Pure Punk Picks
Trash – New York Dolls
I don’t remember where I bought too many albums in my life. I do remember buying The Clash, as an import, at Discount Records in Harvard Square in 1977.
And I do remember, about five years before then, buying my first Iggy & The Stooges album- which was “Raw Power” and The New York Dolls at the same time.
It was at Woolworths, a kind of Walmart type store in downtown Boston. I used to go there on Saturday afternoon, eat some chicken parts while standing up at their little cafeteria, and then buy some albums.
I took right away to The Stooges but I must admit, it took a while for me to fully embrace The Dolls.
Now, I look back at that time, nineteen seventy-two, and realize that these two bands were the two most potent, most powerful, best bands in the world then
“Trash” starts out with the title sung that is weirdly distorted, sounding like someone screaming it while falling down an elevator shaft. Meanwhile, the guitars and drums are flailing away rapidly, dare I say “punk like.”
The rhythms slows down in the chorus and the vocals become more melodic, but it’s not so much an attempt to be commercial but a nod to the great, girl group music of the sixties which so much influenced them, including the falsetto background vocals recalling bands like The Shangri-La’s.
I feel the early sixties girl group music, along with Motown, was some of the best music of the sixties. Music the hippie bands tried to disavow, and what a lot of punk and new wave bands, such as Blondie and The B-52’s, were trying to acknowledge and be inspired from.
I liked this tune right off, but it did sound strange to me. I could only compare it to T Rex on crystal meth at the time and I guess that’s not too far off the mark.
“Trash’ lyrically, seems to be directed at a person. Especially when the singer, David Johansen, pleas “Don’t take my knife away” and “And please don’t ask me if I love you?” And the line “How do you call your loverboy?” may seem to allude to glam/glitters flirt with bisexuality but is actually a line from the great, early sixties song “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia.
This song is frolicking, flippant, outrageous and fun. It was when the underground rock scene was flaunting its un-macho take on sexual identity. And this band, appearing as transvestites on their first album cover, was a big “fuck you” to established sexual mores and constraints and was- almost fifty years ahead of their time in doing so.
The New York Dolls were not a punk band. They were a glitter rock band or glam rock going by current definition. And they were long gone before punk reared its spikey head in 1977.
But they are considered proto-punk along with Iggy & The Stooges, The Modern Lovers, MC5 and others. And, rightly so.
Johnny Thunders was their lead guitarist and you can clearly hear his influence on Mick Jones from The Clash, Steve Jones from The Sex Pistols and Brian James from The Damned.
Johnny Ramone considered Johnny Thunders his favorite guitarist. And I still hear his influence, every year, in new local punk bands that I review.
After a couple of albums this band ceased to exist. After a couple of decades, only two of their members still survived.
But their influence was huge on the eighties hair metal bands and continues to inspire musicians to this day.
Looking at the rock scene in New York, it would appear they were on the cutting edge for quite a few years. Starting in the sixties with the anti-hippie ideals of The Velvet Underground, continuing with the glitter of The Dolls and the first American electronic rock band- the confrontational Suicide.
Continuing on with the birth of punk with The Ramones, Blondie, Richard Hell and Talking Heads. That was then followed with no wave music with The Contortions, Lydia Lunch and Bush Tetras, a genre that was quite unpopular but was great and influenced a lot of noise bands to come. That city had a pretty impressive fifteen year span.
And did you know that the first punk scenes in the world existed in New York and Boston, pretty much simultaneously?
I know ’cause I was there, or should I say here?
The hippies thought our music was trash, and a lot of people thought we were trash. But our music lives on even if many of us fell by the waysides.
But as Oscar Wilde said, and Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders in one of her songs-
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
(Slimedog)
