There goes David Johansen (1950-2025).

He had many guises, but when I interviewed him he was a Doll.

The New York Dolls in their dressing room at Paradiso, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 7th December 1973. L-R Arthur Kane (back left against wall), David Johansen (centre, raising middle finger), Johnny Thunders (part obscured behind Johansen), Sylvain Sylvain (leaning against wall in front of Rolling Stones poster), Jerry Nolan (lying back, wearing red t-shirt). (Photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns)

David Johansen, who passed away on February 28th, was, as the saying goes, a “real one.” A real gent, real rocker, real musicologist, real performer, and a really gifted comic actor with impeccable timing and delivery; in short, the real deal.

In the seventies, he put the personality in The New York Dolls’ “Personality Crisis,” before reinventing himself as Buster Poindexter for the “Hot, Hot, Hot,” MTV 80s and later his musicological diversion in The Harry Smiths.

He was the last of the original New York Dolls to go, having survived his co-founders, Billy Murcia (d. 1972), Johnny Thunders (d. 1991), Jerry Nolan (d. 1992), Arthur Kane (d. 2004), and finally Sylvain Sylvain, who passed in 2021.

I only interviewed David one time, on the phone for my book, A Wizard, A True Star: Todd Rundgren In The Studio and I was so glad to get the story of The Dolls’ debut album from him (and in another interview, Syl) while I still could.

He did not let me down, he had the same kind of comic wit and inherent quotablity that I’d previously enjoyed while interviewing other iconoclastic showmen like Iggy Pop.

While parts of this transcript have appeared in my book, I thought it would be a nice tribute to him if I published the more or less unedited version here. (I’ve only tidied it up a bit in terms of clarity and context, but the text of his words remain unchanged).

PAUL MYERS: How did you and The Dolls ending up having Todd Rundgren produce the eponymous debut LP?

DAVID JOHANSEN: “Well we knew Todd from Max’s and the Scene, and we liked him and dug Nazz and stuff like that. When you’re going to make a record, everybody’s talking about producers and stuff like that, especially like management and stuff like that. It’s their job to pitch you various producers. We were like persona non grata! Producers were afraid of us because, well, I don’t know why! I never understood why, but they were. So when someone mentioned Todd, I don’t remember who it was, maybe me could have been Marty Thau or Syl, I’m not sure. We just thought, ‘Todd? Of course!’ He was right under our nose. To me, it didn’t really have anything to do with how anything sounded or how records should sound, or anything like that, know what I’m saying? To me, it was more like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna make a record and it’s gonna be a new thing, so I wasn’t really basing it on anything that Todd had done before. I just knew Todd was cool and he was a producer. I mean I did know some things he’d produced; I dug what he did with Grand Funk Railroad a lot, you know, and stuff like that.

MYERS: Todd recorded many of clients in that era at Secret Sound [Utopia keyboard player Moogy Klingman’s midtown, which was modified by Rundgren into a serviceable recording studio.] Did Todd try to get you in there?

JOHANSEN: “We may have tried stuff out at Secret Sound, but we made the record at the Record Plant.”

MYERS: Syl spoke of what he called a “social atmosphere” surrounding the sessions. What do you recall of the vibe at the Record Plant?

JOHANSEN: “I don’t actually have that good a memory of it, and plus I don’t know if what memories I do have are colored by things I’ve read about it. But I’d imagine there was a lot of people there like friends and associates, but I honestly can’t recall if it was 20 or 100! I dunno. I’m sure it was a festive atmosphere. I just remember Todd and [Record Plant engineer, and later Dolls producer] Jack Douglas and whoever else was making this record with us, and it just seemed like being on this big dirigible and those guys, and Todd and Jack were up where they steer the thing. It was like the 1920’s, with palm tree décor and stuff. Well that’s how I remember it, anyway.”

MYERS: Was there much in the way of pre-production?

JOHANSEN: “We had played lot of those songs for a long time before [making] the record. We did a lot of demos. I don’t remember a lot of this stuff accurately, but I think we went to England to make a demo, then we made a demo in New York one night were we kind of just recorded our repertoire. All we wanted to do was get good beats, or tempos, and good sounds, so we left a lot of that to Todd.

We went in, just like we always do, and played the songs. And then, when we had enough good takes of the songs, we started fixing them up a little bit, but really it was just about going in and banging out songs. Which is kind of the way you do it.

