Another hero of mine has passed. David Johansen was the last living member of proto-punk band the New York Dolls (his survival to age 75 was a feat in and of itself since so many of his bandmates died far too young of drugs, drowning, cancer, etc. … in a series of almost Biblical blights).
When I was 17, I was looking over one of the first in Rolling Stone magazine’s soon-to-be-too-many “Top 100” lists. Clocking in at No. 55 was a very tiny picture of a band. I had very good eyes back then and a really great knack for recognizing people, and even though the guy in front was the size of an ant and dressed as a woman it was incontrovertibly the cross-dressing ant face of one Buster Poindexter, the SNL lounge singer and “Hot Hot Hot” guy. My life changed after I read that issue because I realized he had a whole history (and a different name) I didn’t know about.
It was then I realized I was going to have to do all my own research to be a better music fanatic. Not only did I discover the Velvet Underground in that magazine but I figured out all the bands who got lost before the punk explosion. The New York Dolls was one of them, one of the most misunderstood bands of the early 1970s and most tragically overlooked and mismanaged and destroyed. They dressed glam but sounded different. They arranged and presented like the Rolling Stones (and also had a singer with big lips) but the harmonics and sonic approach and beats were all completely different. They paid homage to the short pop songs of the 50s and early 60s, but it was 1973 and nobody cared about that yet in rock music. (It would take the Ramones and the Clash to create the context for the approach.) To this day, I think people don’t really pay attention to what the band was doing differently because it’s easier to just say they were all drag-dressing drug users who all died in sad and stupid and suspiciously ignominious ways and seemed to carry the curse of Job.
I never begrudged Johansen reinventing himself as campy lounge singer and often entertaining ham actor (the music business is intrinsically evil and it’s wrong to judge those who have figured out how to survive in it). Whenever I hear “Hot Hot Hot” today I tap my toes a little, sure, but mainly I smile at the fact that somewhere an angel is getting his wings and the guy who wrote “Looking for a Kiss” is getting a mechanical royalty.
“Looking for a Kiss” is one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll songs ever made, by the way, and yet all the other songs on the New York Dolls’ first album are almost as good. It’s a classic from end to end. Do Buster Poindexter a solid and go listen to it.
