In August, I wrote about my love of the music history podcast No Dogs in Space, but mourned the fact that there hadn’t been a new episode in over two years. Little did I know that hosts Carolina Hidalgo and Marcus Parks were gearing up to announce the show’s return with season four, Punk 2.0. The first episode premiered this week, part one of a series on the New York Dolls, a band near and dear to my heart as a native Staten Islander, home of frontman David Johansen.
For the new season, Hidalgo and Parks decided it was time to get back to basics. Part of that was that they felt punk rock was where their passion and expertise were strongest. Parks said that they “wanted to go all over. I wanted to do Beethoven at one point,” but that “we realize like what we do best is tell a punk story, right? Not the punk story, but a punk story.“ But also, they said, that’s just where the most interesting stories are. After spending enormous amounts of time translating German into English for their experimental rock series, they realized that, often, the story behind the bands boils down to ”art school kids fucking around.”
There were a number of reasons why the new season took so long to come together. But one of the biggest is that the duo made a few false starts. Early on, the plan was to tackle the DC punk scene. Hidalgo told The Verge that “we worked on it for over six months” and that they planned to launch the series with Bad Brains. “And then we look into them,” Hidalgo said, “and they’re like, incredibly homophobic. Like, fire and brimstone … A lot of No Dogs bands like, they’re problematic, but that was like a really tough one to focus on.”
The two then attempted to do a series that covered the DC as a whole — “never do that,” Hidalgo warned. Parks said that “it just kept swelling larger,” listing off a number of acts that may not have been part of the DC punk scene, but were important foundational elements, like Chuck Brown and go-go. The two even mused that Georgetown University’s WGTB radio might be worthy of a series all on its own. But ultimately, “when you try to put all of them together, you can’t. You just can’t put all of these stories together,” Parks said. “And after eight months of working on it … we eventually had to admit defeat.”
The effort wasn’t a total waste, however. They did get a two-part series on Link Wray out of it that will premiere later this year.
Like any season of No Dogs in Space, part of the fun is the weird sidequests and rabbit holes that Parks and Hidalgo go down. During the New York Dolls series, Hidalgo became obsessed with Mott the Hoople. The band is best known for their David Bowie-penned hit “All the Young Dudes,” but their story is a fascinating one. Hidalgo says lead singer Ian Hunter “was just a guy digging ditches. And then he got a call from a friend who said, ‘Hey, there’s a band, and like, they’re not very good, and they need a new lead singer,’ and so he just showed up.” Hunter also wrote “Cleveland Rocks,” which was covered by The Presidents of the United States of America and became the theme for The Drew Carey Show.
Parks says he became obsessed with drag queen Jackie Curtis. “It could be argued that the punk style that is often credited to Richard Hell probably actually originated with Jackie Curtis,” he said. He also shared a story about how Curtis once “went out on to [their] windowsill… like Batman, inching like Batman” to get into the apartment of a recently deceased neighbor to steal her clothes before the coroner came.
It’s these sorts of tangents that make No Dogs in Space so compelling. “We live our lives in like a state of obsession,” Parks said. “Obsession really is, it is kind of our superpower. And we were both recently diagnosed with autism and discovered that that’s just who we are. That’s the superpower that we get.“
If you’re wondering where to start, the new series on the New York Dolls is as good as any. The Dolls were a protopunk and glam act that played an important role in building the NYC scene. But I also can’t recommend the series on the Replacements, Dead Kennedys, or Joy Division enough. You can listen to the new season of No Dogs in Space now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you find fine podcasts. Or, for the first time, the show will be posted on YouTube as full video episodes.
