POSITION OF A VAGABOND MISSIONARY

POSITION OF A VAGABOND MISSIONARY

DAVID JOHANSEN

by Mitchell Cohen

In an office that overlooks Central Park, David Johansen finds the videotape he's looking for, a recording of his New Year's morning show at the Hotel Diplomat. There's a soundcheck to make over at the Ritz, there's a photographer waiting to shoot for the Voice, but Johansen doesn't seem to be in any particular hurry. He watches himself on TV: Spraying the drummer with seltzer, mugging for the camera, exhorting the audience to sing along on "Personality Crisis" ("I sound like Dean Martin at this point"), changing from a leopard-skin pillbox ("my Edith Prickley hat") to a 50-gallon cowboy hat.

This rowdy show, from 3:00 a.m. (EST) on January 1, 1982, kicked off what is proving to be an eventful year for David Johansen; it was the performance that gave him the impetus to cut the live album that people have, he says, been asking him to get out for years. (There's a promo-only 1978 live LP that foreshadows Live It Up.) Johansen gets a real charge out of seeing his on-stage shenanigans, and when the clip is over, he pops in another VHS tape, a visit to The Uncle Floyd Show, on which he lip-syncs his Animals medley and "Funky But Chic." There we are, rock 'n' roller and writer, about 30 years old apiece, cracking up at Don Goombah's plans. for a chain of supermarkets. The writer has had tougher assignments.

It's a short cab ride from Blue Sky Records to Johansen's apartment (items contributing to the decor: a Flamingo Road street sign, a Wally Moon baseball card, an autographed photo of Sophia Loren eyeing Jayne Mansfield's cleavage, a cassette of Too Much Too Soon). F rom there, a stroll takes us over to Tramps, where Johansen hand-delivers a copy of his new single for the juke box; he tells them they can take out his "She Loves Strangers" (no hog, he). The Ritz is only another few blocks from there. It's around 8:30, he won't go for at least four hours, but there's already a line building eastward from the door, and two girls break from the queue to give him a lavender rose. It's David Johansen's neighborhood, and he's the hometown hero on furlough.

There's nothing new about all this. He's been on the hometown beat since Nixon was running for re-election. The cool thing about this Manhattan stopover is that it comes in the midst of an overdue Johansen boomlet. There are all those documents of the past that are surfacing —ROIR has brought out a cassette of the New York Dolls' 1972 "Mercer Street Sessions," and Mercury's reissued (original covers, reasonable price tag) the Dolls' two and only LPs—and, get this, you can hear in this summer the unmistakable voice of David Johansen on the radio throughout these United States, further south than Soho, further west than the CBS Building. He has gotten there with a charged-up pastiche of "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place," "Don't Bring Me Down" and "It's My Life."

If you heard Live It Up blaring from a fourth floor window, you'd think that the folks up there were having a great time, and that's a dandy rock 'n' roll criteria right there, but the LP says more than that. The party has an edge to it; it's about a commitment so open-hearted that it can't understand how it can be denied reciprocation. Beneath Johansen's delinquent exuberance is a belief in the emotionalism that can be expressed through classic rock 'n' roll.

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Over at CBS Records (of which Blue Sky is an associated label), Johansen figures he's considered "the proletariat symbol of the company." When he steps on a New York stage, "It's like 'local boy makes good'." And he's concerned that rock writer/fan'll turn his apparent shift in fortunes into a Rocky story. You know, "good ol' David finally getting his due," and all that muck.

"People say to me, 'Aren't you dissatisfied with just cult status?,' or whatever you call it. But what I do have, and which is very gratifying to me, is the most discerning kids in their school listening to me. That's worth more than money. Some people have brains and look for the quality merchandise, and other people will just buy the assembly-line bullshit.

"What it boils down to is all these songs, 'Hey baby, I'll throw you my key and meet you after the show,' a lot of the kids, especially the boys, have been led to believe that that's all there is, and that's what they might as well start boogieing to. 'Cause that's what gets the radio play. What it kinda does is numb the kids.

"I've always considered my profession being a performer, not necessarily a radio star...A lot of people, maybe, programmers, they read the magazines and see that David's at another party every night, or else other ones picture me home in a dress, shooting up or something. Getting out there with Pat Benatar did a lot of good to show people we were really hard wroking and deliver a good show."

