It must have been about three o’clock in the morning on the Bowery. I had already spent all my money on beer, and Joey Ramone and Arturo Vega were out of town with the Ramones, so I couldn’t crash at their loft. So I started off toward the office of Punk magazine on 10th Avenue at 30th Street—the “Punk Dump,” as we called it—to spend the night.
Suddenly, a Checker cab pulled up, the back door flew open, and I heard that unmistakable gruff voice: “Hey, Legs, get in. It’s about time you learned how to eat Chinese food!”
I looked over and saw David Johansen laughing with three or four groupies, sipping a glass of Courvoisier, and looking every part the punk dandy.
I got into the cab and off we went, to Chinatown, where Johansen warned me about the perils of Chinese hot mustard. “This stuff is hot,” he said, “so you’ve got to use it sparingly! Otherwise, you’ll burn a hole through your tongue!”
David Johansen, who died this week at 75 following a long battle with cancer, exploded onto the 1970s rock scene as the lead singer of the New York Dolls. As David told me in an unpublished Punk-magazine interview, “There wasn’t a lot of intellectualizing going on when we started the New York Dolls. It was just a bunch of guys practicing in a storefront who started playing together. The Dolls consisted of myself on lead vocals, Johnny Thunders on lead guitar, Syl Sylvain on rhythm guitar, Arthur “Killer” Kane on bass, and Billy Murcia on drums. None of us said to each other, ‘You wear this’ or ‘You do that.’”
Everyone from Bette Midler and Alice Cooper to David Bowie and Rod Stewart partied in the Oscar Wilde Room at the Mercer Arts Center, where the band held their 17-week residency.
“The audiences there were pretty depraved,” David said. “So we had to be in there with them. 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. We were really into confronting the audience: ‘Hey, you stupid bastards, get up and dance!’ We were not polite.”
The New York Dolls along with the Velvet Underground and Iggy and the Stooges laid the groundwork for the musical genre that would become known as punk rock, but which at the time was labeled “glam rock” because David Bowie had become such a breakout phenomenon. “Bowie used to come see us play at the Mercer Arts Center,” Johansen said. “I had never heard of him before. I remember he used to come around in these quilted drag outfits, and he asked me, ‘Who does your hair?’ I said, ‘Johnny Thunders,’ which was the truth.”
Rod Stewart picked the Dolls to open for his band the Faces at London’s Wembley Stadium in front of 50,000 fans. Just when it seemed the Dolls had “arrived,” however, drummer Billy Murcia died of an accidental drug overdose in London, and all their offers for major record deals quickly evaporated.
It seemed as if the New York Dolls were cursed, especially when the Mercer Arts Center building collapsed, on August 3, 1973, and left the band without a base of operations or a regular stage to perform on.
Just when the band was ready to break up, in stepped drummer Jerry Nolan to replace Billy Murcia. The New York Dolls signed to Mercury Records and released their first album with a cover shot of the band dressed in drag. It was a disaster. Even though all the band members were straight, and the record was pure rock ’n’ roll, adolescent boys across America still felt threatened by the gay imagery.
“I remember like in Creem magazine,” Johansen told rock critic Jason Gross, “we were voted the ‘best new band of the year’ and the ‘worst new band of the year,’ so we got the most votes in both categories!”
The New York Dolls limped along, showing up at gigs across America an hour or two late. Their management teams grew tired of their rock-star antics, but there was one English haberdasher who absolutely adored the band and made it his mission to save the New York Dolls from themselves. Malcolm McLaren, the future manager of the Sex Pistols, took them on when the band’s previous management team threw in the towel.
“I wasn’t taken with Iggy in the same way as I was with the Dolls,” McLaren told me shortly before his death, in 2010. “I think one of the reasons was because Iggy was less about fashion. I think it’s a stupid thing to say, but it’s the truth. I didn’t see the fashion about Iggy. It didn’t sound trendy nice. There was no lipstick there. It didn’t have the fashion element that the New York Dolls had.”
