In Memoriam: David Johansen (1950-2025), Part Two
The making of the band that liked to “look 16 and bored shitless.”
Outtake from Toshi Matsuo’s 1973 photo session for the front cover of the New York Dolls’ debut album. Nobody wore platform shoes or attitude quite like David Johansen. (📸: Toshi Matsuo)
And now for something completely different…
Please forgive me detouring slightly on Friday, pivoting to Damned/Lords Of The New Church architect Brian James’ passing. Hopefully, y’all understand.
But I decided over the weekend we needed some clarification of material in Part One of our extended David Johansen memorial. Most specifically, in the section entitled Standing on a pole, starting a riot, it might be gleaned that the hip young things of the ‘60s—such as a teenage Johnny Thunders, his girlfriend Janis Cafasso, and Arthur “Killer” Kane—swanned all over Central Park in their gladrags. Sometimes, editors are ruthless, excising crucial detail. (And I dunno why I am throwing the editor under the bus here, since the “editor” is me and ChatGPT!)
What Kane and Syl Sylvain told me in that 2005 Guitar World oral history was that it was the Central Park fountain that was the specific focus of all that youthful, Sunday afternoon preening and parading. There also happened to be a joint called Nobody’s Bar at 163 Bleecker Street that these rockers-and-bohemians-in-the-making favored. Nobody’s wasn’t Max’s Kansas City—it wasn’t where you went to schmooze Warhol superstars or catch the next Velvet Underground set. It was a scrappy little dive where the future Dolls and their fellow downtown misfits could drink cheap, flaunt their thrift-store finery, and size each other up like alley cats on a fire escape. A place to be seen, maybe to be discovered, but mostly just to hold court among the young and the restless.
Thunders began hanging out there in late 1970, and this was where Kane and his pal George “Rick Rivets” Fedorcik—the proto-Dolls’ original guitarist—first met Thunders.
Sylvain, his boyhood pal Billy Murcia—the Dolls’ original drummer—all knew Thunders from attending Queens’ Newtown High together in the ‘60s. But Kane and Rivets were both intrigued by Thunders' look, and how he kept popping up in the oddest places. For one thing, he’s clearly visible in The Maysles Brothers’ beautiful documentary on The Rolling Stones’ 1969 US tour, Gimme Shelter—he’s standing atop Cafasso’s shoulders among the first few rows in all the sequences filmed at Madison Square Garden.
Kane: “Finally, I decided, I’m gonna go over and find out what’s up with this guy, because no one’s allowed to look that outrageous unless you actually do something!”
Sylvain: “Johnny was originally a bass player. I basically taught him how to play guitar. I showed him everything I knew: some blues riffs, a couple of three-chord progressions and power chords.”
Kane: “I knew Johnny played bass, but the first time we jammed, he was playing guitar. And he was playing something that I was familiar with, but it sounded different. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t wrong. And I thought, Gee, maybe this guy is hearing something that I don’t hear. And I said, ‘Well, if this is what you’re going to do, then I’m going to play bass!’ He started calling himself Johnny Thunders two weeks later.”
Oh, yeah–he’d been “Johnny Volume” up to that point. Kane also remarked to me, in an outtake from our conversation: “I like to see Johnny taken more seriously as a musician. I’d like to be taken more seriously as a musician. People always wonder why I didn’t play all these walking bass lines, like a standard r&b bassist. Well, if I did that, we’d have just been The J. Geils Band!”
Lol! Yeah, ain’t no mistaking the New York Dolls for the guys who did that angel in the fucking “Centerfold” song! And as good a frontman as Peter Wolf is? He’s no David Johansen.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming, in progress….
“The ‘60s were over!”
“The New York Dolls were the first sign that the ‘60s were over,” Johansen’s future wife, Warhol starlet/Bowie entourage member Cyrinda Foxe, told me in 2000.
“The Dolls were wild-and-free Lower East Side New York. They were really funky kids, and their sound was the beginning of punk rock. They didn’t care if the notes were in the right place; it sounded good, it felt good and the kids liked it. Johnny Thunders’ guitar playing was crude, Arthur Kane’s bass playing was primal and Billy Murcia’s drumming was great—the sound was very basic. And David had something to say; he had great, fun lyrics. They were all fun songs. I have no complaints about the New York Dolls. I thought they were brilliant. Then drugs took over. Alcohol took over. Weak personalities.
“I remember someone telling me, ‘You’ve got to go to Mercer Arts Center! There’s this band you’ve gotta see! C’mon!’ The Mercer Arts Center was this performance-arts place cut up into all these different rooms. The band was playing and Johnny Thunders had on turquoise-blue pants and was playing a clear guitar. David was kinda interesting because he looked like a chick, not some androgynous, funky dude. And Arthur was pretty funky-looking. Syl was cute, like a doll. They were fun. They were too loud, but there was a good vibe. And all the girls. Young girls! They had a little following already.”
