Dolls’ guise finally hits the mark

There was one easy way to tell the New York Dolls concert at the Avalon on Thursday was happening in 2004 and not in 1974: The fishnet stockings were worn by fans, not by band members.

Well, there were also a few other differences. The group, active for the first time since 1977, now featured only two original members in singer David Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain. Lead guitarist Johnny Thunders and drummer Jerry Nolan died in the early ‘90s and bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane died of leukemia in July, just weeks after the Dolls’ first reunion show in London, done at the behest of longtime fan Morrissey.

And then there was the reception.

Here the Dolls were treated as historically important heroes, recognized as equally key in inspiring the punk of the Sex Pistols and Ramones as the ‘80s hair-metal of Motley Crue and Poison.

Back then the Dolls were a publicly ignored purveyor of sloppy, droll decadence, too macho (despite the drag outfits) to be glam, too oddball to be mainstream.

Today it’s part of the vaunted legend that Pistols manager-provocateur Malcolm McLaren first tested his theories of rock outrage as manager of the Dolls in 1975, having them perform with a Soviet flag as a backdrop.

Back then it was just one of many bad career moves.

But on stage Thursday, the Dolls proved worthy of the legendary status that has built over the years, and then some. Bookending the set with the two best-known songs, “Looking for a Kiss” and “Personality Crisis,” the Dolls played 90 minutes of rollicking, celebratory barroom riffs, spiked by Johansen’s resonant growl, brainy wit and ironic bent -- in other words, the kind of stuff the Rolling Stones gave up after Altamont -- but infused with a distinctly Lower East Side edge.

The new guys -- guitarist Steve Conte, bassist Sam Yaffa (of ‘80s band Hanoi Rocks), drummer Brian Delaney and keyboard player Brian Koonin -- never got caught up in re-creating the founders’ musical style note for note, but they nailed the spirit.

“This really sounds like it sounded,” said a pleasantly surprised Robin Danar, a Los Angeles-based music producer who saw the Dolls in small clubs while growing up in New York. “There was more edge to the attitude back then with the audience and the band, but it’s not a self-parody at all.”

The irony is that many saw the original Dolls as parody with the campy drag and sloppy rock. From today’s vantage, though, it’s clear that the band at the time was one of the few keeping the torch of fundamental rock values lighted -- when others had turned their backs on them -- long enough for others to pick it up.

Sitting in a dressing room chair before the show and painting his nails cherry red, Johansen said that while some critics understood that the Dolls had a conscious artistic purpose, the general public at the time didn’t seem to get it. “When the Dolls first came out, we got four-star reviews in Downbeat, saying it was a new way of playing rock ‘n’ roll as folk art, and that was always my idea,” he said. “Over the years the party line became, ‘They were trashy and drag queens and junkies.’ ”

After the band broke up in 1975 (though Johansen and Sylvain led a band with the name for two more years), the roster of groups clearly influenced by the Dolls grew and grew -- some, such as the Pistols and Ramones, openly admitting the debt; others, including the hair bands that copped just about every detail of the Dolls’ playbook minus the intelligence, never acknowledging it.

Still, the thought of a revival never appealed, even when all the members were alive.

“We broke up because the situation was untenable,” Johansen, 54, said. “And Johnny never was going to be tenable.”

Thunders was plagued by a well-known drug problem, which ultimately claimed him in 1991; Nolan succumbed to a stroke the next year. Meanwhile, Johansen carved out a decent solo career in the punk/new wave years before finding even greater success as an actor (“Scrooged,” “Married to the Mob”) and, most prominently, in the guise of lounge lizard Buster Poindexter.

Periodically, offers came in to re-form the band for festival shows, but Johansen always refused, even as groups with such similar legacies as the Stooges and MC5 got back together.

Last spring, though, Morrissey -- president of the Dolls’ English fan club as a teen -- begged Johansen, Sylvain and Kane to re-form the Dolls for a show at London’s annual Meltdown Festival, for which he was the 2004 curator. Johansen turned him down at first, but said he’d sleep on it and came to see the prospect of a reunion almost in spiritual terms. When Morrissey called back, he agreed.

“We put up a T.S. Eliot poem behind us when we played in London,” said Johansen, who continues to be busy in a group with Band drummer Levon Helm and fronting the non-ironic folk-blues group the Harry Smiths. “It said, ‘When our exploration is through we will come back to where we started and see the place for the first time.’ ”

Sylvain added backstage that it was a matter of giving in to the inevitable.

“Eventually we would have done this,” said the puckish guitarist. “Not for money. We never made any money, which I guess is what comes with respect.”

The music Thursday justified revisiting the past. But is there a future for the New York Dolls?

“This is it,” said both Johansen and Sylvain, using the same words about the current tour, with just a handful of U.S. shows now wrapping things up after recent European festival appearances.

Well, maybe.

“Syl and I will sit down in two weeks and see if we want to do this again next summer,” Johansen says. “But if it was tomorrow, I’d say, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ ”

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New York Dolls

Where: House of Blues Anaheim, 1530 S. Disneyland Drive, Anaheim

When: 8 tonight

Price: $30

Contact: (714) 778-2583