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

The Second Album Was the Beginning of the End.

Midnight lipstick, feedback sweat, the blur of youth and arrival: The CD booklet Syl Sylvain and Jerry Nolan signed for me the night I met them, during my first trip to New York the week I turned 23, September 1988.

It’s one thing to make a great first record. It’s another thing entirely to survive it.

The New York Dolls didn’t. Not really.

By the time Too Much Too Soon landed—May 10, 1974, for those of you keeping score—the cracks weren’t just showing. They were spreading like a virus. And like any good virus in a decaying host, the second album didn’t kill them outright. It just weakened the system until the immune response gave up.

It was the album David Johansen wanted. The others? They could smell the compromise coming.

“No matter what anybody says, I think Todd [Rundgren] was the best producer at that time to produce the New York Dolls,” Syl Sylvain told me in 1997, for a Guitar World oral history that I wrote. “And he gave us a fabulous first album. If you compare the first album to the second album, it’s like day and night. The second album is like the first Buster Poindexter album. When you got Black girls singing, you got a horn section, you got a piano player that can really play instead of Sylvain Sylvain—that’s not the New York Dolls! That could be any schmuck! Then you got Johansen singing, so as far as I’m concerned it was the first Buster Poindexter album!”

Sessions commenced in January 1974 at A&R Studios on West 48th Street. Not a bad facility: Sylvain wrote in his book There’s No Bones in Ice Cream: Sylvain Sylvain’s Story of the New York Dolls that it was one of the city’s best at the time, possibly even “a step or two above the Record Plant, where we recorded the first album.” But the foundation wasn’t all that solid.

“We didn’t even demo it first,” Sylvain complained in his book. “That was a warning sign.”

Producer Shadow Morton was a legend, sure: The Shangri-Las’ mastermind, the “Leader of the Pack” guy. He also produced The Vanilla Fudge, but we won’t hold that against him. He knew how to evoke high drama, and how to build a wall of sound, even if it wasn’t quite Spectorian in scope. But the Dolls weren’t meant to be walled in. Todd Rundgren got it. On the first album, he let the band be a mess, a vibe, a real thing. He also understood that Syl and Johnny were meant to be mixed together, like a giant, filthy monolith. Morton separated them, panned them hard left and right. He wanted polish, pianos, backup singers. And Johansen, already reaching for something bigger, bought in.

“We had such a great thing going,” Syl continued. “I wanted to have Rundgren do the second album. I was voted down because I wasn’t that strong. As far as they were concerned, Thunders and Johansen were the power of the band. But Johnny didn’t know where to go on that second album. So they got Shadow Morton, and he was so bad for us! He cleaned us up, he didn’t give us the dirt. He didn’t give us those things that you love of Johnny’s, like the little guitar riffs. He didn’t like me playing piano: ‘Oh, no! I’m gonna get a real piano player!’ So he got some Greek guy [Alex Spyropoulos, founding member of late-’60s British prog outfit Nirvana – yeah, that other Nirvana], and he played piano real good. But it wasn’t the Dolls. ‘Oh, no! You guys don’t sing so good! Let me get these Black girls in to go ‘Shoo-bop-bop-bop!’’ Great, but it ain’t the New York Dolls, baby! It was like night and day.”

Only two new songs were composed for the album – “Puss ’n’ Boots” and “Babylon.”

“It’s kinda sad,” sighed Sylvain, “because ‘Teenage News’ [a Syl original that first officially aired on his 1979 RCA solo album, Sylvain Sylvain] was already written and performed live but wasn’t on the album. The title song was not even used. It showed up later on Johnny Thunders’ acoustic album [Hurt Me (1984)]. I wrote that song just for our second album, and one night I asked Shadow Morton, ‘Hey, when are we gonna get around to my song?’

“‘Well, I’ve been told by management that I have to pay attention to David and Johnny.’”

“I got so fucking pissed off when he told me that I packed up my bags and my girlfriend and took off on vacation to Jamaica. I started getting into that kinda rhythm. That’s where I came up with ‘Funky But Chic’ [eventually recorded by David on his self-titled 1978 debut]. I told the guys, ‘Hey, man, let’s start getting some ska in our stuff, just to keep it going and not just do the same thing we’ve been doing.’”

Thunders finally got to sing a lead vocal, on Side Two’s second track, “Chatterbox,” coming right after “Puss ‘n’ Boots.” It was based on a song that the band developed in Rusty Beanie’s backroom, sometimes credited as “Milk Man,” then reworked as “Leave Me Alone,” on So Alone, finally morphing into “Milk Me” on The Heartbreakers’ Live At Max’s Kansas City LP.

