Happiness, Fishnets and Cigarettes: David Johansen (1950-2025)
Reflecting on the life of NYC’s ‘trashcan intellectual’
“He was a sensitive soul and a trashcan intellectual,” is how my friend Adam Weiner sums up the late, great David Johansen, a rock idol of considerable legend that he owes even more to than most.
As the singer/pianist/mastermind of huge-hearted and sizably-brained E Street successors Low Cut Connie, it’s not surprising he finds kinship with the proto-punk who opined most on the human condition beneath a famously ribald exterior. Or with the man whose radio show demonstrated “what an encyclopedia of obscure music he was,” as Weiner has in turn with his far-reaching Tough Cookies series. Before the Replacements or anyone emo opened up the lane of heart-on-sleeve punk, you’d best believe Johansen was in love, L-U-V.
My takeaway from the New York Dolls is that even with their drug subtexts, the cartoonishly friendly Ramones still comparatively employed more dark, boneheaded imagery like sniffing glue and Nazi shit. The Dolls loved being freaks and piled on the trashy makeup before such a thing was ever a hard rock trope (one could say they invented it), but ultimately their conception of what-would-come-to-be-punk was Love Central, cross-dressing misfits just “Looking for a Kiss” to mitigate their “Personality Crisis.” (Which is no mere fascination with most people who’ve been moved to dress against their pre-designated gender.)
VIDEO: The New York Dolls “Personality Crisis”
MC5 made a racket in the kinda-broad name of revolution. The Velvet Underground and the Stooges flaunted antisocial dares, from the former singing about dominatrixes to the latter’s actual onstage BDSM rolling around in broken glass Skippy jars. The Dolls were never more avant than they had to be; they played loud and fast because it was a rush and because they were entertainers. Politics weren’t really Johansen’s bag so much as sociology. (Don’t pass up the never-more-timely “Totalitarian State,” though.) And if the Dolls bridged the missing link in the chain between the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols, they even came off less hostile than the Stones, who copped more feels than feelings. Johansen may have been a reprobate, self-proclaimed “Trash” on the Dolls’ legendary, Todd Rundgren-produced debut, but there’s far less of a pretense behind “I’m a lonely planet boy / And I’m tryin’, I’m cryin’, baby, for your love” than the costuming would suggest. These particular lipstick killers weren’t Kiss, they just longed for one.
Or as Johansen sang on one of his greatest-ever moments: “You think I’m a whore but I got a heart of gold / And I need protection from the cold.” Remarkable as said heart of gold was, I’d say the man’s rarer strength was his gift for looking forward and backwards at the same time, which can’t be easy in heels. As the Dolls’ noise was turning off an industry that hadn’t yet been punk-pilled, they tried to get Leiber and Stoller to produce Too Much Too Soon, the greatest album of Johansen’s life, settled for Shangri-La’s maven Shadow Morton anyway, and still spent half of it spicing up impeccable ‘50s obscurities like “Stranded in the Jungle” and “Bad Detective.” And it ended with his most unstoppable original, in which he proclaimed his “Human Being” status for six bracing minutes: “If I’m acting like a king it’s because…,” “if I want too many things,” and so forth. Even Axl Rose couldn’t fuck up that one.
He hadn’t thrown in the thrashing punk towel yet with his solo career, shrieking glammy rave-ups like “Girls” or throwing down bon-mots like “I’m in love with you daddy but not that much.” You’ll note in the latter he’s singing from a woman’s POV and gets away with it, since he never really trashed the gender he dressed up as. Too bad his hair-metal successors never really got that part down. On 1984’s bonkers Sweet Revenge he balances what he already did best with state-of-the-art synthpop and even rap (“King of Babylon”), while being way ahead of his time with meta-reflection (“N.Y. Doll”) and class-consciousness (“The Stinkin’ Rich”).
VIDEO: Buster Poindexter “Hot Hot Hot”
Then he dabbled onscreen (Scrooged, the Saturday Night Live house band) before reinventing himself in 1987 as another alter ego completely, Buster Poindexter, which is ironically when he finally became a household (fake) name. Of course he achieved contemporaneous MTV success by going back in time, turning Arrow’s soca “Hot Hot Hot” into a Hot 100 smash alongside ace dusted-off oldies like the Coasters’ “Whadaya Want” and the Jive Bombers’ “Bad Boy.” I was a kid of the perfect age (three) to love “Hot Hot Hot” and still do, even if Johansen went on to consider it the “bane of [his] life.” Slotting into coveted wedding-DJ canons is sometimes how you can realize your cross-generational appeal, and he knew enough music of different generations to understand the art of that simplicity.
He also helmed a pretty great comeback for two-fifths of the original Dolls in 2006, given the perfectly Johansen-esque title One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, nailing down Michael Stipe to sing on one banger (“Dancing on the Lip of a Volcano”) or evoking brother-in-partying Andrew W.K. on another (“Gotta Get Away From Tommy”). “Dance Like a Monkey” poked fun at a “pretty little creationist” as “Take a Good Look at My Good Looks” did with aging, and the Dolls reboot lasted another couple good-enough albums. But from “Too Many Midnights” to “Suspicion” to the majestic “Sweet Revenge,” Johansen’s intermittent non-Dolls output is also loaded with hot-energy performances and smart additions to his catalog lyrically and musically.
New York Dolls may be as remembered as much for being outcasts as their seminal riffs (and wondering aloud if you could fuck Frankenstein), but more than any other punk, Johansen’s attitude didn’t suck: “Havin’ So Much Fun,” “We’re All in Love,” etc. Rock-and-rollers needed an outlet for rage and catharsis and working-class ills, of course, sometimes even justifiable romantic ones. But Johansen’s gifted ear for song and flair for the stage lifted people up like he could transmute the euphoria in his veins. Olé, olé…olé, olé.
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David Jo and the Dolls were incomparable in so many ways that, I’d bet, that if they ran into The Ramones on St. Marks Place at Coney Island High, and a fight broke out, the last man standing would be a Doll!