"You had to see them live," say people trying to explain why everyone doesn't love the New York Dolls. I've always thought this was bushwa myself. The Dolls put out two great, enduring albums on Mercury in the '70s‑-New York Dolls and In Too Much Too Soon‑-and more than three decades later followed with an even more unlikely masterpiece: 2006's prophetically entitled One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. Many people love these albums without benefit of live exposure, and as someone who saw them many times between 1972 and 1975, I have dutifully checked out club recordings of varying legitimacy without finding one I played again after the pan was finished. Yet I do know several converts who went back to the Mercurys after the reunion shows of the '00s: David Johansen and Syl Sylvain plus sidemen, the other three having died by then. So if you've never gotten the Dolls, maybe you should give this DVD a try.

     And if you're a fan, you definitely should, because unlike those lousy club tapes this document does convey aspects of the Dolls' magic during their brief heyday that the studio albums hint at indirectly if at all. Don't expect crystalline sound or snazzy visuals from this footage, which was shot in blurry black-and-white on portable video cameras by ace rock photographer and passionate Dolls fan Bob Gruen and his wife Nadia Beck. But augmented by offstage business and a few interviews, including one by ace rock reporter and passionate Dolls fan Lisa Robinson, it reminded me and my date from back then of just how vital and unprecedented this band was. Johnny Thunders, whose junkie years falling off the stage on the beat with the Heartbreakers left quite an impression, is especially heartbreaking: neither tall nor a muscleman, he exudes the confidence that comes with a naturally sculpted torso, healthy skin tone, and Roman-schnozzed good looks. What happened to his pre-Dolls band? "They kicked me out because I was a creep."

     The Dolls, of course, made being a creep an art form. Says their most experienced musician, drummer Jerry Nolan: "I've been playing so long and I never advanced. That's why I'm with these guys." The polka-dotted Sylvain represents for "good old Queens." Arthur Kane, a big geeky guy wearing sunglasses approximately the size of his head, speaks of his dreams in a faint lisp. And Johansen camps it up shamelessly even if he stole some of his moves from Mick Jagger. With glam still mostly a rumor, the Dolls wave hippiedom goodbye by accentuating genuine gender ambiguity at a moment when mere long hair was identified with Samson, Tecumseh, and Robert Plant. Yet the crowd up front is dominated by the same kind of girls-gone-wild blondes who regularly show up on individual Dolls' arms.

     The greatest secret of Lookin' Fine on Television is that the Gruens were such fans, and as such shot so many shows they easily avoided the built-in tedium of live video. Instead of cutting to closeups of the guitarist's deft fingerwork and the drummer's ferocious barrage, ha ha ha, they cut to other performances of the same song. The sound being what it is, you can sometimes detect lip-synching anomalies, but not often‑-Johansen was unpredictable, but he knew what he was doing. Instead what you get is the wittiest clothes sense in pop history. All of them had a knack for costume‑-Sylvain now designs accessories professionally. But Johansen is the focus for good reason. By my count, which may be compromised by the soft focus and by Johansen's tendency to doff and don hats and such while performing, the Gruens meld eight different performances into the opening "Lookin' for a Kiss," during which Johansen wears black training bra over slim-cut pants, gray Edwardian jacket, illustrated glitter jacket, fur-and-glitter jacket, top hat with white coat-and-tails, tailored black jacket with ruffled shirt, broad suspenders over white shirt, and tight white top. Later come shirtless-with-bowti​e, shirtless-with-dicki​e, shirtless-with-suspe​nders, shirtless-with-paint​er-pants, sailor cap with short black jacket, vertical-striped shirt-and-pants, sheer red (I'm guessing) wet-look shirt, cowboy hat with bandanna, Marilyn T, pearl choker.

     Farewell to hippiedom indeed. Now do you see why it was so much fun to see them? There are 14 songs all told here, and they're great too. But for them you can buy the albums.

