Word: johansens
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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...
...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 outré, but their music was just good old rock 'n' roll...
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...
...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...