When Morrissey attempted to reunite the New York Dolls in 2004 for a performance at London’s Meltdown festival, he thought his odds of success were low. “I expected David [Johansen] to laugh at me and put the phone down,” he said that year. “But he was very agreeable and it seemed like now was the right time. He said, ‘Yes, they are great songs.’ I said, ‘Yes, and that’s the reason why you should sing them. That’s the reason why people still want to hear them.’”
Prior to Morrissey’s call, Johansen had given little thought to a reunion with surviving New York Dolls members Sylvain Sylvain and Arthur “Killer” Kane. And he didn’t see it as anything more than a one-off after he agreed.
“I thought, ‘We’re going to go to England and stay in a nice hotel in London. It’ll be a nice break,’” he told Rolling Stone in 2021. “I was doing a lot of singing in that time with Hubert Sumlin, and I was doing the Harry Smith [solo] stuff. I thought it would be nice to have a little refresher thing. It figured it would be great to see Syl and Arthur. We were just going to do one show. It was sold out, so they made another show. Then we started getting a lot of offers to go on these European festival shows.”
Before they could play any of those festivals, Kane died from leukemia. (For much more on Kane’s incredible life story and his final months, check out the amazing documentary New York Doll.) But Johansen and Sylvain soldiered on with a new lineup of the band, toured the world, and eventually cut three new records: 2006’s One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This, 2009’s Cause I Sez So, and 2011’s Dancing Backward in High Heels.
They weren’t bestsellers, but critics were quite impressed, especially Robert Christgau. He named One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This as the single best record of 2006, putting it above Bob Dylan’s Modern Times. “David Johansen is no longer 24, so this reunion album surprises by revealing the dirty little secret beneath the ’70s Dolls’ playful pansexuality: religious emotion,” he wrote. “Everywhere Johansen mourns mortality and celebrates contingency in the most searching lyrics of the year — lyrics deepened by how much fun the band is having.”
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The second incarnation of the Dolls lasted longer than the original, and they made more music. But by 2011, they were exhausted by seven solid years of touring and recording. That summer, they even agreed to open up for Poison and Mötley Crüe on a long summer amphitheater tour. This meant playing in broad daylight to half-empty venues full of hair-metal fans largely unfamiliar with their music, even if Poison and Mötley Crüe probably wouldn’t exist without the Dolls’ massive influence.
A couple of months after the tour ended, they headed to Australia for a pair of gigs, and then up to the United Kingdom for a run of shows opening up for Alice Cooper. The last one took place Oct. 31, 2011, at the Clyde Auditorium in Glasgow, Scotland. This is before phones with cameras were ubiquitous at shows, but some enterprising fans still captured much of the set. Check out a video of “Pills” from up close” and set closer “Jet Boy” from the balcony.
David Bowie guitarist Earl Slick was in the band at this point, and they put on an excellent show that wrapped up with an encore of “Personalty Crisis.” They gave no indication it was their final show, but they’d done 71 dates that year alone. Everyone in the band was worn out and needed time off. “It wasn’t ever a point of, ‘This is it forever,’” Johansen told Rolling Stone in 2011. “We just kind of cooled it for a while and it just kind of lasted.”
The death of Sylvain Sylvain in 2021 made any sort of further Dolls activity unthinkable for Johansen. “I don’t have any intention of doing that, no,” he told Rolling Stone. “It would be crazy.”
The death of Johansen on Feb. 28, 2025 means that not a single member of the classic New York Dolls lineup is among the living. It’s a very sad reality, but at least they gave fans another chance to see them in the 2000s. It was undoubtably one of the greatest reunion tours in rock history.
