Remembering David Johansen, 1950-2025

A 2020 interview with the influential New York Dolls frontman with many personas

As dynamic as he was on stage for so many decades, in so many guises, it’s hard to imagine David Johansen stilled. The unforgettable New York Dolls frontman died Sunday after five years of dealing with cancers, a brain tumor and a fall in November that hospitalized him. He was 75.

In recent years, he was for me the only reason to listen to Sirius XM with his wildly eclectic David Johansen’s Mansion of Fun.

With just two terrific, influential albums, the Dolls shook a moribund post-Woodstock rock world from its early 70s soft rock introspection and prog rock noodling.

With slashing guitars by Johnny Thunders behind him, Johansen brought in-your-face Mick Jagger moves and chops, with vocals borrowed from powerful R&B influences. He did so, however, frequently in drag, which seemed to put off record execs.

With a reverence to old Brill Building pop, revved up with a raucous raunchy live show, the Dolls seemed to blast out of the TV screen the first time I saw them on a late night Midnight Special in October 1973, whose other guests included Danny O’Keefe and Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

True to the title of their second album Too Much, Too Soon in 1974, they were dropped by their label in 1975 and called it quits in 1976, with a final gig at Max’s Kansas City with Blondie. (Though there’d be an unexpected resurrection of the band this century, issuing three albums before disbanding for good in 2011).

Before that full circle, Johansen released a half dozen band albums that were always had a lot of the same sass and bite as his best work. I first saw him live in October 1981, opening a Midwestern arena show headlined by Pat Benatar. With a band that included Blondie Chaplin on guitar, he played the best of his solo material, from “Frenchette” and “Melody” amid a few glorious Dolls classics. Relaxed, funny, and oozing charm, he made an strong impression even to fans of “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.”

A musical polyglot, he trod in the blues and old folk at the turn of the century in David Johansen & the Harry Smiths, named after the folk anthologist. And he turned out a sophisticated alter ego in Buster Poindexter that gave him his biggest hit in “Hot Hot Hot,” a soca cover of an Arrow record that continues to echo at wedding receptions worldwide.

He returned to the music of the islands in 2020 to record the prescient warning, “Sinking Ship,” a reworking of the political calypso song from Gypsy sounding the alarm about the first Trump administration declaring, “He’s unhinged! He’s gonna kills us all!”

That was about the time I got a chance to talk to Johansen about that single, about his music highlights from half a century before and the music that still inspired him.

Here’s that interview:

You seem to embrace so many different kinds of music. What did you listen to as a kid?

Oh, so many things. Latin music and folk music and rock and roll music, doo-wop music - you name it. I always liked certain operas, and songs from certain operas. It's pretty much everything because I had this built-in radar. If I hear something I think is good, that's peculiar to my taste, my ears open up when I hear it. And if something doesn't appeal to me, I don't really hear it.

Was there a lot of music in your house growing up?

Yes there was. My father, before World War II, he was a singer and he did opera and light opera and things like that. After the war, he started having kids, and he had to get a job but he was always singing around the house and playing records around the house. He would listen to the opera every Saturday on the big wooden radio. My older brothers had a lot of records and my older sister was into Bob Dylan when he came out and all that kind of stuff. She went to see The Beatles at Carnegie Hall. So there was a lot of different music. My older brother was into a lot of doo-wop. I think the first album I bought was a Lightnin' Hopkins album because there really wasn't that much blues in the house and I really liked that.

Were the first bands you were in all doing rock and roll before the New York Dolls?

Yeah, I was in a dance band and I was also interested in playing acoustic guitar and singing, so I was into folk and rock and roll, as far as what was achievable of doing.

It seems like you hid the folk part when you formed the Dolls though.

I would bring songs to the Dolls and that's how they would play them. The Dolls were more than the sum of their parts. I'd say, "I found this Sonny Boy Williamson song, ["Don't Start Me Talkin'"]," or "Let's do this Bo Diddley song ["Pills"]," and they'd come out like a whole different genre than the original. It was good. It was really authentic rock and roll music.

Was it frustrating that for all the acclaim that they got, the Dolls didn't take over the universe like they should have?

I didn't have any grand design. I was just going along for the ride. It was a lot of fun for a while.

What was it like when you reunited in 2004?

You can't ever replicate things that happen in your life, so I don't even think about that. We were going to do one show in England. I thought, well, this will be fun. We were going to play at the Meltdown Festival, and Morrissey was the curator that year, so he asked us to do it.

I was singing at that time in Hubert Sumlin's band, and I was also singing with The Harry Smiths at that time. I thought, this will be really kind of refreshing, it will be fun. We did it and it was a big success, so we just kept doing it, and we did it for eight years or something.