But the lack of strong new originals entering A&R Studios led to an overreliance on material going back to the bike shop days, specifically the ancient R&B artifacts peppering their early sets: Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me Talkin’,” The Coasters’ “Bad Detective,” The Jayhawks’ “Stranded In The Jungle.” and “There’s Gonna Be A Showdown,” the Archie Bell & The Drells hit that’s lesser-known than “Tighten Up.” Morton may have favored all those songs because he could load ‘em up with the sorta sound effects associated with those great Shangri-Las 45s. But he also had “Puss ‘n’ Boots” for that, closing that one with a gun blast/ricochet after Johansen drops the line, “I hope you don’t get shot!”

Then there was the closing statement of purpose, “Human Being,” declaring the band’s right to be messy and capable of bad decisions…the right to be human, “a riff raff human being.”

“The opening riff to ‘Human Being’? That was [Pink Floyd’s] ‘Interstellar Overdrive’!” Sylvain informed me in 1997. “But with Johnny Thunders in the band, anything past six notes and he starts whining: ‘Syl, there’s too many changes in this song!’ So we simplified it, ...writing a new song in the process.”

The New York Dolls in their 1973 prime, performing “Human Being” and “Jet Boy” like a riot with choreography. They’re tight as hell and dying right in front of you, all because Jerry Nolan’s in the engine room. This is rock ‘n’ roll, children!

First time lead vocal or not, Thunders still hated Too Much Too Soon. Jerry Nolan also hated it, but he hated all the Dolls’ albums, always complaining he could never hear the drums. Arthur Kane wanted out of the studio entirely. They could see what David couldn’t—or wouldn’t. The band was being reshaped around him. This was no longer a gang. It was a feature vehicle.

“When they went in the studio for Too Much Too Soon, there was a lot of bickering and fighting,” Sabel Starr, noted L.A. groupie and Thunders’ then-girlfriend. “David and Johnny just didn’t see eye to eye on anything, which was really too bad. ‘Cause I thought they were going to have a promising future, but it all fell apart after that second album. It was a really fun party that first year. Then the second year, once they started that second album, it was all just fighting and it wasn’t so fun anymore.

“And I thought the second album sucked! I didn’t like it. I guess there was just a lot of animosity between David and Johnny. I think that really broke up the band, which was really sad.”

“I know John and Jerry were fed up by the time of the second record,” Arthur told me in 1997. “David was on such a big ego trip by that point. I didn’t even want to be in the studio. I just wanted to come in and put down what I could do, and that was it. I had been outvoted as far as getting my name on any material. It was the end of the line. And we had been going really gung-ho only two years earlier.”

The thing is, Johansen did show up. Say what you want about the ego, the center-stage maneuvers, the I’ll-just-do-it-myself tirades—he worked. Even manager Marty Thau admitted it.

“He was a pro,” said Thau, not even trying to sugarcoat the chaos. “No matter how late the party went on the night before, David was always up and raring to go.”

But being a pro isn’t always enough when your bandmates are strung out, your producer wants pristine sonics you can eat off of where there should be grime and gunk, and your label’s already sharpening the axe.

The whole second record cycle plays like a slow funeral with glitter on the coffin.

“So the second record comes out and sells close to 110,000, like the first,” said Thau. “But no great progress was happening, saleswise. And Mercury was even more pissed off.”

“The good reviews would come from the writers we expected to [give us] good reviews,” Syl observed in his book. “The bad ones were from those who’d never paid attention. It went into the charts at number one hundred and something, but it never climbed higher than number 116, and within two or three months it was forgotten.

He concluded, “Billboard have this thing where a record goes into the chart ‘with a bullet’, and our album was always associated with a bullet. Unfortunately, I think they were aiming at us.”

“We hardly toured,” Sylvain griped to me. “And when we did, we were back to playing the small clubs.”

The bullet on the Billboard charts didn’t kill the New York Dolls. But the bullet aimed at the band from inside did.

🖤 If You Felt This, It’s Time To Show Up. 🖤

This tribute to David Johansen didn’t write itself.

It came out of exhaustion. Out of silence. Out of a week where I didn’t write a single word because the day job was leeching the life out of me.

But Johansen deserved this. So I showed up anyway. Just like he did.

Even when his band was imploding. Even when producers cleaned him up and neutered his sound. Even when the system tried to turn his chaos into product. He still showed up.

So here I am, still showing up.

But I can’t keep doing this without support.

We just gained 15 new free subscribers. And I’m grateful for every single one. But without paying subscribers, this doesn’t last. No more tributes. No more manifestos. No more punk history written from the inside.

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Because this isn’t a job. It’s not a gimmick. It’s not a side hustle. It’s a mission. A calling. And right now, it’s hanging by a thread.

Johansen never mailed it in. I won’t mail it in. But I need you with me.

Let’s light the next match together.

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