Pop Quiz: New York Dolls

Pop Quiz: New York Dolls

Aidin Vaziri | Maybe the New York Dolls don't have the best luck, what with 80 percent of the members dying prematurely and all. But for an entire generation, their grubby hard rock and amazing drag getups pretty much set the rules. Morrissey, the former president of the band's United Kingdom fan club, basically begged the surviving members to get back together for the 2003 Meltdown Festival, and aside from yet another member dying two weeks later (bassist Arthur "Killer" Kane), everything has been going great since. In fact, original members David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain just recorded their first album in 32 years, "One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This." We spoke with Johansen, 56, who spent the '80s as lounge lizard Buster Poindexter, by phone from New York.


David Johansen of the New York Dolls
Q: Are you happy Morrissey called you?
A: Oh, yeah. I'm always happy when he calls me. He's a good guy. Do you mean as far as getting into this fine how-do-you-do?
Q: Yes.
A: It's good. It's just a kind of thing that fell together by happenstance, like most of the things I've ever done. It seems to be the natural place to be at this point.
Q: Did you have to go back and listen to the old albums for inspiration?
A: I did listen to them before we played in London for the first time. I thought they were really f -- musical. What are people talking about? The rock press used to throw rocks at us.
Q: The New York Dolls invented everything: hair metal, punk rock, the Smiths.
A: I wouldn't take that responsibility.
Q: Doesn't your band belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
A: I don't really play that. I don't really know what that's all about. What is that, anyway? I know there's a building in Cleveland and they have somebody's shoes in there or something. What is the point of that?
Q: Those shoes belong to the guys from Hall & Oates.