Livin' Doll

"So, are they slutty Irish Catholic schoolgirls who hike up their skirts when the nun's back is turned?"

Up until a few minutes ago, David Johansen had never heard of The Corrs. Now, perusing a picture of Andrea C wearing a New York Dolls t-shirt in the promo shots for their In Blue album, he's elevated them to the status of jailbait, a kind of Irish east coast Runaways. And all because the bright sparks in the HP art department decided it would be a hoot if the singer were to return the compliment and don a Corrs shirt for our photo shoot.

Johansen looks well for a man of his vintage and track record, a new beard covering the monkey-man features, the eyes crinkling under his bangs like Jagger's when he smiles, which he does more and more as it becomes apparent I'm not going to ask him several dozen questions about Johnny Thunders. Which of course I want to, but not nearly as much as I would if his new album David Johansen & The Harry Smiths wasn't the singer's best work since the demise of the Dolls.

At first though, returning from dropping his suit off to the dry cleaners in George's Street to be pressed in time for tonight's show in Whelan's, Johansen seems tired and somewhat reserved. Or maybe that's just the Big Apple talking. Either way, within half an hour the caffeine takes effect and you can't shut him up. The New York Dolls aren't exactly off the agenda, but he avoids mentioning them by name as much as possible. Like the song says: Don't start me talking, I'll tell everything I know.

David Johansen was born in the New York borough of Staten Island in 1950 to a Swedish father and a mother from Co. Cork. One of six kids, he grew up listening to Lightning Hopkins and Muddy Waters on R&B and blues stations like WWRL and WNJI, and playing at hootenanny nights at the local Jewish Community Centre. At the age of 17 he left his first band the Vagabond Missionaries to move to Manhattan, briefly working with an outfit by the name of Fast Eddie And The Electric Japs. By 1972 he had fallen in with Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, Sylvain Sylvain and Arthur Kane, playing venues like the Mercer Arts Centre and Max's, Kansas City as the New York Dolls.

If you've gotten this far, you don't need me to tell you about the Dolls, the trashiest, the flashiest, the grittiest and the prettiest (well, sorta) stars on the NY skyline. Like The Velvets and The Stooges, the quintet were a hugely influential band whose albums sold diddley squat while they were still together. A hazardous combination of volatile personalities, drugs and bad business sense stopped the show after two albums, but while it lasted, they were the greatest. Latter day manager Malcolm McLaren certainly thought so, pilfering the more garish elements of their sound and style for the fledgling Sex Pistols.

After that, Johansen put out several albums of hard-edged R&B and rock 'n' roll including David Johansen, In Style, Here Comes The Night, Live It Up and Sweet Revenge, but it was as Buster Poindexter, the tuxedo-clad lounge raconteur with a taste for show tunes and jump blues, that he made his real escape from the Dolldrums. Indeed, the early Buster albums (Buster Poindexter, Buster Goes Berserk) presaged 90s preoccupations with Caribbean music, swinger chic and torch songs, while the shows attracted drop-in guests like Patti Smith and Keith Richards. In fact it was through their explorations of Cuban music that Johansen and his musical director/guitarist Brian Koonin acquired a sharpened ear for the nuances of old country blues and folk standards. Next stop, The Harry Smiths, named after the legendary archivist, dope fiend and song collector.

"What was the question?" Johansen laughs after rambling on a bit, squeezing lemon juice into his tea and lighting another cigarette.

For the record, the question was: what does he think of The Stones and Aerosmith still struggling to solve their Peter Pan complexes, while he, of all people, seems to be growing old with some grace.

"Well you know, they make big money," he reasons. "When you're in a situation like that it must be tough to make a decision with everybody throwing all this money at you. I never had to worry about that, so I've always had the luxury of being able to do whatever I want to do, 'cos it doesn't make any fuckin' difference financially. I'm a creative person, so if I had to do the same thing over and over I'd kill myself. Whenever I've been in that situation I'd be so fuckin' depressed, because it's like Groundhog Day."

It's all down to the clubs. While the 'Smith and The Stones went to the stadia, inadvertently begetting Motley Crue and Guns 'N' Roses, Johansen went back to working the New York watering holes which had always sustained him.

"I'll tell ya sump'n," he says, "when we started with The Dolls, or like when I was 16, you'd get on the ferry, go to Greenwich Village, walk down McDougal Street, West Third Street, the West Village, there was literally 50 clubs, and they were rockin' man, they had The Lovin' Spoonful, Muddy Waters and Paul Butterfield were playin' down the street, it was like a festival.

