New York Dolls – "Frankenstein" (1973)

Do you think that 

You could make it 

With Frankenstein?

[NOTE: The last two members of this year's 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME class were released on LPs that didn't do diddly-squat when it came to sales.  (Go figure.)  Here's an edited version of a post about "Frankenstein" that was first published on 2 or 3 lines in 2013.]

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You might assume that the Dolls chose that name because of the way they dressed and made themselves up.  But the real source of their moniker was a doll repair business called the "New York Doll Hospital," which was right across the street from the men's boutique where guitarist Sylvain Sylvain (who was born Sylvain Mizrahi in 1951 to Jewish parents living in Cairo, Egypt) was working when the band was formed.

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I'm sure a lot of people looked at the Dolls back in the day and figured they were shock-rockers (schlock-rockers?) who weren't to be taken seriously. 

Think again, boys and girls.  The Dolls wrote good songs and played the absolute hell out of them.  As one critic said, the Dolls music "doesn't really sound like anything that came before it.  It's hard rock with a self-conscious wit, a celebration of camp and kitsch that retains a menacing, malevolent edge."

Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain with
lead singer David Johansen in 2006

Legendary rock critic Robert Christgau ranked the Dolls' first two album in the top 15 of all the albums of the 1970s.  (The only other musicians with two albums in his top 15 were the Clash and Neil Young, so the Dolls are in very good company.)  

Legendary singer/songwriter Morrissey of the late, great Smiths, ranked the Dolls' album as his all-time personal favorite (ahead of very worthy albums by the Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop, Roxy Music, the Ramones, and the Sparks).

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If Robert Christgau and Morrissey say the Dolls are great, who am I to disagree?  Not that I would ever disagree.  I've loved the Dolls ever since I picked up their first two albums in a cut-out bin at some long gone Harvard Square record store a couple of years after they were released in 1973 and 1974, respectively.

Unfortunately, those two records didn't sell – hence my finding them in the aforementioned cut-out bin – and the Dolls' record company dropped them like a hot potato.  The band then found itself "foundering in drug abuse and interpersonal conflicts" (to quote Wikipedia) and broke up shortly thereafter.

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If I were asked what genre the Dolls' music belonged in, I would say "glam punk" – which sounds like an oxymoron.  Their music was a precursor of punk rock, and their appearance also influenced the glam-rock and glam-metal groups who started popping up a few years later.

The backstage toilet at the legendary CBGB

The Dolls were the first of the great New York punk/new wave bands who populated Max's Kansas City and CBGB and the other lower Manhattan clubs in the early seventies – like the Ramones, and Blondie, and Television, and the Patti Smith Group, and the Talking Heads.

Their candle didn't burn as long as some.  But it burned very, very bright.

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Click here to listen to "Frankenstein."  I picked it over several other hall-of-fame-worthy songs on Dolls' first album because it sounds like David Johansen was making up the words for the song as he went along.

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: