(They) Were the Mystery Girls: New York Dolls’ Too Much Too Soon at 50

Look, if you’ve got a better title, I’m all ears. But the esteemed proto-punks and definitive proto-glams nailed this one in a pinch.

Two albums in two years — the self-explanatory self-titled New York Dolls and the oopsie follow-up Too Much Too Soon — and they were out. I’m fine with the many who prefer the Dolls’ debut, because it’s got the originals (“Personality Crisis,” “Trash,” “Looking for a Kiss,” “Frankenstein,” et al.), the look (so much lipstick it’s even in the logo), and the three-chord onslaught that came to be ratified as P-U-N-K.

But if you’re in it for pleasure, as rock ‘n’ roll always should be, and like me, your favorite track on New York Dolls was Bo Diddley’s “Pills,” then Too Much Too Soon is definitive. It’s nearly half covers, pulled from all sides of their collections, from Gamble and Huff’s “(There’s Gonna Be a) Showdown” to Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me Talkin’.” Then you’ve got the Coasters’ perfectly chosen “Bad Detective,” and best of all, the Jay Hawks’ even more Coasters-like novelty “Stranded in the Jungle.” Bookending the thing you get the definitive David Johanson/Johnny Thunders compositions: the frantic-as-a-pipebomb “Babylon” and its attendant pull-offs long before the guitar had really evolved that way yet, and the absolute runaway train “Human Being,” some kind of six-minute epic philosophy with the Stooges’ “Raw Power” as the blueprint. 

 

AUDIO: New York Dolls “Babylon”

See, the Stooges were sort of to the Velvet Underground what the Dolls were to the Stones. Let the grease and grime and crude excess rise to the top, like you’re literally playing a Stones 45 to death and watching the vinyl itself come unglued and running off the track, melting before your eyes. The Dolls weren’t as audibly subversive as Iggy or Lou’s classic outfits, which is one reason the Dolls’ lifetime sales fall far, far below them. And their drag look was xeroxed by every glam and hair band so quickly and ubiquitously that, like “Cum on Feel the Noize” being a Slade original a decade before Quiet Riot, many people aren’t even aware of the originators. So their image never quite developed the iconicity of the Velvets’ banana or Lou Reed’s leather ‘n’ shades or Iggy’s bleeding shirtless torso from Skippy jars he’d break onstage.

It’s funny that all these frontmen eventually did stumble onto some kind of hit long after they helped invent punk. Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” made it to the top 20 before Raw Power or either New York Dolls album existed, but despite the extraordinarily transgressive (and trans-friendly) lyrics, it was a subdued composition mostly remembered for its upright bass figure rather than any literal musical resemblance to the transgressive glam it indirectly pioneered. Iggy Pop never quite stormed any Billboard chart, but “Lust for Life” is instantly familiar to anyone who hears it, at this point a thundering drum intro as familiar as that of “Be My Baby,” even if their first exposure was a cruise commercial.

And David Johansen’s wonderful “Hot Hot Hot” as Buster Poindexter may be the least reputable of these but it was too perfect. Another guise — this time a screwball lounge singer crashing MTV in 1987 with a calypso novelty song from his depthless record collection among well-chosen R&B finds — was perfectly in the spirit of the original Dolls’ second album. It’s cheating, it’s lying (that accent won’t hold up in court today), and it’s shameless. It’s riddled with cheesy sax and it performs for an audience without proof of one. Like the Dolls, it found one anyway off confidence and panache alone. 

The covers and endearingly sloppy R&B moves keynoted the thing, which would’ve made history as the lone punk album helmed by Leiber and Stoller if the 1950s’ most successful songwriting-producing team didn’t pull out before recording began. Instead, they got Shangri-Las and, uh, “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” hitmaker Shadow Morton, who claims the Dolls “snapped him out of his boredom” with the music industry. It was Morton who pushed them towards the musical excess to match their reputation, the gong effects and backup gals, King Curtis-style sax squonks. Harmonica breathed new life into “It’s Too Late” while one track later “Puss ‘n Boots” was the missing link between Exile-era Stones and the stutter-step beat to the Sex Pistols’ “Liar.”

The package is, for my money, infinitely more colorful than New York Dolls, rich with details to gawk at rather than a bunch of alley-cat weirdos’ formal limitations. It’s even enriched by minor variations, like say, Johnny Thunders’ less outwardly masc delivery on “Chatterbox,” which is eventually sawed in half like a magician’s assistant by its ripping solos.

Too Much Too Soon is just a little too crowd-pleasing to be punk and too crude to be pop. It’s that perfect sweet spot in the middle: rock ‘n’ roll.