In Memoriam: David Johansen (1950-2025), Part Three

Crimony, has it really been TWO MONTHS since the last installment?!

1974, and Mercury Records felt they had something to brag about…. [Taken from Steven (yes, him!) Morrissey’s great elevated fanzine New York Dolls, published February 1981. 📸 PHOTO: Bob Gruen]

“Alright, this it! Nineteen seventy foh! Open up the doh!” David Johansen howled from the stage of Detroit’s Michigan Palace, New Year’s Eve 1973. A heartbeat later, Johnny Thunders detonated the riff Syl Sylvain had filched from Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” plunging the New York Dolls headfirst into “Human Being.”

Well, if you don't like it, go ahead

Find yourself a saint, go ahead now

Try to find a boy who's gonna

Be what I ain't…

A few months later, on this same stage, Iggy and The Stooges (who, like the Dolls, spent the past year rewriting rock ’n’ roll’s rules) would crash and burn spectacularly. That ugly, glorious wreck became Metallic K.O., the sound of punk’s future kicking and screaming its way into the world.

Now what you need is

A plastic doll with a fresh coat of paint

Who's gonna sit through the madness

And always acts so quaint

I said yeah, yeah, yeah…

But like I said, that’s a few months off. Tonight? The New York Dolls were celebrating.

1973 was their year. They had a new drummer in Jerry Nolan, a new record deal (finally!) with Mercury, a new album—their first—that thrilled some, baffled many, and created 1976 and ’77 in the process. In a few months, the readership of Creem, the magazine that had done so much to spread the Dolls’ and Stooges’ gospel, voted them both the best AND worst new group of 1973.

They were gathering new converts everywhere they went.

“That was one of the first shows I saw!” Joan Jett exclaimed when asked if she was a fan 50 years later.

“American Theater, Washington, D.C. I'm guessing it’s like 1973, sometime before we moved to Los Angeles. Oh, I loved it! I had their first album, so I knew what I was in for. I mean, I wasn't going to be thrown by guys in makeup!

“We were in the front row, we had great seats. I don't know how I got them — first come, first serve. I just don't know. But I wound up right in front. I remember David Johansen’s empty beer bottle, and I remember Johnny looking like Johnny. It was a great show. They played a lot of songs from the first album, and I think their second album had just come out. So it was probably in support of that record, and they played a lot of songs from that.

“They were great, just what you want to see from a band: loud, live rock ’n’ roll. You knew what the songs were from the album. They sounded enough like it. It was great.”

“Of course I was a Dolls fan. I saw them,” smiled Kid Congo Powers, when I asked him the same question a few days later. “My older neighbors were in bands and into glam, and that’s how I found musician guys a few years ahead of me in high school. They went to see the Dolls at the Whisky a Go Go, but I was too young. Then they found out the Dolls were taping The Midnight Special in the afternoon. They said, ‘We're going. You should come. Your parents will let you go in the daytime.’ So I went. I saw them do ‘Personality Crisis.’ I was hooked.

“I’d been learning about them from magazines — Creem, Circus, Rock Scene. Mostly the ones Danny Fields edited. He introduced all these new bands. The Dolls were incredible looking, and incredibly raw, unpolished, Stonesy. I saw them again the next year at the Roxy on the Strip. They played a midnight show and showed up hours late.

“But it was the most exciting concert I’ve ever been to. Everyone was half pissed-off but really excited. The stage sides were packed with glam groupies and fans dressed to the nines. The whole place was dressed up. Johansen was incredible. I don’t think he really had a bottle of champagne, but it felt like he did. It was this wild, intimate party. We were right up front.”

We detailed that Midnight Special appearance in the last installment of this fricken War And Peace. What I didn’t state was that I watched that, when I was seven. My babysitter let me stay up. Of course, I got in trouble the next day when I asked my mom what a faggot was, because that’s what the sitter had called them.

Still, I rewatch that clip sometimes, and you can really see the impact. There are ten people up front loving them, singing along. Behind them? Just a sea of people sitting on their fucking hands, thinking, “When’s James Taylor coming on?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly how it was,” Kid agreed. “Those kids in the front row? I met them later at Rodney’s English Disco. They all became punk rockers, like us. It was young people looking for something exciting. Pre-punk energy. We were so done with pompous music — ELP, Rick Wakeman’s Six Wives of Henry VIII. Total eye-roll stuff.

“Glam was raw. It drew on old rock ’n’ roll. T. Rex, chunky chords, Mick Ronson. Wild, exciting guitar. It looked great, it sounded great, and it had humor. It was for teenagers. Not adults.”

Well, as evidenced by those frowning masses behind the grooving glam kids in the Midnight Special audience, not EVERY kid was digging what the Dolls were laying down. This was just weird to them, like the kids who couldn’t comprehend DEVO when they played “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” on Saturday Night Live the week after the Stones themselves appeared.

Well, with your new friend

You're really making a scene

And I see you bouncin' around

From machine to machine…

By 1975, large numbers of American kids had been trained to reject anything that wasn’t “normal.” Which is why they could accept the cross-dressing Alice Cooper, but not the cross-dressing Dolls. Coop and his crew cloaked their titillation in Budweiser and horror movie schtick. The Dolls? Heroin chic and ambiguous sexuality with a wink, a grin, and a blown kiss.

