth did its part as well but sadly didn't have the tunes to cross over, about how losing glam was punk's loss but—considering how a more ostensibly leftist popular genre might have added a wave to trans' rights—also everyone else's loss too, and about how the current still ran—sublimated by both counter and over culture—and how, in that, Alice in Chains probably would have worn tophats if they thought society could handle it.

If anyone knows Duff McKagan, let him know I'd be happy to ghostwrite it with him.

7.

I wish I could claim that all of the above had been on my mind prior to David Johansen’s death last week. Unfortunately, despite my having fallen hard for his band in my twenties—to the point of being in a band called The Candy Darlings, and occasionally/tragically wearing a boa, sans shirt, onstage (no, seriously, don’t try to find pictures online)—I had, in recent years, fallen back into taking the New York Dolls for granted. Not to the degree I did before my New York Dolls awakening of course. In the fifteen years that Zohra and I have been together, I strongly doubt there was ever more than a day or two (max) where one of us wasn’t absentmindedly (or not so absentmindedly) singing “Trash” to ourselves, to each other, or to one of the cats. And whenever the dumb “Baby It’s Cold Outside” discourse reared its stupid head, made sure to post the Buster Poindexter/Sigourney Weaver SNL skit. But, still, I breathed the stuff but didn’t engage with it. Do fish give enough credit to water? 

Ever since Johansen’s death was announced, I’ve listened to little else, and with an attention I regret not paying before. I realize that the world currently, as they say, has a lot on its plate, but I do badly want to stop politicians on the street and ask them to talk to me, their constituent, about the woozy, almost chatty, guitar lines of “Babylon.” I want to ask AOC what she thinks of the idea that, more than the Stooges or MC5, the New York Dolls’ sister band was Mott The Hoople, with the UK band’s main difference—besides the obvious Todd Rundgren Vs. David Bowie approach to production—being that Ian Hunter fetishized Dylan in the way that David Johansen seemed to wish he’d been born into an entire Girl Group’s collective body? I want a presidential decree that mandates that all high school sports, regardless of gender, be abolished in favor of assemblies where all the kids act out “(There’s Gonna Be a) Showdown” and, just so nobody gets mad at me, all higher education is abolished as well, just so everyone between the games of 18 and 21 can sit and ponder the sheer weight of existential grievance that, when he pouts out “I bet you know I can't be wastin' time / 'Cause I gotta have my fun, I gotta get some fun,” David Johansen imbues into the word “some.” 

To be clear, I don’t want to think about and discuss the New York Dolls more than I want to fight fascism. I’m just saying that, if we’re marching on the fascist state anyway, I happen to have some bubblegum in my pocket that we could chew, concurrently.

It would be nice here to end this with something idyllic;wistful but hopeful, along the lines of “at least I can hear Johansen every night and day, in the streets of the city so nice they named it twice.” Which, as an owner of a device, is technically true. On the other hand—and said still in the conviction that there is no exceptionalism, good or bad, and that change has no inherent quality other than the action of change itself—I don’t know that the New York Dolls necessarily make a lot of sense as any sort of soundtrack, or even as background music, in 2025 NYC. The second half isn’t a tragedy, or at least not a newly developed tragedy. Even as, and as I’ve written about previously, Marquee Moon was once omnipresent as background in a certain kind of bar, it’s been a long, long time since that’s been true of David Johansen. Absent the winnowing guitars of Television, the Dolls’ pretty relentless whambamthankyoumam isn’t brunch music in much the same way that Wu-Tang Clan isn’t. Of course, bouncers have specifically asked me not to play Wu-Tang because they didn’t feel like prying adult white skateboarders off of each other. I’m not going to to pretend some barrelhouse stomp from half a century ago, delivered in a different-but-the-same Staten Island accent, is going start the same kind of riot as GZA,RZA, etc. but the two, generationally divided, do share a certain rambunctiousness of spirit which goes less and less well with $18 eggs every year. 

Or at least I’d like to think that’s the case. The reality is that the mishmash of chronology and aesthetics —which was intentional and hep when the New York Dolls did it but which streaming has ruined and retroactively raised us all to passively exist around—means that playing New York Dolls (or any of the band’s spiritual children, be it Hank Wood or Azealia Banks) in a bar or restaurant will be received with docility (if it's consciously received at all), just so long as the line to get in is impressive. 

It’s ok. That doesn’t matter. New York City doesn’t matter. Not in that way, and not to that many people. The young monsters, who most assuredly exist, shouldn’t care about what the city or the scene was then, when the punk wheel was invented and then rejected in favor of being performatively bummed out, before coming back again, and again, and again, till the man himself ran out of road. It’s bad enough that so many of the twerps want to sound like The Fall. A twenty-one year-old caring about David Johansen would be like if I, in 1996, was super into Mort Saul. Which also would’ve been awesome, and if some kid wants to do that, they’re more than welcome. They can join all us Civil War re-enactors as we hang out in our conclave in Ridgewood, share hims prescriptions, and compare battle scars of the times Legs McNeil was rude to our labradoodle. Because we matter and don’t in equal measure, the songs of the New York Dolls sound weirdly better than they ever have, while geography barely exists. It’s fine. Good even, any of us still being in one place or another. That’s a nice thing; if you think you can make it with Frankenstein, you can make it with Frankenstein anywhere. 

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