Remembering David Johansen: NY rocker who paved the way for Replacements and other DIY bands

As music critics, we get blowback from readers. Usually when we write something even the least bit negative about a favorite artist. Sometimes we catch flak, believe it or not, for praising an act.

The first time I got slammed for touting a band was back in my college days. Writing for the (University of) Minnesota Daily’s arts & entertainment section, the equivalent of the Twin Cities' alt-weekly at the time, I applauded the New York Dolls’ 1973 eponymous debut album, produced by Todd Rundgren. They were outrageous and subversive and contrarian and provocative and fun and funny and maybe a little dangerous, all things I admired in a rock ‘n’ roll band.

Tony Glover, Minneapolis bluesman extraordinaire and sometimes music writer, endorsed them in a review in Rolling Stone. He wrote: “In different ways, and for widely different reasons, I’m as excited about the Dolls as I was when I first heard the Allman Brothers. I guess it has to do with being real, and caring enough to do it right.”

I can’t remember the exact words I wrote but, with the Dolls, it was either love ‘em or hate ‘em, and I got an earful from a Twin Cities music man I really respected, John Pete, DJ and onetime programmer at KQRS. Back then, KQ was a free-form FM radio station, playing what DJs thought was cool and hip, not what a consultant or researcher told them to spin. If they wanted to play an entire side of the Allman Brothers’ “At the Fillmore East,” so be it.

But Pete gave me — and Glover — endless crap for liking the New York Dolls.

I bring this up because the Dolls frontman David Johansen, one of rock music’s great minor figures, died Friday at the age of 75, and music fans have been wondering about the Dolls' performance in 1974 at the Minnesota State Fair.

It was called the Youth Expo and Music Festival in what is now the fair’s West End area. After Charlie Daniels Band, Freddie King and Wet Willie entertained, the Dolls took over for the final two nights of the fair.

While many people claim to have been there, I was among the 200 or so music heads (including future Minnesota musicians Chris Osgood, Ernie Batson and Paul Metsa) who showed up for Johansen, guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, drummer Jerry Nolan and replacement bassist Peter Jordan. I don’t think John Pete was there.

It was a riotous show as these 20-something New York street kids carried on with rambunctious abandon in, unfashionable for the time, big hair, eye makeup and androgynous clothes. (One of the musicians wore a tutu.) I loved it, this combination of trash, flash and a driving rock ‘n’ roll beat by a DIY band with rudimentary musical chops and thrift-store swagger.

Johansen was a crazed and clownish frontman, part rebel without a cause and part court jester. It was hard to take your eyes off this hyper and humorous creature with red lipstick barking “Personality Crisis,” “Jet Boy” and a Sonny Boy Williamson blues tune.

The Dolls crashed and burned quickly by 1976 but their influence was felt far and wide as disaffected kids in the United Kingdom and the States started rock bands. Don’t think the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Ramones, the Replacements, Mötley Crüe, Green Day, Guns N' Roses or the Smiths (Morrissey was president of the Dolls U.K. fan club), among other bands, would have existed had the New York Dolls not paved the way.

The glam-punk Dolls had occasional lyrics of substance in their songs as well as nods to other styles — girl-group pop, vintage R&B, Chicago blues, street-corner harmonies, metal guitars — that suggested a sense of history as well as a modicum of musical ambition.

Johansen felt the Dolls were perhaps misunderstood.

“The Dolls are more about metaphysical things than just whining,” he told me in 2006 when he and Sylvain mounted a Dolls reunion tour at Morrissey’s urging. “The whole idea is: Think for yourself and use your imagination. If I can get people to say that `Life isn’t about just getting and spending and dying. There’s other things to life.' Like dancing.”

After the first two Dolls albums, Johansen went on to a cult solo career with tunes like “Funky But Chic” and “Bohemian Love Pad.” Those songs were not where his musical heart was. It turned out that a louche lounge lizard was his true calling as he became, in the 1980s, a pompadoured, tuxedoed character named Buster Poindexter interpreting jump blues and obscure R&B party tunes.

Poindexter scored an unlikely 1987 novelty hit with “Hot Hot Hot,” a remake of a calypso tune by Trinidad singer Arrow. The song became an MTV favorite, leading to regular appearances on “Saturday Night Live” and an acting career, including TV’s “Miami Vice” and the 1988 Bill Murray film “Scrooged.”

Before a Dolls reunion gig at First Avenue in 2006, I asked Johansen if there was a personality crisis switching from the bon vivant Buster Poindexter to the brash New York Dolls. He responded: “When I started doing Buster, an old friend said to me, `Buster is more like David Johansen than David Johansen is.‘”

Johansen started a short-lived folk group in 2000, the Harry Smiths, later hosted an eclectic weekly show on SiriusXM radio “David Johansen’s Mansion of Fun,” made three more New York Dolls albums between 2006 and ‘11, and became the subject of a 2023 Martin Scorsese documentary on Showtime, “Personality Crisis: One Night Only.”

In addition to that 2006 First Ave appearance by the reunited Dolls, Johansen’s other Twin Cities performances included a 1979 solo effort opening for the Clash in St. Paul (Bob Dylan was there with his son Jakob), a Poindexter concert in ’89 at First Avenue and a Dolls show in 2011 at Target Center opening for Mötley Crüe and Poison.

Don’t think John Pete made it to either of those Dolls gigs but big crowds did.