‘Delia’ (2000)
When his career as Poindexter was running its course, Johansen reclaimed his own name on two albums of prewar American folk music. “Delia,” which recounts the murder of an African American teenage girl in 1900, had been covered by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and, umm, Pat Boone. Johansen sometimes crept to the doorstep of minstrelsy in this stage of his career, but the topic required restraint, and he turns “Delia” into a transfixing six-and-a-half minutes.
New York Dolls, ‘We’re All In Love’ (2006)
Morrissey, a huge Dolls fan, curated the 2004 Meltdown Festival in England and asked the three surviving Dolls (Johansen, the guitarist Sylvain Sylvain and the bassist Arthur Kane, known as Killer) to reunite. They played a few additional shows too, but by the time they were ready to make their first album in 32 years, “One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This,” Kane had died of leukemia. “We’re All in Love” is the most quotable song on an incisive, quotable album. Johansen celebrates the band’s return: “Jumpin’ around the stage like teenage girls / Castin’ our swine before the pearls,” he sings, as well as, “Excommunicated, then canonized.”
New York Dolls, ‘Maimed Happiness’ (2006)
The fully grown version of the Dolls was reflective, in addition to delirious, and “One Day” includes two of Johansen’s best ballads: the broke and lonely farewell “I Ain’t Got Nothin’,” and “Maimed Happiness,” a 1950s style waltz, complete with string arrangement, in which a chastened Johansen questions the purpose of life and declares that all he’s ever known is “sorrowful joy.”
New York Dolls, ‘This Is Ridiculous’ (2009)
Johansen wasn’t caught in the past — on “Cause I Sez So,” he sings about government surveillance, cellphone chatter, religious grifters and the war on drugs, and he’s disgusted with all of them. The Dolls’ sound expands to include reggae, country twang and spaghetti Western guitars, plus back-alley blues on “This Is Ridiculous,” in which Johansen bemoans woeful poverty and considers jumping out of a window.
New York Dolls, ‘I’m So Fabulous’ (2011)
“Dancing Backward in High Heels,” the last of the Dolls’ three comeback albums, displays a ripened sound that’s more 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 dull attire of most New Yorkers, champions his own sense of style, rhymes “arriviste” and “nebulous,” and proves that the right way to express disgust is with a laugh and a toss of your boa.
Gary Lucas and Gods and Monsters featuring Gary Lucas and David Johansen, ‘One Man’s Meat’ (2021)
In one of his last recorded performances, Johansen summarizes his Buddhist-adjacent philosophy through a series of riddles and paradoxes delivered at breakneck speed over Gary Lucas’s careening guitar. He drops references to the Bible, dragons, Hinduism, sex and Hamlet, and sums himself up better than any biographer could: “Tried to get straight, Lord, I tried to fit in / Can’t stop and I can’t win.”
