David Johansen: 12 Essential Songs

“We were very raw,” Johansen recalled of his time with New York Dolls. “We were really into confronting the audience: ‘Hey, you stupid bastards. Get up and dance.’” No song better captured the Dolls’ glammed-out R&B than “Personality Crisis,” the opening track on the group’s 1973 debut. Produced by Todd Rundgren during an eight-day session, “Crisis” was the trashy sound of a meltdown: “Frustration and heartache is what you got,” Johansen howled.

“Jet Boy” was the Dolls’ second single, but it’s better remembered as the last track on their debut album, a final fuck-off on their raucous introduction into the rock & roll canon. Singing about a boy on a jet flying around New York stealing babies, Johansen brings to life a fever dream in the dirty city streets — what Rolling Stone’s Tony Glover described as “Marvel Comics meets the Lower East Side.” Their lip-synced performance of it on the BBC show Old Grey Whistle Test made history, too, leading host Bob Harris to brush off the band as “mock rock,” inspiring some viewers — including a 13-year-old Morrissey, who went on to become the president of their fan club — to rally behind them. 

The best thing about “Looking for a Kiss” isn’t the way that Johansen snears his way through the opening, turning a sweet Shangri-Las line (“You best believe I’m in love, L-U-V”) into something more sinister with his scarf-strewn, street-walking stage persona. It’s not even, necessarily, the way Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain’s guitars churn it forward, pounding out the rhythm of a platform-heeled strut down St. Marks. No, what makes this one of Johansen’s best tracks is the intimacy of the lyrics, the way he croons directly to the listener. The identity of his audience is ambiguous — is he singing to a boy? Girl? The heroin itself? It doesn’t matter, he’s opening up for one reason: He’s looking for a kiss. In the original Rolling Stone review of their debut record, critic Tony Glover noted it was “many people’s favorite Dolls song,” but it wasn’t till 1978 that it was released as a single, a double a-side with “Personality Crisis.” Maybe a song about “everyone going to your house to shoot up in your room” was a little risqué in 1973, even for the Dolls. 

Johansen told NPR’s Terry Gross, “Over the years, you know, in the history books, you know, like the Rolling Stone Complete Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll or something, you look in the appendix and see where your name is and see what they say about you. It’s not like you buy the book — and [it] would always say, you know, they were trashy. They were flashy. They were drug addicts. They were drag queens.“ That drug-addict-drag-queen-trash-flash was summed up on “Trash,” the B-side to “Personality Crisis” and the first song on side two of their landmark debut. It’s the original glam-punk anthem – from its hotwired Bo Diddley rumble to its lunatic guitar noise to its falling-into-the-subway-tracks backing vocals to Johansen’s bad-lover-boy shit-talking. Few bands ever boiled down everything that made them great into three minutes the way the Dolls did here.   

The Dolls’ 1973 debut was the quintessential universe-shifting masterpiece that sold pretty much nothing, and the band wasn’t very happy with Todd Rundgren’s production. They originally reached out to legendary Fifties songwriting team Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who suggested Shadow Morton, who had written and produced Shangri-Las classics like “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and “Leader of the Pack.” They knocked out Too Much Too Soon in 1974, loading up the album with old fantastic covers of Archie Bell, the Coasters, and others, as well as killer originals like “Who Are the Mystery Girls” and “It’s Too Late.” It’s a glorious mess of a record that culminates with “Human Being,” one of the all-time classic punk anthems. Over nail-bomb guitar, Johansen and the boys deliver a chorus that perfectly distills their existential glam-punk spirit: “If I’m acting like a king that’s cause I’m a human being.” Any punk rock kid who ever had the guts to blast their noise into a world that wasn’t asking for it, owes this song a beer. 

Starting with his early years in Greenwich Village bar bands, Johansen had unerringly sharp taste in covers. The general public heard a glimpse of that in his medley of the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” “Don’t Bring Me Down,” and “It’s My Life,” a minor hit for him in the early Eighties. But Johansen’s take on “Build Me Up Buttercup,” originally cut by the British soul band the Foundations, truly showed what he could bring to a remake. Hurling himself into the once-bouncy hit, Johansen brought a lovestruck desperation that the original only suggested, and his band matches every ounce of his fervor. Stick with the version on the Live at the Bottom Line set. 

In 1978, Johansen brought out his great solo debut, tilting the Dolls’ sound a bit more toward Seventies rock with the help of a large cast of backing musicians including Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain, Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, and Sarah Dash of LeBelle. Its lead single was the sweet Dolls leftover “Funky But Chic,” which Johansen had written with Sylvain. It’s brash, loud, funny, self-aware, funky, and chic all at once, with Johansen bellowing a tribute to his own outsider sartorial flair. “I got a pair of shoes I swear that somebody gave me/My momma thinks I look pretty fruity but in jeans I feel rockin’,” he bellows. He makes feeling fruity and rockin’ sound like the secret to life. 

“Girls, I like ‘em seizing the power/with girls, it takes me more than an hour,” Johansen sang on this standout from his 1978 solo debut, a very Johanseneqsue statement of solidarity indeed. The rest of the song proceeds on similar lines, as the band delivers tight-but-rollicking bar-band stomp and Johansen digs deep, screams and shouts in what sounds like it could be a lost Dolls classic.

The title track of Johansen’s third solo album was a shout-along declaration of ownership of the evening ahead. Here, that included a lover, a party, and a few hours when “everything is alright.” Johansen teamed with Blondie Chaplin, the Beach Boys’ secret weapon, to find a vibrant, unrelenting production style (Chaplin wrote the song too) that nodded to his New York Dolls punk roots while also embracing the slicker sounds of the early Eighties. The result is a throughline of Johansen’s two worlds.

Johansen elevated his profile (and his hair) with the outrageous lounge singer persona Buxter Poindexter — “I can get away with murder as Buster,” he told Conan O’Brien in 1995 — and became a fixture of the MTV era with his cover of “Hot Hot Hot” and its street-party music video. Originally written and recorded by calypso artist Arrow, Johansen’s version amped up the tropical vibes and the cheese, giving him both a hit and an inescapable signature. “That was, like, the bane of my existence, that song,” Johansen told NPR in 2004. “It was ubiquitous… they play it at weddings, bar mitzvahs, Six Flags.”

We tend to associate Johansen’s alter-ego with pompadour-in-cheek party songs, but Buster had another, more melancholy side that emerged every so often. There’s no better example than this forlorn, Latin-flavored shuffle from the second Buster album, Buster Goes Berserk. Written by saxophonist and band member Tom Brown, the song plays like a great, lost Doc Pomus classic, as a more introspective Buster ditches the shtick and mulls over being “one of the poorest people/Who’s not in love with someone in love.” It was Buster’s own personality crisis, and one of Johansen’s peak later moments.

Johansen was in his mid-fifties by the time the Dolls reunited, against all odds, for 2006’s One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. But his eternal-kid energy shone through on songs like this starry-eyed glam anthem. “Jumpin’ round the stage like teenage girls/Castin’ our swine before the pearls,” Johansen sang gleefully, as if the Dolls’ Seventies party never ended. “Don’t fuck with us, what people say/They go to work, we go to play!” He told an interviewer in 2007 that that lyric summed up his philosophy: “If it was like a job, I wouldn’t even want to do it. That’s the thing that has kept us going, and the reason why we are here now is because we have fun doing it. It’s really a great thing to be in a band where everybody is playing for the sake of what we want to hear.”