Foreign affairs The Dresden Dolls' Dresden debut BY ERIC GERSHON

DRESDEN — It’s 1:45 on a Friday morning, and Amanda Palmer has just shoved a shiny silver vibrator up her nose. Girl Anachronism was dared, and she responded in a blink. While the little toy shakes in her right nostril, she chit-chats, as if it weren’t there at all. Drummer Brian Viglione, Palmer’s partner in the Boston duo the Dresden Dolls, picked up the vibrator on tour. He got one for another girl too, but she’s not here now. He and Palmer are inside their towering tour bus, idling outside a nightclub far from home in the city that inspired their name. In fact, the band have just played their first ever concert in this tough-luck, heartbreak Saxon capital.

"You can’t imagine how terrifying it is to be playing in the city we stole our name from," Palmer had confessed from Star Club’s stage a few hours earlier, moments before tapping out the high-pitched opening notes of "Coin-Operated Boy," the notorious Dresden Dolls song about love and a dildo. A little edge can be a good thing for a performer. It helps keep the engine revved. But there was no need for Palmer or Viglione to be nervous: the locals loved the show. Writing in Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, the city’s major daily broadsheet, Norbert Seidel would rave about the concert. "Sometimes there’s a concert that, from the first beat, not only takes your breath but also stops the clocks, freezes the birds in the trees, and rocks everything in the hope that the crackling tension will never let up. Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione, known as the Dresden Dolls to everyone who pays any attention to music, reached this magic moment and held it for an entire concert." The headline in the Dresdner Morgenpost, the city’s scrappy tabloid, read, "Dresden Dolls: Triumph of Punk-Cabaret at Star Club."

So if Amanda Palmer feels like sticking a sex toy up her nose, why not? It would have been a downer for the Dresden Dolls to bomb in Dresden. But they didn’t. Just as they hadn’t in Berlin or Gent or Liverpool, where, oddly enough, Palmer remembers an English girl coming up to her to thank her for "making Germany cool again."

The Dolls had played several shows in Germany before their March 4 debut at Star Club. But this had been the first time they’d visited Dresden, a city of about 500,000 situated on the Elbe River behind the former East German border — old Iron Curtain turf near the Czech Republic. Once known as the "Florence of the Elbe" for its architectural majesty, Dresden, which was founded 800 years ago, is not the A-list city it was before the Allies’ infamous firebombing at the end of World War II. To this day, buildings destroyed on February 13 and 14, 1945, lie in ruins. And 44 long years of soul-crushing Communist rule didn’t do much to revive the city’s soul.

But Dresden is just the kind of tough-luck place that appreciates punk culture. There’s even a skate shop called the "Fuck You Too Skateboard Shop." It’s in the Neustadt (Dresden’s Latin Quarter), on Alaunstraße, not far from Pension Raskolnikov. The Pension’s logo is an ax.

But back to the Dolls. The band rolled into town early on the day of the show. The night before, they’d played Hamburg, where they’d gone through the last of the CDs — a homonymous 2003 album that was reissued with international distribution last year — they’d brought along to sell at shows. Their first stop in Dresden was the historic Frauenkirche, a Protestant church that was destroyed in ’45 and lay in ruins for decades, a semi-permanent reminder to Dresdeners of the bombing. It’s still under reconstruction and was closed. So much for sightseeing in Dresden.

But Palmer, Viglione, and their crew had more important business to attend to. They were in Europe on a 25-date tour that would take them from Scotland to the Czech Republic. It has started on February 17 and was scheduled to come to a close on March 31, in London, where they’d be opening for Nine Inch Nails.

In Dresden, a band called M.A.S.S. opened for the Dolls. Bad weather had forced Air France to cancel its first two Paris-to-Berlin flights that day and nearly kept me from boarding the third and last flight. So I missed M.A.S.S.’s set. Fortunately, the Dolls were running late. Of course, I had no way of knowing that on my taxi ride over to the club. Had I come all this way only to miss the Dresden Dolls’ Dresden debut? But when my driver mentioned that he’d seen the Dolls on TV earlier that day, I sensed the stars aligning in my favor.

