Would you believe ...

[nofi]

i tend to call it a day on reunions where several key members are absent. in this case thunders talent and gutter charisma and poor arthur's iconic 'dollism'. no, he wasn't a very good player but his image and unabashed love for the band were an interal part of the whole. rip.

[uwe]

What are they gonna do, recreate their old bandmates via DNA samples?  

I'd say the Dolls were always Johansen's baby foremost. He founded the band together with Sylvain, they wrote most of the songs together, with Thunders (who joined after Sylvain) contributing quite some songwriting, but not as much as the other two. Saying that Thunders was the NYD and not the others is a bit like saying Sid Vicious was the Sex Pistols or Brian Jones was the Stones, junkie mystique overcrowding the actual musical role which might have been important (in the case of Thunders and early Jones at least), but not all-defining. I never found that the Thunders-led Heartbreakers, for all their qualities, captured the Dolls sound. It lacked Johansen's blues feel.

The club the Dolls played last night (it thankfully eventually filled up decently) was btw also the venue of one of Johnny Thunders' last concerts in Germany in the early nineties. By that time, he was way out of it and the audience booed his inability to even finish one song on stage. (This after having had a stellar performance in Frankfurt only 18 months before.)

If Thunders, Kane, Nolan and Murcia were watching last night (a good deal of the material came from their era though the Dolls have no doubt progressed in their songwriting on the last two modern day albums), I think they approved of what was going on on stage. And aging gracefully is so much better than dying young.

[rahock]

I've read the positive comments on the Dolls from several of you whose opinions I truly respect, so I'm going to figure I was just very unlucky( kinda the story of my life).
Back in 72-73 I bankrolled a show at the Toledo Sports Arena with the Dolls as the headliner. Steve Miller, who was lukewarm on the popularity scale at the time and Shawn Philips (remember him) were both available at the same price to headline, but the promoter leaned on me to go with the Dolls because they were selling out everywhere. Against my better judgement , we went with the Dolls and a good local Detroit group named Mutzi as the warm up.
Ticket sales were not enough to break even. Mutzi was great, but the Dolls came on and emptied the place faster than a freakin' fire alarm .
They were absolutely terrible. They sucked so bad ,even I left early, before I had to hurt someone.
So many people rave about them......I dunno, must have caught a real bad night, but they were so bad I couldn't even imagine them being good.
And this was when I was young and open minded  ....... years before I grew up and turned into an old sourpuss
Rick

[uwe]

In their early days, they just couldn't play. No instrument control and what might be charming in a Bowery club can lead to a fiasco in a Toledo arena real quick. Rundgren as their first producer said that on their first album they were barely able to play and always at or beyond their limits. And who knows who is actually playing on that album. Members of Utopia and that whole Meatloaf first album backing crew were just a phone call away for Herr Rundgren (who, according to the Dolls, was coked out of his head during the sessions for the first album). Even Lenny Kaye, an ardent admirer of the band from their early days on, said that it took them a while for the music to match the image. Stephen Tyler said about the Dolls mid-seventies: "Everybody knows how I love the Dolls and how much they have inspired us, but unlike them our success is down to the music." (Not that early Aerosmith did not have a reputation for being, errrm, loose on stage too.) And Morgan Fisher of Mott (the Hoople) proclaimed: "The Dolls are amazing, not musically, but as a phenomenon."

If early Dolls did not know how to play, then past-their-prime Dolls were too drugged out to still perform well. This is them probably in their prime and as good as they got live in a German TV studio:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZBIZEnjl0I&feature=PlayList&p=36F0600694D5A634&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=8


Mind you, that is is not exactly progressive rock what they are playing there und Herr Thunders especially is still good enough for the odd bum note. I don't doubt for a minute that a well-honed stadium rock machine like Foghat or Grand Funk could wipe the floor with the Dolls at that time.

All that was more than 30 years ago though. The Dolls today still aren't The Eagles live, but they can hold a beat and sing in tune. Relatively. And they still sound edgy.

Uwe

[rahock]

I didn't mention this in my first post, but they had a harmonica piece in one of their tunes and one of the Dolls was dancing around on stage pretending to play the harp while the real harp player was backstage , behind a curtain playing the real harp.  I was backstage watching all this and that's about when I decided I'd seen enough . I grabbed my date and got out of town
Rick

[uwe]

Rest easy! The club stage yesterday was too small to hide harmonica players, Johansen can meanwhile do it for himself and has the harmonicas in the right key tucked away with the lyrics to each song in a little booklet on a bar stool. Together with his reading glasses. Very rock'n'roll.  

Johansen is a renowned collector/compulsive archivist of old blues recordings, he has even recorded a blues CD or two himself (with favorable reviews). I guess that's where he picked up learning to play harmonica. He ain't Magic Dick, but it's enough for the Dolls, give the man a break. Given  a casuality rate of almost 70% with the NYD, it's a miracle he's still alive.  

Uwe

PS: In hindsight, did "the date" somehow compensate your grievances with the NYD? 

[nofi]

i guess you had to be there in the correct decade. with apologies to rick.

[rahock]

PS: In hindsight, did "the date" somehow compensate your grievances with the NYD? 

As a matter of fact the night did end rather well  
Believe me there are a few other bands I had experiences with who made it a whole lot bigger than the Dolls and were a whole lot worse in their early days .
One of these days we'll have to get on the subject of  Alice Cooper when they were just starting out 
Rick