RIP the last New York Doll

I began my book "Love Goes to Buildings on Fire" with The New York Dolls, because of course I did. In memory of David Johansen.

Photo: Bob Gruen

An hour after midnight on January 1, 1973, Ernie Brooks was barreling down I-95 toward the city in his mother’s Volvo. His band, the Modern Lovers, had been booked for a New Year’s Eve show at the Mercer Arts Center. The New York Dolls were headlining. But his van died outside New Haven. So he hitched to his parents’ house in New Canaan, got the family car, drove back to the van, jammed guitars and microphones into the Volvo, and drove like hell.

The Mercer was packed. There were teenage girls in miniskirts and garish makeup. There were guys in miniskirts and garish makeup. A woman wore a dress that had been cut into pieces and reassembled with safety pins.

The Modern Lovers went on at around 3:30 a.m., plugging into the Dolls’ amplifiers. As a rule, they wore T-shirts and jeans, but for this gig their leader, Jonathan Richman, had bought a white dress shirt. During “Hospital,” a love song as raw as a skinned knee, he ripped the shirt off. A girl standing beside the stage bent to pick up a stray button as a souvenir.

The Dolls went on just before dawn. The lead singer, David Johansen, wore a white blouse, tight white pants, and white platform heels. He swigged from a bottle of Miller, flipped back his hair, and introduced a song called “Trash.” The band was sloppy—the bassist, who was wearing a yellow plastic tutu, could barely play—but thrilling. And the song sounded amazing, like some ’50s rock ’n’ roll gem retooled for a more jaded age.

There were lots of artists in the crowd that night; actors, dancers, musicians. Truman Capote was there. So was Richard Meyers, a poet who was beginning to play bass and write songs. He was impressed.

That’s the start of my 2011 book Love Goes To Buildings On Fire, The photo was taken by the great Bob Gruen at the show I’m describing. It was Bob’s first consequential rock’n’roll photo shoot in a long career. And it was the gig that crowned the New York Dolls as the City’s most consequential rock band, in the vacuum after the Velvet Underground disbanded in 1970, and before the flowering of punk rock, a scene that owed plenty to the Dolls.

David Johansen, the last surviving member of the band, died on Friday after a struggle with brain cancer. He was 75. He was a quintessential New York musician, with “a bit of the vaudevillian” in him, as author and Patti Smith wingman Lenny Kaye put it. It’s the end of an era, and he will be missed.

I interviewed Johansen for the New York Times in 2006, when the New York Dolls’ dropped their third album — a mere 32 years after their prescient Too Much Too Soon. He struck me as a sweetheart and a total showman, acerbically funny, very smart, well-read, and spiritual — “a Catholic Taoist,” he told me with a phlegmy chuckle.

You can read that feature story here.

The music Johansen made with the Dolls is some of the greatest rock’n’roll ever recorded. And his solo career, from his fluke hit version of Arrow’s early-’80s soca classic “Hot Hot Hot” (performed under the camp guise of Buster Poindexter) to Johansen’s work with the Harry Smiths, is full of gems and delightfully provocative takes on the deliciously strange melting pot of American popular culture.

It’s a damn shame the Dolls never made it into the Rock Hall of Fame, an honor I believe would’ve meant a lot to Johansen. Below are a few good places to start a survey of his work, or rejig your memory, including the Dolls’ immortal “Trash” and “Personality Crisis;” a trailer for the recent Martin Scorsese documentary; and the giddy video for “Hot Hot Hot,” featuring a Bill Murray cameo and a meta-narrative about NYC in the Reagan era that seems even sharper in hindsight. There’s also some rough video of one of David’s final performances, with the Harry Smiths at the Brooklyn Folk Festival in 2023.

A tip of the martini glass to one of the greats.