Reborn New York Dolls sporting a new image

The resurrected glam-rock group plans to celebrate its music with a tour.
By BEN EDMONDS
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Sometimes history gets it right for the wrong reasons.
Despite a short and spectacularly unsuccessful career that yielded only two mid-'70s albums, the New York Dolls have finally been accorded a place in the annals of pop music. However, while the band is now remembered, it's mostly as a gender-bending, drug-addled, outrage-perpetrating gang of miscreants whose greatest talent was to embody the "live fast, die young" school of rock 'n' roll.
Sadly, the caricature contains more than a grain of truth. No fewer than four members of this ill-starred band have fallen along the way, three of them -- guitarist Johnny Thunders, and drummers Billy Murcia and Jerry Nolan -- succumbing to the hollow romance of drug addiction. The group's flamboyance obscured the greater truth about the New York Dolls -- that, at its best, this was a life-affirming rock band in the classic mold, and a stunning denial of the punk rock nihilism that sprang up in its wreckage.
The lingering disparity between image and substance drives the tour by the reconstituted Dolls.
Remembering the music
It almost didn't happen. When former Smiths front man Morrissey, who'd been president of the Dolls' UK fan club as a teenager, talked to singer David Johansen about reforming the band for an English festival last year, the singer initially declined.
"We'd had offers thrown at us over the years, but to be blunt I didn't see the point," says Johansen, whose post-Dolls career has included acting roles along with solo music, under his own name and under that of his alter-ego Buster Poindexter, and fronting a band called the Harry Smiths. "Then I went back and listened to our music, and was surprised to rediscover how good it was. Listen, I'd been living inside that image so long that all I saw were the prison bars it had created. But when I put that aside and listened without attaching the baggage, I heard music that was worthy of the influence it's had."
The singer reunited with fellow survivors -- guitarist Sylvain Sylvain and bassist Arthur Kane -- to play the London show. This triumphant concert, recently released on the DVD "Live from Royal Festival Hall 2004," prompted the three to book a few more dates. After Kane's sudden death from undiagnosed leukemia in July of last year, Hanoi Rocks bassist Sami Yaffa stepped in, joining guitarist Steve Conte, drummer Brian Delaney and keyboard player Brian Koonin in supporting original members Johansen and Sylvain.
"I went into the first show thinking that at the very least it would be nice to see the guys, mend some fences and have a couple of laughs," says Johansen. "I was determined to have the most fun I could possibly have, and wound up having even more fun than I intended. But it's not like I'm trying to re-create my glam-rock youth or anything. Whatever notion you might have disappears when you start playing, because the music is so damn good. It's not dated, like ragtime. It's alive; it holds up. That's the spirit we're celebrating with these shows."