gdgt's Peter Rojas | Interview

Published May 10, 2010

Social networking and gadget mania come together this week at gdgt live—a realtime gadget trade show that's open to the public where tech companies (Belkin, Boxee, D-Link, DivX, HTC, Logitech, Windows Phone, Groupon and many more have signed-on) bring their latest, greatest and about to blow-up gear and let us drool all over it. The brainchild of Ryan Block (former Engadget editor) and Peter Rojas (founder of Gizmodo and Engadget—as well as RCRDLBL.com) gdgt is about users sharing lists of gadgets they own, info about how to use them and fix them, and much more. Considering how much time and money—and emotional capital we expend these days on our gadgets, its a brilliant concept. I got Rojas on the phone last week for an epic chat which you read some bits of after the jump. Somewhere in the course of the conversation, I had to get Rojas to comment on the iPad, the hit new gadg for which I haven't found my actual need, only desire. Rojas says of Apple's iPad, "There are two things they got right with it: They made it really responsive. All the gestures and interactions happen really fast. And they scaled the user experience correctly. I've had tablets from other companies. Nokia has had tablets for years. They shrunk down like a PC desktop. I get it, its like a mobile computer. But if you don’t have that core experience out of the box, it doesn’t matter what it can do. The Slate, its running an Atom processor, which is too slow. If its just slow, it doesn’t matter for anything else."

gdgt live is Wednesday, May 12 at Gallery 233 at 233 W Huron at 7pm. R.S.V.P online for admission. Walk-ins are welcome, too. Rojas calls it a "really, really democratic" event, all-ages and open to the public, so feel free to bring the kids.

What’s the gdgt event all about?

Its kind of like a mini gadget trade show where we get a bunch of companies showing stuff that’s coming out. And regular people a chance to get hands on with this stuff. There actually aren’t a lot of consumer facing technology shows any more.

If you think about it, if you are in the tech press, a gadget blogger or whatever, you get to go to these companies, go to these tech events before launch. But the average person, they don’t get to do that stuff.

For us, what the site is about, it is more about the community and users, more of a bottom up site than a top down thing.

It made sense for the mission of the site, which is about connecting people with gadgets. We were like we should do this in the real world too, we should have a physical manifestation of what the site is about.

How long has gdgt been up?
We launched in July of last year.

Are you still building?

We’re still building. Were rolling out new updates and features to the site, almost every few weeks day. We’re not sleeping, and feeling that we have so much more work to do. But Ive been really happy with what we accomplished so far.

My background is the founder of Engadget and Gizmodo, and did more bloggy kind of things before that and was a journalist for a long time. Its kind of a challenge to flip everything around. Ryan and I, my cofounder, are just two users among everyone else. Its kindof recognizing the expertise, knowledge and authority of users and giving them a way to connect and share with each other.

Theres so much more for us to do, but Im pretty happy with what weve accomplished in ten months or so.

Do you like to create new concepts and move on? You’ve moved on to the new thing every few years.

Yes and no. I was with Engadget for a pretty long time and I launched other sites alongside doing that. Its sort of like everything overlaps. I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as moving on all the time, but I know what you mean. I like the big picture stuff and I like the challenge of trying to conceptualize and address the big problems. How can you create a better experience than what is out there right now in terms of people owning, buying, discovering and sharing gadgets. We’re part of the solution there, so to speak.

What blows my mind is that this wasn’t already out there. It seems like such a natural thing, there's such a conversation happening anyway.

When we were working on it, we weren’t in super stealth mode or anything. We didn’t announce what we were doing, partly, because it evolving so quickly. But we were like Man, it would really suck if we wake up one day and someone has done the exact same thing we are doing. It does seem totally obvious. If you think about the way the web is moving–everything is becoming more social and crowd-sourced, you know, you have LastFM for music, you have foursquare for when you go out. Every kind of vertical category is going to have its own social platform. Anything that people are passionate about or want to be connected to other people through, there’s going to be something about that. People that are passionate about gadgets, they think of themselves in terms of the gadgets that they buy.

