The Living Dolls

Imagine yourself running amongst purple flower factories and fields of blue strawberries. Imagine witches flying through the air. Imagine (just do it), a saftey pin tree and orange clouds raining tears. imagine rats whispering in your ears.

Your slowly getting an idea of the world the living dolls reside in.
Part beguiling world full of color and part light blue nightmare. A place where lions mew like kittens and love human beings and winged,fire breathing kitty cats are bent on your destruction.

The Living Dolls, the debut CD from The Living Dolls is 10 songs about broken hearts, relationships gone bad, and letting go of that which demands to be let go. Close your eyes, let yourself go but be carefull, You never know when a winged, fire breathing kitty cat is going to swoop down and incinerate you or what a rat will whisper in your ear

Mix power pop, rock, psychedelic, garage, mod, punkv arena rock. the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and 00’s and you’ll get an idea of the sound of The Living Dolls. The Living Dolls are an alternative blend of old and new. Somehow familiar yet strangely unrecognizable The Dolls play music they love with a devotion to sound, style and show not found inmusic in quite some time.

First formed in 2000 in Los Angeles Ca by singer/songwriter Josh Gordon, The Living Dolls released their first album “The Living Dolls” in 2001. After playing to enthusiastic crowds (meaning no one cared) Josh decided to try something different and so he moved to San Francisco. There He met Drummer Alex DeCarville who instantly dug the 60’s meets 70’s alternative Mod sounds. Alex recruited guitarist Jiri, bassist Huck Wirtz and Huck’s Wife vocalist Amy Shepard.

For reasons unknown to this day Josh moved back to Los Angeles.

Josh had been a staple of the Los Angeles Mod scene of the mid eighties playing is such bands as The Question (with Tony Rugalo) and Strawberry Blue. Frequently hitting the local mod hang-out The ON CLUB and seeing local mod heavyweights The Untouchables every friday night.

JOSH ON THE SCENE AND ON BEING MOD NOW:
It was amazing. Every Friday night The Untouchables would play the On Club. The On Club was in Echo Park/Silverlake in Los Angeles. That area now is a very "hip/cool" place to be. Back then it was an out of the way, sketchy part of town. The place was always packed. We'd be outside sneaking drinks, popping pills, smoking a joint, whatever was passed around. A hundred scooters outside. We were very tight knit. The whole scene. Everyone knew everyone else and while it got a pretty nuts sometimes it was a blast. This was before drugs started ravaging some of us. Everything was pretty authentic then. The clothes, music, style. As I got older I became interested in mainaining the comraderie of the mod scene and the asthetic and iconography as well but with a more progressive touch. I wasn’t as interested in being as extremely literal with it as we were back then. The influences are definitely there with us now. Both musically and stylisticly but the reigns are quite loose. The music stretches those boundries out a bit. Mod purists will probably hate us.
Our window into Mod back then was The Who, The Kinks, The Small Faces and bands like The Jam and Secret Affair. We were also really into some of the two-tone stuff. Particularly The Specials. We didn't walk in through the Tamla/Motown/Stax door. We were definitely caught by the power pop side of it. My philosophy has always been If it's good I'll listen to it, absorb it, and either conciously or unconciously mix it up with everything else I like. That's why our music may not be authentically mod but in the 21st century that would be pretty boring to me as a songwriter and musician. Besides, I have a very short attention span. Doing only one thing would drive me nuts. Asthetically we have basically the same philosophy as the music. 60's/mod born but affected by our other influences as well. late 70's new wave and proto-punk, first-wave punk rock, etc...