Word: johansens
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...Then came the New York Dolls [Aug. 20]. They were all decked out in platform shoes and tacky glitter and they played with an energy I had never heard before. Their music was straight off the street, and I loved it. It's good to hear that David Johansen is keeping it alive...
...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...
...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 Café Wha?, then soon went their separate ways. Johansen was the only one who never looked back...
...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...
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...