We encouraged Todd to play some keyboard on it, but he didn’t tell us to change our choruses or switch out too many things; none of that. I mean, the songs were done.”

MYERS: I imagine things were different when you and Syl [and later New York Dolls members Steve Conte, Sami Yaffa, and Brian Delaney] re-united with Todd [at his digital home studio in Kauai] to make another Dolls record in 2009.

JOHANSEN: “This time, ‘Cause I Sez So was a different story because we showed up with only a couple of QuickTime files for demos. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and if you’ve been doing this for so long, if you have a fragment of an idea and then you kind of play with it, and then you can just see what it’s gonna be. You develop an innate sense that tells you that something is gonna be good or if it’s not worth pursuing. But at that point it, doesn’t mean you’re going to pursue it, it’s just an idea that gets filed away. That little idea will remind you of what it could be, how you’d see it, as a finished thing. Musicians develop this kind of shorthand, it’s like demo shorthand or whatever. ‘So I got this thing that goes like this, bam boom bing, and then I go ‘baby, baby, baby!’ Then there’s a drum fill and the chorus!’ The guys’ll go, ‘Yeah, let’s do that!’

So when we showed up in Kauai, I think Todd thought that we’d procrastinated in terms of nuts and bolts were concerned, or as Sylvain would say, ‘meat and potatoes.’ Oh, we had them, it’s just that they just weren’t cooked. So we sat on the first week, not in the studio but in the living room, and kind of wrote out the songs with acoustic guitars.

We went over there, and we set up and then I played him some stuff and he was like ‘Oh man you better go back and work on this. Oh and when we showed up, he was like ‘Oh I thought you guys were coming here in like three days from now or whatever. His input is more like where the choruses go and stuff like that. With some of the songs he would say, like, ‘Oh you should have a double verse before the chorus,’ or you shouldn’t have that there or whatever. Or don’t start this one with the chorus or whatever, so he would just have suggestions here and there. So what we did was like write songs the first week and then rehearse them the second week. Todd was like ‘Yeah, man well I’m not gonna come to the rehearsals because I don’t wanna, like, dilute my ears, so I’m like biased when we put it down on tape!’ So the second week we rehearsed the band, in another house, and he’d come by like two or three times for like twenty minutes, maybe? He wasn’t like overly influential. I think what he was trying to do was to just chill in Hawaii and his technique, if he had one, if he had a plan for one, he probably had more of a vibe than a plan, would be like ‘chill in Hawaii.’ He had just come off the road and thought, well take this band, which I know is a good band, and record them in this kind of, how shall I say it?, relaxed environment. D’you know what I’m saying. I think there was a lot of relaxation, first and foremost, and let’s see what the band sounds like in that situation. Now, personally, I like to relax so it suited me to at T. Some people, it would drive them crazy, you know, they get nervous, like ‘What am I gonna do with myself?’ And that kind of thing. I’m very good at hardly breathing.”

MYERS: Todd said that the weather in Kauai could be unpredictable, is that why there are so many rain references on the album?

JOHANSEN: “It would rain for periods of the day, I mean, it was the rainy season, but it wasn’t just like raining all the time. It was raining a little bit probably, every day. I can only imagine it influenced some of the songs in the middle of the album, like ‘Drowning’ or ‘Make It Rain.’

I was pretty much writing lyrics on the scene, I mean I had some ideas for songs, as I said, and I knew I could finish them, but I just hadn’t done it yet. I knew I could do it there. I don’t know where Todd got the rain sounds, they may have been recorded there, could’ve been. I just know that the first time we heard the tape playback, I said ‘We should have a Ronettes kind of rain sound on this, like ‘Walking In The Rain.’ We always love to have little quotes from other songs and stuff in our music. We dig stuff like the Shangri-Las, so you might as well do what you dig. It’s what the Dolls dig, yeah.”

MYERS: Did Todd capture the band as a band? I mean was there a lot of overdubbing or was it live off the floor?

JOHANSEN: “This is a hot band, [so] everybody all played at the same time, solos included, so you wouldn’t be stepping on the solos. I’d say there were a couple of songs where the solos weren’t included while we were tracking, but not a lot of them. Syl was taking solos, with the amp in the next room. We didn’t track the band in Todd’s house, we rented another house, really nice house in this lava floe, it was a little neighbourhood, there was a few houses around, but you could see whales and all kinds of shit, it was beautiful. You could see cruise ships, everything. We were up on the hill, in the floe, you know? Very garden like, just beautiful. This place was sort of halfway between Princeville and Todd’s pagoda house, really nice. We rehearsed there the second week then tracked there the third week, then we went to Todd’s house on fourth week and did all the touch-ups, and then we were done, pretty much.

