New York Dolls

Critics have waxed poetic over (or whacked frenetically at) the New York Dolls for nearly 40 years now, but the band's influence is unquestionable: the Ramones, KISS, the Sex Pistols, and a hundred other bands owe their existence to the noisy, nasty brilliance of the Big Apple's oft-spurned heroes. Opening up with a paint-peeling primal scream, "Personality Crisis" sets the glam-punk-thrash agenda for the lipstick-smeared noisemeisters' entire career, blasting through a doorway that the Stooges and MC5 had been assaulting with their own sonic jackhammers. In "Looking for a Kiss," frontman David Johansen goes all brat-boy pouty on us, with a lyrical nod to the Shangri-Las, while guitarist Johnny Thunders plays Keith to Johansen's Mick. And by their next disc, they'd hired Shangri-Las producer Shadow Morton himself, but the blast-furnace ferociousness of "Babylon" is anything but girl-group-y. In Next Steps, we pick up the pieces after the Dolls' implosion, as its members dig their hooks into solo careers.

After two records, it was all over . . . for the time being. The first to depart the Doll house were guitarist Thunders and drummer Jerry Nolan, who formed Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers (NOT to be confused with Tom Petty's backup band). Their first record, L.A.M.F., is not only an unmentionable acronym, it's also a sweat-caked, leather-jacketed, roundhouse punch of an album as the swagger-saturated "Born to Lose" proves. If the cross-dressing years with the Dolls raised any questions about his sexuality, Johansen answers them on his first "solo" album, with a Beach-Boys-dragged-into-the-back-alley bouquet to the fair sex, "Girls." And the razor-slash strike of that disc's "Cool Metro," co-written by co-ex-Doll Sylvain Sylvain, answers any critics who found the N.Y.D.'s hard rock wallop too raggedy. With only two original members still standing, the Dolls regroup for the new millennium in our Deep Cuts.

Flash-forward 30 or so years; Johansen has blazed through multiple personalities (including lounge barbarian Buster Poindexter), Sylvain is in semi-retirement, and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane, and drummer Jerry Nolan are permanently — make that unalterably — retired. Then, in 2006, the Dolls sprang back to life with One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, whose bloody-but-unbowed veterano reminiscence in "I Ain't Got Nothin'" clearly demonstrates that they still got somethin', and plenty of it. Bringing in original producer Todd Rundgren — after a 36 year layoff — on 2009's 'Cause I Sez So reunites as much of the original team as still breathes, and the scruffy, scrappy rawness of "Muddy Bones" sounds more like a bunch of twenty-something ruffians than guys just a few years away from drawing Social Security. And to play us out, the swaggerjackin' funk of the show-closing "Nobody Got No Bizness" ends with a promise we hope they'll always keep: "If we don't come back, just call us on the Ouija board."

According to Chris Bohn of the U.K.'s New Musical Express, "The Dolls epitomized trash. They were tart, amoral, stupid, crass and vulgar." Counterpoint? Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times: The Dolls' second album is "perhaps the best example of raw, thumb-your-nose-at-the-world, punk rock since the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main St.." Love 'em or hate 'em — and there were lots of folks in each camp — you just can't ignore the New York Dolls. And you can't deny their influence; without 'em, there's no Blondie, no Ramones, no KISS . . . no foolin'. Their splash onto what would become the N.Y.C. punk underground wasn't just a match in a gas tank, it was a napalm bomb dropped on a fireworks factory. They played with gender, they played with passion, they played with people's heads, and they did it at maximum volume before imploding, only to arise like a battle-scarred phoenix for a most improbable second act in the new millennium. This is a must-hear band. Period.