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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Sun, July 30, 2006
Winnipeg Sun
Rally of the Dolls
Rock pioneers return after 32-year absence
By JANE STEVENSON,
SUN MEDIA
There are only of a handful of true rock' n' roll characters: Iggy Pop, Keith Richards and Noel Gallagher spring to mind.
Lesser known, in some circles anyway, but no less quotable is the New York Dolls' formidable lead singer David Johansen, who has been busy chatting up Tuesday's release of One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This.
It's the first album in 32 years from the Dolls, the formerly hard-partying, cross-dressing band that inspired countless punk and hair metal groups in their furious wake.
"I need a cup of caw-ffee," are the first strongly accented words out of Johansen's mouth on a recent promotional visit to Toronto.
It's about noon and I ask Johansen whether this interview would have ever happened in the early '70s when the Dolls, who only released two albums before imploding in 1975, were probably just going to bed.
"I don't think so," Johansen, 56, says with a sly smile.
These days, however, he is much better behaved.
"Exceptional," he jokes. "It's like you look up good behaviour, my picture's in the dictionary. I'm like Miss-ter Manners. You know, they always say, 'A fool who persists in his folly will eventually become wise.' They don't put the codicil, 'if he lives.' So I don't recommend that axiom."
Johansen should know.
He and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain are the only surviving members of the Dolls lineup: Original drummer Billy Murcia died from a mixture of drugs and alcohol in 1972; guitarist Johnny Thunders died in 1991 after a long history of heroin abuse; replacement drummer Jerry Nolan died from a stroke in 1992; and bassist and recovering alcoholic Arthur Kane died of leukemia in 2004.
"If you do live, I think ultimately you just start to think, 'This (drinking and doing drugs) is, like, really boring,' " Johansen says. "This is like Groundhog Day or something. So when you stop doing that, it's like a lot of new vistas open up. One of them is daylight. It's funny because near to where I live in Manhattan, there's a park, I wasn't aware of that. I think it's called Central Park."
Johansen, who in his post-Dolls phase has done bit parts in films and performed as a lounge-singing alter-ego named Buster Poindexter, reportedly resisted previous Dolls reunion attempts over the years.
Sylvain, who didn't fare so well career-wise and at one point in the '80s was driving cabs to make ends meet, wanted to reunite 20 years ago.
The instigator behind the Dolls regrouping ended up being British mope-rock kingpin Morrissey, the band's former fan club president, who wanted them for London's Meltdown Festival in 2004, which he was curating.
"When he was a boy, I didn't know him personally but I knew of him because he was such a voiciferous campaigner for the Dolls," Johansen says of Morrissey. "And he would write letters to the editor, so I would read his missives. You know, 'Rock 'n' roll is a desert, and the Dolls are an oasis.' "
Morrissey also said that Mick Jagger stole the Dolls frontman's moves, a proclamation that now makes Johansen laugh.
"I think that's Morrissey, I don't know," he says. "He's in a very interesting bubble. Kind of like that English actor, Dirk Bogarde? I have no idea (about the claim). I've never considered it. (Jagger's) a lovely man. I think I'm more into modern dance. I'm more Twyla Tharp -- the bounding and leaping."
Still, Johansen remembers Morrissey had to do some major cajoling in 2004 for the Dolls to reunite when Kane was still alive.
"We kind of hemmed and hawed, because I had tunnel vision," Johansen says. "But then I realized I should consider this. And I asked (Morrissey), 'Would you do this?' Meaning with The Smiths. He said, 'Absolutely not.' But then I thought it would be great to see the guys and have a couple of laughs. So I went into it thinking I'm going to have the most fun I could possibly have."
SOLD OUT
Johansen says the experience -- they added a second Dolls show in London after the first one sold out -- exceeded his expectations.
Particularly heartwarming was the fact Kane got to play at those London shows, as documented in a DVD of the concerts and the film New York Doll, before succumbing to leukemia a short while later.
"That's such a great artifact to have of Arthur," Johansen says of the documentary. "They almost got him. I mean, you couldn't get him -- it would take a couple of years -- but thank God (director) Greg Whitely came really close to getting Arthur, because Arthur to me was like this mystical kind of creature. When I first met him, I remember the first day that he came to my door and I was like, 'Who is this guy?' Because his perception would take you up there with him. He saw things in a great way. And then he got into the whole booze thing. It was a shame.
Shortly after the London gigs, Morrissey invited the Dolls to join him for a big homecoming concert in Manchester.
Then the European music festivals started calling, and the band starting working on new songs while on the road.
Later, a well-received show at South By Southwest in Austin in 2005 lead to the Dolls getting a record deal that same day. They later played that same year in Toronto at North By Northeast.
"It was a commitment," Johansen says of making the new record with producer Jack Douglas, who engineered the first Dolls record in 1973 under the tutelage of producer Todd Rundgren. "We had written a couple of songs really without even thinking. I mean, there is a lot of idiot savant-ness going on here in this band."
Among the guest artists on the new album are Iggy Pop and Michael Stipe, which makes sense, given the Dolls were influenced by the Stooges, and Stipe was a fan of the Dolls.
As for Pop, Johanson definitely sees a kindred spirit and has enjoyed getting to tour with the reformed Stooges again over the past two years.
"He's a friend. We've both been through the meat grinder and we have this mutual bemusement with our lives and what we do for a living and just being alive, it's almost tacit."
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