A TRUE GEM... NOT A GEMETTE

A TRUE GEM... NOT A GEMETTE

DAVID JOHANSEN

(Blue Sky)

It was a false start. Too much, too soon, when the populace was unprepared to embrace an ambisextrous rock and roll band that had the potential to be magnificent. Even you, open-minded CREEM reader, couldn't decide: in 73 they were voted Best New Group and Worst Group; the next year, they held claim to the latter title.

We were studying movies at NYU grad school in 72-73, and after evening screenings we'd go around the corner to the Mercer Arts Center to see the New York Dolls rehearsing for stardom. How could they fail? Npt only were they theoretically terrific—Manhattan decadence viewed and postured by outer borough and suburban ikids who knew Brill Building pop as well as their British forebearers—but they had panache, impudence, and this lead shouter who was like a Jagger molded out of Play-Dough. David Johansen looked and sounded so right, and wrote such acrid rock songs, that he seemed inevitable.

Four years after the second and final Dolls album, Johansen has delivered a solo foray that is a model of guitar-stroked red heat, a delayed continuation (the JohansenSylvain songs are from late Dolls days), and a platform for a Writersinger of more fervor, expressiveness. and depth than we possibly could have predicted. Some of the utter crassness of his old band is missing (the quartet-plus-augmentation he's assembled play as rowdily, but with more precision), the outrageousness that produced a marginally racist "Stranded In The Jungle," the outcast's rage of "Human Being" and "Frankenstein," but David Johansen piles track upon track to create a density that merges Exile On Main Street with Gary "U.S." Bonds atop invigoratingly melodic bedlam.

More and more, those two Dolls albums look like benchmarks, "Personality Crisis" like an archetype, and Johansen like a primitive classicist. His waggishly ferocious vocal style—a barrage of gang leader exhortations ("Come on, boys!" is a trademark), soul moves thrice removed, squealed "yeah yeah yeah" 's, howls, yelps, vowels hit as though he were being garroted—was present on the earliest cuts, as were the themes that run through David Johansen: "frustration and heartache," life in the neighborhood, dancing, growing ,and giving up. Johansen has a convincing swagger for throaty, brash rockers like "I'm A Lover" and "Girls," but there's a susceptibility to pain and willingness to reveal it that gives his work on this LP particular resonance. He can also be as lustily funny as Rod Stewart who, by mixing moods and playing the vulnerable braggart, Johansen resembles more than any other rock icon, despite his reputation as a Stone clone.

Which is not to say that the Stones are not a vital reference point. Surely in the guitar interaction (there are at least two guitars on each cut—Johnny Rao and Thomas Trask, one piercing and linear, the other fuzzy and chording —and sometimes as many as four), the blaring sludge of the mix, in songs as different as the adamantly burned "Pain In My Heart," the pleading "Donna" and the selfmocking "Not That Much," the lineage is a unmistakable as the modernization is commendable. Johansen has a talent for vernacular ("real whole bunch"), for a hook ("Cool Metro" means nothing to me, but rings so incessantly as a chorus line), for asides that keep a song rolling, and momentum-sustaining turnarounds in the arrangements: when guitars should duplicate parts, when they should divide like train tracks at a crossroads.

The album's closing song, "Frenchette," is as complete a statement as Johansen has put on disc. The suffix "ette" is used various ways, demeaningly, as in phony or diminutive (leatherette, kitchenette), to stand for disapointment; nostalgically, when in a castinet-laden section, he remembers falling in love with the Ronettes. A song about crushed hopes, it begins with piano accompaniment and builds to a rock avalanche as Johansen sings, repeatedly, "I can't get the love that I want or that I need/So let's just dance." And he screams the word "dance" with a strangled cry, letting it bleed as he ends one of the most impressive rock 'n' roll albums in this, by now, not so young year.

Mitch Cohen