Tribalism isn’t quite the right word. People don’t think of themselves in terms of just one product. People who are very enthusiastic about this stuff, this is their pop culture. I kindof figured out with Gizmodo and Engadget, if you think about tech as pop culture, you have to write about it in that way. Then you realize, if its pop culture, its just culture and you have to create a social platform for that, too.

It seems increasingly tied up with people’s identity. Its not like a Consumer Reports thing, what can this do and not do. Its like who is this going to make you. People feel this power that they can do a lot more with these things now.

You know when a technology is really great when it recedes into the background. For all of the hullabaloo of the last twenty years, no one cares what operating system they run on their computer anymore. As long as you can do what you want, which is mainly browse the web and stuff like that, you don’t really care. So that’s why everyone is fighting over mobile OSes, because there is a really big difference now. You want to be able to do the things you want to do and you don’t care how it gets done. And theres sort of a seamlessness to things now that we didn’t have ten years ago. Theres been an explosion in the number of products a person will carry and have in their life now and that’s one reason we started the site. Ten years ago, Im not sure I owned a cell phone. Scarily enough, now, I have five within arm’s reach.

Now the average person owns a smart phone, a digital camera, a laptop, they might own a game console, they might own a blu-ray disc player and a flatscreen TV. Now all of sudden, you go from owning two or three gadgets to an average person easily having six or ten without even thinking about it.

The core, the nugget, of the site was lists. Just go create your list. You can do a social network and layer in all the discussions and news and tips and support, all the different elements of the experience—but it keeps coming back to the list—and the database. The database is user-generated. If you don’t see something on the site, you can just add it. We’re up to 17,500 products or something like that now. Its growing by about a 1,000 a month. Its going to start accelerating actually. Most of the obvious stuff is already on there. You see people digging deep—like what was that random TV I owned 15 years ago.

How old? Are people going deep?

People are going deep. You’ll find Sinclairs on the site and stuff like that.

I'm one of those people who can't get rid of my Mac SE. It's like No, Mom, you can’t throw that out, its going to be history some day.

Its like a Wikipedia, there is a core group of users who really care. We had one of our top users, a woman, go through and systemically added every Sony Walkman and other things. She’s like, you know what, I want this database to be complete. And I’m going to keep adding stuff.

Jamie Lidell | Interview

​I chatted with my old buddy Jamie Lidell for TIme Out Chicago, roughly 7 years after I first wrote about him.

​The U.K. electro-soul crooner calls Nashville home now, but he hasn’t gone country.

We’ve followed Jamie Lidell from his days as a Berlin-based beatboxer to more recent turns with a full-blown soul band. Now, the U.K. native is back with a self-titled album of aggressively funky tunes recalling early ’80s R&B in the best way. We caught up with Lidell via Skype as he toured his new one-man show in Belgium.

After moving around you’ve settled in Nashville.
It was like a Sun Ra move, you know? Space is the place. We realized, my wife and I, that we just couldn’t afford to stay in Manhattan and grow as artists and a couple. A few people told me to check out Nashville—one of them was Beck, the other was Pat Sansone from Wilco. We’ve got a great place and we spend most of our time at home.

You record at home?
[The new album] was entirely recorded and mixed at home. I never left the house for any of it, which is something I’m pretty proud of because I think I got a decent sound for a home recording. It was a pretty serious undertaking. I don’t think it’s for everyone, working out of home, but it’s definitely for me. The empowerment is something that can’t be underestimated. It’s ridiculous.

The album recalls early ’80s funk and boogie. Is that what you were going for?
Living in Nashville, we got addicted to this radio station called 92Q. Michael Baisden puts on this amazing show, it’s become a huge thing for us, they play these amazing jams. It reminded me of these hidden gems that I grew up loving and listening to that I’d put to the back of my mind. Drum-machine funk. And, because I made a lot of this music on my own, starting with a drum machine made a lot of sense. That immediately put me back in the ’80s in a sense.

Did you have a crisis being pegged as part of a wave of soul revivalists?
When I did Multiply and Jim, I was heading down the road of the blue-eyed soul crooner. To sing like I did on those two albums, I’m proud of all that stuff. When I made Jim, to try to follow with what I thought people wanted me to be, some part of me was a bit dead when I did that. It felt like I was chasing the money. There’s some great music on that record, and I don’t regret doing it. It’s an interesting challenge to stay relevant, stay popular enough to tour and stay true to the music you want to make. You’re always going to shake people off if you take a heavy turn.

