Forums dot lukpac.org

You ought to know who the Dolls are, especially after their brief reunion tour (something that happened thanks to Morrissey, the former lead singer of the Smiths who also happened to be their fan club president back in the day). Granted, two of the original members had passed, including key guitarist Johnny Thunders, but the reviews were great. The tour was tragically cut short when Arthur Kane checked into a hospital, thinking he had a really bad case of the flu. It turns out he had a rare and extremely virulent form of leukemia, and less than 24 hours later he died from it - July 13, 2004.

Anyway, these guys helped birth punk. Right up there with the Stooges, VU, the MC5, etc., they broke up about the same time the Ramones were ready to rock. They were popular in NYC, but they couldn't pack it in Peoria, so both of their studio albums tanked. A number of live concerts have been released as well as their famous demos on various labels. I recommend "Live In Paris," the one with the naked 50's pin-up girl on the cover holding the pillow over her naughty parts - an acetate is the only source for this show, and it was recorded for radio so it's not a professional multi-track recording or anything, but it still sounds solid, and the source is very clean without much NR, if any. It's probably the best Dolls disc to get, followed by "A Hard Night's Day" which looks cheap and has a lame title but collects almost all of their demos on one disc and some say the demos are better than the final recordings that came later - there's a demo for every song from their debut and almost everything from their second and last studio album, "Too Much Too Soon."

Which gets to the point of this long-ass post. The album is now OUT-OF-PRINT!! And I think the debut may be next, though it's available through BMG (the second was NEVER available through BMG, at least not for many years).

It had to have been pretty recent, because even though it was impossible to find in stores, Amazon carried new copies it as late as last Christmas. Now it goes for at least $25 before shipping at every on-line store you can find. I checked all the used stores and chain stores - nothing. It looks like private merchants snatched them all up and jacked up the price.

This doesn't totally SUCK, because a used record store dealer told me that back in July (the 28th to be exact), Hip-O Select, Universal's Rhino Handmade knock-off, released a new limited edition CD of "Too Much Too Soon" with an Lp-style sleeve. No word on mastering, I hope it's either Gavin Lurssen - he does some Hip-O Select stuff - or the original Dennis Drake mastering of the old CD, but it retails for $18. My store has marked down to $15, not bad since the old CD was $10 retail, so I ordered it. Chain stores won't order it but if you go to a local indie store OR go to http://hip-oselect.com you can place an order.

This is a poor selling album, so Universal's only doing 5000 copies. How fast they'll go I don't know, but Universal would be a FUCKING ASS to let this slip into obscurity, especially with new Dolls product coming out after years of inactivity - a live album from the reunion tour was released, and the surviving Dolls are supposedly recording a new studio album right NOW.

BTW, if you get the new printing of Clinton Heylin's pre-punk book, it's got an updated epilogue and discography (everything else is exactly the same - well, the cover is different but that's it). In the epilogue, he reveals that Universal actually considered doing a Deluxe Edition of "Too Much Too Soon" several years ago and asked Heylin to look through the session tapes for bonus material! Fucking-A it never materialized, but Heyling said the sessions reminded him of the Beatles' "Get Back" sessions. Not because they were tedious as hell, but because most of the time, the band was falling apart and disgruntled, except for Johansen who was basically cheering and prodding everyone along to record the album, much like Paul did on "Get Back."

I'm not the biggest Dolls fan, but I'd love a Deluxe of that album. For all the chaos the band was surely in the midst of, they never sounded tighter. Maybe that was due to Shadow Morton, I don't know, but I love the way that record sounds. I've only heard the vinyl, so I can't speak about that.

That's one great sounding slab of vinyl. The original CD, while decent, doesn't quite do it justice. Human Being just COOKS.

That's interesting that it's gone OOP, though. I forget whether I kept my original CD; hopefully I did.

I'm shocked that that one's out of print. I mean, when a band's entire catalog consists of two albums, how hard is it to keep everything in print?

I'm glad I picked up a used copy for $6.99 a few years ago.

BTW, are any of the posthumous Dolls collections worth a fuck?

Thanks for the info on this MK. I am sick of seeing copies of this going for $25 plus for used discs. I took a chance on this one.

Does anyone know if the New York Dolls S/T CD that is still available is the original Dennis Drake CD or has there been a recent remaster?

Ess Ay Cee Dee wrote:BTW, are any of the posthumous Dolls collections worth a fuck?

Among the current crop of CD's, there's a couple of choice ones. There isn't much 'new' Dolls material, most of it is the same stuff that's been floating around since the 1970's, just remastered, reissued, and repackaged over and over again, but it's good-to-great stuff.

The packaging (artwork, title, etc.) on some of the current CD's is pretty uninspired or just plain awkward, but...

FROM PARIS WITH L-U-V is probably the best choice. Neither studio album really sounds like the 'real' Dolls. They were a great live act and this is a great show. The Dolls weren't ready to fall apart yet and this gets them at their peak. This is basically a reissue of the LIVE IN PARIS CD I mentioned above. Not sure how sound quality is like between the two, but either one should be good.

HARD NIGHT'S DAY is another great choice. Vic Anesini mastered it from the original tapes. Raw demos, but excellent demos. Maybe a tad soft sounding, but that's either the mix or the way it was recorded. Paul Nelson, a former Stones critic (one of the good ones) who briefly did A&R work before retiring, produced these demos. Every song from their debut album is here, as well as most of TOO MUCH TOO SOON.

