DAVID JOHANSEN: Lonely Planet Boy comes Home

It's somewhere between the hours of three and four a.m. on a rainy Monday night in early May and the atmosphere in the back room at the Bells of Hell is getting so deliriously high-spirited that a raid by the po-lice any minute now would not surprise me one bit. Not that we're doing anything illegal, mind you; it's just that, well, as fellow conspirator Nick Tosches said to me the next afternoon when we met for lunch to try and get our minds and bodies back into semi-working condition, "That scene last night was like, you know, Communism. Absolutely everyone having a really hot time, all so matter-of-factly. Kinda spooky." I knew what he meant. I mean, Elvis Costello laughing? In public? Yes, there he is, off to my right, chuckling it up with the rest of us as we sit watching David Johansen, in trademark sailor shirt, his red cap lopsidedly hanging on his head and a glass of Guinness hoisted high in the air, leading the tuxedo clad pianist A1 Fields (Bells' fixture, Village legend and the man that I had invited everybody over to see after Nick Lowe's late show at the Bottom Line had ended and no one could decide where to continue the evening's festivities) and the rest of us in a follow-the-spilling-suds medley of "Over There," "Give My Regards To Broadway" and "Harrigan." Fifteen minutes before, Johansen was dancing a waltz with Syl Sylvain as Fields pounded out an original composition entitled "Chopin The Pimp" (Why the pimp, you ask? Let A1 explain. "You know, man, that George Sand dyke that supported him for awhile. Hell, she got more pussy than he did!"), and fifteen minutes from now he'll be boogie-woogie-in' away to the surreal strains of Al's rather unique interpretation of "One O'Clock Jump" ("I'm lettin' my hair down, ladies and gentlemen—this ain't the museum crowd we got here tonight. I'm A1 Fields and you're a beautiful audience"). By the time Barry, the stoically patient bartender, finally persuades us to adjourn the meeting of the crazies at 4:30, we've run the musical gamut from great theme songs ("Ben" and "The Young And Restless," the latter being a special request by Mr. Syl vain) to lounge classics ("Misty" and "Summertime") to the Carpenters' "Bless The Beasts And The Children" (done as a "name that tune" by Fields; no one got it, either) to the infamous "Happy Birthday Concerto," Fields' signature piece that comes complete with anywhere from three to eleven variations, depending on how much Fields has consumed at playing time.

Things are a mite cramped as we pile into photographer Bob Gruen's old car—something like four in the front and seven in the back. Our destination is an all-night Greek diner (is that redundant?) on the east side which Johansen recommends highly: "You can get as rowdy as you want and they never throw you out. Great place." We throw on the radio and damned if the first song that comes on isn't "Funky Blit Chic." Everybody starts howling and David looks down at Syl, who may at any second go comatose on us. "Hey, Syl," he says, lifting up his chin in mock brag fashion. "I'm on the radio. Ain't that a kick?"

It sure is a kick to hear David Johansep's album getting airplay and it's an even bigger kick to find him back on the scene performing again after a much too long limbo kind of existence that he found himself in after the demise, of the original New York Dolls. During the last few years, you'd see Johansen playing a gig or two every month, usually at Max's, gigs mainly to pay off the rent, with other ex-Dolls and assorted cronies sitting in. Nothing fancy or special, just loose, fun shows. But then last summer, finally freed from old management contracts, Johansen signed on with Steve Paul and Blue Sky records and the wheels started spinning again. His new band (Johnny Rao and Tom Trask on guitars, Buzzy Verno on bass and Frankie EaRocka on drums) comes from Staten Island, where Johansen was born and raised, and they've got the same rock 'n' roll fever that Johansen has carried around inside him since he was an always-introuble kid, that fever that made the Dolls one of the most exciting rock 'n' roll bands ever to ride roughshod over the face of the earth.

It's still difficult, to gauge just how important the Dolls were. Along with the Velvets, the Stooges and the MC5, they laid the foundation for much of the young, tough music that has given the rock world a much-needed kick in the ass over the last two years. The Dolls' brazen and uncompromising image, their sledgehammer approach to music making and their "let's shoot it all tonight 'cause we may not be here tomorrow" attitude and energy left anyone who ever saw or heard them with no gray area for their feelings to occupy. You either loved them or hated them; it was that clear cut.

I never thought (the Dolls) would get mass appeal.

"I never thought we'd get mass appeal," says David when you ask him about the Doll's failure to capture more than a cult-sized following during their all too brief life as a band. "I mean, I surely wouldn't have stopped had it happened and I always kind of wanted it to, but there'd be nights when we'd pfay in front of three or four thousand people and I'd feel, yeah, this is what I want to do every night. I think that, had we stuck together and made a few more albums, eventually we would have had a hit and then boom, it's Madison Square Garden time. But we quit before any of that could happen." As far as the Dolls' much-maligned and misunderstood image, an image that in the long run did them more harm than good, David has no regrets at all. "In our reverie," he says, "it was important to us to get the point across and the message clear." And so the Dolls shocked and challenged the universe, stuck their collective tongue out at the status quo, and went down fighting.

