Burning Down the Dollhouse

By JAY COCKS

David Johansen, rocking hard, stakes out his own territory

First he heard the name wrong, then he mispronounced it. And spelled it out cockeyed on the record label. But listen to David Johansen sing Swaheto Woman, and you know he has made no mistake.

Johansen had seen some pictures of the people of Soweto, a South African ghetto, and decided that he wanted to write a tune that caught the particular combination of "being oppressed and always wanting to party at the same time." He may have got the name wrong, but the address is perfect. The song pulses so hard with fierce joy and feckless humor that the grooves of the record almost bubble up under the needle. Not long before his new album, In Style, was released last month, Johansen discovered his spelling blooper.

There was time enough to change things to meet world-atlas standards, but Johansen decided to let it stand as Swaheto. "Makes it bigger that way, more universal," he will explain, if pressed. "I think I did it right."

That disregard for the rules, that same off-you lunge for the heart of the melody, makes David Johansen, 29, the prodigious rocker that he is and makes In Style the streamlined scorcher of the year. Ten full-tilt rock tunes that give no quarter. Stand back; this man's a monster.

Not so long ago, however, Johansen seemed like a monster of another sort, a hobgoblin who fronted a band of seemingly demented demons called the New York Dolls. Now the Dolls seem like the respectable progenitors of punk. But back in 1973, when the group first formed and Johansen, only a few years out of high school, signed on as lead singer, the Dolls looked like harbingers of a rock apocalypse. Glitter, outrageous costumes, strong intimations of dressing-room decadence made them notorious. Their mode may have been outre, but their music was just good old rock 'n' roll sand blasted back to life. The Dolls laid down searing, pop-inflected rock, proudly rooted in rhythm and blues, that could pound your ears into flapjacks. Sardonic anthems like Personality Crisis and Vietnamese Baby did not sit easy on a pop establishment that was still recovering from flower power and cuddling up to the peaceful, easy feeling of the California sound. The Dolls made two records and then, in 1975, broke apart like true rock-'n'-roll kamikazes. Drug problems. Women problems. Career stalemates.

Contract wrangles kept Johansen out of the recording studio, pretty much confining him to a narrow circuit of club dates that paid the rent for two years, while lawyers and managers settled the future. His first solo album, finally released last spring, was full of high-vaulting songs performed with his typical breakneck energy, but the record seemed unfocused, finally, as if the release of feeling after such a long time was substance enough.

"I was kind of coming in from the rain on that one," he says now. In Style is more cohesive. It represents Johansen at his best. By sheer velocity alone it could shake the Top Ten out of its discofied trance dance. The raw intensity of the sound is, paradoxically, the very thing that may thwart the record commercially. Whatever its fate on the charts, In Style shows Johansen as a rock-'n'-roll acolyte--part anarchist, part jester, part street bopper --keeping the faith alive.

Johansen's credentials for such a calling include some years in parochial school dodging the discipline of the nuns and four years of public high school in Staten Island, a blue-collar enclave that most New Yorkers regard as little more than the place the ferry stops before it turns back toward Manhattan. Johansen made that ferry trip a lot, voyaging into Greenwich Village at an age when most kids are sweating out the junior varsity cuts.

His first high school band was Fast Eddie and the Electric Japs ("We used all Japanese equipment -- real cheap -- and hung a souvenir war flag of the Rising Sun behind us"), from which Johansen graduated to another group more easily than he graduated from Port Richmond High ("Lunch was definitely my favorite subject").

The Vagabond Missionaries played small-club dates, scored big in a local battle of the bands, eventually put their amps in shopping carts and carried them aboard the ferry, sailing for the big time. They got a gig at the Cafe Wha?, then soon went their separate ways. Johansen was the only one who never looked back.

Two years later, he was raising hackles and testing the limits as the lead singer for the Dolls.

Johansen has not strayed far from the best Dolls tradition, even as he has claimed territory that is all his own. He still leaps about onstage, doing splits and pulling stunts that would fatigue Mick Jagger just to contemplate.

And he still sings as if he has a gun pressed to his temple: if it's a love song, every line is a plea for life. If it is one of his high-wire rockers, the song is like a last attempt to go out in a blaze of manic glory.

Relaxed bemused and in conversation, with the slightly seedy, long-legged grace of the star forward on a reform-school basketball team, Johansen in performance is is like the living soul of big city rock, restless and implacable. He works fast (lyrics for three of the tunes on the new album were written while the band was off having dinner), performs at white heat. He likes to keep the music simple, the lyrics spare, so that a song like Flamingo Road reaches high and wide, becomes an angry, baiting confessional stashed inside a catchy pop threnody. Flamingo Road is a place where many of Johansen's obsessions -- fashion, high romance, lowlife -- all meet and rebound off one another until they form dead ends. Flamingo Road is the street where love is lost and where dreams die. It is probably off somewhere on the far side of Swaheto. You will never find it in Miami Beach. -- Jay Cocks

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