 

 

The Roots: Undun (Def Jam)
It speaks well for their strength of mind that Jimmy Fallon hasn't just been good for their economic viability‑-he's been good for their music. But superb though their 2008 and 2010 records were, and admirable though their equipoise has been, concept albums are such sinkholes that the partial success of this reverse-chronologica​l tale of a doomed small-time hood is more surprising than its partial failure. Maybe I could work out plausible meanings for every song like some exegete brushing the cobwebs off "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." But all song cycles have holes in them, and really, just exactly what level of sagacity do we expect from Black Thought‑-or Bob Dylan, for that matter? What I get from Black Thought, as usual, is flashes of insight and articulated feeling. The sharpest verse here is Dice Raw's on "One Time," which along with "The Otherside" is the closest the song cycle comes to a stand-alone song. So what I get from the album as a whole isn't a feel for the fictional Redford Stephens. It's the pop refrains, Euro orchestrations, and simplified drumming absorbed by a sound that shows no sign of standing pat. B PLUS

 

Action Bronson: Dr. Lecter (Fine Fabric Delegates)

So much more consumable than Jacob or Hublot, the food Bronson fixates on never gets fancier than heirloom tomatoes or seared Ahi tuna‑-no cross-hatched merganser breast with lychee infusion and truffle garnis for this fat guy. With crucial propulsion and more crucial fun from no-name Tommy Mas's unfashionably sampled, unfashionably funky beats, his gluttony humanizes hip-hop materialism at an economically accessible level. If only he didn't treat women as meat like thousands of hip-hop hungries before him, I might even play it for my favorite cook at dinnertime. Instead, the follow-up Well Done trades in his homie Tommy on the more renowned and predictable Statik Selektah as it seeks revenge for the bad romance the fat guy had coming. B PLUS

 

 

 

Pietra Montecorvino: Napoli Mediterranea (Taranta Power/Rai Trade)

A featured artist in the John Turturro documentary Passione!, Montecorvino is a Neapolitan actress born in 1962 whose recording career began at 30. This album, dated 2003 on my copy, has seen at least four releases since then, and as music solely, with no lyrical clues beyond titles with "luna" and "mare" in them, its understatement is riveting. What Montecorvino wants the world to hear is the beatwise romantic grit of the Maghreb, where so many of her home port's most recent immigrants began their hard lives, reinvigorating the sweet romantic melody Napoli's emigrants sentimentalize. Though usually the percussion and guitar sound Euro-American, at times you can hear ouds and darbukas in there, and Elvis fans need to know what she makes of "O sole mio." A MINUS

 

The Sway Machinery: The House of Friendly Ghosts, Vol. 1: Featuring Khaira Arby (JDub)

This strange record would mean less without the bound booklet written by guitarist-vocalist, cantor's grandson, and transcultural seeker Jeremiah Lockwood. And it would mean rather less than that without the three songs by Saharan diva Khaira Arby, whose own Timbuktu Tarab is more consistent but less gripping. The band comprises Lockwood, a drummer, and three horn players who add major oomph to Arby's stately, impassioned showcases. Camels grunt, children trill, women chant. And then there's Lockwood, a deeply pretentious guy who sometimes puts his transculturalism over, but don't count on it. Thank Allah that Arby contributes some backup vocals as well. Thank Jahweh too, I suppose. B PLUS

 

 

Tom Waits: Bad as Me (Anti-)

The three strongest tracks on Waits's most rocking album ever all feature not just Keith Richards but Tom's drummer son Casey‑-Richards alone doesn't rock as hard. Not to equate Casey Waits with Charlie Watts. But since "Chicago" invokes the Great Migration and "Satisfied" namechecks Mick Jagger himself, I believe the grooves on this album are thematic. Of course, the themes are thematic too. The carpet-bombing "Hell Broke Luce" and the one about bailing out millionaires while the rest of us murk around in the mud are low-life chronicles for a time when it would be stupid to ignore the historical connection between low-life and poverty per se. A MINUS

 

Pusha T: Fear of God II--Let Us Pray (GOOD/Decon/Re-Up Gang)

You know him‑-runs Clipse Cocaine LLC with his sharp-voiced brother Malice, who want you to know that, in the hallowed tradition of Handsome Dick Manitoba, music is just a hobby for them. The grand beats are safer than the clenched, confining, arrogantly hookless minimalism of Hell Hath No Fury. But every mean word delivers, and with cameos from Tyler the Creator to 50 Cent it's as if he never went solo. Like it or not, the volume dealer who raps for pocket money remains a good act‑-does he sound miserable in his thousand-dollar sneakers. Of course, we who buy our footwear online may prefer the price of the mixtape where half these tracks surfaced last spring. So maybe it would be poetic to try and obtain this improved version free as well. He won't spray us. That's just talk. A MINUS

 

 

Loudon Wainwright III is a quintessentially minor artist. An upper-middle-class WASP who came up in the folk scene without ever pretending he wanted to be one of the folk, he's the son of a famous journalist who studied acting in college and has the meager intuitive musicality that background would imply (although it's deepened with the years along with his voice, which needed it). In addition, Wainwright is kind of a dick. His dozens upon dozens of intelligent songs about his emotional life never convey the deep decency of his contemporary John Prine or his first wife Kate McGarrigle. He's too jocose, too snide, too repressed.

