Living Dolls.(One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This)(Sound recording review)

The achievements of the original New York Dolls are difficult to describe and impossible to equal. The two records that the band made in the early seventies threw together fifties rock and roll, girl-group pop, kitsch, and glam in a recipe that was not necessarily nutritious but was very good for you; the singer David Johansen and the guitarist Johnny Thunders were the proto-punk Jagger and Richards, at least, on songs like "Trash," "Pills," "Personality Crisis," and "Frankenstein." But while the Stones were built to last, the Dolls were built to shatter, which they did in 1975, and Thunders's drug-related death (possibly a murder), in 1991, seemed like final, indisputable punctuation.

But beneath the burn-the-candle-to-the-ground debauchery and trash-as-treasure aesthetic was a highly professional outfit, driven mostly by Johansen, who went on to a successful career as a solo artist (with a string of fine records) and a faux solo artist (as the popular Buster Poindexter). Spurred on by Morrissey, who had been a fan of the band as a teen-ager, Johansen re-formed the Dolls in 2004 as a touring concern with the two other surviving members--the guitarist Syl Sylvain and the bassist Arthur (Killer) Kane. Though Kane died a month later, from leukemia, Johansen and Sylvain rallied to release the first official Dolls ...