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"That was so weird it was great," crows New York Dolls singer David Johansen, sitting in the control room at the Shed, a small Manhattan recording studio. On the other side of the glass, guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Steve Conte, bassist Sam Yaffa and drummer Brian Delaney have nailed the keeper take of a track destined for the re-formed Dolls' new album, to be released in June. The song, like the album as yet untitled, is a Delta-juke-joint romp with drunken-parade snare rolls and rusted-screech slide guitar: a different raunch, as Johansen notes in his strip-mined growl, from the mascara-and-fuzz fury of the original Dolls' glitter classics, 1973's New York Dolls and '74's Too Much Too Soon.
"But when you took off the makeup and spiked heels, at the bottom of it all, it was the blues," Sylvain says of the Dolls' lipstick-killer heyday during a break in making their first studio record in thirty-two years. The Dolls "were a blues band. We played those three-chord progressions."
In that sense, nothing has changed. The new material is firmly rooted in the futurist-R&B swagger of the first two albums. And except for Johansen's vocals, everything -- from the Eddie Cochran-like zoom of "Beauty School" to the girl-group classicism of "Plenty of Music" -- was cut live in the studio.
"When I heard the new songs, I knew they were capable of sounding like the Dolls but not as nostalgia," says the album's producer, Jack Douglas, who first worked with the band as the engineer on New York Dolls. "They had the stuff."
Johansen and Sylvain are the only survivors of the infamous '72-'75 lineup. Guitarist Johnny Thunders died in 1991, drummer Jerry Nolan in 1992. In July 2004, bassist Arthur Kane died of leukemia, a month after reuniting with Johansen and Sylvain for two shows at the Meltdown Festival in London. "He'd be here now, and it would be great to have him," Johansen says soberly. But he insists the new Dolls "are part of the enterprise. It's not just me, Syl and a pickup band."
Delaney has played with Johansen for several years, while Yaffa started out emulating the Dolls' sound and couture with the Finnish band Hanoi Rocks. "They want a balance -- bring your own shit to it but have respect for what went before," Yaffa says of the charter Dolls. "And you know if you go a little too far. David will be like, 'No, no, that's too smart. Reel it back in.'"