     Minor is a lousy look for somebody hoping to sell a four-CD box plus bonus DVD that will set you back 50 bucks. Who does he think he is‑-Yes? Yet one odd thing about 40 Odd Years is that the title speaks for itself. Wainwright may not have Prine's heart or McGarrigle's tonsils, but compared to either he's been amazingly persistent and prolific. In 1993 he put out a live best-of called Career Moves. Complain that 11 of those songs are repeated here if you like. I'll note that eight are not, and that any of them would fit right in if it was‑-he's got a whole lot of material. Career Moves came out 18 years ago, which means that all of the third disc here was recorded later, just as all of the "Rare & Unreleased" fourth was essentially unavailable until the box appeared. Moreover, and extraordinary for these extravaganzas, the fourth disc is not crap‑-not close. Most of the songs are new to us and many are superb, including the pathetic "Laid" (hers are saggy, his is small), the elegiac "Hank and Fred" (Williams and Rogers as co-equals), the post-9/11 "No Sure Way" (among the victims, a subway stop), and the horseman-pass-by "Dead Man," which mourns his dead father and his soon-dead self with equal dispassion.

     What makes Wainwright a good box candidate is that so many of his 24 albums on 14 labels are uneven enough to repay cherry-picking. What makes him a bad one is that quite a few of them are worth hearing on their own‑-Grown Man, say. Not all of these songs will make you say umm the moment it comes on. But the first half of the first disc is astonishing proof of how much pizzazz he had just joking around, with even less heart and tonsils than he's grown since. And later in the set, many of the songs you don't first recognize grow on you fast and sometimes big. "Hollywood Hopeful" is a hoot, "So Many Songs" anything but, "When I'm at Your House" in between.

     Then there's that DVD. It's over three hours, way too long for one sitting and just plain way too long. Beginning with a one-hour Dutch documentary from the '90s and augmented throughout by interviews and patter, it's mostly performance clips that date all the way back to the '70s‑-some of which offer up keepers the CDs missed, my personal favorite being his best political song, which in a typical twist concerns figure-skating lowlife Tonya Harding. Tour-based as it has to be, this exhaustive and exhausting audiovisual record leaves a powerful overall impression of an odd man out who has spent 40 years alone on the road. It helps you admire his persistence and understand why he's a dick. It strongly suggests that his difficulties with human relationships led to the life he chose rather than vice versa.

     The thing is, his difficulties with human relationships have combined with his obsessive craft to produce an unparalleled bunch of songs about family life. "Your Mother and I," "Your Father's Car," his indelible version of Peter Blegvad's "Daughter"‑-even if your family history is less neurotic than Wainwright's, as it probably is, you can recognize its dynamics in the man's endless self-examination, bitter analysis, and joking around. Some of the more generalized laughs get old eventually‑-it'll be a while before I need to hear "The Acid Song" again. But "Bein' a Dad" I could play right now.

     Whether this experience is worth your 50 bucks is for you to figure out. But I'll tell you one thing. Wainwright didn't have the guts or good sense to include his greatest and most painful family song of all: Grown Man's "That Hospital." Try to check it out. Might clarify your decision, might not.

 

 

 

 

Mates of State: Team Boo (Polyvinyl '03)

Music box. Hurdy-gurdy. Pinball gallery. Turning point of silent movie. Between-innings entertainment at a minor-league ballpark. E Street pseudoclassical. Even, almost, ? and the Mysterians. That’s how pop history is conceived by Kory Gardner. Words aren't quite irrelevant‑-cf. "This is the whiner's bio," or "Set the rocks on fire." But they are ancillary. B PLUS

 

Mates of State: Re-Arrange Us (Barsuk '08)