What can you tell us about your current tour?
It’s a one-man show, so sonically I’m presenting new material and old material in a made-over fashion. I’m taking people back to the early house days, which always seemed a good setting for my voice, my horn of a voice. I’ve been tapping into my inner diva. I’m just belting it out over house music at the end. I get everything lathered up and at the end we have a wash down. That’s why they call it a rinse. You check your troubles at the door and rinse it out.

Published April 4, 2013

​Jamie Lidell

The unpredictable life of Flosstradamus

Spend a night with the young DJ duo whose name will soon be on everyone's lips-and everyone's playlists. By John Dugan

​Photos by Marzena Abrahamik

Chicago DJ duo Flosstradamus (Josh Young/J2K and Curt Cameruci/Autobot) has only been around since Fall of 2005, but the stars (or perhaps the beats) have aligned to make 2007 the group’s national breakout year. With three turntables and the skills to blend a club tempo playlist that treats everything from indie to crunk as fair game, Floss has gone from creating chaos at a non-descript Boystown bar to banging the hippest parties nationwide. Flosstradamus is at the center of the city’s emergent underground dance-party scene, where the covers are low; the beats are fast; and the rappers, DJs and partiers are particularly chummy. We tagged along for a night out with Floss and entourage when the boys made their triumphant return to a monthly residency in Wicker Park. We were not, at any point, disappointed.

7pm, St. Ben’s 
We knock on the door at Flosstradamus HQ, a compact single-family home in St. Ben’s. Inside, J2K sits around with New York–based Fader editor and DJ Nick (Catchdubs) Barat trading music files from laptops while MTV Jams screens a Swizz Beatz video. The conversation revolves around music and fashion. “Whoa, he’s still got ski goggles; he’s still keeping it alive,” says J2K about Swizz’s “uncle” style.

7:30pm, Floss studios (upstairs)
A narrow wood-paneled stairway leads upstairs to Autobot’s bedroom, which is filled with piles of clothes and a neatly arranged ball-cap collection. A remix session is in progress, and Autobot shows us how he puts the Floss touch on a familiar tune, the Who’s anthem “Baba O’Riley”: He throws a steady bass drum, hand claps and some tambourine underneath, then winds it up to a bumpin’ tempo. He wants to use the mutated track as an intro to tonight’s set, the duo’s monthly residency at Subterranean. He spends the next ten minutes tinkering while J2K hunts for his laptop’s power cord. We chat about Floss and where the duo is headed. Indisputably, the star-making moment for the local DJ outfit is right now. The group built its name at loft parties, a monthly session at the Town Hall Pub in Boystown called Get Outta the Hood and eventually regular slots at forward-thinking clubs like Sonotheque.

In March, Floss turned up the volume at numerous gigs at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas. “We seriously made a noise,” Autobot says. An URB cover story and a DJ mix they crafted for Vice Records further amped up the Floss buzz well beyond Chicago.

The duo has largely set aside remixing and producing to hit the road. “We’re striking while the iron is hot and getting our tour on,” Autobot says. The boys recently went to Europe, supporting Craze and A-Trak, though taking an opening slot was “weird” for a duo accustomed to bringing down the house with its three-turntable sets. “We had to learn a bit. It was kind of humbling,” Autobot says. A few minutes later, with turntables packed in the trunk, the group heads for Wicker Park.

9pm, Subterranean, upstairs
J2K’s sister Melissa arrives. Together, they make up the rap duo Kid Sister: quick rhymes with a South Side drawl from the lady, who J2K eggs on. Melissa, radiating star quality, tells us she’s recording one-offs to build hype for her debut album, due this summer. She recently sang on a U.K. house track “about beepers” and joined Floss at the Coachella festival in late April.

9:30pm, backstage
Clubbers start to show up as Autobot spins a warm-up detour into soul and reggae before he turns over the tables to Catchdubs. Kid Sister talks about Tarantino’s flick Grindhouseand graphic designer Dust La Rock. It’s decided that J2K’s tee “is just too crazy” so he turns it inside out, while Melissa’s put-together ensemble (neutrals, jewelry) is a winner. “I’m tired of this hipster stuff, I wanna look like a woman,” she says.

