If I’m being honest, the first time I ever heard David Johansen sing was not via his storied tenure in the New York Dolls, but rather during the early portions of his post-Dolls solo career, just prior to his comparatively lucrative reinvention as Buster Poindexter.
He’d scored a minor hit with “Funky but Chic” in 1978, which abandoned his previous incarnation as a lippy, cross-dressing frontman in favor of a more streamlined, mainstream approach. But his music didn’t cross my transom until the early days of MTV, wherein David was promoting a live album called Live It Up, featuring a not-really-punky at all cover medley of songs by Eric Burdon and the Animals. In between era-defining clips by bands like The Fixx, Golden Earring and Thompson Twins would come this ersatz live clip (Dave is clearly lip-syncing) of the great man in front of a very receptive audience, flanked by a band of gurning guys with mullets and sleeveless t-shirts. Here’s that clip now. It’s aged better than I’d remembered it.
I don’t think I bought a proper New York Dolls release until my junior year of high school. I remember picking up the ROIR cassette of Lipstick Killers at the Disc-O-Mat on East 58th Street, but by that point, the band’s proto-punk blend of bawdy glam-damaged rawk had been so brazenly appropriated by dozens of pretenders to the throne that it was hard to reconcile how original they must have sounded at the dawn of the impenetrably beige 1970s.
In any case, Johansen’s gone on to lead a fairly remarkable career of comebacks, detours, reinventions and surprises ever since, and remains something of a national treasure. Sadly, the latest surprise was his admission, today, that he’s currently battling Stage 4 Cancer and a brain tumor. Click here for more details and to help, if you can.
Godspeed, David. This will always be my favorite New York Dolls track....
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