As for the rest:

PRE-CRASH CONDITION: LIVE FROM ROYAL ALBERT HALL is easy to find at Border's. A show from their brief reunion tour with Kane, Thunders was a key ingredient, but even with his absence, this is a top-notch show that stands on its own.

"Live in NYC - 1975: Red Patent Leather" has been reissued several times in the last few years and each reissue has had the lifespan of a mayfly. They're easy to find used for a shade under retail. This was their last recorded concert, when they were ready to call it quits, but it's still an excellent show with a few songs they never got a chance to release (on a studio Lp that is). This was when Malcolm McLaren briefly took them on and tried some weird Commie shtick - maybe they were aping the Nazi shtick the Asheton brothers were doing for the Stooges. Anyway, it was stupid shtick, but the music's excellent.

Lipstick Killers (Mercer St. Sessions) - 9 measly tracks. So why is it $14 retail? It's OOP but still a cheap buy at any good used store, if you can call $10 for 9 songs on a used disc cheap. These are 8 more demos, but unlike the Paul Nelson demos I mentioned, they were recorded months, maybe a year before. I think they're the first demos ever cut by the Dolls, and with their original drummer, Billy Murcia. These are the only studio recordings to feature Murcia, who died afterwards. To be honest, he wasn't a big loss musically speaking, and they got a better replacement, but we can only speculate what the psychological impact was, losing someone like that. Not as good as the Nelson demos, but pretty good.

I finally found out about the mastering of the new Hip-O Select edition. All it took was a phone call.

It's the work of Jeff Willens at Universal Mastering. Dennis Drake mastered the original CD (and even includes it on his website's mastering credits), but when Universal was unloading their cheapie 20th Century Masters compilations or whatever they're called, they did one of the Dolls and Willens mastered that.

Now, this is confusing, but whoever I talked to said that Willens mastered the original CD. This isn't entirely true, the original disc is clearly Drake's work, but perhaps a substitution was done later on? I wasn't going to get an answer, I don't think she knew, but it's clear Willens mastered the whole album sometime in the 90's (the decade she gave - I believe Drake's CD was issued in 1990 at the latest), and apparently, Bill Levenson (one of the Universal dudes behind their reissues) listened to Willens work and felt it could not be improved upon so he kept it.

Willens has compressed his share of CD's so if it's really his work, beware, brother, beware.

IIRC, Willens did some of the Traffic CDs, and I thought those were generally pretty good...

lukpac wrote:IIRC, Willens did some of the Traffic CDs, and I thought those were generally pretty good...

Yeah, in the case of Heaven Is In Your Mind (US), a tad bright, but certainly not unliveable, and not compressed, that I could discern.

Hello.

I almost never do this, but since someone just told me about this thread, I thought I'd come on and set some details straight, 3 years after the fact. I'm NOT speaking on behalf of Universal or Hip-O, just my own recollections concerning the New York Dolls CDs and the Too Much Too Soon remaster from 2005.

MK wrote:I finally found out about the mastering of the new Hip-O Select edition. All it took was a phone call.

It's the work of Jeff Willens at Universal Mastering. Dennis Drake mastered the original CD (and even includes it on his website's mastering credits), but when Universal was unloading their cheapie 20th Century Masters compilations or whatever they're called, they did one of the Dolls and Willens mastered that.

All true. In fact, Dennis was on the original recording sessions for the TMTS LP.

MK wrote:Now, this is confusing, but whoever I talked to said that Willens mastered the original CD. This isn't entirely true, the original disc is clearly Drake's work, but perhaps a substitution was done later on? I wasn't going to get an answer, I don't think she knew, but it's clear Willens mastered the whole album sometime in the 90's (the decade she gave - I believe Drake's CD was issued in 1990 at the latest), and apparently, Bill Levenson (one of the Universal dudes behind their reissues) listened to Willens work and felt it could not be improved upon so he kept it.

Not quite true. Whoever the OP spoke to at Universal was uninformed.

I remastered both NY Dolls albums for Bill Levenson in mid-2002, at the Edison studios for the Millennium Collection compilation. It came out the following year. Mr. Levenson opted to put out "Too Much Too Soon" (then OOP) as a Hip-O Select release in 2005. To the best of my knowledge, no running changes were made on either of the original CDs from 1990, although I don't know that for sure.

The debut NY Dolls album was reissued in Japan in 2006. I don't believe my work was used there, as a Japanese engineer is credited. So AFAIK, my remaster of that album is still on the shelf.

MK wrote:Willens has compressed his share of CD's so if it's really his work, beware, brother, beware.

To each his own.

While it's true that the remastered TMST is louder than the original, it's partly because the original CD was not using the full amount of headroom it could have used. We used all original masters on the reissues, which were pretty compressed to begin with. I did add some in the mastering process, but it didn't need much. Most of my projects have little or no compression added if I can help it. I don't believe in getting in the way, brother.

Bear in mind though, the mastering engineer works for the producer, who makes the final call on how a finished project sounds. This is true for remasters as well as new albums. Sometimes we get our way, sometimes not.

-Jeff Willens

Thanks for dropping in. Five years to the day almost we get some first hand facts (or three anyway).