I did vocals later; I wouldn’t track with the band. I don’t think that I would allow that because a lot of times people might try to talk me into keeping that vocal, cut live with the band, and I’m not really cool with that.

I’ve always got lyrics on little pieces of paper, but mainly I composed on a laptop, for me that’s like the greatest invention in the world.”

MYERS: In your own perspective, how does working with Todd on the 2009 Dolls record compare with the 1973 debut?

JOHANSEN: “Todd, I don’t think, has changed very much and of course his innate curiosity about sound hasn’t changed, but he’s now got all those years of exploration. In my observation, the cool thing about Todd, and what keeps him going, so to speak, is that he likes to throw everything out and start all over again or do something for like the fuck of it. He doesn’t have a factory kind of mentality; you know what I’m saying? Like, he likes to do records in different places and have different experiences while he’s doing them and stuff like that. I think that’s the best way to make records, because you could go insane if you went into the same studio you went to last time. That’s gonna kind of affect what you’re gonna come up with. Like ‘Oh maybe we should come up with something like the last time,’ or whatever. His way, you got a fresh slate, you’re not using anything to measure it against – it’s much more creative that way. It’s like putting the ‘inner critic’ to sleep on a mass scale.”

MYERS: You’ve had a lot of what I want to call personas over the years, did you have to consciously get back into “Dolls front man” headspace?

JOHANSEN: “I don’t consciously draw on Buster or the Harry Smiths, it’s just kind of what you become the experiences, subconsciously. That gets me back to this thing, where it’s good to have experiences, you know? I know people who kind of do things repetitively and they usually get burnt out from it.

MYERS: I know Todd is mainly digital these days. Was that the case in Hawaii?

JOHANSEN: “I didn’t see any tape on this record, but Todd was kind of in the bedroom of this house, and we were in the living room, and we had put, like, an amp in the pantry and an amp in the kitchen and an amp in the other bedroom and Todd was off in another room. So we’d work on a song, then he would come in and say something. We’d go and in do it again, he’d say that was better, we’d go in and listen to it and say, ‘Okay, now let’s make another one, a different one.’”

MYERS: Todd gave me the impression that he and Johnny Thunders had a difficult time with each other. Can you comment on that?

JOHANSEN: “I don’t think Johnny had any special dislike of Todd, it was probably just the band being the band and all the individuals being themselves, so it wouldn’t have seemed that there was anything different about today than last month or something. So John, as a defense mechanism, used to mouth off to everybody. Usually, he was kidding but who knows, you know?”

MYERS: Since this is for the book about Rundgren’s production career, how would you sum up his strengths in the studio?

JOHANSEN: “As far as I’m concerned one of Todd greatest strengths as a producer is his EQ. I mean, just the way he makes what comes out of the amps or your mouth or the drums sound. I like it a lot. It makes you feel like you’re in a room and there’s a band playing. It’s not like you’re in some place where you’re listening to a record and you can actually see the tracks, in your mind, because they were all put on individually (laughs). He could take this like mishigas of us playing and then he could off and listen to each instrument and just EQ’s them in such a way that they all sound really enriched, I think. I mean it’s not it affect the notes of the thing, just the tone of the thing. When you’re in the midst of a band, playing, you don’t necessarily hear all those things. But then you listen back, and you go ‘Oh man, I can’t believe what [guitarist Steve] Conte’s doing on this song!’ or this, that and the other thing, you know? Because to me, it reaches out and says, ‘Listen to me,’ or ‘Listen to my bass!’ and it’s in such a friendly kind of atmosphere that it’s more of a swingin’ groovy music, I think.

Todd is just Todd, and I respect that, just like I’m gonna be me. I don’t want to say we have a psychic understanding, but maybe because we both have that kind of big Scandinavian forehead or something, I think that we can communicate as well as words. I would do a vocal and say to him, ‘You want me to do that again?’ and he’d say ‘Why? Then he’d say okay let’s go again’ It was never ‘What do you mean?’ He just knew what I knew, I don’t think we said any more than a hundred words together the whole time we were there. Come to think of it, we probably didn’t say that many words to each other on the first record either.”