Alternia knows two things about this duo: raw biography and raw sound. Married, two kids, publicly affectionate on stage; so tuneful they embarrass coolsters who think babies are icky, but also, due to how hard Kory Gardner pumps her organ and John Hammel meets his match, energetic, rendering the tunes forgivable. And right, sometimes their hooks are sugary enough to give me a tummyache too. But for Gardner to devote herself to piano as Hammel quiets down doesn't justify the consensus diagnosis of, eeuw, domesticity. Musical symptoms just aren't specific enough. Instead one must refer to those supposedly unmusical carriers of specificity, the words. Seldom anything special in the past, now they add up to a painful, unresolved song sequence about a couple who buy a biographically verifiable dream house and then hit the rocks as definitely the husband and possibly the neglected wife seek sexual solace elsewhere. So no, Pitchfork guy, you can't call "Blue and Gold Print" a lullaby just because it's slow and invokes the kiddies. No, Pop Matters guy, you can't praise the "The Re-Arranger"'s arrangement without noting that one thing getting rearranged is lives. Pop hooks deployed to keep up a good front are too complicated for tummyaches. Not heartaches, though. A MINUS

 

 

Wussy: Strawberry (Shake It)

The first Wussy album in which louder, heavier tub thumper Joe Klug replaces Moe Tucker fan Dawn Burman is also the first he co-produced. There's more distortion, less naturalism; Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker yowl more, as when Chuck's aging head voice rises to the challenge of Mark Messerly's organ on "Pulverized." These alienation effects help define a rock that generalizes the connubial agony at the band's core, and if this is alienating for those of us who love them as well, it's also comforting, because it distances us from real-life couple Chuck and Lisa's real lives. I'd as soon assume the co-written "Fly Fly Fly" was inspired by a dumb young couple they know. I'm glad "Pizza King"'s tale of permanently adolescent disarray takes place in Indiana, not Ohio. And it's fine with me that "Asteroids" is so spacey‑-it means the heart "floating in the frozen void" might be metaphorical. A

 

Wussy: Funeral Dress II (Shake It)

I'm so skeptical of unplugged Record Store Day thingies it never occurred to me to sample this one when it materialized last April. This means I was an idiot‑-when you love a record the way I love their debut, you never know when some alternate version might turn into, say, the live Daydream Nation that other couple group assembled. It also means the limited edition is almost sold out by now. What will you miss if you don't buy it‑-eek!‑-right this minute? Suffering stripped naked beneath the wit, tune, and transcendent noise you long ago learned to love. Detailed knowledge of how nuanced and expressive Chuck and especially Lisa's voice can be, and how delicately they're capable of interacting. Well-turned lyrics you never before had to concentrate on‑-and yes, they make sense except when they don't, which why should they always when life doesn't either? Acoustic guitars, brushed drums, occasional accordion. And a finale you never knew was so agonizing. Try to break up to that. I dare you. A

 

 

 

Wilco: The Whole Love (Anti-)

Full-on Radiohead electronica Americanized with aw-shucks diffidence, red-blooded guitar, sharp tunes, and exceptionally dull poetry ("Standing O," "One Sunday Morning") ***

 

The Mountain Goats: All Eternals Deck (Merge)

Four great songs, all of which address mortality directly instead of implying it the way the nine merely ambitious ones do ("Estate Sale Sign," "For Charles Bronson," "Sourdoire Valley Song," "Beautiful Gas Mask") ***

 

Radiohead: The King of Limbs (XL/TBD)

So much more fun than Eno these days ("Little by Little," "Bloom") **

 

Comet Gain: Howl of the Lonely Crowd (What's Your Rupture?)

Desperate times catch up with desperate punk love poetry ("Clang of the Concrete Swans," "Ballad of Frankie Machine") **

 

 

Giant Sand: Blurry Blue Mountain (Fire)

With nothing much at stake but the shape of his life, Howe Gelb keeps his slow hand in ("Fields of Green," "Better Man Than Me") **

Faust: Something Dirty (Bureau B)

Synth-free after lo these many decades, their experiments have more oomph, especially the Hawkwind homages ("Tell the Bitch to Go Home," "Dampfauslass 2") **

 

Wire: Red Barked Tree (Pink Flag)

Even formalists get the grays--well, especially formalists ("Bad Worn Thing," "Please Take") **

New York Dolls: Dancing Backwards in High Heels (429)

Weary blues from trying ("Talk to Me Baby," "End of the Summer") *