“When they took the stage, I couldn’t help but think, ‘This has got to be the most wild-looking, bizarre-looking group I’ve ever seen,’” said Marty Thau, who went on to co-manage them with Steve Leber and David Krebs, of his first peek at the Dolls. “‘Either I’ve just seen the best or the worst group ever.’ Afterward, I went backstage, and I introduced myself and told them who I was and how impressed I was with them. We met about two weeks later and I realized that these guys were street fugitives of a sort. You could easily write them off as a bunch of dumb street thugs, or you could say they know exactly who they are and what they want and how to get it. I thought they could really be important and decided to manage them.”
Foxe: “They didn’t know what the hell they were doing. They were like a garage band that just got out of the garage. All they knew was they were getting laid. Small theater, small room, but it was fun. Then they got into a bigger room and started playing all around town.
“We needed something new. Everything was old, or English, or this or that. This was America—New York! It was happening right here at home! We don’t want imports! We’ll take them, but if we have something homegrown, we get so excited, and we get behind it.”
If the Dolls had no idea how to execute this wild and carefree amalgam of ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll, the high drama of The Shangri-Las, and the MC5’s molten guitar fury, their grasp was much more firm with Jerry Nolan’s installation on the drummer’s throne, following Murcia’s death-by-misadventure in London.
“All the elements are firmly in place, waiting for Todd Rundgren and Jack Douglas to commit them to tape,” I wrote nearly two years ago of a, er, “fan club edition” LP that had just surfaced called New York Dolls: Showdown At The Mercer. It presented pioneering rock critic and Mercury Records A&R man Paul Nelson's tape of the Dolls’ January 16th, 1973 appearance at the Mercer—one of Nolan’s first gigs as a New York Doll.
“Thunders’ guitar is slippin’ and slidin’, screamin’ and grinding, while Sylvain comps a little cleaner, a little bluesier. Kane locks in with Nolan, providing a fat, solid bottom for the six-string kamikaze missions. And Johansen is as arch and hilarious as ever.”
Murcia was nowhere near the drummer Jerry Nolan was. At best, Murcia was Moe Tucker with less talent and groove. Nolan had played since his teens in the early ‘60s, backing exotic dancers and playing in Twist bands downtown. He came straight to the Dolls from stints with Suzi Quatro and Wayne County (as Jayne was known back then). The impact was immediately evident. Plus he was a licensed barber, as well as a former New York street gang member who looked like he could pull a switchblade out of his stick bag, even in Mary Janes and a faceful of Maybelline
Johansen? As always, the consummate rock ‘n’ roll frontman—a star, even if the universe hadn’t figured it out yet. People already saw him as Mick Jagger, Jr.—the swagger, the moves, the slight resemblance—especially next to Thunders, whose Keith Richards worship wasn’t exactly subtle. (In reality, however, the singer probably more resembled Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits than the Don Knotts lookalike fronting the Stones.) He also had a wit more arid than the Sahara desert, and a distinctive basso profundo—a voice like a Brooklyn cab driver moonlighting as a blues singer. And his lyrics? Pure poetry: “Now with all the crossin' fingers Mother Nature says/Your mirror's gettin' jammed up with all your friends.” Iggy Stooge, for all his 25-words-or-less lyrical discipline, could never write a line like that.
If Showdown At The Mercer proves the Dolls had fully coalesced by that gig, the Nelson-produced demo session, A Hard Night’s Day, shows their repertoire was already set in stone. It’s easy to see why record companies were now showing up, sniffing around among those glittery critters adoring the band down at the Mercer.
“When we came back from England, we just went right into this show, just to get ourselves back into it,” Johansen drily informed Creem’s Ben Edmonds that October. “But someone had invited down Ahmet Ertegun, Clive Davis, Joe Polydor and these other crazy people. Out of an audience of 500, there were maybe 20 real kids who were there to rock. The rest of ’em were record company people, and if you mess up... well, goodbye, and the trap door opens and you fall into the snake pit.
“So we came on stage, and all we could see were these balding old relics with their polished heads, snorting coke and thinking that they’re so outtasite. And I’m supposed to get a record contract out of these people? It’s like I’m just a prostitute, right, but if I’m okay maybe they’ll give me a Lincoln and make me a pimp. Ahmet Ertegun and Mick Taylor decided that we were the worst high school band they’d ever heard. Mick Taylor told us, ‘You guys got just six months to polish it up.’ I told him to go screw.”
