Goodbye to David Johansen, the last jet boy standing from theNew York Dolls.
It wasnt just his madman energy that helped invent punk rock it was his warmth and soul.
The news inspired a worldwide outpouring of grief and gratitude.
Singer David Johansen of the New York Dolls onstage at the Academy of Music, February 15, 1974. The show was advertised as ‘St Valentine’s Day Massacre with the New York Dolls’.Linda D. Robbins/Getty Images
I may be the punch in whos justmaaaaadabout every little thing that I see!
They were lost boys looking for fun in the urban wasteland, but almost accidentally inventing punk rock.
As Johansen told Rolling Stone in 1972, We like to look 16 and bored shitless.
But thats all they needed to make history.
He was the heart of the Dolls, alongside Johnny Thunders maniac guitar feedback.
But like the always-wearing-shades outlaw in that song, David Johansen was good-bad, not evil.
They quickly drew a hardcore regular crowd as outrageous as the band was, dressing up to act up.
Everybody out there I could just watch them from the stage and reflect them.
Johansen grew up on Staten Island, where his father was an opera fanatic.
I know all the operas by heart, he tells an L.A. fan in the doc.
Would you like to hear someCarmen?
But the outrage they inspired was real.
A symbol of rock & roll oppression, he told Rolling Stones Random Notes.
He spent the night in jail.
They loved me in the cellblock.
He wanted to be the Bad Girl as much as he wanted her.
With the word New York stuck on itit was the ultimate!
And then the music!
Those are womens pants!
That debut always rips, kicking off with the demented sex howls of Personality Crisis (A-wooooo!
No no no no no no no no!
), touching down for Johansens vulnerable acoustic doo-wop confession, Lonely Planet Boy.
Unfortunately, the album flopped not ready for radio airplay in 1973, to say the least.
Morrissey saw that performance and immediately started the bands U.K. fan club.
This band epitomized New York cool at a time when it was scarce in the music world.
By the Eighties, their albums were impossible to find.
(Not even Arrows best song Groove Master was ten times hot-hot-hotter.)
In the video, he showed the MTV audience a few Dolls LPs for reference.
I seen better days, Johansen sang.
But Im putting up with these.
Sometimes the Dolls could seem like an albatross for him.
Kane died just 22 days after the show; nobody even knew he was sick.
The world wasnt ready for them, Morrissey said in 2004.
Often it takes death within a group and then people say, Ah, yes.
We do like those people now that theyre not here.
That didnt happen with David Johansen.
He went out knowing how much the world was grateful to have him.