J2K also explains why Floss aren’t the mash-up artists they’re often made out to be: He says  they simply create traditional hip-hop “blends” that “involve putting two tracks on top of each other,” and they usually work live.  Some of those blends include Floss-created samples they dial up with additional beats and rhythms before dropping them into their sets. Some of the tunes they’ve reworked like this include the Beatles’ “Twist & Shout” and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

11:15pm
The band area is filling. Chicago rappers the Cool Kids take the stage—or a slice of it, as there’s a growing entourage around the decks.

12:15am, onstage
Just as Autobot is about to step up to the mixer, he’s accosted by a lady who sounds like a feisty ex. He evades her, hits the turntables and works in OutKast’s “B.O.B.” and Green Velvet’s “Shake and Pop” as spazzy local MC Hollywood Holt commands the crowd to “juke,” then get their “hands up.” Melissa tells the crowd it’s her “first sober show” as she takes the microphone and bangs out a set of her animated odes to fabulous living (including “Pro Nails” and “Telephone”) with J2K chiming in.

12:45am, upstairs
After dramatic dead air, Floss comes on, with Autobot’s “Baba” intro working. The stage is crazy, the joint is sticky and a few tracks into the set, folks are asked to make some space just before the duo launches into an updated version of hip-hop staple “Apache,” complete with a blistering synth bass line. A kid in a fedora and white tie boogies a few feet from a girl at the edge of the stage in a classy charcoal frock. Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” comes on at 1am, as bits of Missy Elliott’s “Pass That Dutch” weave in and out.

1:20am
​Floss crams in more crowd-pleasers, including versions of “This Is Why I’m Hot” and the group’s ravey “Act a Fool” remix. Peter Björn and John’s “Young Folks” closes out the set as the room lights turn on and security kicks everyone out. The guys have gigs in Orlando the next night, Chicago on Friday, Atlanta on Sunday and New York on Wednesday. They’re running ragged and seem eager for June to come around, so they can hunker down, do remixes and start working on something to call their own, something that lasts longer than a damn good party.

Duran Duran at Chicago Theatre | Live review

Posted in Audio File blog at TIme Out Chicago by John Dugan on Oct 22, 2011 at 11:08am

​Photo by Matthew Reeves

Birmingham, England was not a glamorous place in the 1980s. The decline of industry in the once prosperous city had led to unemployment, unrest and bad vibes. The city has given us the mighty Move, Black Sabbath, and UB40, but few associate it with yacht-racing and half-naked jungle chase scenes. Somehow, Duran Duran with its fantasies of louche living in exotic locales and marriage of funk, New Wave and indulgence emerged from that haze of decline and neglect, to take the role left by art rock sophisticates Roxy Music and disco hitmakers Chic. It even broke through to America via MTV. So now, with a not so bright future and present before the regular folk of the modern world, is it any wonder that the glam pop outfit is once again on the rise? Of course, there is a successful Mark Ronson-produced All You Need is Now album backed by the almost all-original line-up (guitarist Andy Taylor returned to, then left the fold a few years ago) giving the oft-critically dismissed band a dose of cred that few '80s acts can muster. Also, I tend to think there is a darkness that lurks in the band's pop music that has helped it stand up in the long haul. That darkness isn't imagined, frontman Simon Le Bon is an artist intellectual that has a bitter streak from years of not being taken seriously. A few years ago, the band scrapped a more cimmerian effort influenced by contemporary events called Reportage that would have thrown fans for a loop.

So what we got last night at the Chicago Theatre was the cathartic, charismatic and only a little nostalgic Duran Duran, in a set full of plastic, but fantastic New Wave pop tunes and atmospheric modern rockers executed with the kind of confidence and panache that comes from hard work or making deals with the devil. With Le Bon looking probably better than he ever has (more tan and fit than the pale and soft Le Bon of the early '80s) and John Taylor looking like an Anime avatar come to life (long limbs and famous cheekbones that made him a heartthrob for your sister), the Durans looked the part, sporting slick and shiny clothing that gave them each a lounge lizard vibe. The band's deep reservoir of cool allowed it some wiggle room—John Taylor hyped the live twitter stream on screen and admitted his own twitter addiction. 