Those uncomprehending heffalumps were waiting for the Dolls’ pedestrian labelmates, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, also on the same episode. They were surely the same ones who voted the Dolls the worst new group of 1973 in that Creem poll.

So, as they stepped through that doh into nineteen seventy foh, in Johansen’s appropriated street jive, both Mercury’s upper muckety-mucks and Leber Krebs (the more conventionally minded part of their management team) had some qualms about the New York Dolls. Their doting A&R man Paul Nelson, and the more visionary manager, Marty Thau, felt the Dolls could do no wrong. So did the Dolls themselves.

But Mercury and Leber Krebs saw a ledger sheet dipping deeper into the red, mostly thanks to (AHEM!) “youthful antics,” and worried they’d bitten off more than they could chew. Maybe they’d made a mistake. Maybe the Dolls weren’t that good. Maybe that’s why BTO was selling more records?

In any case, Leber Krebs had already signed a more conventional Boston hard rock act, Aerosmith, with a slight glam veneer, and instructed them to pay close attention to the Dolls. Maybe Aerosmith could pull it off in a more commercial fashion?

At the same time, a local band named Wicked Lester, featuring Nolan’s teenage friend Peter Criss, took inspiration from the Dolls’ ruckus. They applied the Alice Cooper trick, amped up the horror, and renamed themselves Kiss.

And you know they're never real

They're never what they seem

And you can try to generate some warmth

And you see just what I mean, I said yeah, yeah

Yeah…

Two years later, both bands ate teenage America alive in a way the Dolls never could. Aerosmith and Kiss invented the entire dynamic of mid-’80s Sunset Strip lipstick metal: wear the Dolls’ image, but don’t play their music. Just coat pop metal with Max Factor — you’ll be alright.

Bands like Mötley Crüe and Poison sold their less-than-hard rock to the little brothers and sisters of those BTO fans in the Midnight Special audience. They did it on the back of the New York Dolls’ innovations, by aping the photographs, not the music or philosophy.

Which is why MTV ate those groups up like manna from heaven, while more proper children of the New York Dolls (such as The Joneses, Redd Kross, and Hanoi Rocks) were eating beans out of the can and sleeping five to a shitty efficiency apartment.

Meanwhile, back in nineteen seventy foh, the New York Dolls had an album to do.

And I've just gotta go around

With my head hung down

Just like a human being, oh no, human being

I can hold my head so high

Because I'm a human, a riff-raff human being

…or did they?

End Part Three

James Baker as a Scientist, late ‘70s. [📸 PHOTO: Courtesy the James Baker Collection]

James Baker (March 7, 1954 – May 5, 2025)

James Baker — the Australian punk and garage veteran whose story I was in the middle of telling here on the ‘Stack before book duties yanked me away — has left us.

He died at home in Perth last night, shortly after 7:30 PM, after a long, defiant fight with cancer. James being James, he didn’t go quietly. He held the disease off long enough to give us one last run with The Victims (the band he co-founded with Dave Faulkner back in 1977), a new Beasts Of Bourbon album, a December reunion with the Hoodoo Gurus onstage in Perth, and even his first solo record in decades, Born to Rock, released just last year. He was still recording right into January — cutting a single with Dom Mariani — because of course he was! Rock ’n’ roll was in his blood and stayed there right up to the end.

If you know your Australian underground history, you already know how deep his fingerprints run. James was there at every crucial turn: The Victims, The Scientists, Hoodoo Gurus, Beasts of Bourbon, The Dubrovniks, The Painkillers. He lived it. He shaped it. And he did it all while staying true to what he loved most — loud, wild, heartfelt rock ‘n’ roll. He wasn’t a careerist or a tourist. He was the real thing.

He caught the bug early, playing in bands like Black Sun and Slink City Boys, inspired by The Stooges, MC5, Alice Cooper, and the Dolls. In 1976, he made the pilgrimage to the U.S. and U.K. during punk’s ignition phase, encountering members of the Dolls, Ramones, Damned, Pistols, and Clash. When he returned to Perth, he brought that spark back with him and lit a fuse. First with The Geeks, then with The Victims — and from there, Australian punk and garage rock had its roadmap.

James is survived by his wife Cathy, daughters Lorna and Faye, his sister Barbara, and a grandson due to arrive very soon.

On a personal note, I regret deeply that we didn’t get to finish telling James’ story while he was still here to see it. But it was an honor to have the privilege, to help tell part of that story, and to include The Victims in Anarchy In The Studio. We’ll conclude James’ tale here next week — and give him the last word, as he deserves.

Rest easy, James. You lived it all.

Enjoying this? I’m glad to be back, and thanks for sticking with me.

If you’ve been following The Tim "Napalm" Stegall Substack, you know it’s been a little quiet lately. That wasn’t by choice. Book duties called (they screamed, actually), and I had to step away from this space much longer than I wanted.

But this — remembering David Johansen, finishing James Baker’s story, and everything still to come — is why I started this in the first place. Not necessarily to become Punk Rock’s Obituary Page, but to keep telling these tales. To get them down right, with the love, sweat, and irreverence they deserve.

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