RIP David Johansen

 RIP DAVID JOHANSEN

(9 January 1950 - 28 February 2025)

 

My introduction to the New York Dolls was an article in Hit Parader magazine from August 1974 in which the writer, either Lisa or Richard Robinson, discussed the then nascent New York pun scene and referenced the Dolls as one of the forerunners of the current scene. By this time, Johnny Thunders had left the band and was fronting the Heartbreakers while, if  I’m correct, David Johansen still led a version of the Dolls, managed by Malcom McLaren.

 

The takeaway from this article was that the young Johansen was a kind of Mick Jagger lookalike and that the Dolls played raucous, Stonesy rock & roll while dressed in women’s clothes and high heels, not because they were cross dressers but because they wanted to outrage the establishment. Mind you, this was well before glam rock became a thing in the UK.

 

Of course, at the time, I had no idea what the New York Dolls music sounded like. My local music store didn’t stock either of their two albums and the radio didn’t play any of their songs. If the Dolls were obscure in the USA, other than in their New York scene, they might as well not have existed for South African purposes.

 

Fast forward a couple of years and by mid-1977 I was a regular reader of the NME, usually about 3 months after time because the rock weekly came to South Africa by mailboat, right at the time when it’s focus was on all things punk. NME writers regularly referenced the Dolls, The Stooges and the MC5 as influences on the UK punk scene and it was in the pages of the NME that I was educated about these three, and other, then defunct bands hailed as proto-punk.

 

Between 1977 and late 1981 I acquired the first two Stooges albums and the first two MC5 albums but still never saw any New York Dolls records in the record stores I frequented.

 

I was still buying Hit Parader and they were still championing Johansen  as solo artist, in features and record reviews and those, combined with NME’s recommendations, in that 1977 to 1081 period,  I did buy David Johansen (1978) and In Style (1979) and, in probably 1983 or ’84, Here Comes the Night (1982). 

 

I preferred the first two albums over the third one because they were light-hearted rock and roll fun, straddling the line between what I imagined the Dolls had sounded like and the influences of punk and New Wave. The production of the third record made it sound as if had been recorded with session musicians and was aimed at a mainstream, AOR rock audience and was therefore a far more serious attempt at crafting a radio friendly, commercially successful record than might’ve been the case with the first albums.

 

After that I lost interest in Johansen’s music.  I saw him in the movie Scrooged and took note of his Buster Pointdexter alter ego and thought that he’d given up the struggle to be independent and idiosyncratic and had surrendered to the lures of filthy lucre in a mainstream showbiz career.

 

I was mildly surprised to come across the album Shaker (2002) by Johansen and the Harry Smiths probably about 10 years after its release, at a flea market stall. The well-known blues songs on the track listing convinced me to buy the CD at its discounted price and when I played it, I was smitten by this, to me, really weird deviation in Johansen’s musical direction. I saw the Buster Pointdexter persona as a joke that somehow became commercially successful and hardly thought of Johansen, given the oeuvre I knew, as aspiring to being a bluesman.  Whatever, I liked the record and then sought out the earlier album, just called David Johansen & the Harry Smiths (2000), which was as satisfying as Shaker. 

 

The only New York Dolls track I’d been familiar with, since the late ‘90s, was “Trash” from a compilation of tracks from bands that had influenced UK punk and this fast paced, insouciant and exhilarating song seemed to be the perfect realisation of what I’d thought of as the Dolls sound, based on what the Hit Parader and NME had to say, as a rollicking update on old-school rock and roll with a fresh edge  yet not the same harsh edge that punk often had though “Trash” shared the same sense of melody. And song structure, unlike the hard core or straight edge punk that emerged in the USA after UK punk had finally made its way to the US.

 

It was only after I joined Apple Music sometime after 2015 that I had access to New York Dolls (1973) and Too Much Too Soon (1874).  By this time, I hardly found them life changing but they were fun and hugely pleasurable to listen to and I saw these records as forerunners, not so much to punk, but to other pre-punk bands like The Dictators 9especially their debut album)  and the early Cheap Trick where power, melody and humour were pre-eminent.

 

The difficulty with looking back at bands that were praised by rock critics when they started out,  not being part of any scene, the band was involved in and hearing their music not only years later but also after being exposed to the bands they influenced, is that the discovery is not mind blowing and one doesn’t always get why the band might have been so highly regarded in the first place.  I’ve read the history of the Dolls and it must’ve been a blast being at the Mercer Arts Center in New York when the Dolls played there in the early ‘70s partly because of the way the guys dressed and partly because the music was at odds with the prevailing fashion of heavy metal and prog rock, but, frankly, now, the music isn’t particularly original or impactful. I still prefer the Stooges’ Fun House (1970) and the MC5’s Back in the USA (1970) as records, even well after their original release dates, that had a genuine impact on me but maybe it was also because I was in my late teens at the time.

 

Regardless, I enjoy the Dolls’ albums and I’m really fond of  David Johansen, In Style and Shaker.  With the latter he really got my respect for not being just some New York rocker dilettante dabbling in all manner of activities that would earn him a buck.

 

One odd thing about Johansen though, on a purely personal level, is how badly he aged from the fresh faced, Jagger  wanna be pretty boy to a guy with a ravaged, jowly, deeply lined face that contrasted starkly and incongruously with his youthful, no doubt tinted, locks, in which he still resembled a Jagger wanna be who couldn’t do much about how his face aged but would be damned if he were going to allow his hair to age in the same way.. Interestingly, he was less than 10 years younger than Jagger.

 

Anyhow, Johansen was a large presence, I guess, on the New York scene, at least amongst his peers who experienced and celebrated the same scene though he was hardly a giant in the rock field. I suppose the New York Dolls will always be fondly thought of  and be  noted as precursors and harbingers of a musical genre that briefly turned the rock world on its head in the late ‘70s without themselves ever achieving that level of contemporaneous popularity.  They’ll probably continued to be lumped in with the Velvet Underground, MC5 and Stooges as prophets that were barely honoured in their own time yet whose influence spread like pebbles cast into a calm lake.

 

That is a substantial legacy and David Johansen helped created the legacy and then had a second act, a third act and even a fourth act and during the course of his career created an intriguing selection of music that is, and will always be, part of my record collection.