With touring guitarist and co-writer Dom Brown, a glamazon back-up singer named Anna and a red-haired percussionist, Le Bon, two Taylors and Nick Rhodes burned through a well-balanced set that never leaned too hard on ancient history. Incorporating fresher material like "All You Need is Now" and "Blame the Machines" with ingrained hits "The Reflex" and "Is There Something I Should Know?" and neglected fan favorites such as "Careless Memory," the band made a case for its mid-period and recent output. Admittedly, I'm not spinning any '90s Duran Duran discs at home, but last night I wondered if I shouldn't give them another try. The likes of "Ordinary World" were pulled off with class, Le Bon's voice sounding more than up to the task and Brown's guitar simmering on the epic solo. Outside of perhaps "Leave a Light On" which features Le Bon on rhythm guitar, there wasn't much slack in the set. The newer number like "Girl Panic!" seemed to fit right in, buoyed by a solid rhythm section of Taylors that's never gotten its due from the music establishment.

As Mondrian-inspired videos streamed behind the outfit, it closed out the regular set with an extended "Notorious," "Hungry Like the Wolf" and "Reach up for the Sunrise." Returning for "Wild Boys" and a bit of Frankie's "Relax" before a "Rio." 

It was fashionable at one time to cite Duran Duran as modern music's lightweights, but we hadn't experienced the likes of the Black Eyed Peas at that point. If Duran Duran has had a weakness over the years, it has been that it was all too ready to believe that it was innocuous or tried to hard to be dangerous. What we learned last night—amid Le Bon's between song indictment of Bush/Blair as "war criminals"—is that Duran Duran is at its best when it combines that effortless pleasure and a taste for the risqué, teasing out our decadence and playing up the complications of overindulgence. 

Duran Duran set list, via setlist.fm
Before the Rain  Planet Earth  A View to a Kill  All You Need Is Now  Blame the Machines  Come Undone  Safe  The Reflex  The Man Who Stole A Leopard  Girl Panic!  Is There Something I Should Know?  Tiger Tiger  Careless Memories  Leave A Light On  Ordinary World  Notorious  Hungry Like the Wolf  (Reach Up for the) Sunrise  Encore: Wild Boys/Relax (Don't Do It)  Rio 

Os Mutantes | Interview

For the many fans who fell in love with Brazil’s influential psychedelic group Os Mutantes during the three decades since they stopped playing together, it’s a dream come true that this cult favorite is having a reunion tour. And it’s a bit of a freak-out because they’re coming to Chicago for the first time to play at next week’s Pitchfork Festival. 

But what seals the deal is the fact that Os Mutantes (pronounced “ohs moo-TAN-chees”; it means “The Mutants” in Portuguese) founder Sérgio Dias will rock the giant, gold-plated, custom-made guitar—with distortion and delay effects built in—that his elder brother Cláudio handcrafted in the late ’60s. (Cláudio, though never in the band as a musician, engineered many of Os Mutantes’ custom instruments and effects.) “We’re gonna blow your head off! Get ready, man,” Dias laughs.

Once universally praised for its Technicolor pop-art albums—which combined literary references like Don Quixote with samba and psych-rock—the group had a May show at London’s Barbican that brought brothers Sérgio Dias and Arnaldo Baptista together onstage for the first time in 33 years.

Like the young Beatles tuning into Radio Luxembourg, the teenage brothers first heard rock via shortwave radio in1960s Brazil and formed a band with Arnaldo’s girlfriend, singer Rita Lee. The trio went on to become the backbone of the kooky, intellectual and artistic movement Tropicália, which rebelled against Brazil’s cultural and political stagnation. Mutantes made its way to Paris, where the band cut an English-language album. But tension between the brothers, heavy acid use, and Arnaldo and Rita’s breakup led to reshuffling in 1972, a move toward prog-rock in 1974 and the band’s eventual demise in 1978. Lee went on to Brazilian mainstream stardom and Mutantes faded into obscurity—Dias played jazz and new age, and Arnaldo spent some time in a mental-health facility.

