Catching Up With... David Johansen of the New York Dolls

David Johansen swaggered onto the music scene in 1971 as lead singer and songwriter for the notorious New York Dolls. With bright lipstick, dark eyeliner, irreverent wit, leather pants and platform heels, he seduced and inspired a generation of rock 'n' roll bands both in the U.S. and abroad.

Critical acclaim was quick. But commercial success was elusive. The gender-bending Dolls burned too brightly, made only two albums and imploded by 1975 under the pressure of their own excesses. In the intervening years, David Jo reinvented himself a few times, continued to create great rock, folk and blues music, had a hit as the kitschy lounge lizard Buster Poindexter and even appeared in a variety of minor acting roles though the '80s and '90s. He currently hosts a weekly radio show on Sirius called Mansion of Fun.

This month, as the resurrected Dolls—featuring original band member Sylvain Sylvain, along with Sami Yaffa, Steve Conte, Brian Delaney and Brian Koonin—release their new album, 'Cause I Sez So, Johansen is still having big fun and living in the present, seeming completely at peace with his place in the rock 'n' roll pantheon. Paste caught up with Johansen last week.

Paste: With a new album out [tomorrow, May 5] and the band getting ready now to go out on tour behind it, how are you spending your time these days?

Johansen: We just got back from South America. In Peru, we played a soccer stadium with the B-52s and a Peruvian band. In South America everybody sings. They love to sing. When you finish the show they sing their local anthems for you instead of cheering for an encore. I guess they are football songs or something. It’s really kind of heartwarming. The trip home, man, we had to fly down to Sao Palo, wait for five hours and then get back on a plane to New York. So we were traveling for about 20 hours. Last night I did my radio show and got home pretty late. Then I had stuff I had to do this morning, so I am kind of sleep deprived, which is normal. We don’t rehearse a hell of a lot during the week, because we found that you can rehearse and rehearse but it doesn’t have anything to do with what is going to happen on stage. But we are going to rehearse for a couple hours this week to work on a couple of the new songs. We’re going to run down the album to figure out which ones will work live.

Paste: The new album on Atco Records is called 'Cause I Sez So. It’s the second album since the Dolls reformed five years ago. How did you write the songs on this new album? Is there a creative process that works for you guys?

Johansen: We got a call from our manager in November and he said, "You guys have to make a record in January if you want to keep playing." Well, we want to keep playing, which is our raison d’etre. So we were like, "OK we’ll make a record." And we kind of hemmed and hawed about that for a while. On the [last] record, One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, we woodshedded. We practiced for like five weeks. We got in a rehearsal studio and we would play for six hours a day, five days a week, coming up with songs, honing them, and all of this kind of stuff. This time we’re thinking, we already did that process. Now we know how to make a record together because we are old hands at this. So we had a little bit of a more cavalier attitude about it. So I would sit down with Syl and I would say, "Let’s hear what you’ve got." And he would play like 10 songs. And I would say, "Okay that one’s great, that one’s great, that one’s great." So all I have to do is write words for them. Then Conte and Sami had songs, and I said, "OK, that’s a good song, that’s a good song." So we rehearse them a little bit, put some choruses on them, whatever, see how they are going to work as a band. So maybe we just did that four or five times.

Paste: You worked with Todd Rundgren again on this record, who produced your very first album. What was that like?

Johansen: We need a producer because we need somebody to mediate us. Otherwise it is going to be like WWIII and nothing is ever going to get done. A lot of producers want to put like a brand on whatever band they are working with, because they have a sound or something. That’s OK. But that’s not for us. The thing with Todd is that he is sonically a genius, but also he is not going to alter what it is the band does. For us that’s the perfect thing. So we’re not thinking, oh my god we’re going to meet a new producer; what if we wind up with some kind of maniac who locks us up in a room with a gun or something?

So we got to Hawaii, where Todd was going to make the record. I had some Quicktime files of the band playing some songs on the computer, I played them for Todd, and he was like, "Oh man, you guys got to be kidding. You can do better than that." I said, "No, no, I can hear them." You know, you can fill in the blanks when you’re a musician. He said he couldn’t fill in that many blanks. So then we sat down for like a week and really wrote the songs out how they should go. Like there’s got to be a verse here, and a chorus, and there have to be some words here. Then the second week, we rehearsed them. Then the third week, we recorded the tracks. And then the fourth week, we did the overdubs. We started on Jan. 3, and we were back in LA by Feb. 4.

You have to understand that since the last record, Syl is like sitting around in his room playing guitar. I’m taking ideas that I get and jotting them down on little pieces of paper and throwing them into an envelope or something. It’s not like we just show up and have nothing. We have these tidbits. As a musician, though, you say, "All right, that’s enough, now on that one," because it really just has to be finished. But the impetus is there. The thrust is there. We just know that when the time comes to finish it, we’ll finish it. Our tendency is just to procrastinate as long as possible. And I think there is something to that, because when you do decide to spew it out and commit it to tape, it is really now.

Paste: So could it possibly be that spontaneous with you guys? Nothing is really pre-planned or calculated?

Johansen: For us, it’s a here and now kind of thing. Our philosophy is we play just the way we are every day. So however you feel when you go on stage, you take it from there. You don’t transform yourself beforehand. We try to transform ourselves onstage, if that’s possible. But, you know, if you were in a band and you sold five million records, and you had to make a follow up to that, you would probably be paralyzed. But being that we’ve never had that problem [laughs], our philosophy is let’s go in, let’s play what we’ve got, let’s put it down, and let’s do it. There may be expectations among certain people about what we’re going to do, but what they are seeing is really us just being ourselves. Just by us being who we are, we’re going to do the right thing.

We’re the kind of band that doesn’t have any real consideration for the marketplace. What we want to do is play great rock ‘n' roll music. And it doesn’t have anything to do with what anyone else is doing. So we just do what we do. And if people like it, that’s great. But we’re still going to do what we do, because if we try to alter that and make it something else, then we feel like we might as well just have a job. It's kind of like folk art in a sense, where people just do things for the fuck of it."

Paste: Any plans for a live album or maybe to shoot a documentary film of the tour coming up?

Johansen: We just made a record. We’re launching it this month. Then we’re going to go to England and do the same thing. Then, when we come back in the end of May, we’re going to get on a bus and go around America. And then in July and August we are going back to Europe. So we’re just going to take it as it comes. It’s not like anything is planned. I gotta tell you, the way this band works is we got together to do one show at this arts festival Morrissey was curating in London. We got together to do one show. We thought, "What the hell, it will be a lot of laughs." Then we got offers to do other shows and we said let’s do it, and it just kind of continued. So it’s not like we ever have any kind of plan. We just go with it, and have as much fun as we can.