We don't care about David Johansen, but we care quite a bit about the band he sang for a long time ago—the Rolling-Stones-by-way-of-Mark-Bolan-by-way-of-a-Bronx-gutter New York Dolls. They were important, not so much because of their endearingly sloppy and clunky music, but because of its context: One so proudly soaked in the sticky, desolate New Yawk underworld of drugs, androgyny, and hedonistic danger that it practically reeked of that city's fabulously garbage-strewn streets, sweated booze, and spat cockroaches. Greater than the sum of their parts, the Dolls were the first punk rock band, with their fabulously minimalist, shouted "Trash", wherein Johansen repeatedly demands, "Don't take my knife away," over a fast, three-chord march, the genre's first standard.
   But none of that was Johansen's world. While his fellow Dolls really were street punks, Johansen was actually a Staten Island boy recruited from the Greenwich Village club scene into the existing group Actress in 1971 because lead guitarist and songwriter Johnny Thunders couldn't sing strong enough (though his voice, we would later find, could be painfully evocative). Johansen, born David Jo Hansen in 1950, with his big lips and tall, slender build, was a dead ringer for a Scandinavian American Mick Jagger—the perfect foil for Thunders' emaciated, low-rent Keif. It didn't hurt that Johansen had a strong, soulful voice that could be gritty when he wanted it to be (which, in the Dolls, was most of the time). It was good enough to carry a song, which was more than could be said for the band's playing in the early days (for proof, see Lipstick Killers: the Mercer Street Sessions). They all donned hot pants, pumps, and boas, smeared on lipstick, and gained local and then international notoriety, opening for Rod Stewart at Wembley Stadium before they had an album out.
   One dead drummer (a victim of alcohol, Quaaludes, and a callous and irresponsible British entourage who—upon finding him passed out on the floor—put him in a cold bath and poured coffee down his throat, which he essentially drowned in) and two classic, mediocre-selling LPs (1973's New York Dolls and 1974's In Too Much Too Soon) later, the Dolls reached the end of the line, with Thunders and drummer Jerry Nolan following their heroin addictions into the live-fast-and-die-young Heartbreakers with ex-Voidoid Richard Hell. Johansen and rhythm guitar player Sylvian Sylvain slid by on the group's name and reputation for a few years (meriting their prominent inclusion in Wayne County's celebratory extended name-check, "Max's Kansas City"), but by 1977 called it a day.
   We know that Johnny Thunders, who through legendary self-abuse and magnificently sloppy guitar soloing gained a cult audience for himself around the world in the late 1970s and 1980s, died in New Orleans in 1991 at the age of 39. Such was the extent of his drug habit that no one expected him to live that long. Nolan, Thunders' best friend through it all, turned up dead a year later. Arthur Kane, the Dolls' bass player, lives in Los Angeles now and writes back when the occasional fan, including this one, sends an email asking how he's doing. Syl Sylvain, according to everyone who knows him, is a decent, well-grounded guy, lives in Atlanta with his son and makes custom guitar straps for a living.
   But what about David Johansen? Whatever happened to David Jo Hansen? Well, after a series of decent-but-undistinguished solo albums (the best of which, David Johansen, sounds like a more professional-sounding Dolls minus everything that made them fun, interesting, and relevant) he disappeared into the New Yawk club scene that birthed him. He got all "artsy" on our arses, burying his punk rock past under something more dubious, ostensibly more sophisticated. He dusted off the tight-fitting tuxedo he wore sometimes as a Doll, slicked his hair up into a pompadour, found an obnoxiously large big band and became—er, descended into—a bad nightclub in-joke called Buster Poindexter. Don't remember him? Think "Hot, Hot, Hot". If you lived through the 1980s, you couldn't have missed it. Your parents probably thought it was the best thing since "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)". Tony and Angela from "Who's the Boss?" did.
   Surely, a man's got to do what a man's got to do. The Dolls' albums didn't make anyone rich, and worse, didn't elevate any of its members past cult stardom. Surely, even in his Dolls days, Johansen had teetered on the edge of being cheesy. In Too Much Too Soon in particular went for the camp funny bone as much as the throat with a wacky, half-comedy cover like "Stranded In the Jungle", in which various members of the Dolls approximate apes. Maybe without Johnny Thunders to keep him in check, Johansen couldn't resist his urge toward novelty music. Maybe he was bored with being a rocker. Maybe it had only ever been a means to an end.
   Skimming the cover of 1987's Buster Poindexter for clues, it's hard to get past the size of Johansen's gaping nostrils, let alone find a sense of purpose in his squinted eyes. On the back Johansen and his impossibly lame-looking backup band, Banshees of Blue, are superimposed on the New York skyline. The score so far: This Was a Very, Very Bad Idea 2, This Was a Good, Sensible Career Move 0.
   Listening to the album—an experience akin to knowingly walking into the insect-filled room in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom—one finds that it sounds basically like a better-executed, slickly produced Brian Setzer Orchestra until the start of track three. A group "Olé, Olé" announces the island-fiesta arrival of "Hot, Hot, Hot": unlistenable soca torture, perhaps the low water mark of 1980s' adult pop music—something of an accomplishment considering the competition. (Calling Peter Cetera! Christopher Cross? Rick Astley, are you there?!)
   By the time the horns kicked in, the 1980s' masses were hooked. Out onto the island-themed dance-club floor charged the big-haired women simply because they loved to dance, and the Don Johnson-clone men because, dignity be damned, they had to play the game to have any shot in hell of getting what they wanted. Here is David Johansen, dignity be damned, singing in pidgin English like some dressed-up Jar Jar Binks, like a bad Vegas act, like a stateside Don Ho, giving the people what they want, pleasing the lowest common denominator with processed, homogenized soca of all things. This can't be real. This isn't really the singer of the New York Dolls brining us into a bad processed-drum breakdown, "People in the party, hot, hot, hot."
   It gets worse before it gets better. "Are You Lonely for Me Baby" is trite and unnecessary. "Screwy Music", in which Johansen quips "I'm daffy 'bout goofy tempo" is a motley cabaret nightmare, like something you'd hear at a mobster's daughter's Atlantic City wedding circa 1972. At least "House of the Rising Sun" is included on Side 2. That doesn't qualify as anything near a risk, but it's mercifully unfuckupable. Johansen's voice, still technically solid and gritty, carries the song, even if it doesn't make anyone forget Eric Burdon.
   Johansen would graduate into a bit part in the Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged, and would co-star as Toodie in the almost-straight-to-video film adaptation of Car 54 Where Are You? He'd milk the Buster Poindexter thing for all it was worth, coughing up 1989's Buster Goes Berserk, 1994's attempt to capitalize on the sudden, unfortunate hipness of lounge culture (Buster's Happy Hour), and 1997's horrifically superfluous Buster's Spanish Rocket Ship. Otto Luck's NY Rock review of an April 1998 Poindexter gig says it all:

Buster and company closed the evening with the obligatory "Hot, Hot, Hot," his biggest hit to date. Half the band formed a rumba line for the song and marched through the crowd. There was something inherently sad about seeing Poindexter at the head of the line, parading through the audience and smiling at his customers like a suit salesman. I mean, the man is history. In my mind, he's accomplished incredible feats.... All that just to Bossa Nova his tiny fanny through a crowd of tired office workers on a Saturday night.

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