But the band’s inimitable sound developed a cult following: Kurt Cobain invited the group to tour with Nirvana (even though it hadn’t existed for 15 years), members of Fugazi collected paintings by former Mutantes members, and Beck named his 1998 Mutationsalbum in their honor. Mutantes’ earlier albums became available on CD in the late ’90s—David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label issued a compilation of early material, and this year the group’s catalog is being reissued worldwide by Universal.

In one sense, the Mutantes comeback is right on time. “God, can you imagine if we surfaced in the ’80s?” asks Dias, who’s stayed hip producing underground acts in his São Paulo studio. “This would be a total disaster. It didn’t have anything to do with us. Now, I think the musical scene is more toward what we did and what we do. I think it was a very healthy way to come back and come alive again.”

It’s unclear who sowed the seeds of the reunion, but Dias’s account points to an ambitious festival curator in England. “I started to receive mail saying that we were going to play in London, and then suddenly we started to talk about it because we didn’t know anything about it,” he says. “It was really amazing. Suddenly I was talking to Dinho, the drummer, and he said, ‘If you want to, we can try. I can try to play.’ I never heard him say anything like that before.” Lee won’t be joining the band, citing family commitments. “She will always be a Mutante—she is more than welcome to come over,” Dias says. Brazilian pop singer Zélia Duncan will sing Lee’s parts on the U.S. tour.

The brothers and drummer Dinho (who joined the group in 1970) will play as part of a ten-piece band to reproduce the multiple layers of Mutantes’ recordings. “There’s a lot of things to be covered,” Dias says. “We don’t want to use a damn computer and play with a click. Everything is played. There’s flutes, there’s recorders.”

Mutantes will also mix in some English-language versions of songs to court the American audience. In addition to Pitchfork, they’ll play venues such as the Fillmore in San Francisco, where Dias saw psych blues band Ten Years After at age 17. “It’s outrageous—we’ve never been in the States and suddenly I’m going to be playing at the Fillmore,” he says. “It’s something that can make someone very humble and humbly proud of the right decisions that we took when we were at such an early age.”

Os Mutantes headlines the Pitchfork Music Festival Sunday 30.

Brazil's Os Mutantes, the psychedelic pop group that inspired Nirvana, Fugazi and Beck, plays its first Chicago gig at Pitchfork. By John Dugan Photograph by Nino Andrés

Pete Townshend | Interview

The Who guitarist chats about his new memoir and touring Quadrophenia.
​By John Dugan Published: November 29, 2012 in Time Out Chicago.

Pete Townshend may have finally answered the question posed by his iconic band, “Who are you?,” in Who I Am, his recent autobiography. In the brutally honest tome, Townshend takes us from his rough-around-the-edges upbringing all the way through the rise of the loudest rock band ever, interspersed with dramatic rock-star ups-and-downs—especially downs, namely drugs and infidelity. It’s cut with a dry humor, but Townshend’s memoir is serious and thoughtful.

We reached the Who guitarist-songwriter on the road as he and Roger Daltrey tour their 1973 rock opera, Quadrophenia. Chatty, funny and deadly honest, the 67-year-old rocker seemed to relish taking the long view of his life and work.

You write about schoolyard gangs in your book, and you’re back in a band again. Do you find comfort there?
With the Who, I feel comfortable. I think you’re right, I feel this is an extension of the gang. I think people love it when at the end of a show, Roger and I, who have allegedly hated each other all of our lives, hug. It’s ‘Ahhh, look, they’ve overcome their obstacles.’ It’s like fucking On Golden Pond or something. We take great stock in the fact that we’ve been working together such a long time and there’s so much that can be left unsaid that goes back to the neighborhood. The fact that the Who were a gang at one point did give me a sense of continuum. After Chinese Eyes, I did try to create a gang—I hired a bunch of people and tried to create a band. It felt as futile as when Bowie did the Tin Machine thing, it really wasn’t a band at all.

You also write about having a spiritual enlightenment at a Holiday Inn in Rolling Meadows.
Yeah, it was one of those kind of sublime moments. The only reason I know it was Rolling Meadows was I wrote about it on a piece of Holiday Inn notepaper. There it was with a little drawing of the nation’s innkeeper.

