David Johansen: David Johansen
let's just dance.
David Johansen, the last remaining New York Doll, has left the planet. We only recently learned that he had been very, very sick, and my only hope is that he felt all the love sent in his direction after that announcement.
I wrote this essay about David Jo's eponymous first solo record for the great anthology The White Label Promo Preservation Society Volume 2 - More Flop Albums You Ought To Know and while you should absolutely check out that book for all of the great writing about records that you just never heard about, I'm reprinting my essay here in tribute to David until I can get it together to write something else.
You call that love in French
It’s just Frenchette
I’ve been to France
so let’s just dance
“Frenchette” is the song that closes David Johansen’s eponymously titled first solo album. It’s definitely still one of his greatest songs, maybe the greatest, delivered with more sincerity than you expect to get from New York City’s first and best street-walking cheetah (with a heart full of Gem Spa egg cream). “Frenchette” is a colossal song. It is love and life and heartbreak and despair, but it is also primarily about hope and resilience. I always saw it as this post-apocalyptic anthem: you can’t kill us, we’re still here, so let’s just dance.
David Jo has always given us characters and stories and maps and legends; that first New York Dolls album hit so hard because it was modern urban blues, it was telling us about people we recognized, it was setting scenes we knew and felt because we lived them, from “Babylon” to “Human Being” to “Frankenstein” to “Personality Crisis.” But this is not about the Dolls, this is about Johansen solo, which in a perfect world should have been him taking over New York City and then the world, like King Kong at the top of the Empire State Building. It didn’t happen and that is wrong. But we still have this record and I am grateful for that. It is sitting right there for you to listen and get to know it, if you haven’t already.
The record opens with “Funky But Chic,” which will probably make you perk up your ears and think, I know that one. It was a perfect first track, a hook to get you in the door and sitting at the bar with a drink, because the record will keep you in your seat and enthralled. “Funky But Chic” is our first introduction to David’s backing band, the Staten Island Boys, a group of musicians who weren’t fancy or virtuosic but were reliable and knew their shit. He needed good musicians who he could rely on to hit their marks and deliver, to be onstage foils when he needed them but not so flashy that it started to get busy up there. They were solid and muscular and when you listen it to it now -- yes, you can hear the 80’s waiting just around the corner, but it still holds up. You could drive a tank over it. You can dance to “Funky But Chic,” it’s a good song for a party, you can even vacuum to it. It should be Johansen’s trademark and for many of us it is, period.
You hear the New York Dolls all over this record if you know what you’re looking for. Or if you were a member of that particular faith-based community you hear it and you nod sadly and knowingly. If “Girls” wasn’t a Dolls leftover it could’ve been, should have been, a brisk 3:30 that launches you straight to the heart of the matter: “Girls! I like them hanging around,” David tells you matter-of-factly, just another red-blooded hetero dude expounding upon the virtues of the fairer sex. “It takes me more than an hour,” he confesses, not bragging, mind you, he is just saying. Listen to the band vamp on the bridge and remember what I said about the Staten Island Boys. That shit is TIGHT. It’s also just a perfectly crafted song in terms of drama and tension and movement, it’s not too short or too long and he caps it with a beautifully timed final shout of “Girls!” as the thing crashes to a close.
I don’t want to play “What could’ve fit on a Dolls album” that much more but back when lead singers left the band for a solo career you did, indeed, look for those things. And the Dolls ended so ignominiously and disastrously – although, to be honest, they were probably not built to exist past those first two records. If they had kept going the people who stole their shtick would have had to at least cop to it, and in a fantasy land maybe they made another four or five albums and a great double live record and drugs did not cut such a disastrous swath through them. Maybe I am wrong and they were doomed once Billy Murcia left the building. SORRY. Sylvain Sylvain is on this record with him and toured with him on and off and Syl was always a beacon of positive energy that I think stopped David Jo from sinking too deep into – not despair, but despondence.
So on David Johansen he is painting this picture of a suave Casanova, not a lothario, more romantic than that. “Pain In My Heart” tells us about the perils of being such a loverboy, and “Not That Much,” which underneath “She’s in love with you daddy, but not that much” is actually a pretty great song about consent. “I’m A Lover” – do you even have to ask if that’s the subject matter? It opens with a faux-repentant declaration of fidelity:
I’ve gone through the years, and sometimes I get so blue
But holding back the tears is all that I can do
I’m tryin’ to tell you, girl, that I’m in love with you
And it’s the truth when I tell you I’ve been true.
Live he would make the sign of the cross, before holding up his right hand: “Swear to god.”
Reader, he was not true, but he does a hilarious job in explaining that he was but he wasn’t, but he is, but he isn’t; it’s one of the songs on the record where you see the connections back to the 50s and early rock and roll and with a different band it could have come from back in the day. It definitely got its roots from there, but then again, it always did and it always would, up until the point where he decided to stop bothering with his own versions and just transform into a stellar interpreter of material.
“Cool Metro” could’ve/should’ve been the opening track to the album but that would have been kind of predictable and boring and “Funky But Chic” sets the tone he wanted to set. It was, however, a fantastic opening number for Johansen’s live show and had the effect of liquid nitrogen whenever he came out with that one. It’s about New York City, it’s about the place in every city where you can be yourself, it is rocking and universal and starts with a shriek of delight.
Johansen delivers not one, not two, but three separate epics on the record. It’s a dangerous thing to attempt, he’s mostly successful but I have always believed the record would have done better if one of them had been deferred to a future album. “Donna” is gorgeous, heartbreaking, poignant, DJ plays acoustic guitar on it, live, and although I still insist that lead singers should not play guitar, it adds and doesn’t detract. “Frenchette,” as discussed, remains unparalleled. But as much as I like “Lonely Tenement” it’s the one I believe the least, it’s trying to do too much, there’s a violin (we’re not that far from when Dylan put Scarlett Rivera on Desire and then everyone wanted one), it’s just a little too predictable despite all of the performances within the song being completely on point. Although the characters in the song are doing the same things as all his other characters -- they love, they fight, they work, they drink, they fuck -- but no one is looking to David Johansen to tell a story about a union hall and a downtrodden life and while I believe he could certainly write anything he wanted to write, this is not one of his best numbers. But I’m poking holes at the one thing I can poke holes in, you know, maybe it should have been on In Style, the second to last track before his Four Tops paean, “Melody.”
But you’re going to forget all about that once he starts “Frenchette,” which closes the record, five and a half minutes of abstract expressionism that goes straight for the heart and soul. It’s here where Johansen’s command of pacing and intensity comes to the front and pretty much holds you by the neck up against the rolled-down metal shutters of a bodega that’s closed up for the night. It is riveting. It is celebration. It is snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. It is still getting up in the morning in the same place you have always lived, doing the same job you have always done, but there’s nothing you can do about it. So let’s just dance.
Caryn Rose
