| April 19th, 2005 10:56 PM |
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| FPM C10 |
David Johansen and the Harry Smiths by Phil Kitchel
published 4/17/00
A couple months after I moved to New York, I saw David Johansen sitting at a café table in Central Park, wearing faded black jeans and a faded black turtleneck, holding the leash of a faded black poodle. Even though I’d already seen Janeane Garofalo, Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth, and the guy who played Mark Ratner in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, this was by far my most significant celebrity sighting yet. The only thing cooler would’ve been seeing Lou Reed and Andy Warhol making out under Garibaldi’s statue or something, except Andy was already dead, and Lou was never as funny, ballsy, and cool as David Johansen and the New York Dolls.
It is exactly right that David Johansen should front an American musical ensemble like the Harry Smiths. The New York Dolls were the rightful heirs to the Rolling Stones’ white-boy blues throne. The Stones should have quit the minute the Dolls appeared in 1972, but maybe they could see that the Dolls were going to drive their smoking clown-mobile straight off a pier, so they just waited them out. The Dolls dropped napalm on the Stones’ decadent blooze: honking harp, bluesman strut, hyper-amped Chuck Berry riffs, and driving urban momentum. They were no world-weary soul survivors; they joyfully played in a mess they never made: sprawling stinking cross-dressing Times Square-peep-show runaway subway New York City. They were the giant sound of the Seventies sucking, a guffawing, slobbery razzberry at the pompous Grand Funk and simpering James Taylor-ness of Rock Music, and they made the world safe once again for wild, loose rock’n’roll, just as Thomas Jefferson declared it should be.
Actually, Rock Music stood its ground, and the Dolls skidded into a multi-junkie pile-up, though not without some lasting influence. I myself blame them for making irresistible to me such rancid fare as the Dead Boys, Guns ’N Roses, and D Generation, which has caused people who might otherwise hold me in some esteem to view me with pity, and has been the source of problems in all of my relationships. You could probably blame them for Poison, Ratt, Mötley Crüe, and every other terrible poodle-rock band of the ’80s, but--and let me be very clear on this--the Dolls rocked in a way those bands never came close to. They had power, and they had the boogie-woogie. The New York Dolls were real, they lived their blues, and, with the lone exception of Mr. Johansen, they died young. (Or is Sylvain Sylvain still alive?)
Twenty years before the Dolls, in a different New York City, in Greenwich Village and other folk enclaves across the country, clean-cut young bohemians sipped espressos, smoked cigarettes, and nodded their heads to the strange sounds of the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled and annotated by one Harry Smith. The Anthology was a set of three double albums, a carefully and curiously ordered selection of blues, gospel, country, and other uncategorizable sounds of rural America--not field recordings, real records--from the time between the wars, before there was a media oligarchy at the top of which New York sat. Thin, earnest voices reached up from a past that must have already seemed ancient in 1952, describing an anarchic, whimsical world of violence, escape, and salvation that had been right here, right in our backyard, complicated, hilarious, and unpredictable, nothing at all like the plastic-built, spray-washed, gleaming future of today in which the beat youngsters found themselves. They grew their hair, mussed their clothes, and questioned their destinies, trying to find something like the purer reality contained in those snapshots of pre-modern America.
All those atmospheres--the fetid New York of the Dolls, the idealistic ’60s coffeehouse, and the isolated backwaters of the original practitioners--are in sometimes uncomfortable proximity in the performance and audience of David Johansen and the Harry Smiths. Johansen isn’t a pure-hearted young folkie, piously presenting quaint relics. These pertinent, darkly humorous tales still have blood in them, and they’re meant to be pushed and punched around. Johansen’s voice is as powerful as 90-proof bourbon, and he dispenses it like a careful bartender. He’s primarily an interpreter of the blues, and the Harry Smiths veer more towards black musical forms than the high, jangling, white Appalachian music also found on the Anthology.
The set wasn’t all lifted from the Harry Smith records and included tunes by Sonny Boy Williamson, Bessie Smith, and others with the same musical and cultural background. They’re often funny--“Well I’ve Been to Memphis” was introduced by a rueful story of Johansen’s “first band” and a “misunderstanding at the Memphis Civic Center . . . I was dressed like Liza Minelli at the time.” Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me Talkin’” got a good stomp going, and gave Johansen a chance to show off his wicked harp skills. But the overall atmosphere was more smoky than smokin’. The drumming was sparse and precise, the upright bass carefully plucked, and the two talented guitar players took turns on banjo, electric, and acoustic, with hair-raising slide-work that spoke volumes in dissonant, ghostly overtones. There were bleak tunes like “Delia,” which, with the repeated refrain, “All the friends I ever had are gone,” made it hard not to think about the rest of the Dolls, who didn’t mature so successfully. “Poor Boy Blues” studiously avoided a groove; instead, Johansen sparred with a bristling slide acoustic, and the drums and bass flashed, thundered, and faded like a bad night in July.
The mannered atmosphere at the Bottom Line seemed to constrain the musical energy--as did, perhaps, the $20 tickets, which limited the crowd to a certain affluence. Sitting wedged into tables, the warmly responsive audience could only smile appreciatively or clap. It was like an acoustic night at Barnes & Noble, which seemed at odds with the scabrous irreverence of much of the material. As a friend of mine said, “You’re not gonna get anybody’s tail waggin’ when they’re all sitting down.” Music like that ought to get a little sweat on it.
Throughout the show, Johansen sat in the middle, casually crossing his legs during instrumental breaks, appreciating the musicians he’s brought together, sometimes strumming for his own amusement an un-miked acoustic, sipping drinks and St. John’s Wort, and making introductions in his sharp Staten Island accent. Unlike Buster Poindexter, Johansen has no persona here; although he occasionally inhabits the characters in a song, he is simply himself, with a dignity that his onetime predecessor Mick Jagger could learn from. When, in the encore, they did the Dolls’ “Lookin’ for a Kiss,” it fit in seamlessly. Strip away the bawdy, brawling noise from the New York Dolls and you find the same blues, blood, and whiskey that are the root sources of all great American music. David Johansen and the Harry Smiths have a concept with room to grow, and I can see him doing this for a long time.
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