Rolling Stone ran a cover story of yours titled “In Love with Meher Baba.” Where are you now in terms of seeking spiritual satisfaction?
In order to have faith, or follow any other organized religion, I’d have to suspend a degree of disbelief. In a sense, the god we trust politically is a slightly different god than the one we bring into the fray when we enter a rock concert. One of the things I can say with absolute conviction is that I worship that god. I think that when a crowd is at a really great music event and they start to lose themselves, they find themselves in a crowd and because it is physical and mental and looking for something uplifting and life enhancing…. I think when people gather together in large numbers to do that, there’s a sense of congregation, and I’m happy to be a part of that.

What have you got in store for us with the Quadrophenia tour?
Well, I haven’t had a lot to do with it. I was worrying Roger for the last five years to try to bring Quadrophenia back out again, and he has insisted that he has complete control of it. So I first saw his video presentation a couple of few weeks ago when we were rehearsing it. It’s a story about life in the U.K. and our neighborhood, rather than the story ofQuadrophenia—it’s almost like a biopic in some ways. It’s Roger and I performingQuadrophenia in a very pure way. At the end, we play some old hits and say good-bye and crowds seem to like it. We’re getting reasonably good reviews but it’s early days yet. I can’t see what’s on the screens behind me, but I get a feeling from the crowd that it’s working.

The Who plays Allstate Arena Thursday 29 and Friday 30. Who I Am is out now.

David Johansen of the New York Dolls | Interview

David Johansen of the New York Dolls chats about the band’s comeback glam wonder Dancing Backwards in High Heels. Yes, and Buster Poindexter.

By John Dugan Published: March 9, 2011

Punk precursors alongside the Stooges, New York Dolls are perhaps the most influential band people have never really heard. Both the Sex Pistols and KISS built on the Dolls’ gritty glitter and street-gang sleaze. But more shocking than their history is their future—even with just two original members remaining. The new Dolls album, Dancing Backward in High Heels, is glam-rock perfection, swirling a syrup of R&B, doo-wop and punk in a tongue-in-cheek milkshake. We spoke with lead singer David Johansen about the sucker punch of a comeback.

The Dolls’ second act has lasted longer than the first. How did that happen? 
The first time around if certain things had been different we probably would’ve not broken up. [Guitarist] Syl [Sylvain] and I still wanted to play. I think that was a lot of impetuousness of youth. Maybe we needed somebody watching us who could say, “Go to your mutual corners and come back in a month and we’ll talk about it.” As opposed to, “Well, fuck you. Oh, yeah? Well, fuck you.”

Why did you decide to record this album in England? 
It’s nice to go some place different to make a record. But of course I’m saying that in retrospect, because there’s this company in England that had been pursuing us to make a record in their studio so they could put it out in the U.K. So, that was the most… let me think of a good word… fiduciary [Laughs] responsible way to make the record.

I hear a lot of ’50s pop music in the new record. 
Oh, yeah, there’s so many little quotes in there. Which has always been like a Dolls kind of trademark. Some of them I don’t want to say because I don’t want to wind up in plagiarism prison.

Do you find it difficult to write? 
I don’t know that I’d write a song unless it was at gunpoint. It comes time to make a record and we write a bunch of songs. Otherwise, if left to my own devices, I’ll write two songs a year.

After the Dolls broke up, you scored a huge hit as Buster Poindexter. Do you feel you have to explain some of your pop-culture past sometimes? 
I had a lot of fun doing the Buster Poindexter thing. It started in this little bar in my neighborhood. I was going to do on Mondays, like, a little cabaret of jump blues and stuff like that, and it just mushroomed. I started doing weekends and I could walk to work and I was 
making a nice living.

Are you still associated with that character? 
It’s got that “Hot Hot Hot” curse. People go “Oh, Buster Poindexter. ‘Hot Hot Hot.’ ” I think Buster Poindexter, I think [1940s bandleader] Jimmy Liggins and songs of that sort. It’s just selective memory in my case.

The Dolls were famous for looking fabulous onstage and causing a reaction. Do you still try to re-create that or is that a thing of the past? 
Well, I’ve always been chic like a motherfucker, what can I tell you? [Laughs]

Dancing Backward in High Heels 

is out this week on 429 Records.