Sunday Music: "Trash" By New York Dolls

I knew the band’s name, but I didn’t really know what to expect when I pulled the lipstick-red on otherwise black-and-white promo shot album cover from a used CD bin to bring home. I was guessing Stones meets Ramones honestly. I wasn’t wrong when “Personality Crisis” came out of the speakers first .

I love the in-between artists. The New York Dolls fit that bill perfectly. Garage-punk attitude, with arena scale potential. They were too punk too soon. Too Glam too soon. And if you shifted them even slightly on the timeline, who knows how else it all could have played out?

“Trash” is the song that hooked me. It could be straight out of a Broadway musical from 30 or 40 years later. Without really knowing what it meant in the 90s when I first discovered it, I knew exactly what it was about.

You’re a freak. You’re a weirdo. You’re… trash.

Go pick it up. Gross. But don’t take my life away either.

Half-cross dressed amongst the proto punks of a nascent early 70s rock scene, the world just wasn’t ready.

Artistically, Johansen and the rest of the band were playing with so many advanced tools it’s ridiculous. I’d later fall in love with the lyrical games in this one. I miss reading lyrics in liner notes.

Just look at the opening chorus:

Take them lights, take your life, take my knife - how much risk can you plow into an action, all before you ask someone not to ask if I (so personal) love you (so very personal)?! And it escalates too. The violent potential, it peaks (yeah, it PEAKS) with a threat over a lover’s validation.

Clutch your pearls. My god.

The song is barely in control. The lyrics get drunkenly switched up in various choruses. The energy is a time machine to New York in 1973.

The Dolls never blew up. There probably aren’t the pre-grunge post-punk Replacements without them, and 50 million other bands we never heard of either. But the in-between influences, they’re still so vitally important. Even Morrissey was a fan. Think how much influence he went on to have, or think how many other artists like this make a dent without ever making a clear break.

RIP to singer David Johansen. I’ll play this song for the rest of my days:

and, just seeing this live, can you imagine…

I hate that I love this too, but mostly because the way he says “Traaa-aysh” is the funniest/funnest thing to imitate ever: