New York Dolls: Radio Luxembourg - On Vinyl, A Well Traveled Recording

 

[review by Rev. Keith A. Gordon]

NEW YORK DOLLS

Live At Radio Luxembourg

(Radiation Reissues, Italy)

VENUE: Radio Luxembourg studios live-to-air broadcast, Paris France; December 1st, 1973.

SOUND QUALITY: Not too bad overall, possibly taken from the original radio station tapes. Tinny sound, and a little hollow, with an odd separation of vocals and instruments that sound like they’re sunk into a sonic cavern. Side two clatters a bit and the frequent interjections by the DJ mess up the overall EQ. Quite listenable, though, the album capturing the band’s anarchic energy and young, loud, and snotty attitude. Turn it up!

COVER: Front cover features the electric-pink New York Dolls “lipstick” logo above a hazy photo of the band against a black backdrop with “Live At Radio Luxembourg” superimposed in yellow, looking like an old rubber stamping. Back cover has track list and band credits; the album sporting nice thick vinyl with simple black labels with the pink type. In other words, nuthin’ fancy…and virtually identical to the 2010 Lilith Records vinyl release of the show. 

TRACKLIST: Side A: 1. Intro • 2. Personality Crisis • 3. Bad Girl • 4. Looking For A Kiss • 5. Give Her A Great Big Kiss • 6. Stranded In the Jungle  Side B: 7. Pills • 8. Vietnamese Baby • 9. Trash • 10. Chatterbox • 11. Jet Boy

COMMENTS: While in high school during the early ‘70s, I was fanatical about getting every issue of Creem magazine as soon as it hit the newsstand. I lived and died by what Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh (and later, my rockcrit mentor Rick Johnson) would write about, and I’d buy a lot of records by unknown bands just because of the reviews in Creem. That was my introduction to the New York Dolls, whose debut LP I bought because somebody raved about it in my favorite rock rag. The Dolls’ audacious rock ‘n’ roll sound and campy proclivities (including the front cover’s controversial drag photo of the band) may have been polarizing to others, but songs like “Personality Crisis,” “Frankenstein,” and “Lonely Planet Boy” tickled brain cells I didn’t even know existed within my skullspace.

The earliest incarnation of the Dolls was formed in 1971 by guitarists Johnny Thunders (who doubled on vocals) and Rick Rivets, bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane, and drummer Billy Murcia. They added vocalist David Johansen when Thunders decided to concentrate on guitar; Murcia’s childhood friend Sylvain Sylvain would replace Rivets on rhythm guitar. They initially made a name for themselves by playing regularly at NYC venues like the Mercer Arts Center and Max’s Kansas City, but the band’s momentum took a hit when Murcia accidentally overdosed during a brief 1972 European tour. After auditioning a number of drummers, including Marc Bell (who would later play with the Voidoids and the Ramones) and Peter Criscuola (née Peter Criss of Kiss), they enlisted Jerry Nolan, a friend of the band, to fill the empty drum seat.

It was this line-up that was signed to Mercury Records and put into the studio to record their self-titled 1973 debut album under the aegis of musician/producer Todd Rundgren. Although the set received overall a modicum of critical acclaim, sales were nothing to write home about, and not everybody was on board – a writer for Stereo Review notably compared the Dolls’ guitar sound to that of a lawnmower – but rock critics like Ira Robbins of Trouser Press considered it “an innovative record, and brilliantly chaotic” while Robert Christgau in Newsday called the Dolls “the best hard rock band in the country and maybe the world right now.” Although it was widely overlooked at the time, and the label put little (if any) resources into promoting it, the Dolls’ debut would prove to be a major influence on bands like the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Smiths, the Ramones, and Redd Kross, among many others. 

Touring in support of their debut album, which was released in July 1973, the New York Dolls made their way to Europe in late November of that year, playing a handful of U.K. dates before landing in France. They would perform live in the studios of Radio Luxembourg in Paris on December 1st for an on-air broadcast that has since become the stuff of legend. Frequently-bootlegged, the performance would become the “Holy Grail” of Dolls collectors, as it captures the band at their drunken, anarchic best. This version of the show comes from the Italian-based Radiation Records label, which is connected to the Radiation Record Store in Rome and has released a number of interesting recordings by an eclectic bunch of artists like Joy Division, Toy Dolls, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and the Gun Club as well as a bunch of vintage reggae sides from legends like Max Romeo, Derrick Morgan, and Augustus Pablo.

