‘Delia’ (2000)
When his profession as Poindexter was working its course, Johansen reclaimed his personal identify on two albums of prewar American people music. “Delia,” which recounts the homicide of an African American teenage lady in 1900, had been coated by Bob Dylan, Johnny Money, and, umm, Pat Boone. Johansen generally crept to the doorstep of minstrelsy on this stage of his profession, however the matter required restraint, and he turns “Delia” right into a transfixing six-and-a-half minutes.
New York Dolls, ‘We’re All In Love’ (2006)
Morrissey, an enormous Dolls fan, curated the 2004 Meltdown Competition in England and requested the three surviving Dolls (Johansen, the guitarist Sylvain Sylvain and the bassist Arthur Kane, often called Killer) to reunite. They performed a number of further reveals too, however by the point they have been able to make their first album in 32 years, “One Day It Will Please Us to Bear in mind Even This,” Kane had died of leukemia. “We’re All in Love” is probably the most quotable music on an incisive, quotable album. Johansen celebrates the band’s return: “Jumpin’ across the stage like teenage ladies / Castin’ our swine earlier than the pearls,” he sings, in addition to, “Excommunicated, then canonized.”
New York Dolls, ‘Maimed Happiness’ (2006)
The totally grown model of the Dolls was reflective, along with delirious, and “One Day” contains two of Johansen’s finest ballads: the broke and lonely farewell “I Ain’t Obtained Nothin’,” and “Maimed Happiness,” a Nineteen Fifties type waltz, full with string association, by which a chastened Johansen questions the aim of life and declares that each one he’s ever identified is “sorrowful pleasure.”
New York Dolls, ‘This Is Ridiculous’ (2009)
Johansen wasn’t caught prior to now — on “Trigger I Sez So,” he sings about authorities surveillance, cellphone chatter, spiritual grifters and the struggle on medicine, and he’s disgusted with all of them. The Dolls’ sound expands to incorporate reggae, nation twang and spaghetti Western guitars, plus back-alley blues on “This Is Ridiculous,” by which Johansen bemoans woeful poverty and considers leaping out of a window.
New York Dolls, ‘I’m So Fabulous’ (2011)
“Dancing Backward in Excessive Heels,” the final of the Dolls’ three comeback albums, shows a ripened sound that’s extra reflective than ecstatic, and there’s a clearer sense that to an idealist like Johansen, this world has proved to be a vale of tears. On the up-tempo “I’m So Fabulous,” he mocks the uninteresting apparel of most New Yorkers, champions his personal sense of favor, rhymes “arriviste” and “nebulous,” and proves that the suitable approach to specific disgust is with fun and a toss of your boa.
Gary Lucas and Gods and Monsters that includes Gary Lucas and David Johansen, ‘One Man’s Meat’ (2021)
In one in all his final recorded performances, Johansen summarizes his Buddhist-adjacent philosophy by a sequence of riddles and paradoxes delivered at breakneck pace over Gary Lucas’s careening guitar. He drops references to the Bible, dragons, Hinduism, intercourse and Hamlet, and sums himself up higher than any biographer might: “Tried to get straight, Lord, I attempted to slot in / Can’t cease and I can’t win.”