Do you look back fondly at that time?

Oh yeah. It was great, because we traveled all over the world, like, three times. We went even to China.

What was the reaction there?

It was very similar to every place else except we played at the first outdoor festival they had. It was very similar to what we were used to except the army was standing in front of the stage with really stern looks on their faces. The kids were getting rambunctious and then the army would walk through the crowd. It was crazy, but it was really interesting.

Are you still doing some Harry Smiths stuff?

Yeah. We still do that once in a while. We haven't done it since the plague, but we had done one just before that. But it's not like an ongoing thing. I love some of the guys I play with. Larry Saltzman is such a great guitar player. It's just so much fun to play songs with those guys.

And you're playing a lot of old obscure music, and letting people know who Harry Smith was.

Well, you know, we don't play a lot of songs from Harry Smith's record collection, but it was kind of a shorthand way to name the act so people have an idea what they were going to get. We play a lot of country, blues and I don't know what to call it — early music, I guess. But a lot of it is songs that people never really heard before. So we had a chance to bring it to people.

When we started doing that Harry Smiths thing, I had just come out of this period where I was making this Spanish Rocketship record [in 1997] for Buster1, and during that year when Brian and I were writing songs and recording them, I really didn't listen to anything but Latin music. People would give me records and say, "Oh, you've gotta hear this," but I would just put it aside.

And then after that record was finished I started listening to different music and even music I hadn't heard for years. After coming out of that Latin course, I heard all these songs with new ears. I didn't realize how great it was because I had heard it so many times.

So the guy who ran the Bottom Line, Allan Pepper, he called me and said he wanted to do this series of shows for their 20th anniversary or something like that. They were asking people who played there a lot to do something they've never done before or something that's different than what they normally do, so I knew immediately what we were going to do. So I said, "OK, we'll do this 'whatever you call that' music." So we did that and it was a big success. It got written up in the Times. And we just kept on doing it.

We made a couple of CDs with this audiophile company called Chesky that essentially sells records to Swiss people with elaborate stereo equipment. They have a method of recording that's like a live recording, but they do it in a church, and they mic different areas of the church to get echo. Then they have us stand around this giant tube mic and they say, "OK, the drums have to be in back and the bass player has to move a little." When they finally get that sounding great, they just go for it. It sounds like ASD [Active Sound Design]. It sounds like the center of the room for the listeners. They mostly do jazz.

Regarding “Sinking Ship,” it seems like Trinidadian music was also much more topical than US pop music, going back a long way.

Yeah. You know, calypso is the way they used to tell the news essentially. So a lot of people keep up that tradition in the calypso world.

It kind of brings you back to your soca persona we know from “Hot Hot Hot.”

I always liked that music, and when I hear a good one, it sticks in my brain. There's a lot of really good ones.

You must have felt there was something that needed to be said about the current situation, telling people, "It's up to you, it's up to me."

Yeah, but not like a lot of people that make songs that are dire and dismal about the situation. You're bombarded with that kind of stuff on the news all the time. This one sneaks the message in there with a happy song.

How have you been faring generally during the pandemic?

I've actually been rather content to have this time to contemplate. My daughter Leah [Victoria Hennessey] put together the video for the song. She's got a band called Hennessey. It's a great band. But she's a multi-talented polymath, and she also works putting videos together for people. So she was visiting us, and spent like a week with us in August, and after the hurricane [Isaias], we went down to the beach and shot a take of me singing it.

Then she was going the next day to this guy Tony Oursler, who's an artist, and he was going to shoot her on a green screen for her new single, which is called "No Transformation." So Mara and I went over with her and I managed to do a take in front of the green screen. Then Leah had a vision of putting The Wreck of the Hesperus and some beautiful paintings in the background. We had a bunch of ideas, and Leah put it all together and it came out as a really great video.

And the nautical costume you were wearing, is that something you had in your closet?

The shirt, our friend is a French designer, his name is Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, and he's a designer in France, and a couple of years ago he gave that shirt to Mara, which she had worn maybe three times over the years, and I wore that shirt.

What's your guiding principle in putting together Buster Poindexter's Mansion of Fun radio show?

It's stuff I like. That's pretty much it. I don't have to answer to anybody about what I'm playing.

I've been doing it once a week for like 20 years. I have to play about 60 songs in every show. It's a three-hour show, so it really keeps me involved in music. I find that sometimes you can be in a lousy mood, you don't want to do anything, then I have to put the show together, so I start listening to music and then two minutes into starting to listen to songs, I forget that I was in a lousy mood. So it's really a good kind of mood lifter.