When I saw the New York Dolls, in 1973, at a now defunct club sandwiched between strip joints and dirty magazine stores on Broadway, I was confused. Up until the Dolls, the musicians making the rock and roll that I liked - from the Beatles, Stones and Dylan to Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish - knew how to play. The debut album: New York DollsBut the New York Dolls were different. As musicians, they were a mess. And yet, and yet - I dug them. In fact, in 1973, I saw both the Dolls and Led Zeppelin, and the Dolls blew the Zep away.As you probably know by now, the New York Dolls have reassembled. At least the two remaining original members: singer/writer David Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain. The others - lead guitarist Johnny Thunders, Bassist Arthur 'Killer' Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan - died.I’m always skeptical of reunions. I suspect the musicians motives. It’s not that I have a problem with musicians attempting to cash in. In fact, I think it’s great. Musicians deserve to be well paid, and if they have to reunite and play their old songs to finally make some money, cool. But I don’t have to go see them struggle to recapture the magic that came so effortlessly when they were young and it was all new and their dreams were still in tact.So I’m not particularly interested in this New York Dolls reunion. But seeing an article in the New York Times today about it, made me think about the Dolls.I’m not sure how I first heard of them. I might have seen something in Creem or even Rolling Stone. Or maybe it was from rock critic Ed Ward. What I remember for sure was that it was when I was a sophomore in college in ’73. I had become friends with Ed, who shared an apartment in Sausalito with critic John Morthland. One day I stopped by their place. Ed always had a huge stack of promo albums and if I wanted one that he wasn’t interested in, he’d usually sell it to me for a dollar. And in the pile was the Dolls debut, New York Dolls. He didn’t want to sell it. He did play some of it for me. The cover was amazing – it was like these New York rockers had taken Bowie and Mott the Hoople and the Stones to another place. I dug the cover, but it was the music that floored me. You can get the CD and what you’ll hear are great songs sung by a great singer. You’ll hear raw punk rock. It’ll sound really good. What you can’t experience now, after all that came in the wake of the Dolls – the Ramones, Patti Smith, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, all of the rest of UK punk, American hardcore, Black Flag, Husker Du, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, and so on. – is the ‘shock of the new,’ when you heard that record for the first time it sounded so raw and unprofessional and wild. It sounded like what rock ‘n’ roll was supposed to sound like. You just couldn’t help but dig it. Well, I couldn’t anyway.The New York Dolls were the reason I lost a friendship. I bought the album when it was released and played it for my close college buddy and he just could not relate. He thought it was crap. The line was drawn. I was on one side, he was on the other. And so was his girlfriend. And that was that.As crude as that record sounded at the time, the Dolls live were way more undisciplined, chaotic and, well, a noisy mess. They were utterly fantastic in their exaggerated, drag queen send-up, over-amped mess of a take on a rock band. They remain one of my favorite rock bands of all time.