Live At Radio Luxembourg opens with brief introduction by the station DJ (spoken entirely in French) in front of a studio audience, the band then ripping into “Personality Crisis” with reckless aplomb, Johansen’s vocals roaring above a din that is dominated by Thunders’ stinging fretwork and Jerry Nolan’s bombastic drumbeats. “Bad Girl” continues at a galloping pace, Nolan’s machine-gun percussion outrunning Kane’s sonorous bass licks, Johansen doing his best vocal gymnastics above the roiling, turbulent soundtrack. The band meshes well on “Looking For A Kiss,” the instrumental attack perfectly blending proto-punk and primal metal in creating the chaotic Sturm und Drang that was the band’s trademark. 

“Give Her A Great Big Kiss” is a reworked version of the 1961 Shadow Morton hit by the Shangri-Las (interestingly, Morton would produce the Dolls’ Too Much, Too Soon album). The band delivers it as an over-amped, frat-rock jam with call-and-response vocals between Johansen, Thunders, and Sylvan while the rhythm section choogles on gleefully behind the hambone frontmen. It’s an enthusiastic and exciting performance that makes one wonder why they didn’t include it on one of their two 1970-era albums (the song demoed but never properly recorded). Side one closes out with “Stranded In the Jungle,” a cover of the 1956 hit by doo-wop group the Jayhawks. It seems to have been tailor-made for the Dolls, offering a tale of love and betrayal with brilliant, tongue-in-cheek lyrics and whiplash time changes that challenged the band’s instrumental prowess.

Side two of Live At Radio Luxembourg cranks the amps with the band’s larger-than-life cover of Bo Diddley’s “Pills.” The Dolls imbue the song with the crackling energy that would inspire a thousand and one punk bands to follow, Johansen’s lead vox battling with skewed harmonies from Thunders and Sylvain while the band bangs away in the background. “Vietnamese Baby” remains one of my fave Dolls songs, maybe the closest they ever came artistically to the Stooges, Thunders’ low-slung flamethrower guitar and Johansen’s growling, sneering vocals rising above a complex instrumental wall-of-sound that crushes any expectations of the band, offering a glimpse at the magic the band was capable of creating onstage.

There are far too many unintelligible DJ introductions on side two, disrupting the livewire electrical current of the album’s first side. “Trash” would be considered a throwaway by any other band, but Johansen’s gatling-gun vocals and emotional shading, combined with the band’s reckless instrumentation, elevate what is essentially a parody love song to the level of great rock ‘n’ roll. Thunders’ “Chatterbox” features the wayward guitarist acquitting himself nicely on the microphone and shining with his scalpel-sharp, pre-Tommy Peter Townshend-styled six-string pyrotechnics. The album closes out with the ear-banging roar of “Jet Boy,” the band teetering down the tracks like a runaway locomotive with snotty Johansen vocals, Sylvain’s hypnotic rhythm guitar riff, and Thunders’ tornado-strength solos.  

Live At Radio Luxembourg straddles the line between the Dolls’ critically-acclaimed self-titled debut album and their soon-to-come sophomore effort, offering seven tunes from the former and a pair of scorching rockers from the latter, with a welcome outlier in the middle. The performance is wonderfully reckless and engaging, bursting with energy and charisma. Reviewing a different vinyl version of this show, Will Pinfold writes for Spectrum Culture, “the chances of ever hearing the band at its absolute best would seem to be pretty slight, but in fact it’s a relief to find that, for every moment on this album – and there are a few – where the show sounds like drunks fighting in a guitar shop, there are many more where the band meshes perfectly and delivers glam trash rock at its most sublime.”

This specific NY Dolls’ performance has seen a number of semi-legit CD and vinyl releases through the years, including French label Skydog’s 1993 CD Paris’ Burning and former Dolls’ manager Marty Thau’s 1999 Red Star Records’ LP Live In Concert – Paris ’74 [sic]. Other versions include Paris Le Trash (Triple X Records), If It’s Saturday This Must Be Paris (Rokarola Records), and From Paris With Luv (L.U.V.) (Sympathy For The Record Industry). The Russian label Lilith Records released the show in 2010 on vinyl and included a full-length CD as a bonus! 

By comparison, this Radiation Reissues wax is kinda chintzy, dropping a live version of Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man” that seems to appear on every single other version of the show that I’ve found. The Dolls’ classic “Puss ‘n’ Boots” is also absent, although it too can be found on other CD and vinyl reissues of the same show. Because of this short-sheeting of the set list, I’m docking Live At Radio Luxembourg a full grade, the performance worth an ‘A’ but the presentation falling short of perfection. Grade: B (Review by Rev. Keith A. Gordon)

Another perspective on the show: https://spectrumculture.com/2021/06/13/new-york-dolls-live-at-radio-luxembourg-paris-dec-1973-review/

For more information on the New York Dolls, check out https://www.fromthearchives.com/nyd/chronology.html