"And then, five years later when the Dolls came about, the place was boarded up man, it looked like Belfast after a riot or sump'n, y'know what I'm sayin'? We used to have to go to beg people, 'Please let us play in your place' - 'Naw man, we don't want that fuckin' music, we got a jukebox, it's good enough for 'em.'

"So we were very fortunate at that time that some lunatic had invested in an old hotel and gutted out the ballroom area and made these rooms for performance, theatre and cabaret and experimental video, it was called the Mercer Arts Centre. I didn't even know about it, but this guy Eric Emerson who had a band called The Magic Tramps said, 'Why don't you come down and open for us?'

"So we opened for them and the kids went nuts and we got offered our own room, so we had a room where every week we could hold court and put it together. And if it wasn't for that, God knows what would've happened because there was no place to play. Then CBGBs came about; a scene started developing. Maybe I didn't articulate it at the time but I knew in my gut… I saw all these kids on the street that didn't know each other but yet were into the same (thing). You could see them all walking around, they just had no place to get in touch with each other. And from that scene people met, they started fashion companies, whatever, all kinds of creative pursuits. So that was a big part of the Dolls thing; we brought these people into the same room, but they were just as creative as we were. That original audience was really a very artistic type of person."

By contrast, Johansen has said that his current acoustic incarnation was partly born out of a frustration with meatheads showing up at his gigs looking for a Dolls nostalgia trip.

"I had that revelation, y'know, 20 years ago, that's when I started the Buster thing," he points out. "It's hard to describe, but my life then was like, I would be in a van with six guys and we would get up in the morning, who the hell knows where we'd be, travel like 400 miles - that takes up to eight hours - go to some hockey rink, set up and play in front of some heavy metal band and then throw all this shit back in the truck, suck down a bottle of gin, and travel another 800 miles, crash, get up and do the same thing again. Like, hundreds of thousands of miles. And your ass is breakin', just sittin' there suckin' on gin, and it gets to you after a while."

Salvation came for Johansen at Dubliner Terry Dunne's bar Tramps, where he could use slow nights to develop the Poindexter revue.

"And then within a couple of weeks I was making as much, what with all that travelling and having to pay for hotels," he continues. "And I just thought, 'Why am I killing myself?' That changed my life at that point, that's when I took possession of my life. See, the thing is, when you're in a rock 'n' roll band, right, and you're going out and playing for these kids, and the majority of them, 70% of 'em aren't that bright, so you really have to present a one dimensional kinda character to them, 'cos otherwise it's just too overwhelming.

"At the time I had this friend Elliot Murphy, he's a singer, he used to say that Buster Poindexter is more like David Johansen than David Johansen is, meaning it wasn't like some idealised honed-down version of me, it was all of me, whatever was going on with my neuroses, whatever was going on in my life, I would be talking about it on stage, it was like therapy almost.

"So it was really the opposite of inventing a persona. I had been trapped in this character before that who was like (adopts frazzled tone), 'I'm okay! I'm cool!' And it just became such a burden to be like that because you could be not okay and then you gotta go out there and be like, 'I'm cool!' and I just got sick of that. So I thought, 'If I'm not cool today, I'm not fucking cool, I can talk about it'. So that's where that came from."

And yet, there was always an underlying angst, a fucked-upness to the New York Dolls that made them so much more than just a good time band. Hearing 'Personality Crisis' at 15 was like getting a call from some transvestite druggie version of the Samaritans.

Johansen chuckles at the memories.

"Well, when I wrote that song," he says, " it was the story of my life."

Johansen met comic actor Bill Murray through the Buster shows, resulting in a part as the cab driver from hell in the 1988 Christmas comedy Scrooged. Despite his obvious talent as a character actor, Johansen is under no illusions, figuring an occasional acting job gets him a new car and takes care of a few bills. Similarly, he has no problem with taking Poindexter to gruesome corporate bashes like the Superbowl Ball ("It's horrible, but it's like watching a train wreck, you can't stop looking, you know what I'm sayin?!") which also afford him the chance to travel to places like Puerto Rico, Thailand and Hawaii.

"We're a dance band, so if they want to have a dance, they hire us," he reasons.

In fact, sometimes you get the impression Johansen is more an old showbiz pro like Sammy Davis or Dino rather than the proto-punk tart-with-a-heart in all the rock 'n' roll history books.

