I'm talking about the human race

Celebrating the great David Johansen (1950-2025) in the studio and onstage

When I read that David Johansen had died, my first thought went to a song that he wrote that’s about being very much alive.

“Human Being” is the closing track on New York Dolls’ second album, 1974’s Too Much Too Soon—a wholly appropriate bit of sequencing, because anything following the song would’ve had to struggle mightily to be heard. Written by Johansen and Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders, the song came to life a year or so earlier, the result of jam sessions detonating at various “rent parties” thrown at Thunders, guitarist Sylvain Sylvain, and drummer Billy Murcia’s loft on Chrystie Street, in Chinatown. One of the Dolls’ most moving and affecting songs, “Human Being” rocks its own argument so graphically and powerfully that every time I listen I get the impression that a slate’s been wiped clean.

Vintage Dolls: the opening sounds accidental, the ending’s a surprise, and the playing throughout threatens to break down, but for Thunders and Sylvain stitching it together, measure by measure. “Basically, what we wanted out of music was something simple, powerful and sexy, topped with a hook that would just drive you crazy,” Sylvain remarked to Tim Stegall and Chris Gill in 2008, adding that he and Thunders didn’t create the power chord, “but we perfected it and it became the punk sound. Instead of holding all six strings, you’re holding only two, but when you hit it hard and you’ve got your amp up loud, that’s what gives you the power. I showed that to Johnny and, I swear to God, he took that to the fucking hilt, and that’s how we came up with every other song.” “Human Being,” Sylvain said, is all power chords: “It gave Johnny a brand-new invention.”

The Thunders/Sylvain twin attack emerges, really, as second and third voices on “Human Being.” The primary voice, of course, belongs to Johansen, who sexily, confidently, boastingly, celebrates his very right to exist, his song a six minute soundtrack for the misfits and the marginalized. The three of ‘em—Sylvain with his rhythmic chopping on the right, Thunders with his less studious, half-grin buzz saw on the left, Johansen mouthy in the middle—strut along in gang solidarity and with infinite nerve. The song’s packed with personality, as most Dolls material was, brimming with an urban blend of cockiness, humor, and spectacle. You recognize, after the glamour and the fairy dust settle and ringing in the ears abates, that they’ve been singing about you all along. Nina Antonia in Too Much Too Soon: The Makeup and Breakup of the New York Dolls described “Human Being” as “an incredibly honest assessment of the foibles and frailties that exist in everyone and excuses them all.”

The Dolls, of course, were theatrical. The still-jarring shot of the four of them on the cover of their debut album—all teased hair and platform shoes and smeary makeup—left an indelible after-image that couldn’t be blinked away even if you wanted it to be, an impudent vibe that inhabited all of their songs. “We were all kind of dressed up when we met,” Johansen told Jason Gross in 2007. “It wasn't like we sat down and said ‘Let’s get rid of these blue jeans and put on these costumes...’ We liked dressing up, which was kind of like a thing that was happening in the Village anyway so there were a lot of people doing that…kind of like mixing and matching and going to thrift stores and wearing man-tailored jackets that were made for Marlene Dietrich.” He added, laughing, “We were trying to look mod but... that’s the way it came out!”

Johansen claimed that as the Dolls began their career they weren’t thinking about their image. “I think we just into doing it so it wasn’t like anything we really discussed,” yet as things progressed “it got more outrageous because I guess we got more fearless about it or something. And then, we were trying to raise each others’ eyebrows a little bit. It would be a bit of one-upmanship like that but in a healthy way.” You can see the Dolls as you listen to their songs, more than you can with many groups, Thunders and Sylvain’s reckless playing and Johansen’s exultant singing suggesting larger-than-life characters strutting across an Off Off Broadway stage, after having one-upped each other in the tiny dressing room.

Anchored by drummer Jerry Nolan and bass player Arthur Kane, “Human Being” is a dance song before it’s anything else, so you know that the argument’s gonna be fun. And that you can groove to “Human Being” is crucial to its sly secret. The band hits a ten second poor-man’s sound check, followed by a rowdy count-in; the opening bars, with guest sax player Stan Bronstein (Elephants Memory) along for the ride, are prime Dolls: freaks and misfits from downtown dancing on top of frat-rock. Johansen’s first lines, barked out, lay down the dilemma and its solution:

Well, if you don’t like it
Go ahead, find yourself a saint
Go ahead, now try to find a boy
Who’s gonna be what I ain’t

He’s mouthing off at the suits at Mercury Records, the tone-deaf and cowardly critics who don’t get it, a narrow minded boyfriend/girlfriend—but he’s also giving voice and courage to the outcast who’s cast out in the boroughs and every far flung suburban ‘hood where loners hide out because of the bodies they were born into. If it’s God’s cosmic joke that we don’t choose our parents, the socio-economic streets we’re plopped down in, or our own bodies, then “Human Being” is the punch line.

