Personality Crisis

Before punk had a rulebook, the New York Dolls were already breaking rules no one had thought to write yet. "Personality Crisis" opens with a glam stomp that's falling apart in real time — the guitars thick and slightly out of tune, the rhythm section lurching forward on sheer adrenaline, the whole thing held together by nothing more than collective will and David Johansen's extraordinary mouth. His voice is a force of sustained theatrical chaos: part Jagger sneer, part camp showmanship, part genuine desperation, capable of turning a syllable into an event. The song tears at someone — possibly a real person, possibly a cultural type — whose performed self has overtaken whatever was underneath, and Johansen delivers this diagnosis with the relish of a man who has fully embraced his own contradictions. Johnny Thunders' guitar solos are gloriously wrong in a way that somehow sounds exactly right, all bluster and wobble and accidental poetry. This was 1973, and almost nobody was ready for it: too decadent for the Velvet Underground crowd, too musical for the coming punks, too American for glam's British home. The Dolls planted the seed for everything that followed in New York for the next decade. Play it loud when you need permission to be excessive, when the occasion calls for something that refuses to hold itself together.