What's Wrong Today is What's Wrong With You

Or, Falling belatedly in love with the first New York Dolls album

I posted the above pic on social media a couple of days ago, in honor of the 50th anniversary of one of my all-time favorite albums: The New York Dolls’ self-titled debut.

In the post, I mentioned that I didn’t really get hip to the album until over a decade after its release, which prompted someone on Instagram to thank me for being honest. “Seriously,” they wrote, “People bullshit about being hip to stuff from the get-go, even when the recording was released before their birth.”

Which is totally true — many music fans do indeed love to posture about having been into this band or that artist from the time of their first record (or even before it), as if having discovered said band before you discovered them is an indication of their inherent superiority. But as my late, great, supremely no-nonsense Grandma Rae useta say, “So what?”

The thing is, with the possible exception of Bo Diddley, no one was ever born cool. Some of us just had the good fortune to land in the right time and place to observe, absorb and maybe even participate in important moments in music history. Some of us just had the benefit of having parents, older siblings or friends with excellent taste who were more than happy to turn us on to their favorite records. And some of us just had to figure it all out for ourselves, eventually doing so after tripping over numerous false starts and stumbling down countless blind alleys. And all of our journeys to music discovery are equally valid, as far as I’m concerned.

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I fell in love with The New York Dolls in early 1985 — a dozen years after the release of the band’s controversial debut album, and ten since the classic Dolls lineup had crashed and burned in a firestorm of poor management, public indifference and heroin addiction. I was 18 years old, trying to find and fight my way through a decade that was about as un-Dolls-y as one could imagine. Which is, in retrospect, exactly why (and when) I needed The New York Dolls in my life.

I’d read about the Dolls for years, about how outrageous they’d been and how profound their influence was on so many of the punk bands that followed in their stack-heeled wake. But I’d never heard anything by them on the radio, and I didn’t know anyone who actually owned their albums, so I wound up working backwards to get to them.

David Johansen’s live album Live It Up, a surprise hit in the summer of 1982, got the ball rolling for me. Most of the stuff on that record sounded more in the realm of Bruce Springsteen/Southside Johnny than the work of someone who had once fronted a notorious proto-punk band, which is honestly why I was initially drawn to it; but after a few spins, the raucous Side 2 closers “Stranded in the Jungle” and “Personality Crisis” quickly become my favorite tracks on the whole thing. A review of the album (probably in CREEM, a rag that was invaluable to my early musical education) flagged those songs as throwbacks to David Jo’s Dolls days; I was intrigued, but since I’d also read somewhere (probably in Rolling Stone, a rag whose opinions I too often took as gospel) that the Dolls had been a hype and couldn’t play, I didn’t explore any further. Clearly, I wasn’t ready yet.

Two summers later, I picked up an import copy of Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers’ L.A.M.F. Revisited — a newly remixed version of their classic 1977 album, a record that I’d seen mentions of for years but had never been able to track down. I loved the album from the first needle drop; it was loud, sloppy, uncouth in a charmingly obnoxious kinda way, and thrillingly easy for this budding musician to play guitar along with. Up to this point, the Ramones had been the only ‘70s NYC punk band that I’d really cared about (pretty much all the other punk and new wave records I loved to were from the UK), but The Heartbreakers’ album made me realize that I needed to dig deeper into ‘70s NYC punk in general, and into the Dolls in particular.

By now, I’d read enough to know that Thunders had been the “Keith” in the Dolls to Johansen’s “Mick” (and Heartbreakers drummer Jerry Nolan their “Charlie”); so I was curious to hear what kind of Stones-y sparks had flown when they were all in the same band. The problem was, I couldn’t find any Dolls records anywhere in Chicago. Okay, that’s not entirely true: Wax Trax (the best place in town to find old punk and punk-adjacent records) did have an original promo copy of New York Dolls in their bins, but they wanted 25 bucks for it — way more than I was prepared to pay for an album I’d never heard. It took months of searching, but I finally scored a cut-out of a late-’70s pressing for five dollars at one of the several used record stores along Clark Street.

I caught the 36 bus home and slapped the vinyl on my turntable as soon as I got there. “Personality Crisis,” the album’s opening track, was cool, though I was a little annoyed by how slow and sluggish it sounded compared to the version on Live It Up. I was just thinking, “Eh, maybe this sounded cooler back then,” when Johansen’s voice suddenly grabbed me by the collar.

“When I say I’m in love,” he growled, “You best believe I’m in LUV, L-U-V!”

I recognized that opening from an old Shangri-La’s song, but everything else about “Looking for a Kiss” was completely fresh and entrancing to me, especially the swaggering groove, the way the two guitars danced around, tumbled over and collided with each other, and the non-stop, shit-talking comedic monologue from Johansen that was occasionally interspersed by his assertion that “I feels BAD — and I’m-a lookin’ for a KISS.” It was funny, it was raw, it was as menacing as it was campy, and I loved every second of it, even the cartoonish smooching noises at the end.

The image of the band on the album’s front cover didn’t seem to jibe at all with the music I was hearing — they were too posed, too pretty, and what was up with the roller skates Syl Sylvain was wearing? The photo on the back cover, however, was a different story. They looked in that pic like they sounded: wiseass but soulful, tawdry but tough, like they’d strutted through the East Village looking for a kiss (and other things) countless times before, and were not about to take even the barest hint of shit for the way they looked. “Whassamatta?” Syl seemed to say while gesticulating meaningfully at the photographer. “You never seen a buncha guys with braciole in their trousers before?”

“Vietnamese Baby,” the next track, kicked things into even higher gear with buzzing, clanging guitar riffs, a hard-charging tempo and a Johansen rant that I could make precious little sense of — though the line “What’s wrong today is what’s wrong with you” hit completely home with me. I was in the midst of a “gap year” between high school and college, working as a go-fer for the legal department of a gigantic and completely soulless corporation, and the majority of the humans I encountered every day at work and on the bus were totally buying into the “80s Dream” of conformist wealth-chasing. Ronald Reagan had just settled in for a second term in the White House, AIDS was running rampant, Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” was Number One on the Billboard charts, and even the sleaze was slick and synthetic and sharply manicured. No wonder I was fucking depressed all the time.

Then, out of nowhere, came “Lonely Planet Boy,” an acoustic-driven ballad about alienation that was sweet and genuinely heartfelt enough to make me tear up on the spot. Ah, fuck, I thought; it had been a really lonely year, with all my friends from my high school graduating class off at college while I was still stuck in Chicago, figuring out what the hell I was gonna do next. New York City, where I was born and where my dad still lived, had already been calling my name, and hearing “Lonely Planet Boy” at this moment just further reinforced to me that I wasn’t in the right place right now — geographically, creatively, spiritually or otherwise. One way or another, I decided, I was going to get out of Chicago and get myself to New York before the year was over.

If those had been the only four good songs on the album, New York Dolls would still hold a special place in my heart. But there was so much more to it, including the snotty doo-wop war cry of “Trash,” the gritty ballad “Subway Train,” the absolutely burning revamp of Bo Diddley’s “Pills,” and “Jet Boy”’s insane Yardbirds-on-crank rave-up. (Anyone who says the Dolls “couldn’t play” is a liar or a moron.)

Being of both Italian and Jewish extraction, I quickly decided that Johnny Thunders and Syl Sylvain constituted the greatest Italian-Jewish guitar tandem in rock history, and I would spend a considerable portion of my free time over the next few months trying to learn every lick from the record on my trusty Hondo Fatboy guitar. (Only much later would I learn that a substantial portion of the really cool parts and riffs had been played by Syl, and not guitar-hero Johnny.)

Just your typical New York Dolls fan, 1985.

The album impacted me in other ways, as well — though unlike so many folks who were influenced by the Dolls, I felt no compulsion to wear platform boots, squeeze myself into spandex, or shoot heroin. During the time I’d been working downtown, I’d become well acquainted with the Loop’s more flamboyant clothing emporiums; I’d initially gone in just to buy shoes like the ones you see in the above pic, but the Dolls inspired me to buy more colorful iterations of the mod-inspired clothes I was already wearing, and to carry myself with a little more swagger.

The older Black dudes who worked at these shops made no attempt to hide their amusement at the presence of a scrawny-but-impeccably-dressed little white kid in their establishments, but I also got a few appreciative nods from them when I brought my latest purchases up to the counter. Sure, I got some stares on the bus in the morning, but hey — whassamatta, you never seen a guy in a purple shirt, pink tie and two-tone shoes before?

But beyond that, New York Dolls felt like it was sent from the ‘70s to show me just how idiotic the ‘80s were; and in doing so, it inspired me to take myself, and the messed-up world I was living in, a little less seriously. Sure, it said, you’re surrounded by squares and dimwits and yuppies who care about ridiculous bullshit — but that doesn’t mean you can’t laugh about it, or find a way create your own reality. And a good start to doing the latter is to find some other people to play music with…

Great music is a lot like water: if you give it a way in, it will eventually find you. And the truly great stuff will resonate with you, regardless of how long it’s already been available; there’s no sell-by date on it, no “you had to be there” caveat stickers on the album sleeve. Would I have loved to have seen the Dolls in their early ‘70s prime at Mercer Arts Center or Max’s Kansas City? Absolutely. Would it be cooler to say that I got into the Dolls around the same time I was digging Sesame Street? Sure. But if either of those things had been the case, the Dolls’ first album wouldn’t have found me when I needed it the most, back when I was just a lonely planet boy.

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