But perhaps the one thing that remains overlooked when people fondly reminisce about the Dolls is the tremendously positive energy that propelled the band. For, besides their bone crushing power and outrageous looks, there was a huge supply of wit, humor and camaraderie and Johansen, as the front man and chief lyricist, was responsible for much of that. Watching him and his new band performing at a small suburban club on an otherwise sleepy Sunday night in April, I find myself marvelling (as I do each time I see him live) at how warm and friendly Johansen is onstage. The squeakyclean wood floored club didn't seem well-suited for hectic, hard-driving rock 'n' roll, and though most of the people in the place aren't familiar with most of the songs being played, Johansen has all eyes riveted front and center as the band plows through songs from the new album. Since the band is, at this point, still getting their feet wet and getting to know both Johansen and their audiences in a concert situation, things start out a bit tentative musically, but with Johansen bouncing around, making faces, acting out almost every word of every song (on "Lonely Tenement," for example, he takes his jacket off and slings it over his shoulder when he gets to the verse about the union hall; then, when he hits the word' "free," he salutes), it doesn't take too long before things get loosened up and energized. By the time they swing into "I'm A Lover," with the band taunting Johansen and he reacting to their snide, "Yeah, yeah, yeah"s with foot stamping defiance, the band is just plain smokin'. Johnny and Tommy are perfect counterpoints on guitar, Tommy straight out of the Keith Richard upfront-and-to-the-point school and Johnny leaning towards more melodic and subtle runs and twists. And in the background of the band's sound, Buzzy and Frankie just push and push and push.

The second set is especially satisfying as, in best club tradition, Johansen proclaims "dance time" and the band swings into some non-stop soul shaking with three perfect cover choices: the Foundations' "Build Me Up Buttercup," the Supremes' "Love Child," and the Falcons' "I Found A Love." Echoes of "I hear you're pretty fast on your feets/Lemme show you how we do it down on 14th street" dance in my head while I watch the well-dressed kids work out on the dance floor. It's not what you'd call a particularly Johansen-attuned audience, and yet the sheer force and good nature of the show has gotten through to them. They have accepted everything that's been tossed their way, from "Cool Metro" to "Personality Crisis" to "Donna," the song that just tears me right up whenever I hear it and which hits the audience so that not one sound comes from the crowd while it's played.

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Backstage after the show, the band unwinds and Johansen, a bottle of cognac in his hands, treats everyone to an acapella version of Patrick Sky's "Nectar Of God" (now that's what you'd call roots) and we lay over that night at Steve Paul's house in Greenwich, playing pool and drinking and watching TV until well past sun up. Johansen, an aficianado of morning kiddie shows, calls out the names of the shows as we go around the channels ("Hey, hold on—there's Harriet,v he says as the New Zoo Revue hippo appears on the screen), and he tells me that he's taped an appearance on the Uncle Floyd show (Floyd, who has blossomed into quite a folk hero through his little show on a Jersey UHF station, had been recently moved from his seven p.m. slot to an incongruous eight a.m. shift due to mucho pressure in regard to his show not really being a kid's show and apparently was either being smacked down by his station or being made to fit it, or both. Johansen, an old fan of Floyd's, was expressing his solidarity with the down, but still kicking, Floyd). We both finally pass out after tryng to keep each other awake so we could get all the info being disseminated by PBS on a special report on cloning at around nine-thirty. On the ride back into New York late in the afternoon, Johansen mentions the one time he'd heard himself on AM radio. "The Dolls were in some city in the Midwest and suddenly I hear us doin' ‘Stranded In The Jungle,' and just as I'm getting all excited, I realize that it's a commercial for one of those Jungle Habitat places with us as the background music." He shakes his head. "Pretty funny, huh?"

It's tough to predict what will happen to Johansen's album, although the rave reviews pouring in from everywhere and the apparent thumbs-up that many radio stations are giving the record bode well indeed. It seems to me that David Johansen is the kind of record that you always want to come across and very rarely do; a record filled with intelligence, with emotion, with up songs and down songs, at times introverted and at other times extroverted. A record put out by an artist who, more than anything else, is a human being, not some calculated conniver or scheming poseur. What Johansen has always been and probably always will be, is a natural and because of that, I find myself listening to him with an implicit trust that's difficult to find with most of the music currently around. The spirit inherent in his writing and his singing is right at the core of that often nebulous phrase "rock 'n' roll." The roots are easily traceable and the boundaries are limitless, which is just how it should be. And whatever the future holds in store for Johansen and his new band (and as I write this, Syl Sylvain is now gigging with them, although it's unclear whether he's there for good or just for a month or so), you can be dead sure of one thing. He is giving it his best and truest shot once again, and it's hard to ask for anything more. ff