The Dresden Dolls as life soundtrack
It’s 2017, a chilly Monday night, and I’m standing near the back of the floor crowd at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston. Swaying along to their anthemic “Sing,” jubilant and a little teary, I realize I have no idea how many times I’ve seen the Dresden Dolls perform — I’m sure it’s at least 4 times in this venue alone. Since 2003, I’ve seen them pretty much every time they’ve come to town, or done at show at the ART, or had a brief reunion tour. Yet I don’t know that I’ve ever once bought the ticket that got me there. Which is the oddest thing about it: while I do love the Dolls, I don’t know that I’d call myself a fan, exactly. But having spent the bulk of my adulthood in Boston, The Dolls have formed a kind of soundtrack to my life.
Which raises a question: what does it mean, to be a fan? It’s an odd thing, that perhaps shifts in different life phases. I’m a singer, and when I truly love a band, I absorb the lyrics and sing along like crazy. But as many times as I’ve heard the Dolls’ classics — “Half Jack,” “Coin-Operated Boy,” “Missed Me,” “Delilah” — I still don’t know the words, and can’t quite sing along. I never sat in my room, rapt, listening to the albums end to end to end again and memorizing every moment. And that’s how I understood being a fan when I was younger: the entire discography of The Smiths, The Indigo Girls, Tori Amos, musical theatre soundtracks swallowed whole. (I could likely still sing you Les Miserables end to end.) There were songs that changed my life, songs that made me feel seen and heard and known. And I know that the Dresden Dolls were that, for many, many people, many of whom were singing along that night, but never so loudly that they drowned out Amanda.
After college, though, things changed, as they do. I had a lot less time to sit around in my room listening to music. I got sucked into the musical tastes of partners. Music distribution started to shift. When I first heard the Dolls I was maybe 28, recently out of a long and bad relationship, the man I’d felt stuck with for five years through an early-mid-twenties last gasp of my adolescent insecurities, my certainty that nobody worthwhile would ever really want me. I’d recently met and partnered up with my first polyamorous lover, and was living in my own place (mostly; I was at his place, a polyamorous co-op, an awful lot). I was finishing grad school and working a full-time job, and both feeling like a Real Adult for the first time, and basking in what felt like a Real Relationship for the first time. I was in Big Love, several times over, in fact, for another new partner came into my life not long after the first one, and my tumultuous two years or so of being OMG POLY had officially taken off. I was fresh meat in the Boston scene, and for a little while I went out with practically everyone. Still, my heart dropped into my stomach and bounced back up again for two main men, and the Dolls, when I first saw them, reflected back some of that passion and overwroughtness to me. I was learning a lot of things late, and finally, with tiny steps at first and then great ill-advised leaps, becoming the person I always hoped I would be.
Still, I tried listening to the album a few times and realized that the Dolls had a peculiar strength when seen live: “Girl Anachronism” sounded noisy and thin to me on the recording; “Coin-Operated Boy” was cute, but lacked the exquisite telepathy of Amanda and Brian’s performance together, seen in person and experienced as a living, breathing piece of art. (Neil Gaiman writes profoundly about seeing this synergy for the first time, after becoming engaged to Amanda, here.) Seeing them live continued to be something I did every time I got the chance, yet I only ever got the chance when somebody else brought it up. Because while I love what they do, the themes of the music always felt like they were about something else, someone else: someone younger, cooler, wilder and more broken, someone who hadn’t had the sheltered life that I did. So I didn’t listen to them at home. And every time I found myself standing at the Paradise, or the Avalon, or the Orpheum, or the Somerville Theatre, I kept being blown away by the experience — the reality — of their performances.
Years passed. That first tumultuous polycule (though we didn’t have that word, yet) ended in 2004, in an ugly fashion; I met and got swept up by and married a man I maybe shouldn’t have; fell in love many more times, and kept going to Dolls concerts. The Dolls broke up; so did my marriage. My new-in-2012 partner was a massive fan as well; I followed the phenomenon known as AFP less closely than he did, but still went to see her a few times. I grew, I changed, I calmed down some. I went through some massive grieving over losing the life I had been building. I kept building a new life with the kindest and most loving man I’ve known.
And then last year, The Dolls did a little tour with a show at the whatever-the-hell-bank-owns-it-now Pavilion in Boston, and we went. Hell, everyone went; I must have seen more people I knew there than I do at most parties I go to. I saw people I hadn’t seen in years, wearing stripey stockings and bowler hats and lingerie, drinking $14 Harpoons out of big plastic cups and being grateful, because we were here to see the Dolls.
And it was good. Even in a huge space like that, it was good. They brought on all of Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band, a local group with some of my friends in it, to play along. They had a whole burlesque troupe join them. They essentially, as always, used their platform to showcase a whole lot of other emerging artists. And of course, they rocked the damn place.
Still, I left feeling old, feeling like I was revisiting an old time, feeling like, maybe, still, after everything, that The Dolls had just been a phase I’d gone through.
The fall came. Trump got elected. I lost my father. 2017 began, with its daily parade of horrors. I started supporting Amanda on Patreon. I’m paying attention to what she’s doing, and finding it meaningful, painful, thrilling. And then it was last Monday night. The Dolls were at the Paradise again, their old Boston home. And so even though it was a Monday night, and my wonderful partner (who’d bought the tickets, natch) was unable to go, and even though I was depressed and exhausted…I got it together, put on my stripey stockings and curling eyeliner, found some f’ing Boston parking, and went.
It’s probably 15 years now since I saw my first Dolls show, and this may be the best one I’d ever seen. The crowd was all-in, dressed up and present and listening, but also with the Dolls, in a way that they were with us, solid and true and on some kind of equal footing, all of us singing the same tune, all of us trying to make it through this goddamn mess our world has become. They played Madonna’s “Material Girl” as a death-metal dirge. They played “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” apparently by accident. They did “Amsterdam” and “Pirate Jenny;” they invited their old friend up to sing “Delilah” with them, unplanned, and while I didn’t know what his personal relationship to the song was, it was plain there was one, and I was floored by his pain and catharsis. At the end of “Half Jack” — which always haunts me, given my relationship with my own father — I couldn’t stop myself yelling out the song’s final echoes. And with darkness and beauty and always absolutely committed performance, with intense emotional presence and with humor and love and authenticity, they were with us, and we with them. Just sing.
I left that club hours later with more heart, more sorrow, more joy, more hope than I’d felt in a while. It was a quiet sensation, the shimmering silence after a heart-opening, when you’re waiting at that precipice to see if it’s all going to fall away from you again. But it was there again: that yearning, that reality, that sense that maybe now, or now, or now, you can be the person you always hoped you would be.
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