New York Dolls

Personality Crisis: Live Recordings & Studio Demos 1972-1975 CHERRY RED

Another time around for the band’s well-travelled demos and classic live sets.

The late Marty Thau, who bravely took on the unenviable task of managing the New York Dolls until they started disintegrating in 1974, was a smart cookie when manoeuvring the music business. Before his 2014 death, he had amassed the band’s live and demo catalogue, outside of the two official albums forever numbered as failing to capture the Dolls’ fabled live onslaught, despite their colossal importance to this and many other lonely planet boys at the time.

The Dolls recorded three demo sessions: two in 1972 with late drummer Billy Murcia at New York’s Blue Rock and the UK’s Escape studios, then March 1973’s epic 22-track Planet session after Jerry Nolan replaced Murcia and noticeably elevated the band’s latent live rampage. All have been endlessly recycled since the Blue Rock session appeared on ROIR cassette in 1981, the Escape tapes as a 1982 EP and nineteen Planet tracks on Receiver’s 1992 Seven Day Weekend.

After Thau licensed the latter to New

York’s Norton Records for 2000’s A Hard Night’s Day and live sets elsewhere, he sold his archive to Universalowned Sanctuary/Castle, first producing 2002’s Great Big Kiss studio/live collection; then 2006’s live motherlode From Here to Eternity: The Live Bootleg Boxset, corralling recordings of key shows in Paris, Vancouver, Detroit and Long Island, and 1975’s Red Patent Leather set (some bootleg, others radio broadcast quality).

Soon after, Universal sold Sanctuary to BMG. While that didn’t stop Easy Action lavishly repackaging April 1974’s My Father’s Place radio broadcast in 2015, Cherry Red’s BMG-licensed set remasters everything over five CDs. Intrepid diehards will find nothing new, but it’s nice having it all in one handsome box, even if it’s slightly diminished by workmanlike notes. As a long-time Dolls chronicler blown apart at Biba’s in December 1973, it stands as a worthy stab at bottling the magic frustratingly sabotaged by clueless producers when the Dolls glimpsed the big time.

Live was another matter. On their night, the Dolls cooked with a white-hot street-punk energy that nobody has got near since, their soul covers astutely obscure, with David Johansen one of rock’s great showmen. Newcomers can do a lot worse than start right here.