Interview: David Johansen

During his 40-plus-year-career, David Johansen has made a name for himself as a sleazy rocker with a taste for lipstick in New York Dolls, as well as the suave, campy crooner Buster Poindexter, whose dark-horse hit in the late ’80s, “Hot Hot Hot,” quickly overshadowed the mighty rush and roar of the Dolls. But not for long: The glammy proto-punk band has enjoyed an ever-increasing rise in critical recognition and popularity over the past few years, culminating in a full-blown Dolls reformation in 2005. The band—featuring the only surviving original members, Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain—recorded the inevitable comeback album in 2007.
What wasn’t inevitable was how good the comeback was. While not on par with the raunchy snarl of the Dolls’ pair of classic studio albums from the early ’70s, the new disc, One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This, was a respectable addition to the catalog of a band that always prided itself on disrespectability. Johansen and Sylvain reconnected with Todd Rundgren, the producer of the Dolls’ 1973 debut, for 2007’s Cause I Sez So, another raw batch of retro-rock that was hastily written, quickly recorded, and sounds like it—in other words, it’s an exhibition of the kind of trashy urgency that made the Dolls so revolutionary in the first place.
But with the group’s third post-reunion album—and fifth overall—Dancing Backward In High Heels, Johansen takes a different direction. With the help of Jason Hill (former frontman of Louis XIV and best known for his production work for The Killers), Dancing Backward is a shimmery, reverb-soaked album that evokes just about every era of Johansen’s career—not to mention ’60s girl groups and a reworked version of the disco-ish “Funky But Chic,” originally released on his self-titled 1978 solo debut. But as Johansen tells The A.V. Club, looking to the past is something that’s as painful as it is inescapable—not to mention occasionally funny...

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Jason Heller @'A.V. Club'