David Johansen: 15 Essential Songs

New York Times

01-03-2025

It's a paradox that Staten Island, New York City's most conservative borough, produced David Johansen, one of its most outrageous frontmen. Johansen led the New York Dolls, five bright-eyed boys who dressed flamboyantly and dreamed of sounding like the Shirelles crossed with a midtown traffic jam. He died on Friday, at age 75.
The Dolls' self-titled first album, released in 1973, peaked at No. 116 on the Billboard album chart. Dismal, but they never got any higher. The title of their second album, 'Too Much Too Soon,' told the story: The Dolls' ecstatic form of rock 'n' roll is credited as a chief influence on punk rock, but at the time, they were dismissed as talentless charlatans in drag. Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones supposedly called them 'the worst high school band I ever saw,' and even if their A&R man Paul Nelson made up this quote, it summarizes a widely held opinion.
Overwhelmed by rejection, the Dolls disbanded, and Johansen started a solo career that was distinguished by his bonhomie and panache. He took stylistic diversions that included disco, Latin music, folk and vaudeville, and in the late '80s, he began acting in movies, including 'Scrooged' and 'Car 54, Where Are You?' He also performed as Buster Poindexter, a lounge singer whose taste in oldies was more cruise ship than Café Carlyle. Regardless of style or medium, his work retained a sense of humor, a love of individualism and a distaste for conformism.
Johansen seemed to know every good song ever written, a breadth he displayed on Manson of Fun, the weekly SiriusXM satellite radio show he began hosting in 2004. He didn't distinguish between low and high art, or between kitsch and classics. In May 2019, he tweeted a reminder to tune in to Mansion of Fun, and added, 'a passion for music is in itself an avowal. We know more about a stranger who yields himself up to it than about someone who is deaf to music and whom we see every day.'
He yielded himself up to a passion for music as much as anyone who's ever lived. Here are 15 of his best songs.
The first track on their first album immediately demonstrates how the Dolls built raw excitement from distorted power chords and prison-break drums, not to mention Johansen's antic singing. 'Personality Crisis' introduces one of his ongoing themes: the ways the world beats down individualism by doling out 'frustration and heartache.'
Honestly, all 11 songs on the first album deserve to be on this list — it's an unflagging delight. With emphatic joy, Johansen looks down his nose at junkies and hangers-on: 'Most of them are beautiful, but so obsessed with gloom.'
Drugs and booze took a toll, and when the Dolls came up short of new songs for their second album, they padded it with R&B covers. 'Too Much Too Soon' is sometimes too cutesy, but it displays Johansen's comic timing, which became a huge part of his career. In 'Human Being,' he recites to a wayward lover all his flaws, from arrogance to depression, and accepts them: 'If I'm acting like a king / Well, that's 'cause I'm a human being.' Then the Dolls went away for three decades.
Johansen took a few years to recover from the whirlwind, and returned with a self-titled debut album that sounded like someone had given Ritalin to the New York Dolls, allowing them to hone their arrangements and tune their guitars. 'Funky But Chic' is an anthem for Johansen's particular type of seedy, emaciated glamour: 'Mama thinks I look pretty fruity, but in jeans I feel rockin'.'
Johansen always exuded an inclusive type of humanism, with particular love for outcasts and the defenseless. In 'Girls,' he makes it clear that hard-rock misogyny isn't for him: 'Girls, I like 'em seizing the power / With girls, it takes me more than an hour.' Compares very favorably to 'Girls' by Beastie Boys or Mötley Crüe's 'Girls Girls Girls.'
This overlooked gem is pedal-down rock dotted with irresistible 'doo-doo-doo-doo' background vocals. Johansen turns so joyful and eager to prove the conceit of the title, he's practically speaking in tongues: 'I want your economic growth,' he hoots, whatever that means.
'Here Comes the Night,' the most professional-sounding album of Johansen's career, still has plenty of twists, including 'Marquesa de Sade,' an augury of his commitment to Latin music. 'You Fool You' is a reproach and a call to action directed at a mopey lad who's home alone 'with a girlie magazine' when he should be out looking for a kiss.
A live medley of songs by the Animals gave Johansen the closest thing he ever had to a hit. He followed it up with 'Sweet Revenge,' a surprising and clumsy diversion into new wave rock. 'The Stinkin' Rich' is his nauseated but comical critique of the money-focused yuppification of New York, if not America. He even admits his envy: 'Who's got big money, and won't give none to me?'
Listening to a Buster Poindexter album can't compare to having seen Johansen perform as his alter ego, especially in a small club like Tramps in New York, where Poindexter debuted in 1983. Dressed nattily in a tuxedo and bow tie, Johansen gave a master class is being cavalier, dispensing quips and unearthing pre-rock gems. 'Screwy Music' was first recorded by Jimmie Lunceford and His Orchestra in 1936, and describes a mental patient who claims he was institutionalized because he loves music too much. Johansen could relate.
When his career as Poindexter was running its course, Johansen reclaimed his own name on two albums of prewar American folk music. 'Delia,' which recounts the murder of an African American teenage girl in 1900, had been covered by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and, umm, Pat Boone. Johansen sometimes crept to the doorstep of minstrelsy in this stage of his career, but the topic required restraint, and he turns 'Delia' into a transfixing six-and-a-half minutes.
Morrissey, a huge Dolls fan, curated the 2004 Meltdown Festival in England and asked the three surviving Dolls (Johansen, the guitarist Sylvain Sylvain and the bassist Arthur Kane, known as Killer) to reunite. They played a few additional shows too, but by the time they were ready to make their first album in 32 years, 'One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This,' Kane had died of leukemia. 'We're All in Love' is the most quotable song on an incisive, quotable album. Johansen celebrates the band's return: 'Jumpin' around the stage like teenage girls / Castin' our swine before the pearls,' he sings, as well as, 'Excommunicated, then canonized.'
The fully grown version of the Dolls was reflective, in addition to delirious, and 'One Day' includes two of Johansen's best ballads: the broke and lonely farewell 'I Ain't Got Nothin',' and 'Maimed Happiness,' a 1950s style waltz, complete with string arrangement, in which a chastened Johansen questions the purpose of life and declares that all he's ever known is 'sorrowful joy.'
Johansen wasn't caught in the past — on 'Cause I Sez So,' he sings about government surveillance, cellphone chatter, religious grifters and the war on drugs, and he's disgusted with all of them. The Dolls' sound expands to include reggae, country twang and spaghetti Western guitars, plus back-alley blues on 'This Is Ridiculous,' in which Johansen bemoans woeful poverty and considers jumping out of a window.
'Dancing Backward in High Heels,' the last of the Dolls' three comeback albums, displays a ripened sound that's more reflective than ecstatic, and there's a clearer sense that to an idealist like Johansen, this world has proved to be a vale of tears. On the up-tempo 'I'm So Fabulous,' he mocks the dull attire of most New Yorkers, champions his own sense of style, rhymes 'arriviste' and 'nebulous,' and proves that the right way to express disgust is with a laugh and a toss of your boa.
In one of his last recorded performances, Johansen summarizes his Buddhist-adjacent philosophy through a series of riddles and paradoxes delivered at breakneck speed over Gary Lucas's careening guitar. He drops references to the Bible, dragons, Hinduism, sex and Hamlet, and sums himself up better than any biographer could: 'Tried to get straight, Lord, I tried to fit in / Can't stop and I can't win.'