First, please check out this link - Sweet Relief Fund / David Johansen - then read on.
(For the uninitiated, the ADD-addled, or people just too busy to bother - David Johansen has been battling stage four cancer the past few years, recently fell down a flight of stairs at his home, breaking his back in two places, and rendering him bedridden. If any musician needs our help, it’s Johansen.)
I was lucky enough to meet and have an – admittedly brief, but very rock & roll – conversation with David Johansen in 1979. More on that later, first some background.
Longtime readers of Pencil Storm (and my blog Growing Old With Rock & Roll) will already have heard a lot of this stuff, and for that I apologize, but I’ve gotta begin at the beginning when I write about David Johansen.
In 1973, when I was 21, I fervently believed The New York Dolls, Mott The Hoople and Elliott Murphy were going to be the leaders of The Next Wave of rock & roll. I believed that the Dolls, Mott & Elliott were going to be (not necessarily respectively) the new Beatles, Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan and as far as I was concerned all those admittedly essential-in-and-for-their-times 1960’s bands could just toddle off into the sunset. (Ditto toddling-off; The Allman Brothers, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, and various ephemera like The Doobie Brothers and Chicago.)
Of course, I was wrong.
Dead wrong.
All of those 60’s acts have become enshrined (codified? embalmed? mummified?) by Classic Rock Radio & its ilk, and just yesterday I saw a Pink Floyd t-shirt for sale at my local Target. (JESUS CHRIST, people, just fucking give it UP! “We don’t need no education” indeed. No wonder fucking Trump got re-elected with young minds that would buy a Pink Floyd t-shirt in 2025 running around loose with charge cards in their pockets & Venmo on their phones.)
But I digress.
By 1975 my Grand Dream of the Next Wave had fallen by the rock & roll wayside. The Dolls and Mott The Hoople had broken up, and Elliott Murphy was on his second record label in two years. He was soon to be on his third – Columbia – only to be totally supplanted by a fellow New Dylan, one Mr. Bruce Springsteen, whom I also worshipped, but I thought Murphy was more original and wrote better songs.
(Ricki, congratulations; that’s 345 words and you haven’t gotten around to David Johansen yet.)
ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, I’M GETTIN’ THERE!
The InterWideWeb tells me that The New York Dolls’ first album was released July 23rd, 1973. I would have bought that eponymous first release soon after, as I had been reading about the Dolls for a coupla months already in my Rock & Roll Bible of the Time, Creem magazine. (Creem told me to JUMP, and I asked HOW HIGH?)
My favorite “rock & roll band band” prior to July 23rd, 1973 was – and believe me, boys & girls, cats & kittens, I am LOATH to admit this – Loggins & Messina. Following is a helpful, two-pictures-are-worth-well-more-than-2000-words graphic…..
From the first nanosecond the needle of my record player hit the first grove of “Personality Crisis” and those blessed, sacred, Johnny Thunders-provided power chords BLARED out of my speakers and SEARED into my brain, NOTHING was ever the same again for me in rock & roll.
The Dolls instantly became my new favorite band (joining Mott The Hoople, who I’d followed since seeing them live at the Cincinnati Pop Festival in the summer of ’70), taking up the slack from losing The MC5 and The Stooges to various drug-related problems earlier in the 70’s. And it wasn’t just the sacred din the Dolls’ music provided, it was a sense of personal STYLE I think you can see I was seriously lacking in that pre-Dolls pic above. If it wasn’t for the Dolls I would still be listening to Grateful Dead bootlegs today in 2025, with a grey ponytail hanging halfway down my back.
By 1975 it was all over, The Dolls broke up – Johnny Thunders & Jerry Nolan going on to The Heartbreakers (not Tom Petty’s band) and heroin addiction, which would eventually kill them both (the Dolls 1974 album Too Much, Too Soon was prophetic in that sense); Arthur Kane to Los Angeles and a debilitating alcoholic existence; David Johansen & Sylvain Sylvain (the “clean” duo of the five) to continue a faux version of the Dolls, and then to band together for the mighty David Johansen Group, whose first album was released in 1978.
It was that fearsome rock & roll assemblage I crossed paths with in 1979 and had a quick (and not particularly heartwarming) personal exchange with David Johansen, when I was a roadie for Willie Phoenix’s band The Buttons. That exchange is detailed in the following link from 2012…..Exchanging Pleasantries With David Johansen. Please check it out before moving on.
What I liked about that exchange was the joie de vivre, the genuine sense of humor, the lack of rigid gotta-be-PC spirit from David Johansen, all qualities he instilled in his band. It’s that man - that hilarious bone-thin-skinny rocker - laughing with me on that Agora stage that I think about now when I read the Sweet Relief article detailed above. (BTW – The drummer of The David Johansen Group – aka The Staten Island Boys – was Frankie LaRocka, who decades later was Watershed’s A&R man at Epic Records. Colin reports that LaRocka was, “A real rock n roller. Not a suit. So obviously…he got sacked.”)
A second version of The David Johansen Group peaked in popularity with their 1982 live album, Live It Up, and Johansen later attained some chart success with “Hot Hot Hot” in his lounge lizard alter ego, Buster Poindexter, incarnation. In the first months of the 21st century he fronted a blues band called The Harry Smiths and in 2004 reformed The New York Dolls with Sylvain Sylvain. That band recorded three acclaimed albums between 2006 and 2011, one more than the original incarnation of the Dolls.
April of 2023 brought the Martin Scorsese-directed Personality Crisis: One Night Only to the Showtime network, giving Johansen his highest-profile film project to date.
Okay, okay, that’s enough words about these rock & roll boys. Let’s make some rock & roll noise.
And readers - please, please, please, try to help out the David Johansen Sweet Relief Fund if you can.
Ricki C. is 72 years old and has two dresser drawers full of black rock & roll t-shirts, which he wears incessantly. He also has a hand-tooled leather hippie belt from 1972 that still fits. He has congestive heart failure and prostate cancer and KNOWS that all this rock & roll nonsense has to stop someday.
But not yet.
