Even without (consciously) thinking about the transvestism featured on the cover art, my knee-jerk reaction to the vocals on album opener "Personality Crisis" was, "Wow, David Johansen sounds just like Dee Snider of Twisted Sister." Strike that. Reverse it. Thinking Snider begat Johansen is eerily similar to Lloyd Christmas from Dumb & Dumber observing, "Hey, look, The Monkees. They were a huge influence on The Beatles." For my second sortie into glam rock territory, I looked to the self-titled debut, New York Dolls. If the balls-out, winner-take-all abandon with which they approach these arrangements and performances is at all genuine - and since they come from a band that imploded after two albums, I'm inclined to think it is - then these recordings constitute powerful evidentiary support for letting the chips fall where they may. I'm not sure where you come down on That 70's Show, but let's pretend for a moment that you love it. New York Dolls are the Michael Kelso of 70's rock: big, dumb, pretty & proud. They hammer on their keyboards and wail away on their guitar strings. On "Lonely Planet Boy," a sloppy saxophone floats in and out of the mix like its player stumbled into the studio spaced out on amyl nitrite. "Trash" is a catchy, three-minute number of fully-formed punk rock before there was a thing called "punk rock." It's song as sonic assault; rock as a blunt instrument. As far as favorite moments, it's a tie between the anarchic singalong to "I've Been Working on the Railroad" at the end of "Subway Train" and the great line in "Bad Girl" when Johansen sings, "I'm beggin' please, little lover, stop this carryin' on / gotta get some lovin' before the planet is gone." Because everybody knows what an aphrodisiac eschatology is. The hyperbolic urgency is so funny and the phrasing, right down to the use of "little lover," reminds me of a similar moment from Bob Dylan's "Talkin' World War III Blues," when he sings, "I was down in the sewer with some little lover / when I peeked out from the manhole cover." Some things never change. And I'm glad rock stars evoking Armageddon to cop a feel is one of them. Grade: B+
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