There's this whole subtext to Johansen's solo career, this Living Down The Dolls nonsense (how could the homage to Eric Burdon have pmitted "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"?). It's symptomatic of the moment that new albums by Chicago, CS&N and even, heaven help us, Uriah Heep are embraced eagerly, while being a former member of the New York Dolls is something to be overcome. "The whole image became so albatrostic," Johansen says about the Dolls' break-up. "And you don't want to do that the rest of your Me. You don't want to be known as the Quentin Crisp of rock. Leave that to David Bowie. We were New York street kids, scaring the hell out of the homophobics, and it was a ball, going around the country sticking their faces in it, making people just fall apart and realizing how weak their whole ego structure was. Their defense mechanisms would just grind to a halt. And that's a rotten thing to do, really. That's mean. But when you're a kid, it's a lot of fun."

"The Dolls," Johansen says, "were the first ones who did shows at midnight and showed that it could be done. We brought together a lot of people who thought they were disenfranchised, and when they saw each other in the same room they realized that there was actually a scene."

So the Dolls, who should be celebrated for their humor, their hooliganism, their urban panache and almost everything else, have to shoulder some of the blame for the appalling proliferation of the clubs like the Ritz. The Ritz is one of those places you hate to go to because they pack people in at mqre than $10 a head and it gets steamy and crowded and a can of Heineken will set you back more than two bucks and the headliner goes on about the same time that David Letterman signs off but you end up going there anyway because someone you like, like David Johansen, is playing there. Opening night of his three-night stand (in the midst of a tour that's finding him opening some dates for Joan Jett, another ex-Mercury band member who'd had to wipe out an image stigma, and for Blondie, who in their early days seemed to get their trashy Shangri-La notions from the Dolls) is practically a cocktail hour show. He comes on before midnight with "Cool Metro," and takes his excellent new band through a set that sparkles, with good-natured, impassioned hilarity. You get the feeling that he puts the word "crazy" into so many of his songs so he can spin his finger next to his skull and make google-eyed faces when he performs them live. He hardly has to work to win over this house, but he does: he's antic and pugnacious, like James Cagney in Footftght Parade, and by the end of the set, "Personality Crisis" and "Babylon" sound like the anthems they were meant to be 10 years ago.

Away from Johansen's pockets of fame, in arenas in America's heartland, it's a different story. "You gotta be relentless with 'em," he admits. "And you only got a chance to do about seven songs, so you wanna nail 'em by the third song so at least you got 'em for four songs. It's good for ya. We didn't even do 'Funky But Chic' on the Benatar tour because it wasn't going over. In the sticks, it's like 'Chic? Is that someone who sells you oil?"'

The Johansen show I missed back in April is the one "I was curious about, however, and he's generous enough (after much unsubtle pleading on my part) to lend me his cassette of it. On Palm Sunday, in a loft on Chrystie Street, Johansen and the Uptown Horns played a goosed-up, slightly sloshed set that started with the theme from Murray The K's Swingin' Soiree and included the Coasters' "Shgpping For Clothes," The Fugs' "Doin' All Right," "The Theme From Valley Of The Dolls," "Mack The Knife," the Who's "My Wife" (preceded by a lecture on Catholicism and Tennessee Williams), songs by Archie Bell & the Drells, Major Lance and Don & Dewey, and a catalog of songs on booze-indulgence ("Alcohol" by the Kinks, "Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well," "Gimme A Pigfoot," "Let's Go Get Stoned," "I Got Loaded," and a blues about champagne that he picked up from a 1968 LP by the James Cotton Blues Band.) "People say the Dolls were ahead of their time. I think we were right on time, as far as that's concerned, because somebody had to give the scene a kick in the ass and get the ball rolling. So it's OK, it might as well have been us."

Li People say the Dolls were ahead of their time. I think we were right on time, because someone had to give the scene a kick In the ass... w

"It was educational," Johansen says. "We just worked out a repertoire. I picked the songs that I wanted to do, and made a cassette of the originals. We had like two | rehearsals, we all wore suits. To do that is 5 very refreshing to me. There's just not c enough time to do all the things you want. s?1 It gives me the chance to really rap, too, I and talk about the songs, and how they £ affect you, and how you first hear them."

