Couldn’t miss ‘New York Dolls, ‘The Hard Lessons’ and ‘Army Navy’ at Spaceland in Silverlake! After wondering why we are so doggedly determined to stand in line around the block in unseasonably cold weather for a band that I thought vaguely must have broken up, died of various heroin overdoses, or maybe from falling into a grate from stumbling on size 12 high heels, and hasn’t done a bloody thing in a couple of decades, we finally push our way in.

THE HARD LESSONS is a Detroit local fave band naively thinking their hometown popularity will somehow magically explode into national greatness. I am here to predict they are indeed going to learn a ‘hard lesson’! Every city has a local basic garage band that we have so much drunken memories of crawling from pub to pub following them, that when they finally do a national tour we forget that nobody else could give a flying fart. They laid down a good natured, hard solid set that was just uninspiring enough for me to spend most of it thinking of examples of just such bands. LA has their own local punk legends ‘X’. There was a time I would tearfully throw a drink in the face of anyone who denied they were the best damn band in the world! Still getting airplay around here, they were expected to be as big as the Ramones. Uh, not hardly! Boston has the Street Dogs whose hardcore mosh pit punk with exhilarating harmonies and balls-to-the-wall passion can pull their hometown together with more jolting force than the combination of a Democratic Convention and the Redsocks win. Yet sadly, I honestly doubt the world will ever pick them up like wildfire!

ARMY NAVY did a serviceable set considering we were all clearly at Spaceland to see the legendary New York Dolls. In the shoe gazing tradition of My Bloody Valentine, the LA based band brought us swirling distorted keyboards that have nothing to do that I can see with the military, the New York Dolls, or anything other than a tired 90’s flashback, but then the ultimate flashback is what we’re all here for anyway with the New York Dolls.

Which brings us (at last!) to the NEW YORK DOLLS…Would their set at Spaceland be considered great if they weren’t legends? Was this a live music experience that was like hearing them for the first time? Oh please, of course not…. No, and no! But maybe all those bands that never get past their local following are just what make the New York Dolls worth standing in line for! A few times in a millennium, there is a band that manages to defy any logical statistics for their roll of the dice, and rock the world the way our local heroes never will, and for what seems like an endless run. Yeah, you could say they always were - and remain - the poor man’s Rolling Stones, but maybe out of the sheer impudence of refusing to take themselves seriously they do a better job of nailing the heart of rock for us regular folks out there just wanting to have a good time and forget the world for a round or two. David Johansen and Syl Sylvain were all that was left from the original Dolls, but somehow we all were smiling at each other, shaking our heads and uttering completely moronic epiphanies like ‘Wow man, this is so cool!’…all experiencing the same kind of chills down our spines that can only come from witnessing undeniably the womb from whence music as we know it today burst forth unexpectedly one day and plopped onto the cold streets of New York from the ‘brickies in drag’, like hearing the ocean for the first time and understanding immediately that is where life itself began!



-June Caldwell
 

June Caldwell lives amidst drawers stuffed with an array of earplugs, clipped wristbands, and notes scrawled on ticket stubs… splitting her time between concert reviews, and doing radio airplay promotions for Indie bands at Bryan Farrish Radio Promotions. She covers the LA music scene for artrocker.com, the largest bi-weekly new music publication in the UK, and www.fly.co.uk with her shutterbug hubby Roger.

June’s always interested in Indie bands looking for promotion, and can be contacted at: junejer@gmail.com.