David Johansen’s Debauched, Preening Brilliance

This past Friday, the singer David Johansen, perhaps best known as the debauched, preening front man of the New York Dolls, a band essential to the genesis of punk rock in New York City in the nineteen-seventies, died of cancer, at age seventy-five. The Dolls released five studio albums over a thirty-eight year period, beginning in 1973, with their loose and raunchy Todd Rundgren-produced début, “The New York Dolls.” In “Please Kill Me,” Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s definitive oral history of the scene, Johansen talks about the lawlessness of the band’s earliest days, when they were regular performers at the Mercer Arts Center, a venue on the Lower East Side: “The audiences were pretty depraved,” Johansen said. “We couldn’t come out in three-piece suits and entertain that bunch. They wanted something more for their money. And we were very confrontational. We were very raw.” (Incidentally, the Mercer had to be torn down soon after, when a neighboring hotel collapsed “like a pancake,” per the fire chief—an event that feels indicative of the dereliction and indelicacy of both the punk scene and of downtown New York in the summer of 1973).

Johansen was born on Staten Island, on January 9, 1950. After graduating from high school, he became interested in the provocative countercultural art collectives coalescing around Manhattan, including Andy Warhol’s Factory and Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Johansen helped form the New York Dolls in 1971. Persona was crucial to early punk—it was the cornerstone of the whole chaotic endeavor—and Johansen, who often wore makeup and women’s clothing, could be an audacious showman, carnal and stagy in the spirit of James Brown or Little Richard. In 1973, the Dolls performed a brief set on NBC’s “The Midnight Special,” a variety show that aired on Friday nights after Johnny Carson. I’ve probably watched this particular performance of “Trash,” a single from “The New York Dolls,” several thousand times. Johansen is wearing shiny leather pants, a bangle on each wrist, a wide red belt, a cropped blouse (unbuttoned), and heeled boots. He was twenty-three. Is he chewing gum? Yes, I think so. He plays it cool, all sinew and confidence, hands on his hips.

I couldn’t tell you what “Trash” is about, in any sort of narrative sense. Maybe it’s about literal garbage, in the way that every New York life—every urban life—is at least a little bit about garbage? I do know that when Johansen sings, with some disdain, “And please, don’t you ask me if I love you,” it feels as if he’s claiming some eternal wildness, publicly admitting that romance, with all of its domestic trappings and sentimental whispers, is simply not on the table for this dude. Why even inquire? (The visionary pop critic Ellen Willis, my first predecessor at this magazine, once described Johansen’s onstage comportment as “the definitive American version of the Jagger sneer,” and there’s certainly a glaze of frontier attitude in Johansen’s delivery—manifest destiny as applied to the Bowery). Then, it’s back to the garbage: “Trash! Won’t pick it up!” Johansen shouts. The phrase has a kind of poetic firmness to it. Eventually, the guitarist Johnny Thunders, his long black hair teased to the rafters, pipes up with high and whiny backing vocals. It sounds as if a baby in an adjacent room has just started to cry; it sounds awesome. The whole thing is over in less than four minutes. “Trash” is a good example of the Dolls’s musicality—the way they mixed a sweet, sing-songy tunefulness with something more feral, the Shangri-Las as played by the Stooges. But there’s something else in it, too—something fully disobedient and perfectly sexy.

Johansen’s solo career was equally audacious. In 1987, under the sobriquet Buster Poindexter, he had a hit with “Hot Hot Hot,” a cover of a seven-minute soca jam, first released in 1982, by the Montserratian singer Arrow. I’ve always found the Poindexter bit to be a pretty good gag: Johansen, one of the O.G. punks, mugging in a tuxedo, with voluminous Ken-doll hair, his Martini sloshing out of its glass, singing lines like “Party people / All around me / Feeling hot, hot, hot!” Johansen performs the song in a vague island patois, which is, at times, gently mortifying; the vibe is part Sandals Resort, part Weird Al. Yet, inexplicably, it’s also extremely punk rock: defiant, stupid, incredible. Willis wrote that the New York Dolls “dug irony and revelation-through-artifice and the complex iconoclastic pleasures of cutting with rather than against the commercial grain, and in this context they dug rock n’roll,” and she was, of course, exactly right—the point is to inject subversion into popular structures, to let the revolution start from inside. That’s always been rock and roll’s most radical gesture: insurrection, baby, with a beat. Perhaps inevitably, Johansen developed a complicated relationship to the song, which peaked at No. 45 on the Billboard Hot 100, but has endured in broad and funny ways, including a scene in “The Office” in which Michael Scott, in a state of deep post-vacation ennui, plonks it out on a lone steel drum. In a 2006 interview for “Fresh Air,” Johansen implored Terry Gross not to play it on air, calling it “the bane of my life.” (Incidentally, “Hot Hot Hot” also features the bassist Tony Garnier, who played on Tom Waits’s “Rain Dogs” and later became a central figure in Bob Dylan’s band).

In 2000, Johansen channelled his interest in the vernacular music of the prewar era into another group, the Harry Smiths, named after the curator, collector, and filmmaker Harry Smith, who, in 1952, produced “The Anthology of American Folk Music,” still a sacred text for anyone entranced by early American recordings. Over the years, Johansen also released a significant amount of music under his own name; much of it is tender and beautiful, including “Frenchette,” a yearning piano ballad that turns boisterous and defiant, slowly transforming into a raucous, rock-and-roll eruption: “I can’t get the kind of love that I want / Or that I need, so let’s just dance,” Johansen squealed. Maybe his feelings about love and devotion had softened. He was married three times: very briefly, in the late seventies, to the actress Cyrinda Foxe (she later wed Steven Tyler of Aerosmith), then to the rock photographer Kate Simon, from 1983 to 2011, and then, beginning in 2013, when he was sixty-three, to the artist Mara Hennessey. Last month, his stepdaughter, Lara Hennessey, helped organize a fund-raising campaign to offset some of his medical costs. She and Mara were with him at his bedside, holding his hands, when he died at their home on Staten Island.

Johansen was a frequent guest on “Saturday Night Live,” and on Valentine’s Day, in 1987, he performed his song “Heart of Gold,” from the 1981 album “Here Comes the Night.” It’s a gorgeous and vulnerable appearance, with aching harmonica and a fiddle solo by Soozie Tyrell in a red sequinned dress. Johansen talks of wanting someone to choose him: “I sure wish you’d see something in me,” he sings. Oof—I still cry each time I hear it. That gnawing desire to be witnessed, to be received by another consciousness—I suppose once it starts it never lets up. Johansen is dressed in his Buster Poindexter tux, and occasionally makes direct eye contact with the camera. “Well, I’ve been bought and baby / I’ve been sold and I / Need protection from the cold,” he sings. It’s a true and heartfelt idea—that we all need a defender sometimes. Yet for a lot of people, anyone who ever felt instinctively at odds with buttoned-up, normie culture, Johansen was that person. “You think I’m a whore, but I got a heart of gold,” he promised. He didn’t need to say it—we knew. ♦