The Palm Sunday show, as well as the show captured on Live It Up, and Johansen's professional life through and since the Dolls, is an outgrowth of his great taste, and the way he ties it up with his own music. You can hear the songs dovetail on the album: "Frenchette," a plea for authenticity of feeling that summons up Ronnie Spector and Levi Stubbs, reflected by "Is This What I Get For Loving You" and "Reach Out, I'll Be There"; "Donna" and "Melody," Johansen originals that explicitly connect women and song, musical loss and personal loss; the sheer fun of "Bohemian Love Pad" (a terrific song rescued from Here Comes The Night) and "Stranded In The Jungle." Alongside the songs that were hits are songs that sound as though they should have been hits; Johansen molds himself in a tradition, and part of that tradition in rock 'n' roll involves widespread exposure, the charts, the radio, the world out there. It's Johansen's rightful inheritance.

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"When I was a kid, we used to go to like the Night Owl and see the Lovin' Spoonful or the Blues Magoos, and we used to go to the Cafe A Go Go and see Paul Butterfield and Muddy Waters. They didn't serve booze in those places, so you could be 13 or 14 and see tons of music. Then when we grew up and we were like 19 or 20 and had a band and came to the neighborhood, everything was boarded up. I used to get so melancholy in like, say 1972, because it was dead and it used to be so rockin'. At that period of time, we had no place to play. It used to practically give me tears in my eyes."

The Dolls got their break at the Mercer Arts Center, and then they'd go around from joint to joint, asking owners to book them; the band would get the door, the club would keep the bar receipts, 500 kids would show up at $2 admission, the Dolls got a thousand-dollar payday, and everybody was happy. It was the start of something that, unfortunately for Johansen and friends and followers, wouldn't come to full fruition until five years later.

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Johansen knows, and I know, that we could go on about the misapprehensions and mishegas that have gone on since, the scene that burgeoned as the Dolls disintegrated, but, as he says, "I'm not gonna Monday morning quarterback the Dolls, that's for sure." So we leave it at that. (Go get their albums; together with Live It Up, they'll cost you no more than a sawbuck.) Instead, I ask if he's equally proud of all his solo work.

"I like In Sty/e a lot," he answers immediately. "People who criticized it in the press, I think they missed the whole point of the album. Some people thought it was about buying clothes or something. 'Style' meant dignity in that context. You have ideas about people, and you think they're intelligent—I'm talking about individuals, not in general—and they disappoint you. Say if you have a lover, and you find out she's a schmuck, but you've been blinded by love.

"I've never really felt deterred, or anything by having an album that was a stiff because I know it's a good album, and I would just stick to my guns and do what I do. Because eventually it's gonna come around and enough people are gonna open up their ears and hear."

For David Johansen, going in style does mean carrying himself with a sense of pride, just as living it up is a triumph of spirit and persistence. When he was a high school sophomore, he had a band called, with prescient resonance, the Vagabond Missionaries. "I became a singer because you didn't have to carry an instrument. You didn't have to shlep, you know?" At their first gig, in a church basement, they did "Bugaloo Down Broadway" and the crowd went nuts. "I decided that's what I was gonna do." All rock 'n' roll lives begin with personal epiphanies and connections and, under the best circumstances, they go public and spur other people on.

"I have brothers and sisters, and the older ones had the hi-fi on when I was born, so it wasn't like I had to discover it or anything. When I came home from the hospital, Bobby Rydell was on, or something. i go to a swingin' school.' That Philly sound. When I grew up and Motown was happening, and the Animals, then all of a sudden I said, 'This is my music.' This stuff was talking to me.

"I think it's very important, in your development, when you all of a sudden find your own music. 'Cause like the music I went on to make when I got older became somebody's music."

Those "discerning kids" who find Johansen's music and make their own, those kids who resist the cold, emotionless music of their peers and gravitate towards Johansen's heartfelt rock 'n' roll, those kids are the lucky ones.

"First of all, [Baudelaire] says, the modern artist should 'set up his house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of motion, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite,' in the midst of the metropolitan crowd. 'His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd.' ...This 'lover of universal life' must 'enter into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy...Or we might compare him to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness'."

—Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air ^