Unlike the other New York Dolls — the band he didn’t quite invent but came to personify after he was recruited when geeky bassist Arthur Kane and doomed drummer Billy Murcia knocked on his door in 1971 and asked if he’d join — David Johansen grew up solidly middle class on Staten Island, where his opera-loving dad was in insurance and his mom worked as a librarian. But he wouldn’t have skipped college to relocate to the East Village if he didn’t have artier plans. When I first saw them in December 1972, in the SRO Oscar Wilde Room of the long since collapsed Mercer Arts Center, I went in a skeptic and came out so psyched I raved to my wife, who raved herself after their even more-mobbed gig in the same room a week later. After that, it was every chance we got, including dinner for the band on my then-employer Newsday, and ultimately sitting in on their Todd Rundgren-produced debut album sessions for Mercury, where folkie guru turned A&R eccentric Paul Nelson had become Johansen’s doomed prophet.
But big deals though they were in the Mercer Arts Center, what I told Newsday was that Johansen’s “desperate, bombed-out, unisex power” failed to make much of a dent with a rock audience both unremittingly masculine and marooned ideologically between a U.K. riding out the Beatlemania wave and a U.S. mired in lame post-folkie notions of both authenticity and the big beat. Neither the 1973 debut New York Dolls nor its 1974 follow-up Too Much Too Soon — produced by Shadow Morton, whose sole major credit was the legendary girl group the Shangri-Las — cracked the Top 100, great albums though both are now thought to be. The finale of the follow-up summed up what Johansen would be about till the day he died — titled simply “Human Being,” its tireless refrain went simply: “Well if I’m acting like a king, that’s because/I’m a human being.” And on a personal note, I’ll add that those two lines were the title I proposed for a criticism collection that in the end was called Grown Up All Wrong. A little long, Harvard thought, and that wasn’t all.
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The New York Dolls didn’t disappear after their second album flopped in the marketplace. There were even the occasional shows — one where the rejiggered band dressed all in red, and later a May 1976 appearance at Max’s Kansas City, where guitarist Syl Sylvain was the only other original member (and remained one decades later). My wife, Carola Dibbell, reviewed it for The Village Voice, providing a firsthand historical account of how Johansen presented himself in what was already a bleak time for him: “Too smart not to survive and too smart to be boring about it,” he “can’t create his own context — but he can’t be upstaged either,” and with “his own considerable tenderness” to boot. This show was a debut of sorts for the shoulda-been classic “Frenchette” (“like that dietetic salad dressing,” Johansen explained): “You call that loving French/But it’s just Frenchette/I’ve been to France/So let’s just dance.” He clearly was going to be sticking around even if the group that a cadre of true believers thought deserved to take over the world was sadly kaput.
The band Johansen first signed on with and then shaped failed to get over for multiple reasons, not least of which was the kind of built-in disarray that can doom any public enterprise. Professionalism didn’t come easy to these crazies, who’d lost original drummer Billy Murcia to a tranquilizer OD on a highly optimistic British fling in 1972, although his replacement Jerry Nolan proved the band’s most technically accomplished musician until he died of just barely natural causes 20 years later. Kane could hardly play bass at all, trouper in waiting Syl Sylvain was no hotshot technically, and although guitarist Johnny Thunders’s squalling sound was so original he had a solo career, most prominently in a band he called the Heartbreakers, until he OD’d — how and on what so disputed it’s best classified as unknown — in 1991. But Johansen himself never left show business even though the band that made him sort of famous offended right thinkers all over middle America while presaging two major cultural developments he played an unmistakable role in seeding even if he espoused both from a distance that came naturally.
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The first was gay pride. I honestly have no idea what the erotic life of the man who in 2004 told a Rikers Island audience I was part of that he’d tried to convince his faithful mate Syl that “what we had in the ’70s wasn’t really sex” did or didn’t entail. For sure he was publicly heterosexual for the entirety of his long post-Dolls life, most impressively with his third wife, Mara Hennessey, who I met while reporting a piece in 2005 and who saw Johansen through the long bout with the cancer that just now killed him. But without question, the Dolls’ playful pansexual affect did no less and quite possibly more than David Bowie’s calculated gender-fuck or Elton John’s belated coming-out party to challenge rock’s all too heterosexual male chauvinism. And the second was punk. Structurally, the Dolls’ music was “rock” with healthy helpings of “and roll” on the side. But their force-beat speed and proud clatter presaged the kind of musical noise that would arise at CBGB just as they were riding Too Much Too Soon into the oblivion it was much too good for. And as far as America at large was concerned, the fact that they chose to vaunt their big-city pride with their shamelessly urban, geographically braggadocious name was more than enough to Make America Mad Again.
But Johansen had a long, varied, and accomplished solo career for the three decades that followed the Dolls’ disappearance from the musical marketplace. The four mostly excellent solo albums he released between 1977 and 1982 included gems like “Girls” (“I love ’em seizing the power)” and “Funky but Chic” (“My mama thinks I look fruity, but in jeans I feel rockin’”), like “Wreckless Crazy” and “Bohemian Love Pad” and “Heart of Gold” and the aforementioned “Frenchette,” some of them coextensive with the Dolls but as the years went on most of them not. Before too long, he invented a doppelgänger dubbed Buster Poindexter who was a fixture of the New York club circuit and made clear that the punk godfather loved all kinds of pop music, most of which Johansen wrote up himself and some of which he didn’t — including the Americana classics he convened a pickup group he dubbed the Harry Smiths to perform at the Bottom Line. And when he gathered together a new edition of the New York Dolls for a unimaginable and aesthetically ambitious 2005 album, he sure did come up with a prophetic title: Some Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This.
The two subsequent new-Dolls albums weren’t altogether up to that standard, although it’s impossible to imagine what would be. Instead, it was the pro called Buster Poindexter whose Cafe Carlisle set was the linchpin of Martin Scorsese’s superb 2023 Johansen documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only — shot, it now becomes clear, after the Johansen I described as “a gratifyingly hale 70-year-old whose voice seems barely diminished” was aware he was harboring the cancer that would eventually kill him. I had my doubts about whether the slicksters who populate the kind of house bands who make their keep at overpriced joints like the Carlisle could do justice to a rock & rolling vulgarian like David Jo even in his Poindexter persona. But their set proves the perfect capper of a film we now have the most compelling reason imaginable to be grateful for.
Maybe Scorsese could even release the unabridged set as a stand-alone. Problem is, leaving out the biographical details that constitute most of Scorsese’s biodoc would cost anyone who admires David as much as I do the film’s most revealing physical detail: the modest statue of Buddha in the garden behind his and Mara Hennessey’s house, which is contextualized in the film by a brief Johansen disquisition about how he came up with the Some Day It Will Please You title “Maimed Happiness,” a phrase he lifted from William James. It peaks with a couplet that goes “You got the human condition/Boy I feel sorry for you.” Sure the first two Dolls albums were unjustly ignored masterpieces. But Johansen was never going to stop there.
Robert Christgau’s newsletter “And It Don’t Stop” appears three or four times a month on substack.
