New York Dolls (part two): You're so sorry, busy sorry, that's all you'll do
Am reprinting here my New York Dolls piece from 1997, this being the second post in a three-post series. What you're reading today is simply the three original footnotes to the part of the piece that I'd reprinted Wednesday. What's lost in this reprint is the way that, in my fanzine, I'd had the text and its footnotes snaking around each other, as if the parts of the story were in conversation with and against themselves.
At the start of each footnote below, I link its location in Wednesday’s post's text, if you'd like to see where the sentence I'm commenting on lives in context. (Am linking to the Substack version because its software allows me to single out and jump from text to footnote and back. The simple HTML I use in Dreamwidth and LiveJournal doesn't let me set that up, so on those platforms you have to scan the pieces to where I put superscripts and asterisks and such. Better off following my links to the Substack.)
Thanks to the University of Georgia Press, who published my book Real Punks Don't Wear Black (and here), where I reprinted this, and are letting me reprint this now.
Footnote 1 (link)
"It'll be pretty hard to explain why this image meant so much to me."
But I do want to talk a little bit about how the band sounded, since not only did they play dress-up – you know, like little kids let loose in their big sister's wardrobe – they played music. Really, it was a lot like how they looked. It was tough – it was a hard r&b sound, like the Stones infusing soul with nasty blues riffs – but it was warm too; Johnny played thick guitar, it was almost syrup, with a noisy blues-whine and a way of careening up into the right pitch rather than hitting it head on, and he would play pretty counter melodies or his guitar would harmonize against the singing. The style was influential. The Dolls invented a sound I call "the loud pretties" meaning they'd mix the noise and the hard blues and the ugly yowls with loud beauty, so the clamor and the beauty were inseparable, all one big roil (I'm contrasting this with how, say, the Beatles or Raspberries or Cheap Trick or Sweet would put pretty vocals merely on top of raunchy instrumentals). The Clash and Nirvana played later versions of the loud pretties. Of course the Dolls were about ten times more fun. They brought back a lot of the rock 'n' roll silliness from the pre-Stones days: animal sounds, novelty tunes, shoo-wop shoo-wop oompahs. Rare for the "progressive-rock" era, especially since they didn't seem like an oldies band doing it. They sounded like little kids let loose in their big sister's record collection – but then gone off on a rampage, with the sound attached to their raving ugly beauty. Except I also have to say that they didn't quite do it: They rumbled forward, but their rock sound never quite got a roll to it, though they tried. This is what I meant way back in WMS #5 when I said that the Sex-O-Lettes sounded the way the Dolls looked, really got on record with the rolling in-your-face exuberance the Dolls were shooting for. And I was certainly implying then that disco could do it but "rock" couldn't anymore. This is why the Dolls are only 27 on my albums list, rather than number 1.
New York Dolls "Jet Boy" (on the Old Grey Whistle Test)
Footnote 2 (link)
"As if I just didn't care how I looked."
I realize that this doesn't convey very well how I actually dressed. The fact is I don't remember. Teen popularity/nonpopularity was so traumatic for me that my mind froze and I wouldn't pay attention. And that was part of my rebellion, too, not to pay attention. I liked summers because I could wear T-shirts. All T-shirts were white then. I think I wished that I could wear single-color pullovers in other months, as I'd worn when I was a little kid. I didn't like shirts with collars and buttons. But I always wore them, because that's what my mother bought for me. To buy my own shirts would have taken money that I used for records and books. It did not occur to me to tell my mother what I wanted. As it is with traumatic subjects, I wanted to turn them off, not bring them up. I remember making two fashion decisions in high school. The first was to wear my shirts tucked in, despite the cool trend that said wear them out. I tucked them in because wearing them out made me look heavier. Second, in tenth grade I let my hair grow long, a complicated decision (no matter how I looked, I'd be giving in to someone) that was simplified for me by the fact that it caused great conflict with my parents, who tried to forbid it. My dad said that he was upset that a generation of young men was looking like fairies. This was just the thing to make me resist him.
Given that my mind is blank, I've gotten my childhood friend Jay Carey to describe how I looked.
Jacqueline Carey: You dressed in high school as if your clothes were chosen by someone else – presumably your mother. You wore various colored slacks and dress shirts, patterned but based on the color white. They were generally opened at the collar to reveal an undershirt underneath. This is a look I don't really remember on anyone else except Sandy [her husband]. Eventually (and reluctantly) I took over the job of buying his clothes from his mother, and I bought undershirts with V-necks, thus radically revamping him.
One difference between the two of you is that he often wore blue jeans with dress shirts, and you almost never did. I remember my amazement when you showed up in (straight-legged) jeans one day in high school. In fact, I'm still curious: Who bought them?