Unruly, the song slides among a few chords, and its pulse quickens as it goes; it sounds like a crowded city street, forward-moving, brash, noisy. The celebratory pride in the chorus gives way to the determined fighting in the verses and back again, a push pull of weariness and triumph, a sonic struggle at the end of which these pretty/ugly boys reign victorious. I love the smirking conversations that Thunders and Sylvain are having in the background—after Johansen yelps that “what you need is a plastic doll with a fresh coat of paint / who’s gonna sit through the madness and always acts so quaint,” Thunders lets out an approving horse laugh on his Gibson. Yet Johansen’s in control of the conversation. When the chorus hits, the guitarists are wise enough to fall back into rhythm, their showy leads deferring to Johansen’s profound and simply moving discoveries: if he’s acting like a king, that’s ‘cause he’s a human being; if he’s greedy, that’s ‘cause he’s a human being. If he dreams obscenely That’s ‘cause he’s a human being. “I can hold my head so high ‘cause I’m a riff-raff human being,” Johansen adds with a mascara wink. Alive and well.

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Johansen also came alive onstage, too. In 1982, he released Live It Up, an album recorded over two nights at the Paradise Theater, in Boston. His fourth solo album following his self-titled debut (1978), In Style (1979), and Here Comes The Night (1981), Live It Up finds Johansen in a bit of a wilderness period, doggedly forging an identity while burdened with middling album sales and endless touring, just a few years before he’ll submerge and ironically find himself in the popular and remunerative Buster Poindexter persona.

I loved Live It Up since the moment that I heard it blasting in my older brother Phil’s bedroom. I didn’t know the New York Dolls then—they were several years away for me, a college discovery, and even then it’d take me a while to fully catch up—but I didn’t need to, which was the point of Live It Up, really. The album’s a celebration of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and showmanship, all crucial elements in the Dolls’ sound and style, but eternal stuff also. Backed by a crack band (featuring guitarist Huw Gower on loan from The Records, another band I’d discover later), Johansen sings only two Dolls tunes (the band’s cover of “Stranded In The Jungle” and the requisite “Personality Crisis”) and a handful of tracks from his solo albums (“Donna,” “Melody,” “Funky But Chic,” “Frenchette,” “Bohemian Love Pad,” the last three written with Sylvain).

The album stands tall on its cover songs, electrifying versions of “Reach Out (I’ll Be There),” “Is This What I Get for Loving You?”, “Build Me Up Buttercup,” and a stirring medley of the Animals’ tunes “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” “Don’t Bring Me Down,” and “It’s My Life.” Most of the original versions of these songs I knew well, from family albums and “oldies radio,” but to that point in my life I’d never heard them sound so lived in, so rousing, or so movingly, passionately performed. Johansen and his band made these old songs sound new (that old trick). Johansen’s vocals on Live It Up are simply enormous: he takes over the room with such force and humor and liveliness that he sounds feral. A rediscovery of and renaissance for the New York Dolls are a few years down the road, but at the Paradise Theater in 1982 punk rock’s long behind Johansen; instead of celebrating outcasts, juvees, and loners, here Johansen’s celebrating, with party lights in his eyes, the simple, communal act of getting together a bunch people—who cares how they look, what they wear, who they fuck— in a loud room grooving to stone classics.

After I learned of Johansen’s death I pulled out Live It Up, which I hadn’t played in a long time. It’s a bit of a straight album, I can acknowledge now. The band’s playing is solid but restrained. The arrangements are safe. The recording and production, under Ron Nevison (UFO, the Babys, Eddie Money, Jefferson Starship), is smooth, any on-stage screw ups, bum notes, or unruliness rubbed to an agreeable sheen. Yet it was an indisputably exciting record for me to hear in ‘82—along with the J. Geils Band’s outrageously great Live! Full House which I also discovered around this time—and Johansen’s gusto is undeniable still. His grinning threat to muscle up a politely played song keeps everything just on the verge of dangerous. As a result, the album’s bursting at the seams, rubbing up against professionalism with an embarrassed half-grin. Throughout, Johansen’s the master showman, plugged in and thrilled to play.

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At the close of “Human Being,” Thunders and Sylvain’s shredding and Johansen’s whooping lead to Bronstein’s crankily charming, honking solos. The band departs, and a kind of a casually wasted exhaustion settles with the expiring horns. It’s a strange, stately way to end a loud, raucous song—but I like to think that the band and their friends just found another, a better, party to hit. Meanwhile, Bronstein and his fellow players open their eyes to see a deserted loft. Sadly, the party ended for good for the New York Dolls shortly after Too Much Too Soon stiffed on the charts and as escalating drug use was pulling the band to pieces. By 1974 things were cooking elsewhere, yet close enough to the ear-ringing, inclusive, courageous—did I mention fun?—sound of the Dolls that the messages were passed along. David Johansen has died, but his spirit’s eternal. All you gotta do is turn it up.

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See also:

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Photo of Johansen by David Gahr, inner sleeve of Live It Up