At the place where early 1970s glam met late ‘70s punk, you will find the New York Dolls. They stood at the forefront of a new evolution of popular music, swapping out earnestness and musicianship for attitude and energy. It was a transaction that was much maligned at the time and which is still looked upon with condescension by serious rock scholars today.
However, if you were to plot out the trajectory of popular music on some sort of scattergram, the New York Dolls almost certainly had more impact and foretold the future more accurately than did the Eagles, arguably their polar opposite in the early 1970s.
The man who stood in front of the Dolls, often in heavy makeup and with various parts of his torso unclothed, was David Johansen. He died on Friday at 75.
New York Dolls front man David Johansen died at age 75
Johansen lived longer than any of his Dolls bandmates. Rhythm guitarist Sylvain Sylvain died a few years ago at the age of 69. Arthur Kane, the tall blond bassist who at times merely stood on stage without actually playing, passed away about 20 years ago, at 55. Johnny Thunders – the Keith Richards to Johansen’s Mick Jagger - died when he was just 38, back in 1991. The original drummer, Billy Murcia, succumbed to an overdose while the band was touring the UK in 1972. Murcia was 21.
The fact that Johansen outlived them all may mean nothing. A bit of good fortune, perhaps. But I think it might suggest something about Johansen as an artist as well. David Johansen understood as well as anyone in the rock era what his role was.
He was not particularly talented. He could sing, but not nearly as well as a lot of other vocalists who never achieved his level of success. He could write some clever, catchy songs, but his output was rather limited and, truth be told, kind of redundant. Eventually, he would come to rely on covers far more than originals.
No, Johansen didn’t make it because he was gifted. He made it because he had the very rare ability to be a genuine revolutionary without ever getting entirely subsumed by the revolution. Johansen understood that as frontman of the New York Dolls, his job was to play a part – a part that rattled the rafters of New York City music in the pre-disco era – a part that inspired countless major players in what would become punk rock and Britpop for decades to come.
He dressed in outlandish clothes that were both homage and parody. But the bond he formed with his fans during live shows was as genuine as it gets. The Dolls were one of the clearest examples of a band whose true value could never be captured in the studio. They had to be seen live to understand why they mattered. You will hear the same thing about the B-52s and Bad Brains in the years that followed.
Johansen learned stagecraft as a teen working with Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, a transgressive NY ensemble that put gay characters and gay themes front and center beginning in the mid-1960s. The Dolls, whose original name was Actress, employed extravagant sexual playfulness as part of their pounding, grinding rock & roll.
Hearing Johansen’s ragged vocals on the lead off track of their self-titled debut album would not call to mind a man in lipstick with frizzed out hair. When he shouts out “Personality Crisis,” he sounds just like Jagger – a tougher, American Jagger.
That first album – produced by Todd Rundgren – did not match the hype that rock critics had been writing about the Dolls. Rundgren was the wrong producer, but it’s doubtful anyone could have lassoed the unruly group. They weren’t a studio band.
That led to a fissure in their inchoate fanbase. In ’73, they achieved the truly remarkable feat of being voted Best New Band and Worst New Band by the readers of Creem Magazine. But when they toured Europe at the end of the year, future Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, along with core members of what would become Duran Duran and Ultravox, were among their disciples. Perhaps their most famous fan was 13-year-old Steven Patrick Morrissey, who would front the Smiths a decade later.
Had Johansen never done anything beyond fronting the Dolls, he would be vital to rock history. The fact that he completely reinvented himself as Buster Poindexter – different look, different sound, but no less theatrical – demonstrates Johansen’s recognition of rock music as performance.
The transition to actor was seamless. Johansen acted in dozens of films and TV shows over the years, most famously playing alongside his friend Bill Murray as the Ghost of Christmas Past in the 1988 movie Scrooged.
Two years ago, Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi filmed the documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only about Johansen's career. Scorsese admitted that he relied heavily on the New York Dolls debut album when he was in the weeds of filming his very first movie. The movie does a great job of capturing a remarkable life, but I still kind of feel like it suffers in the same way that those original New York Dolls albums did. With David Johansen, you really had to be there.