Located in a quiet residential neighborhood far from downtown, Star Club was smoky and packed solid with, a club employee estimated, between 500 and 600 people. Reaching the bar was out of the question. Movement was impossible, except in a narrow channel along the wall stage left, where I posted myself. The crowd simmered quietly with murmured voices. Nose rings, black lace, and tattoos blended in a crush of percolating anticipation. It was an eclectic audience that included an alterna-preppie with well-groomed dreadlocks and a turtleneck sweater, some non-judgmental-looking middle–aged guys with frayed ponytails minding their own business, and absolutely nobody wearing Palmer’s trademark jailbird-striped stockings. When the Dolls took the stage, the audience fell quiet, as if at the opera.

Without a word, the duo launched into "Good Day," the album’s opening track. The audience gave no hint of recognition but seemed on the verge of pleasure, as if gently swishing a first mouthful of spätlese. "Missed Me" followed, and when it was over, Palmer spoke, quietly. "Gute Nacht," she said calmly, and, in her deep voice, "Good evening. It’s kind of impossible to say how excited we are to be in Dresden, so we’ll keep playing and say nothing."

But the incantatory "Backstabber," which the band hasn’t recorded yet, set off the seismograph, and by the time the Dolls rang up "Coin-Operated Boy," the album’s lead single, there was no question the audience had been won over.

Not above pandering to left-leaning Europeans, Palmer roused the crowd to cheers with a little self-flagellating political rhetoric about George W., whose recent visit to Europe had overlapped with the early part of the Dolls’ tour. "For the last two weeks auf tour, we were followed — how do you say followed, verfolgt? — by George Bush," she said, laying down the set-up line. She waited for applause, which was forthcoming. "Now he’s back on his ranch." Pause. "We don’t know what he does there. Fucks cows. We don’t know. So this is a song to express our feelings about George Bush and the current regime in America." The song was a cover of Black Sabbath’s "War Pigs" that’s become a staple of the Dolls’ live set. As they played, Amanda shook her hair loose and thrashed around the keyboard in what provided the show’s most climactic moments. The crowed pulsed. Fists shook.

The band’s new-found fans were duly impressed, especially with the duo’s theatricality. "That’s not typically American," 27-year-old Dresdener Andre said of the blend of punk and cabaret and pop. And everyone I encountered seemed intrigued by the name Palmer had chosen for the duo. "Why the Dresden Dolls?" Sandro, 24, asked. Andre said, "I thought it was a Dresden band." Susann, 26, who’d made the more-than-two-hour trip from Berlin, served up a juicy backhanded compliment: "I’m astounded that an American knows any German cities. Normally you know your own country and nothing else."

Backstage, the Dolls cooled down with friends and associates. Viglione ate grapes. Palmer swigged a beer. A Canadian performance artist named Marykristn who’d hitchhiked from Berlin for the show sat on the couch, legs curled beneath her.

In the US, Dolls shows regularly attract performance artists — living statues (Palmer’s own performance résumé includes her many afternoons as the "Eight-Foot Bride" in Harvard Square), painted mimes, almost-naked women. The Dolls refer to these folks as "the Brigade." A guy in San Francisco recruits them worldwide, largely over the Internet. That’s how Marykristn heard about the Dresden show. She wants to be a circus performer. And she does an expert crab walk. "In general, I am playing with fire," she said in English with a French accent. "But I cannot do it here."

Palmer addressed the matter of the band’s name: "It’s not like I named the band with some giant fucking concept in mind." This despite the Weimar-era trappings of their music and cabaret theatricality, right down to Viglione’s ever-present bowler. She noted that she first encountered it in a work of pulp fiction by V.C. Andrews when she was, "like, 12. It’s taken on meaning as we’ve had to explain it to countless journalists."

"It’s been an awesome name to grow into," Viglione added. "The associations build on it."

As the club urged the band to clear out so it could close up for the night, Palmer gathered her belongings, including a floral-print silk yoga-mat bag. Dirk, the full-time rock-and-roll tour-bus driver on assignment with the Dolls, was waiting in the giant purring bus parked outside. Inside the bus, the carpet was soft, the ceiling plastered with mirrors. The bunks looked snug and warm.

Palmer reviewed the contents of her pillbox — ginseng, Chinese herbs, joint-support pills, grapeseed extract, echinacea pills, multi-vitamins. She’s kind of a health nut. "I exercise a shit ton," mostly yoga, she explained.

And what of the silver vibrator, no bigger than a lipstick case? Does it really vibrate? "But of course," she said, and up her nose it went. Then it was time for the Dolls to sleep, and Dirk to work.