Yours was probably a pretty smart approach to fashion; it somehow took you completely out of judging range. I remember Susan Long (much later) saying, "How does he get away with it? He wears polyester, he's not even ironic about it, but he gets away with it."
Frank Kogan: Probably it was my exquisite handsomeness that allowed me to get away with everything. I don't remember who bought the jeans. It may have been me. You'd think I'd have remembered. There were school rules against jeans when we started (also against girls wearing pants). This outraged me in principle, but I can't remember when the rule was allowed to lapse. I don't remember pulling the "undershirt" ploy until after high school, though Jay's memory may well be correct. The undershirts she's referring to are the white T-shirts I mentioned above. In high school I think I only wore – as undershirts, that is – the regular Stanley Kowalski undershirts that my mother bought me, which are as deep as V-necks and so wouldn't have been visible (they used to be called, generically, "undershirts"; Hanes and Fruit of the Loom now call them "A-shirts" or "athletic shirts" to distinguish them from white T-shirts, which are now also called "undershirts"). After high school I was only wearing dress shirts (1) when I had to work at an office, or (2) when I'd run out of clean pullovers – which unfortunately was often, since I was still generally unwilling to spend money on clothes when there were records out there, still unbought.
Footnote 3 (link)
"David was asking if you – if *I* – could make it with the monster of life."
A final note, about the words. The first thing to say is that maybe a quarter of them are difficult or impossible to make out. For instance, "Frankenstein" might start:
Something must've happened over Manhattan.
Who could've spun all the children this time?
Did they ever, could they ever,
Expect such a Frankenstein, a Frankenstein?
except that I initially heard "who could've spun" as "hurled in their fun," which is actually just as good and almost as plausible. There's a lousy Website that has Dolls lyrics, but they do an even worse job of it than I do. Their version goes "Who can expound," which may be correct but isn't very good. For "Vietnamese Baby" the site has "Show you more mustard gas than any girl ever seen," but I'm sure David's saying "Show you more busted glass." And later on he's saying "You're so sorry, busy sorry, that's all you'll do," though the Internet idiots think he's merely "solid." In any event, David's deliberate use of "bad" grammar creates hot emotional poetry that sounds like normal bad-grammar conversation. "We was all engaged in charms, swear we're having fun" (Chuck Eddy hears this as "He was all endangered zone where we're having fun," and if he's right I don't want to know it). So in David's world (and mine) we're busy doing sorry and engaging in charm – it's a world where you've got to work for your emotions and work to be somebody, to be someone who counts. I guess we are all endangered zone. And the glass isn't just broken, it's busted.
New York Dolls "Vietnamese Baby"
In a college term paper I said that Johansen "works in a fictional style, with characters, and sometimes with what I will call a narrator (who never narrates)." My point was that David never provides an objective framework, he's always jumping from voice to voice, so you're hearing a character addressing another character, or the narrator addressing the character, or the character or the narrator addressing us, all jammed up together so you're hearing bits of conversation and bits of subjective description in no kind of chronological order. But as someone says in "Vietnamese Baby": "Everything connects."
In the paper I called the style "maddeningly confusing" and said that it "is probably the result of both genius and laziness." But Johansen's genius/laziness allows words to carry a whole overload of emotional meaning: Since he's not specifying who the "Vietnamese Baby" is, for instance, you can make it many things – a burned napalm baby like we were seeing every night on the war reports, or a "baby" in the affectionate sense, like a honey or a sweetie, a Vietnamese girlfriend (or boyfriend – remember, these are the Dolls). And when David sings, "With a Vietnamese baby on your mind," after having run us through the usual shift of pronouns, we don't know whose little mind has got the baby on it: that of the Viet vet who boasts, "When I'm getting' home to you, I gotta show you what I can do"; or of the girl he came home to; or of the girl he left behind (you know, maybe she got pregnant and had a baby). It's probably the vet's – his mind keeps going back to Vietnam. But you see what happens: Because David doesn't specify, the baby is on everyone's mind.
Johansen piggybacks "Babylon" and "Frankenstein" on the plot of "Like a Rolling Stone" without bothering to state that plot, which frees him to pour forth huge gobs of conversation and poetry in an uninterrupted stream. He simply uses the word home to invoke "Like a Rolling Stone":
So now you're tellin' me
that any time you can get on home,
but you know this place it is my home,
so where am I to go?
That's Frankenstein talking to the runaway; but he (the monster? the narrator? Johansen?) is also concerned on the girl's (boy's) behalf that she's (he's) going to get put down for being too "back home." And anyway like in the Dylan song she/they are really without a home, with no direction home, etc. And while David's just layering on words and talk he manages to vastly (I think) improve on Dylan's imagery. Dylan's "Napoleon in rags" was a strained metaphor, some bum or Chaplinesque loser whom Dylan was instructing Miss Lonely to love and appreciate; whereas Frankenstein is a whole city/monster/predicament/mess-of-one's-own-making, and when Johansen asks her does she think that she can make it with Frankenstein, he's not giving preachy instructions but asking a genuine question, and one that I still don't know the answer to. Of course, if you've never heard "Like a Rolling Stone," don't know the strong Dylan framework – or can't invent it for yourself – the song could be a big noisy mess.
