The two Dolls albums are touchstones of punk the early Johansen discs are “merely” great hard rock records.īy the time Johansen released Revenge for indy label Jem Records, he’d moved even further from the joyous cacophony that had made him infamous. Even his 1978 solo debut, which featured songs that had been part of his old band’s repertoire, don’t measure up to the divine blooz-rock noise of the Dolls. Many rock fans have an ambivalent attitude toward Dave the Solo Artiste: as frontman for punk/glam pioneers New York Dolls, he was part of a music-making moment so seminal that there’s probably no way he could have matched it going off on his own. Revenge was the last new studio album to appear under Johansen’s name until he resurfaced in 2000 playing the traditional blues belter with a band called the Harry Smiths.
Wouldn’t be the first or last time that I’ve fallen in love with music that hardly no one else knows about, so let’s take a closer look at this ‘un, okay?
Per VH-1, it was Revenge‘s failure to find an audience that pushed the former New York Dolls frontman to adopt the Buster Poindexter persona which he parleyed into a performing gig on “Saturday Night Live” in the mid-eighties. Recently I’ve been playing and replaying a disc from 1984 that didn’t get much attention when it was released, Sweet Revenge (Passport Records).
Nuthin’ like broke-ness to get you digging through the personal library: not a bad thing, really, when it means rediscovering books and discs that have been lying unacknowledged for way too long.
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