Playing the corporate circuit, Johansen found that the fast cha-chas got the best response and decided to extend his Latin repertoire. Becoming more and more immersed in salsa and "deep rumba, not like Ricky Ricardo", he and Brian Koonin began studying Cuban music, researching recordings from the early part of the century, delving into his old Latin boogaloo recordings ("I call it Puerto Ricans on acid, it's indescribable, the things that the songs are about"), Dominican music, the whole Pan-American panoply.

"It was completely turning my head around as far as polyrhythmic music was concerned," he explains. "I started seeing this music in a way that I hadn't experienced before, and by accepting that into my soul it nourished my outlook on all music."

Buster's Spanish Rocket Ship album was just one of many that fell through the cracks when Chris Blackwell sold Island Records, but Johansen kept on digging for roots, becoming intrigued with a lot of 78s being reissued on the Shanachie label, "those bad man ballads and stuff like that. Prior to that I was like, 'If I never hear another blues song, I can wait.' I had heard it all. So many bands play it so generically and it just becomes this endless drone, this endless boogie as they say. So all of a sudden I was looking at it from a new head from going through this Cuban thing. That's when Alan Pepper called me up."

Pepper, owner of The Bottom Line, asked Johansen to participate in the club's 30th anniversary gigs. Johansen told him he happened to have an act. Lo and behold, the Harry Smiths were born.

"I said, 'This is gonna be one show,'" Johansen recalls, "but I really wanna go at it from a jazz head. And the (New York) Times came, that's like, the paper of record. And they really got it. And it wasn't about me, it was about the music, which was what I wanted to bring to it."

Having worked up a set of 30 or 40 songs, Johansen decided to keep doing a show a month at the Bottom Line, all the time reviewing tapes from the mixing board. Enter none other than Bob Dylan, looking to sign the Harry Smiths to his Sony-backed Egyptian label.

Johansen: "That's when Dylan got the tape, and he wanted to put it out. The guys in his band were telling me, 'Y'know, he made us learn 'Delia' from your tapes so we can play it on stage'. And it's funny because I got the arrangement from him. He was goin' (affects nasal tone) 'Why can't you guys play like these guys, man?' Y'know, all this kind of shit! But it's a great band, I know those guys - I played with a lot of 'em.

"So finally Sony says, 'Absolutely not, you people are crazy. We knew you were crazy, but now it's official.' And I was feeling, 'Well, it was good.' I wasn't even real crestfallen, I was thinking about getting ready to wind it down. He (Dylan) wanted to go and keep talkin' to them about it and I told him not to because I didn't want him to go there, y'know, get involved in that shit. 'Cos you don't know him man, he'd take that shit seriously and like, fuck up his own scene."

But then, Johansen got a call from label owner Norman Chesky, whose distributor was calling on him for a new record as soon as possible. Within a week, the Harry Smiths had gone back to church. Literally.

"With Chesky, you go to this beautiful old church with this old wood, and you can smell the myrrh and it's musty and it's got this huge arched ceiling, and then they run mics and a speaker up to the ceiling for the echo sound, and essentially the band just sits around a mic and plays."

"So we just sat there on the altar smoking cigarettes and stuff," he remembers, "and the priest would come in and go, 'Hey boys, everything alright?' - he didn't care. We played songs for three days in this delightful atmosphere, and y'know, you're smelling these smells, bringing back this stuff from when you were an altar boy. So three days later, 12 o clock at night, boom, it's over, let's go out and eat.

"I don't know if I'm ever gonna be able to go back to doing it any other way. Especially at my age, I'm not gonna make some fucking record with the proper amount of beats and the right amount of echo that is gonna make radio think like, 'Oh well, this'll fit between our commercials."

That night during a lengthy and quite remarkable set in Whelan's, with his band seated, booted and suited, Johansen becomes a kind of vaude-villain and confidence trickster, playing the bluesmaster, the flophouse torch singer, the Spanish gaucho balladeer and the Weimar Republican singing songs about 1920s prohibition.

And with 30 years of wear, Johansen's voice has gained the kind of old man's authority you hear in Rabbit Brown and Clarence Ashley and Dock Boggs.

"I don't know how old you have to be, you just have to have had some kind of a life," he'd told me earlier. "Some kind of - what do they call it? - 'foxhole prayer' has to have gone on in your life, you know what I mean?"

That's the story of the blues.

David Johansen & The Harry Smiths is out now on Chesky