Wild, waspish and whip-smart, there are few rock stars as great as David Johansen | Music

Nick Kent’s fabled 1974 NME piece about New York Dolls, Dead End Kids on the Champs-Élysées, is packed with characters and incident. The band have arrived in France after a showcase gig at London boutique Biba, marred by various members getting caught while attempting to shoplift from the store. Their famously dissolute guitarist Johnny Thunders vomits copiously in front of the assembled press at a record company reception to welcome the band to France, then pukes again midway through a “horrendous, tuneless” Dolls gig at Paris’s prestigious Olympia theatre. Bassist Arthur Kane, a large man clad in a ballerina’s tutu who apparently looks “like he’d just been run over by a truck load of Valium” confides that he’s in fear of his life: the last groupie he slept with tied him up in his sleep and attempted to cut off his thumb with a knife.

And yet, even in such exalted company, there’s no doubt who the star of the show is. Frontman David Johansen never appears to stop talking throughout, an endless, wildly entertaining source of tall tales – at one juncture, he claims to have been an underage star of gay porn films – hysterical bitching about other artists (John Lennon is an “asshole hypocrite”, Keith Richards is “past it”, Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter has “terrible piggy eyes”) and eminently quotable statements: “We attract only degenerates to our concerts”; “We want to be known as the tackiest boys in New York.” Whatever you made of New York Dolls’ music – and, as the evident distaste with which host Bob Harris greeted their appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test proved, it was nothing if not divisive – you would have a hard time arguing that Johansen wasn’t fantastically good at the business of being a rock star.

He was also very much the right man to front New York Dolls. He was good-looking, charismatic and the press loved him – Johansen always provided great copy – and he sang in a brash, snotty yowl, the perfect complement to the band’s punk-inspiring edge-of-chaos sound. A former participant in the confrontational avant garde Theatre of the Ridiculous shows put on by directors John Vaccaro and Charles Ludlam – big on drag queens, outrage and cast members covered in glitter – Johansen applied their techniques to New York Dolls’ image, helping make the band an instant underground sensation in early 70s New York. Their early residency at the Lower East Side’s Mercer Arts Centre attracted not just an equally flamboyant crowd of followers, but celebrities including David Bowie, Elton John, Lou Reed and Bette Midler, while Rod Stewart invited them to support Faces in London before they’d even released a note of music.

Johansen wrote or co-wrote every original song that appeared on New York Dolls’ eponymous 1973 debut and its follow-up Too Much Too Soon bar one, minting a raunchy, trashy style. Flying in the face of rock’s increasing seriousness and grandeur, his songs were as in love with 60s girl group pop as they were the Rolling Stones: Looking for a Kiss opened with a steal from the Shangri-Las’ 1964 hit Give Him a Great Big Kiss. They made a virtue of the band’s rudimentary musicianship, but for all Johansen claimed “there wasn’t a lot of intellectualising going on”, they were always far sharper and deeper than the band’s detractors gave them credit for. Vietnamese Baby pondered the effects of the Vietnam war and collective guilt on attitudes to hedonism (“everything connects,” it suggests); Frankenstein was a garbled hymn to the alternately glitzy and grubby allure of New York; Subway Train quoted the lyrics of the 19th-century folk song I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.

The music press understandably thought New York Dolls were going to be huge, but perhaps they were too polarising for their own good. A degree of homophobia provoked by their appearance – every member of the band was straight – undoubtedly hampered their progress in the US; a sound that seemed incredibly prescient when punk arrived was easy to dismiss as sloppy, semi-competent flailing in 1973: “the worst high-school band I ever saw”, sniffed the Rolling Stones’ Mick Taylor. Even the producer of their debut album, Todd Rundgren, thought they couldn’t play and treated them with a degree of disdain.

Certainly, everything that could go wrong for New York Dolls did go wrong: drug addiction, a disastrous hook-up with the alcoholic former Shangri-Las’ producer Shadow Morton on 1974’s Too Much Too Soon, a dalliance with Malcolm McLaren as their manager who convinced them to take up a new Marxist-inspired image that succeeded only in alienating even the New York hipsters who had flocked to their gigs in the first place. They lost their record deal, and most of the band quit: Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain soldiered on until late 1976, finally giving up just as the seeds New York Dolls had sown began to bloom: their last gigs featured a support act called Blondie.

Johansen’s first eponymous post-Dolls solo album and 1979’s In Style – the latter featuring a guest appearance by Ian Hunter, who’d presumably forgiven him for the “piggy eyes” jibe – should theoretically have capitalised on punk, a genre he’d done more than most to inspire, but both flopped. A pity, because they were packed with smart, impactful, witty songs: Funky But Chic’s brilliant defence of the Dolls’ image (“mama says I look fruity, but in jeans I feel rotten”), Girls’ surprisingly pro-feminist rallying call; the gleeful Wreckless Crazy. He finally scored an American hit with a medley of British Invasion classics in 1982, and finally became the star he’d always threatened to be by adopting the character of Buster Poindexter: a dinner-suit clad lounge singer performing old jump blues, swing and R&B numbers. His cover of Arrow’s Hot Hot Hot ended up all over MTV (Johansen later called its success “the bane of my life”) and he regularly turned up on Saturday Night Live before tiring of his alter ego in the early 00s, returning to his own name and making a couple of blues albums that revealed his deep knowledge and understanding of the genre: New York Dolls had covered Bo Diddley and Sonny Boy Williamson.

The surviving members of New York Dolls reformed at the behest of super-fan Morrissey when he curated the 2004 Meltdown festival: bassist Arthur Kane died shortly after the gig, but Johansen and Sylvain carried on under the name. You could hardly blame them for basking in the glow of belated glory, moreover the new albums they then made as New York Dolls were far better than anyone might reasonably have expected them to be. They evoked the band’s past without seeming like a wan facsimile, they addressed latter-day topics – the “war on drugs”, mobile phones, online surveillance – with enough wit to avoid sounding like old-man-shouts-at-cloud moaning. And they occasionally boasted an affecting air of reflective melancholy. Implausible as the very idea of a grownup New York Dolls seemed, here it was, sounding oddly moving as it looked back at their glory days, “jumping around the stage like teenage girls, casting our swine before the pearls,” as Johansen put it on We’re All in Love, a song from 2006’s One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This.

On their final album, 2011’s Dancing Backwards in High Heels, there was a song called I’m So Fabulous, a paean to the band’s good looks and sense of style, filled with snorting disgust at what passed for fashion in “nebulous” 21st-century Manhattan. “I’m so fabulous, you arriviste … The way you dress is so insidious – how do they even let you on the subway? … you’re so Cincinnati … I don’t even want to look at you,” sang Johansen, to a backdrop of raging guitar and wailing harmonica, sounding just like the guy who’d boasted to Nick Kent about New York Dolls’ tackiness and degenerate audience nearly 40 years before. In its own cocky, swaggering, outspoken way, it’s the perfect epitaph.