And with "Vietnamese Baby" you're really on your own, because it's hard to know what he's saying or what might be happening, since there's no story that *I* can hear depicted or alluded to or invoked. I guess I'm free to make the story up myself. So in one line there's something about a slingshot, in the next a lightbulb (it sounds like), and in the one after that we've got the busted glass. (Brad Gillis of the band Night Ranger: "People tell us that 'Sister Christian' was the main song at their prom. That's great, but they should also know that at my prom I was in the parking lot, shooting out lights with ball bearings and a wrist-rocket slingshot.") Actually – before the Dolls, before Night Ranger – when I was sixteen I'd written a fantastical story about a girl who goes to a party and gets bored and frustrated, so she (naturally) burns the place down and goes out into the night, knocking over houses, using lightposts she had torn up from the ground. (Several years ago I sent Chuck a copy of this story. He and Linus liked it but wondered how she was able to lift the lightposts. But then they figured it out: because the posts were light posts.) I wrote five or six variations on this story during the next half dozen years. One version (in 1975 or 1976) was called "Vietnamese Baby"; in that one the guy (now it was a guy, a soldier home) goes out and thinks he's showing off by throwing stones and knocking the bulbs out of streetlights.
Back to the Dolls song. The plot or theme? Well, a guy has come home from the war, but he's left something emotional behind. "Well maybe they're just givin' you all you ever wanted, and maybe you never ever know what that was." There's a phrase in Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook, "nostalgia for death" I think it is, which seems to fit, somehow. There's an intense time, terrifying but also full of heightened emotion and maybe camaraderie and love. (This is my version, and maybe Johansen's, but not Lessing's, I don't think. She was being sarcastic.) And now that you've gotten out of this godawful place, everything else is pale, doesn't measure up to the awful war/awful love you left behind. I drew a parallel to my complicated messed-up high-school years being succeeded by my sane but blah college time, and my mind was going back... There was a sense in which I'd loved the war – this monster war that I had spent so much energy worrying about and opposing, it thereby giving some purpose to my life. And now that it's over, whatcha gonna do?
The due date of my term paper, by the way, was the day I read in the New York Times of the Dolls' disbanding. The day I actually handed the paper in (I'd gotten a five-day extension) was the day Saigon fell.
Meta paragraph for Substack: For those who saw part one via email, I've subsequently tried to tweak its meta paragraph in the direction of intelligibility, if you want to give it another look on your browser. Continuing a thought from that paragraph and those tweaks: I once told a group of people who, like me, struggle maintaining solvency, that I'm someone who thinks outside the box – but that, in order to write prolifically, I need a box. [Draws box in the air w/ his two index fingers.] A variant on this paradox is that (1) I'm someone who suffers from greater-than-average social anxiety, I feel it physically, a permanent twist in my stomach that I've chosen not to medicate; in any event, I need a certain amount of dead air, dead space surrounding me in order to function as a person much less a writer – but also (2) I'm someone who writes most easily and naturally when I'm responding to others, when there are communities of others enveloping me. I kind of dealt with this paradox by creating fanzines in 1986 that, had they emerged online 10 years later, would've been called "message boards."1 I asked people questions, I printed their answers and responded to them; in the next issue people responded to other people's responses, asked new questions, *I* asked new questions, etc. I jokingly tell people that I invented the comment thread.2 In any event, even when I'm the most original thinker in the room, I need a spark from someone else for the thought to get going. Notice, for instance, that big gobs of part one were lifted from a letter I wrote to Liz Armstrong, in response to a letter she'd written me. And part three was inspired in part by a suggestion from Lucy Sante. --Also, of course, the great truth that my freshman-year alienation was telling me – the school's failure to reach, my failure to reach – is a critique I level against pretty much everything I'm involved in (indie rock, music criticism, the political left), my wanting communities to help me reach in a way I can't reach without them – and then I get peeved when they fall short of this job I've laid on them. [To be cont'd in the part three meta paragraph, ft. Lindsay Anderson's IF... and a missed opportunity w/ Kerry.]
This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/393635.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.
In fact, when Tom Ewing started the I Love Music message board circa 2000, he copied my question-answer format. He'd never seen an issue of Why Music Sucks, but back in 1991 or so he'd read a review of it by the pseudonymous Hopey Glass (in reality, Mark Sinker) in The Wire.
Love you are posting these, I saw the New York Dolls in the UK in 1973 they were amazing.