Lessons In Love & Art From A Cultural Gangster
On New York Dolls, Creative Solutions & Truly Living
“Keep the music wild and the spirit free. That’s how you truly live.” David Johansen*
I’ve always been about watching and learning - from my elders, from my contemporaries, from younger people.
When some kind of idea or philosophy or approach resonates, I almost feel a little click in my mind, that shimmery feeling of ‘ahhhh, that’s how you do it’. I guess that’s what school is for, but I’ve pretty much always preferred learning in my own fashion and my own time, gleaning things here and there and grabbing on.
I was sad to hear the magnificent David Johansen died a couple of days ago, frontman for the New York Dolls and ultimate cultural gangster, although happy to hear he got to live a long and fruitful life, surrounded by love and family.
I was a casual fan of the band and its individual members (most especially Johnny Thunders), some of their songs like ‘Personality Crisis’ were burned into my brain and live forever in my heart, I deeply admired their aesthetic and their photographic archive and had heard plenty of crazy stories about them, but I didn’t know half as much as I thought I knew.
Yesterday I watched the Martin Scorcese and David Tedeschi co-directed documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only (2023) - a jam packed portrait of Johansen created with live footage taken from his 70th birthday show and a couple of gigs at Club Carlyle, intercut with archives and intimate home interviews with his family. Amongst a million other hilarious, glittering tales he offhandedly recounts from onstage, he recalls spending time at the Chelsea Hotel where you could get lost for days going from room to room, and said he always sought out the older people, the ones that had something they could teach you - such as ‘cosmic scholar’ Harry Smith. I learned a lot while watching, about him, and about how to live well in the world and make choices that work for you.
The New York Dolls burst onto the music scene in 1972, delivering chaos, danger, belligerence and true prototype punk spirit to rock’n’roll with their gloriously urgent distorto trashy sounds and wildly provocative appearance; a a fabulously fucked up mish-mash of women’s attire, high heels, makeup, ripped clothing and exposed chests - as terrifying to the mainstream as any snarling inner city street gang.
When their debut self titled album emerged in 1973, music journalist
described them in Zoo World as:glitter mutants escaped from the juice bar of a Staten Island reform school, ready to sweep away your kid sister/brother for an orgy of blood and drugs. But to cop a phrase from their most direct predecessors, the Shangri-Las, the Dolls are good-bad: certainly not evil. They're more a rock 'n roll Bowery Boys (aka the East Side Kids) with all the raw muscle and sinewy street smarts that name implies.
Lesson Number One: Turn Yourself On
Johansen says the look and sound of the New York Dolls just emerged out of what they loved and thought looked and sounded cool, but shaped within the limitations of availability, skills and finances; ‘It wasn't like we would talk about what we were going to sound like or what we were going to look like or anything, we just kinda did it’ he told Mojo.
Like Dolly Parton and other larger-than-life artists, they just intrinsically understood how to excite an audience with their presentation; “We all had similar ideas of what it takes to be a great rock star … the lie that tells the truth”.
Lesson Number Two: Make Your Own Scene
Johansen told Uncut; ‘There was nothing happening in 1971, early ’72. There was no place to play. The scene was still happening on the street. We, the band, sort of fell together and started looking for places we could play. They had these draconian laws that went down in the late ’60s… they passed these Cabaret Laws, and all those places closed. It was like a ghost town. We had an ambition to get something going again … I knew this guy, Eric Emerson, who was in a band called The Magic Tramps. He was an Andy Warhol movie star and he used to wear lederhosen and do the cha-cha dance. They had a gypsy violin player. It wasn’t a straight rock’n’ roll band, it was a Turkish rock’n’ roll band. He said he was playing at this place called Mercer Arts Centre, did we want to play with them? We started playing Tuesday nights at midnight. We started doing that on Tuesday nights and this scene grew up, a very groovy scene.’
Lesson Number Three: Aim For What You Love
The Dolls received an offer to reform and play at the Royal Festival Hall in London from none other than Morrissey, who knew it was Johansen’s dream to play there, just like his idol Maria Callas had, because he had been the obsessed teenage president of the New York Dolls fan club before becoming a rockstar himself with the Smiths. And now he was curating his own Meltdown Festival, where he could make his musical dream line-up come true.
Johansen didn’t need any convincing and jokes that he combed every opium den in Chinatown to track down his old band mates to make it happen. The show was a wild success - with a bittersweet aftertaste, as bass player Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane, died a mere 22 days later, from leukaemia, which he was literally diagnosed with 2 hours before his death.
Kane’s incredible story is told in the 2005 documentary New York Doll - he had renounced drinking and his rock’n’roll lifestyle and embraced Mormonism, returning to working in a Mormon library in a suit and tie just after the performance in London. But playing the show gave him a much needed heartfelt charge of joy and appreciation, and rekindled the loving friendship with Johansen that had fallen by the wayside in drugs and recriminations when the band broke up.
Above all, the documentary and the stories around it are an ode to keeping a fire burning in your heart, and making things happen.
Lesson Number Four: Find Creative Solutions
After the Dolls broke up in 1977, Johansen began touring solo, a non-stop grind that eventually wore him down so much, he created Buster Poindexter, a lounge lizard stage persona, that he says in Personality Crisis: One Night Only, could really only work in New York, so he could stay home and work and hang out with his family and friends. He convinced his favourite venue Tramps to let him start a Monday night residency with just a pianist and a guitarist, and basically sung whatever he felt like.
One of those songs was Calypso hit ‘Hot Hot Hot’ - which proved so popular he recorded it and had his own major hit with it. The hit propelled him to being a recurring musical guest on Saturday Night Live (and became such an ubiquitous staple of weddings and karaoke that he ended up calling it ‘the bane of my life’).
But really, the lesson here is that throwing out what’s not working for you and finding creative solutions to make your life/work balance work more effectively for you, can actually be the key to better living and bring unexpected rewards.
Lesson Number Five: Fill Your Life With Art & Love & Watch It All Come Back
In February 2025, Johansen’s family announced he was living with Stage 4 cancer, a brain tumor and a broken back. They wanted to keep it private but were in a state of severe financial burden so had started fundraising efforts to help provide for better care.
Daughter Leah Hennessey told PEOPLE “Fame does not equal financial security” and said they had accrued a “mountain of medical debt” over the ten years of his illness, during which he had continued to perform until he couldn’t, kept presenting his eclectic Sirius radio show Mansion of Fun, which he described as an act of devotion to music, and had an exhibition of his extraordinary painted icons.
The family reported they were overwhelmed by an outpouring of love and donations, which made a significant difference to his day to day care, and by connecting with the community who reached out to them.
This is the part that really struck me - she also told PEOPLE “It's really making me cry because almost all of the donations are under $100. It's the kind of money that people are happy to spend on a musician they love.”
I feel like there are other lessons that will continue to creep in over time, about chasing your muses and what you want from life, choosing to love deeply and staying confusing to the world if that’s what makes you happy.
Stay trashy, listen to the cosmic scholars around you, embrace your personality crises and never stop looking for a kiss
Lo x
*I lost the link to source the headline quote at the top of this essay and I’m trying to hunt it down - if anyone knows where its from please let me know!
Recommended further reading on the New York Dolls:
It was a life well-lived. Thanks for the article. RIP DJ.
“Stay trashy” is sincerely the loveliest advice I could have received today. Written with love and care as always, Lo. Just right <3