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THE NEW YORK DOLLS AND GANG OF FOUR
SOLID GOLD

Even given the attrition rate, the smart money in the reunion-band sweepstakes this past week would have been on the New York Dolls rather than Gang of Four. After all, the Dolls have songs, and Gang of Four, great as they once were, are all groove and texture, right?

Wrong. The Dolls played to a sparse audience at Avalon on Thursday the 12th, Gang of Four played to a near-capacity crowd in the same room on Monday the 16th. Each show, in its own apples or oranges way, was beautiful.

The Dolls, who have probably launched a thousand Boston garage-punk bands, were in fine fettle. "Oh, Boston, do I miss you so fuckin’ bad!" guitarist Sylvain Sylvain said. He and singer David Johansen, the only surviving members of the early-/mid-’70s proto-punk glam band, are now fronting a tight sextet with Hanoi Rocks bassist Sami Yaffa, guitarist Steve Conte, drummer Brian Delaney, and (mostly inaudible) keyboardist Brian Koonin. From the first notes of "Looking for a Kiss," the band were off, Johansen stalking the stage, emaciated, wearing a white T-shirt with a loincloth over his jeans. Sylvain, meanwhile, was a chubby fireplug clown in striped jacket and floppy newsy cap. Lead guitarist Steve Conte had all the fluid runs, but Sylvain established his authority in his first solo — a few, raw, chunky riffs laid end to end, rhythmically perfect, bleating and shouting. When a bit later he said "This is for Johnny Thunders" and went into the opening of the late Doll’s "You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory" and began to sing with the lovely chord change "It doesn’t pay to try/All the smart boys know why," well, it would take a smarter boy than me to hold back tears.

There were plenty of other high points in the set: "Pills," the pure power punk of "Who Are the Mystery Girls?", "Frankenstein," the Shangri-las’ "Out in the Streets," an epic "Jet Boy" with its patented scraped-guitar-string jet taking off, Sylvain kicking the song out of the verse and into the chorus with fast chords and an extended guitar jam with Conte, "Personality Crisis," and "I’m a Human Being." More than 30 years later, they were still the voice of the New York underground. "We felt like we were a liberating force," Johansen had told Matt Ashare in the Phoenix back on May 6, and it was easy to believe him.

For an instructive comparison, you couldn’t have asked for a better Gang of Four opener than Radio 4. The New York band’s dance rock has been slagged as a ripoff of Gof4’s fractured funk. They should be so lucky. Their hard bass, clangy guitar, driving percussion, and yelping vocals were convincing enough, but they filled every hole in their sound with busy beats and fast tempos and wore out their welcome long before the end of their 45-minute set.

Gang of Four taught them a lesson as old as James Brown: it’s the empty spaces that create the drive of funk, the elided beats that seem to suck everything in around them like a vacuum and drive a song into the next phrase, the next chorus. Drummer Hugo Burnham and guitarist Andy Gill entered the barely lit stage and Gill began to pluck a loud, sour two-note interval. Bassist Dave Allen and singer Jon King followed, and before long the band were into "Return the Gift," the beat building slowly into the release of the chorus and King — towering, dressed in a dark tunic buttoned to the neck, and lit from below like Dracula — cut loose with a spasmodic dance, his arms over his head crossed at his wrists, provoking the crowd’s first roar of the night.

This was rock as great theater as well as great music. At times, Allen and Gill stood stock still; then they’d spring and hop across the stage. King would crouch and take big sideways crab leaps. During "He’d Send in the Army," he took an aluminum baseball bat to a steel-shelled appliance (apparently a microwave oven), raising the bat over his head, playing a slow, deliberate beat, alternating with stutters and squawks from Gill’s guitar, until finally he kicked the oven off its low table into the wings, where he continued to beat it.

And the "no songs" turned out to be one "hit" after another: "Paralyzed" (Gill re-creating one of his greatest abstract riffs), "What We All Want," "Anthrax," "At Home He’s a Tourist," and, in the last number before the encores, "To Hell with Poverty," with its shouted-out verse "In this land! Right now! Some are insane/And they’re in charge!" The crowd sang along. Music as liberating force indeed.

BY JON GARELICK

Issue Date: May 27 - June 2, 2005
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