Little Steven’s Underground Garage Rolling Rock ‘n’ Roll Show
w/ The New York Dolls, The Supersuckers, The Chesterfield Kings, The Charms
Tues. Nov. 28
8 p.m.
$20
Music Farm
32 Ann St.
853-3276
www.musicfarm.com
www.littlestevensundergroundgarage.com
As rock band reunions go, the return of the legendary glam/punk band The New York Dolls has the trappings of a momentous event. But frontman David Johansen isn’t doing anything to add to the hype. Forget any theories of big money incentives, expectations for chart-topping albums or big arena tours; for Johansen, the Dolls rock again for the simplest of reasons.
“I just started doing it and started having so much fun doing it,” says Johansen, 56. “It was more fun than what I was doing.”
The Dolls’ story qualifies as a major rock world event. They’re one of the rare bands whose stature, influence, and mythology have grown considerably since breaking up. Despite making only two studio albums — 1973’s New York Dolls and ’74’s Too Fast Too Soon — the band enjoys almost iconic status in rock history. Their impact far exceeded any statistics.
This Tuesday, the Dolls headline the third round of the “Little Steven’s Underground Garage Rolling Rock ‘n’ Roll Show” at the Music Farm with support from Arizona rock twang-bangers The Supersuckers, N.Y. garage band The Chesterfield Kings, Chicago noisy kids The Charms, and the famed Garage Girls A Go-Go dancers
Formed in 1971, at a time when grandiose progressive rock was the latest trend, the Dolls created the blueprint for punk rock with a catchy, high-octane sound and a grand gender-bending sense of fashion and theater.
The classic lineup of the Dolls — Johansen (known briefly during the mid-’80s as “Buster Poindexter”), guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane, and drummer Jerry Nolan — reawakened a New York City rock ‘n’ roll scene that had gone dormant. By the time they fell apart in 1977, Patti Smith, The Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, and Television had made New York City venues such as CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, and The Mud Club the epicenter of American punk rock. In Britain, the Sex Pistols and the Clash were also heavily influenced by the New York Dolls’ audacity, edginess, and trash-guitar sound.
The group’s mercurial career, its impact — and the deaths in the early ’90s of Thunders (of a drug overdose) and Nolan (of a stroke, after years of addiction) — make for one of rock’s most tragic and compelling band stories. As much as Johansen is proud of the music and the impact of the Dolls, he sounds believable when he describes the modest circumstances that led to the reunion and the release of a new studio album titled One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This.
The reunion is the direct result of an invitation from the revered British artist Morrissey (formerly of The Smiths) to play the Meltdown Festival, which he curated in 2004. Johansen had been famous for dismissing previous overtures to re-form the Dolls. This time, his response was different.
“With Morrissey we were just going to do our gig,” Johansen says. “Prior to that, like Sylvain would call me up and say. ‘I’ve got this guy that we can make a million dollars with, and all we’ve got to do is get in this truck and drive to bum-fuck, Nevada, and then we walk to Idaho and then we die in a ditch or Winnipeg or something.’ So I’d say, ‘You know Syl, I think I’m just going to do what I’m doing.’ It was never like a thing where I never wanted to play with him or something. It was just like the situation was never right.”
Johansen recruited surviving members Sylvain and Kane (who, sadly, died of leukemia shortly after the first reunion shows), and along with other guest musicians, brought the Dolls back to life for this one occasion.
What the singer didn’t expect was that it would be so much fun. He and Sylvain filled out the New York Dolls lineup with bassist Sammi Yaffa, guitarist Steve Conte, keyboardist Brian Koonin, and drummer Brian Delaney and began doing more gigs.
“We went to South By Southwest in 2005, and like, the guy from Roadrunner Records came to us that day and said, ‘I want to make a record with you guys. I can’t believe you guys don’t have a record contract,'” he relates. “We were like, ‘it hadn’t really occurred to us. But yeah, OK we’ll make a record with you.’ It was just like that. It wasn’t like let’s go see what this guy has to say or that guy. We just took it.”
The singer gave very little thought to the mystique of the Dolls or meeting the expectations that would come with the new CD once the band began writing and recording One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This.
“We didn’t really think about anything too much,” he says. “We just wanted to make great songs. And I think there’s something about when me and Syl get together that it makes like a third element or something that’s greater than the sum of its parts or something, which maybe explains why it’s Dolls music. Other than that, I didn’t really think about that legacy business too much. Really, we were just doing it for fun — that’s the ethos of this thing.”
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