YOU CAN PUT YOUR ARMS AROUND A MEMORY: NY Dolls, TLA, November 25, 2006
NEW YORK DOLLS [FLICKR]
PEACHES/MR. QUINTRON [FLICKR]
CITIZEN MOM REPORTS: What the hell is Quintron doing back there?
OK, there’s keyboards, and one of those whirling synth things you wave your hands over, and there’s a small drum kit, set behind the grill of an old Lincoln onstage at the Trocadero. The headlights work, of course, and when they blink to life, you know Mr. Q is about to go off. And my man lets loose, a Deep South dervish sweating through his nice white suit. He calls it “swamp-tech,” and that works in the way that Beck is “surfer-tech.”
Quintron really won me over when plowed into the crowd, found the one dude standing still with his arms crossed, declared him a “badass motherfucker,” and laid the party down right there. Miss Pussycat, being a badass motherfucker herself and looking naughtily prim in white hose, looked on approvingly.
It warmed the cockles of me heart to see the way Peaches worked the Troc crowd into a sweaty horndog mess. It’s good for the kids to try new things.
She’s got a guitar stance like Gene Simmons, wide-legged and cocky, setting forth on the “Teaches of Peaches,” scaling the speakers and lap-dancing a few stoners up in the balcony. That was cool, but nothing I haven’t seen before. Where Peaches made me her bitch was when they brought out the bike — one of those ’70s chumpies with the banana seat and the big U-shaped handlebars. So hot.
On to the TLA for a New York Dolls nightcap, and the rock was as tight as David Johansen’s leathuh pants. (And that’s tight, my friends.)
He is your Fairy RockFather, nearly old enough to use his Social Security checks to pay for the red nail polish, but you’d best believe he’ll rock your socks. Obviously the crowd was older, but no less kinetic, probably finding all kinds of new meanings in “Pills,” ones that they were either too young or high to get back when.
Sylvain Sylvain handled Johnny Thunders’ “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory,” and the newest, “Dance Like a Monkey,” whipped the crowd into no less a wiggly sweat than Peaches had wrought on the kids earlier. One day it will please them to remember even this.