429 Records

Dr. Dean Budnick, Ph.D.
Editor-In-Chief
Jambands.com

Well, Doc …

Everything’s right in the world. I feel like the sun is going to come up tomorrow. There’s hope for peace in places that have never seen the light of freedom. I believe we’re making headway in ceasing the slow suicide of our planet’s very being. And I’m even beginning to get an upper hand on this rotten cold that’s had ahold of me by its yellowed fangs. (Tigger brought home a jug of American Honey; a wonderful product produced by the same folks who distill Wild Turkey. It’s far, far better than Dayquil. I love that woman.)

Anyway, Doc, you can probably guess the reason for my joyous outlook on life. That’s right: the new album from the New York Dolls is good. Damn good, as a matter of fact.

You knew I had my reservations going into this one, right? I mean, here we have a band that played no small part in my formative years. After the Dolls made Creem Magazine’s “Best Band of the Year” and “Worst Band of the Year” lists in 1973, I knew I had to hear what that was all about. (Which entailed leaving our little island off the coast of Maine and driving an hour inland to find a record store. Trust me – it was a big deal at the time.) Of course, once I brought their album home, it was a total no-win situation: here we had a blast of rock ‘n’ roll that was like the raunchiest parts of the Stones and the Stooges all mushed together in one rouged-up ball – but I couldn’t tell anybody about it. Nope: there was no way I was going to ask any of my buddies to pause in their repeated playing of “Smoke On The Water” and throw on the Dolls. Wouldn’t have mattered how much I yelled, “Wait! Never mind the cross-dressing part – this is killer rock and roll!” I still would’ve gotten the tar beat out of me. It’s just the way it was back then.

So that was my own little musical secret; even when our garage band covered the Dolls’ “Chatterbox” at the prom, nobody picked up on the song’s source. (Which proved my point, of course: it didn’t matter if they were a bunch of straight NY punks in heels and makeup, a bunch of gay punks pretending to be a bunch of straight NY punks in heels and makeup, or a combination of both. They were rough and tumble; cool and weird; sexy and asexual; but most of all, they were rock and roll.)

Anyway, Doc, that was then. By the time I graduated from high school in 1976, the New York Dolls had imploded and the five members had gone off in various directions. Guitarist Johnny Thunders died of complications from being Johnny Thunders in 1991; drummer Jerry Nolan did the same in 1992. Of the surviving Dolls, lead singer David Johansen seemed to have it figured out the best: for a while, he became a living, breathing, conga-line-leading, cartoon-character-in-the-flesh known as Buster Poindexter. I guess I must’ve been aware of his big late-80s hit “Hot Hot Hot”, but I just didn’t want to know. Buster didn’t have anything to do with what caught my ear about the New York Dolls way back when.

Even when what was left of the Dolls reunited for some festivals in 2004, I really didn’t pay much attention – I guess I was afraid of being disappointed, truth be known. Not long after they played the Meltdown Festival in June of that year, original bassist Arthur Kane died of leukemia. (I don’t know if you’ve been keeping score, Doc, but that left two original Dolls: guitarist Syl Sylvain and Johansen.) There was an album in 2006 ( One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This ) and another in 2009 ( Cause I Sez So ), but I didn’t put an ear to either one.

Why? Good question, Doc. I’m cool with getting older myself (the weirdness goes over a whole lot different with grey hair), but I guess I didn’t want to deflate the memory of what was wild, weird, and wonderful about discovering the Dolls all those years ago. Maybe it was simply my own lack of imagination: I couldn’t get my head around David Johansen being 60. David Crosby hitting 70 this year? Sure – that I could roll with. But not David Johansen being 60.

So all of this – these first 700 or so words – is the roundabout way of telling you that having me review the Dolls’ new Dancing Backward In High Heels was no guarantee for a big ol’ Boy Howdy-style thumbs up review, Doc. Nope. In fact, they stood to get a better shake from someone who’d never heard of them before and had no old ghosts to arm wrestle. And that’s the truth.

And so’s this: Dancing Backward In High Heels is a hellish good time.

I’m serious, Doc. I threw the disc in, cranked it up, and let the opener “Fool For You Baby” soar out of the old KLHs. Braced for some sort of twisted-string guitar squall, I did a double-take when the song launched with a rumbling bass slide-up followed by the sound of a Farfisa organ as big as this damn house and a chorus of slowly-descending-the-fire-escape “bom … bom … bom”s (or something like that), straight out of some early-60s girl-group symphony. And then came ol’ DJ’s lead vocal – a little growly, a little smoky, but all soul and real as hell: “I’m a fool for you baby/that’s what it takes to get in your mind …”

By the second time David Jo launched into the street-scat chorus at 1:56 (I’m paraphrasing here, but something like, “A ditty dom ditty – a ditty dum dum – a dum dum ditty ditty …”), I felt like I’d heard this tune when I was 5 and it had been lying dormant in my DNA waiting to fire off like a shuttle launch.

No sooner had “Fool” faded than a “Hard Day’s Night”-style guitar chord ushered in “Streetcake”, full of doo-wop and come-on-baby pleads (“Let me be your street cake ‘til your breadman comes … I’ll love you better than that old baguette”). Just when you think the song has lurched to an abrupt finish 2 minutes and 10 seconds in, the faintest hint of shaker lets you know that things aren’t over yet and … wham! “Look like your breadman ain’t gonna show,” growls Johansen over a snarly palm-muted guitar. “He done took off with all the dough.” The Dolls come barrel-assing back in, all thundering bass, clanging guitars, and thick layers of backing “ooooooh”s until the song ends for real.

The speakers had barely stopped quivering when on came a classic Johansen rant captured in the studio as he explains to the band what “I’m So Fabulous” was written about (the same wanna-be-for-the-wrong-reason attitude that gutted everything from the Hotel Chelsea to the Haight). The tune itself is all guts and plenty of glory – with Johansen laying down the kind of blues harp that made those old tunes like “It’s Too Late” so damn raunchy and good.

I’ll spare you any more blow-by-blow rundown here, Doc. The thing I need to get across is that this is a group that is creating music –rather than recreating anything – and they wear the results well. If Thunders, Nolan, and Kane were still around, would this be the music the New York Dolls would be playing? Hard to say – and with all due respect, it’s pointless to worry about. When you hear the way-cool diddly-bump-thump of “Round & Round She Goes” (featuring some wicked sax by guest Jamie Toms) or the quasi-reggae rikka-tikka-tikka slur of “Baby Tell Me What I’m On” or the lovely acoustic guitar and strings on “You Don’t have To Cry” (a Spanish cousin to the Stones’ “Lady Jane”, perhaps?), you’re nothing but glad that Johansen, Sylvain, and company aren’t attempting to relive the past. The humor, the blues, the soul, and the hipness are still there – all fueled by right now rather than used-to-be.

Producer/bassist/pianist Jason Hill deserves a lot of credit for making Dancing Backwards work. By Johansen’s own admission in interviews, he’d rather be out playing live than in a studio any day, but it feels like Hill knew how to act as a catalyst both behind the board and out in front of it.

So there you have it, Doc. A trip in the Wayback Machine that actually brought me full-circle to here and now – and glad that we’re all who we are.

Long live the New York Dolls. And Dancing In High Heels proves that they’re very much alive.

Of course, I’m not sure how all this is going to go over the next time I return to the Island … but I’ll deal with that when the time comes.

A ditty dom ditty, Doc.

Your humble servant,
BR