Unfortunately, McLaren’s management of the New York Dolls proved to be yet another disaster—he dressed Johansen and his bandmates in red patent leather that to some fans made them look like Oscar Mayer wieners—eventually leading to the band’s breaking up in Florida when Thunders and Nolan decided to return to Manhattan to cop heroin. Johansen told them if they went to New York, the band would be over. His words didn’t stop them, and the New York Dolls were no more.
Thunders and Nolan joined Richard Hell, who that same week had left the band Television and created the Heartbreakers, perhaps the greatest short-lived all-star punk band ever. Hell left a few weeks later to form Richard Hell and the Voidoids.
Sylvain waited in vain for McLaren to send him a plane ticket to London in order to join a new band McLaren was promoting called the Sex Pistols.
Kane drifted off to California and became a Jehovah’s Witness after a failed suicide attempt, and he dreamed of the day when the New York Dolls would be reunited, which happened for a single show in 2004.
Thunders and Nolan went to England and recorded the Heartbreakers’ legendary album, L.A.M.F. (Like A Mother Fucker) for Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert’s Track Records and sank deeper into heroin addiction.
Johansen signed with Steve Paul’s Blue Sky Records and released a handful of excellent rock ’n’ roll albums and constantly toured the East Coast, playing clubs in Boston, Providence, New Haven, New London, and Hartford, as well as a handful of venues in New Jersey.
In the late 1980s, he stopped drinking and re-invented himself as Buster Poindexter. Dressed in a tuxedo, with a skyscraper pompadour, he had a crossover hit with a camp cover of the calypso song “Hot Hot Hot,” by the Montserratian musician Arrow. The song has always reminded me of Johansen pulling up to me on the Bowery in that Checker cab and dragging me off to eat Chinese food.
As Johansen said of his transition from seasoned rock ’n’ roller to wacky lounge singer, “I was living on 17th Street and Third Avenue, and I had this bar in my neighborhood, Tramps. It was a nice quiet neighborhood then. Tramps was a little bar and had bands and singers I liked—such as Big Joe Turner and Big Mama Thornton—who’d do residencies. I liked to hang out there. I decided to do four Mondays at this little cabaret, and I used that [Buster Poindexter] moniker because I didn’t want people to be coming in and yelling for songs that I was famous for. I could just do what I wanted. Then that month, without any publicity or anything, it became very popular, so I started doing weekends there. It wasn’t a plan or anything. It just happened.”
He came to hate “Hot Hot Hot,” which is most likely why he started yet another band, David Johansen and the Harry Smiths, named for the man who compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music. A bible for beatniks and hipsters in the late 50s and early 60s, it influenced such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and John and Michelle Phillips, as well as throngs of other folkies.
Johansen appeared in a string of Hollywood comedies, including Car 54, Where Are You? and Scrooged, with Bill Murray. He was also a guest of Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, and Conan O’Brien on the late-night-talk-show circuit.
It’s no wonder that Martin Scorsese wanted to make a documentary about him, probably because he’d become addicted to Johansen’s weekly radio show, David Johansen’s Mansion of Fun, on SiriusXM, after first becoming a New York Dolls fan in the 1970s.
“I’ve known David Johansen for decades,” Martin Scorsese told Variety. “And his music has been a touchstone ever since I listened to the Dolls when I was making ‘Mean Streets’ … Then and now, David’s music captures the energy and excitement of New York City. I often see him perform, and over the years I’ve gotten to know the depth of his musical inspirations. After seeing his show at the Café Carlyle, I knew I had to film it because it was so extraordinary to see the evolution of his life and his musical talent in such an intimate setting.”
Johansen is survived by his third wife, Mara Hennessey; his stepdaughter, Lea Hennessey; as well as his five siblings.
He was a real rock star in the days when Blondie, the Ramones, and the Talking Heads were just rock ’n’ roll wannabes!
Legs McNeil is a co-author of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk and The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry
