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New York Dolls
Irving Plaza - New York, NY
Filter Grade: 87%
by Tom Birner | 01.01.2007

Dirtbag punk fans and spike-wearing coquettes unite! Can’t get further apart in appearance but that’s who came out for the latest episode of slop-based mojo shit (see recent Stooges, Pistols, Mekons reunions). The New York Dolls sold out Irving Plaza all week despite having only two original members remaining. And why not? The songs are loose, and most quasi-boogie rock that followed seems to sound really gimmicky. Besides, anyone so loyal to Johnny Thunders has since died of an overdose.

Tonight was the second to last New York show; they went on at eleven thirty and fired up “Looking for a Kiss”- still crass (and honest) after all these years. David Johansen, heroin thin in a see through pink shirt, coolly strutted and brayed, all the while exuding that possibly smug poise derived equally from influence and resurgence. The energy level was much higher than audience expectations (being rock and such), and so the glam lustered on “Trash”- and if that phrasing doesn’t explain the New York Dolls then what does? Johansen pulled dutifully on the harp for a cover of Willie Dixon’s “Hoochie Coochie Man.” Original Doll Syl Sylvain and Steve Conte (replacing the group’s legendary guitarist Johnny Thunders, who died in ’91) pissed out those timeless, degenerative licks of “Personality Crisis” as Johansen led the crowd through a raucous if fulsome encore of “Human Being” from the Dolls second and last original release, 1974’s Too Much Too Soon.

The set was appropriately terse and furious. Though said members had a way or trumpeting the transient nature of their music (mostly through perfunctory body language or pleas for crowd participation), the sound was true and biting, the roof trembled, and these old geezers’ sound is inimitable. I’ve never heard nostalgia scream so loud, or maybe it was that biker-clad double-fisting rock pirate next to me.



Photo Credit: New York Dolls Official Site