While watching a '70s performance clip of the New York Dolls on YouTube, I'm a little exhausted. There they are on Old Grey Whistle Test, the classic British music show, garishly dressed in shiny painted-on pants and platform boots. One guy even wears a gold-colored sequined tube top. And the music is unrelenting. The clip is from 1973, about four years before the rise of punk, whose general sound and attitude the band presages.
"When we all got together, we had similar aesthetics," says lead singer David Johansen. "We wanted to make each song like little explosions, not these long laborious affairs."
Back then, the group was like nothing that came before it. Sure, the snarling full lips and strutting performance style of Johansen recalled Mick Jagger. The band's grimy, noisy musicianship was reminiscent of the Stooges. But the New York Dolls - five pencil-thin New York City white guys with colossal hair and makeup straight from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? - still managed to be aesthetically groundbreaking with just two studio albums: their 1973 self-titled debut and 1974's prophetically titled Too Much Too Soon.
Not long after the release of that album, drugs and infighting effectively ended the first incarnation of the New York Dolls. And in the past 32 years, the deaths of Johnny Thunders, Arthur Kane and Jerry Nolan guaranteed no reunion of the original five.
But surviving band mates Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain are still at it with four younger recruits. In 2006, the "new" New York Dolls returned with a surprisingly solid studio effort, One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. To support it, the band is on a winter tour, which kicks off at Rams Head Live on Tuesday night.
"That's how a good rock 'n' roll band works: You give it up to the music," says Johansen, who last week was at his Staten Island, N.Y., home. "We're not a prefabricated machine. It's different every night. There's not much neurosis about what we're doing."
In 2004, British pop-rock star Morrissey organized a reunion of the three surviving members, which at the time included Kane, for a performance at that year's Meltdown Festival in London.
"We got together to do that one show just for the hell of it," says Johansen, his voice husky and breathy. "Morrissey was the president of the Dolls fan club in London. Being that he was such a big fan all those years, he asked us to get together and do a show. We sounded really good and had a lot of fun, man."
Just months after the performance, Kane died unexpectedly from leukemia. But that didn't stop the other two surviving members from building on the momentum of the enthusiastically received London gig. Plans for the new album were announced in 2005. Also that year, Johansen and Sylvain recruited guitarist Steve Conte, bassist Sami Yaffa, drummer Brian Delaney and keyboardist Brian Koonin.
"Luckily, we were able to get the people to play instinctually, which is the best way to do things," Johansen says. "If we had to think about the playing of the musicians too much, I don't know if we'd ever gotten together."
On One Day, that riotous Dolls energy is sharply focused by producer Jack Douglas. The album is perhaps the band's most accomplished work. Although the CD can't compete with the sheer musical recklessness of the '70s recordings, One Day still crackles with the elements that have always imbued the band's sound. The blues, '60s pop and acidic rock inform the arrangements as the lyrics mix street smarts with silly musings on music and relationships.
Johansen sings it all with guts and swagger, infusing the tunes with an energy that belies his 58 years. It's a far cry from his '80s lounge-lizard persona, Buster Poindexter. Under that name, Johansen stormed the pop charts with "Hot Hot Hot," the faux-tropical dance smash from 1987.
"Some people are aware of that, and some people don't put it together with what I do with the Dolls," he says. "It doesn't matter. What we're doing now with the Dolls is a lot of fun. We cipher all this energy from the universe, and it just happens. It's like a different realm we're in. It was always like that."
rashod.ollison@baltsun.com
See the New York Dolls at Rams Head Live, 20 Market Place, at 7 Tuesday night. Tickets are $20-$22 and are available at ramsheadlive.com or by calling 410-244-1131.