Between the band’s fuck-you front and Thau’s reported $250,000 asking price, it’s no wonder Mercury was the only label that bit. Mercury’s Paul Nelson wasn’t some industry hustler chasing the next big thing—he was a true believer. He saw in the Dolls everything he loved about rock ‘n’ roll: danger, excitement, and a total disregard for polish. He pushed Mercury hard to sign them, nearly losing his job in the process, because he knew they deserved to make records. And if no one else was going to make it happen, he would. Mercury took his advice, signing them on March 20, 1972.
“We like to look 16 and bored shitless.”
The Dolls were finally corralled into Studio B of NYC’s Record Plant studios from April to June, Rundgren gamely attempting to nail down what Edmonds called their “knockdown chord figures and…blitz-fills like electric Siamese criminals” on tape. Douglas, the session engineer, was as responsible as anyone for New York Dolls’ warmth and thump. Rundgren seemed to want to distance himself from the LP immediately: “I did the album as a present to New York…and then I moved outta New York!” The Dolls couldn’t have cared less, snarkily dedicating Loggins & Messina’s “Your Mama Don’t Dance” (“...and your daddy don’t rock ‘n’ roll!”) to their producer on radio station promo visits.
“Some people think that we don’t have any manners,” Johansen shrugged to Creem, “they say that we’re very crude and don’t use our guitars in the traditional sense of the instrument. But we use those guitars to make sounds that mean something to us. We don’t make sounds that would mean anything to a bunch of hillbillies.”
Truth of the matter was, New York Dolls and Raw Power owned 1973, alongside the Stones’ Exile On Main Street, a less ragged/less lively version of what The Stooges and the Dolls offered. (Perhaps because of that overly wanky guitarist who sniffed that the Dolls had six months to shape up?) And the Dolls’ LP especially mimicked the sound of the Stones crunched up in a subway accident, appropriate for a New York band. They were now a global juggernaut. They stunned The Midnight Special’s audience, patiently sitting on their hands waiting for Bachman Turner Overdrive, as a dozen Sunset Strip regulars shook like demons to “Personality Crisis.”
Across the pond, the clueless Old Grey Whistle Test MC Bob Harris tutted “mock rock” after they lip synched to “Jet Boy,” Thunders resplendent in a skull-encrusted leather jacket, Brian Jones’ old Vox Teardrop guitar slung across his shoulders. Whisperin’ Bob, an ex-cop, failed to realize his “pale derivative of the Stones” jab had just endeared the Dolls to an entire generation about to start Britain’s first punk bands. Maybe he should’ve had his ears blown out the night before, when the Dolls destroyed London’s ultrachic Biba’s Boutique with a PA and backline borrowed from the very band they were supposedly a pale derivative of. (Mick Taylor could not be reached to comment on whether he’d felt they’d sufficiently tightened up.)
Two days later, Thunders threw up before the French rock press gathered in Paris’ Orly Airport, then kicked in some heckler’s jaw with his platform boot at the Olympia Théâtre, before stumbling behind the amps to take a leak.
No, Edith Piaf never did it like this. London Teddy Boy haberdasher Malcolm McLaren, a friend who accompanied the band on this Continental sojourn, furiously scribbled notes.
And Johansen presided over this gang of rock ‘n’ roll refugees in jacked-up hair and platform boots like the world’s most arch game show MC. He’d make onstage dedications such as, “This is a song for the 21st century, when all the women will have taken over all the power and the men will have to seek refuge for themselves in massage parlors.” Then turn around and inform the press, “We like to look 16 and bored shitless.” Or “I have just been compared to Joe Brown and Linda Lovelace. She’s a symbol of the youth of America.”
Nothing could stop the New York Dolls now, could it?
End Part Two
The Real Story Deserves Real Support
If you’ve made it this far, chances are you care about the real story—the raw, messy, glorious noise that changed everything. That’s what we’re doing here at The Tim ‘Napalm’ Stegall Substack: telling the truth about the punks, the glam kids, the outcasts, the legends.
This memorial to David Johansen isn’t something you’ll find in the mainstream music press. It’s longform. It’s researched. It’s written with heart, humor, and a hell of a lot of respect. And if that matters to you, maybe it’s time to throw in with us.
Free subscriptions are great. Paid subscriptions keep this alive. Hit the button below and give your favorite ‘Stack the support it needs. Thank you.
#TimNapalmStegall #TimNapalmStegallSubstack #PunkJournalism #DavidJohansen #NewYorkDolls #JohnnyThunders #ArthurKane #SylSylvain #BillyMurcia #JerryNolan #RickRivets #CyrindaFoxe #MartyThau #PaulNelson #MercerArtsCenter #BleeckerStreet #GlamRock #ProtoPunk #NYCUnderground #NewYorkUndergroundTribalHistory #PunkHistory #RockNRoll #RealPunkJournalism #MusicTribute #SupportIndependentJournalism #Substack #SubscribeNow