That Time I Traded Tapes with David Johansen

Remembering a moment, an era, a blues belter and a blazing brilliant fast-moving artist

It’s impossible to overstate the scroungy, frequently disappointing work that went into tracking down music in the pre-Internet era.

You’d be intrigued by a song on the radio, and the whole time it played you’d hope the DJ would back-announce it. If people were talking in the car and you missed the band name, the primary option was to listen to the station more and hope. This is how Shazam was born, during desperate stretches of car ads on the radio. People actually read the newspaper for a sense of what to expect from a star’s latest work. Record store clerks served as layperson oracles, connecting fans who maybe knew a lyric (or could halfway sing the refrain) to the object of their desire. Woe to the poor soul obsessed with West African guitar music, the artists’ names being hard to spell and pronounce, the records being rare and hard to order.

Everyone was always chasing at least one something. And if, like most musicians and critics, you were an omnivore interested in many types of music, you developed techniques for acquiring. Most of those came down to asking strangers about their music and where they got it. The Jamaican weed dealers in New York were early influencers before anyone heard that term, happily recommending reggae and ska acts ahead of their arrival in the U.S. The jazz oldheads might dispense a dose of stinkeye if you didn’t know some landmark record, but could be trusted for guidance on deep catalog. Nobody who searched for music minded the gigantic time lag – weeks? months? – between learning about a record and actually getting to hear it. “Discovery” was a protracted, multi-act affair.

We hung out. We listened. We read. We eavesdropped. We asked questions.

We did not search Google.

And: Rock stars and label poobahs were pretty much in the same boat, doing the same thing.

Which explains how, sometime in the mid ‘80s, I came to possess a TDK “Normal Bias” cassette with the words “Dragon Man” on it and a simple pastel magic-marker drawing made by David Johansen on the index card.

I was a critic at the Miami Herald at the time. Most of the interviews I did happened on the phone, but Johansen, who died February 28 at age 75, was in town on tour and agreed to meet in person. When I turned up at his hotel, he suggested we talk poolside. I perched on the end of a lounge chair and off we went. (Presumably I had my trusty cassette Walkman recording the chat. I could not find the cassette after extensive searching this weekend.)

Johansen was a storyteller of dramatic flourishes and wild digressions, and also an opinionated man of the world; you could just mention a novel or a songwriter and he’d start in, not waiting for a question. I asked him about the (many) bands that copied every move of his groundbreaking first band, the New York Dolls. More amused than bitter, he said something along the lines of “goes with the territory.” We talked about the very different band he was then working with, and the change in temperature he experienced going from being in a band to being the lone name on the marquee.

At some point during the interview, he started asking me questions. About what was happening in Miami, where to catch live salsa and which of the dancehalls in Little Haiti were safe for white people. As I scrawled out a few recommendations, I had the sense that Johansen – who was already performing at the Bottom Line in New York as Buster Poindexter, an affably louche character styled after Louis Prima and others – would pick up on them. He had that music-obsessive curiosity. And, beyond that, he was an artist perpetually on the lookout for new material.

As we were wrapping up, I mentioned that it was a shame he wasn’t here last week. Because Tobacco Road, the small blues bar near the Miami river, brought back Diamond Teeth Mary Smith McLain for a rare appearance. McLain was an older woman, from Bradenton Florida, who claimed to be Bessie Smith’s half-sister. She was a blues belter from the future, with tooth caps and grillz (later removed) that gave her a 1000-watt smile.

The Johansen eyes got wider. He wanted details -- who did she sound like, was she really related to Bessie Smith, did she have any records? I’d gotten a private-press single at the show, and had already transferred to cassette so I could listen in the car – her manager and I set up an interview in Bradenton for the following week.

Johansen asked if he could hear it, saying how he was fascinated by the stylistic differences he’d noticed in blues from different regions; decades later, he’d form The Harry Smiths, a collective that revived material from the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music – and celebrated its outsider spirit. Diamond Teeth Mary was right up his alley.

I didn’t have solid answers to the Bessie Smith questions – my editors at the Herald were wary of simply repeating her claim, but recognized that research on it went beyond the scope of reporting for a newspaper feature. Again, this was pre-Internet; since then, Florida folklife researchers have confirmed that McLain, who was born in West Virginia in 1902 and died in 2000, was telling the truth. Bessie Smith’s mother was one of Mary’s four stepmothers – when I interviewed her, she told me she ran away from an abusive stepmother at age 13. She took up with a circus, sometimes catching rides on freight trains. She toured with minstrel shows (including the long-running Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels) in the 1930s and ‘40s, and later was heard at the Apollo Theater and other concert venues, alongside such luminaries as Billie Holiday and Count Basie.

At places like Tobacco Road, she’d sing blues standards with a small combo, sometimes giving little mini-sermons between songs. Her show had novelty elements – here was a woman in church-lady gowns talking like she was on a first-name basis with the devil. Most of her sets included at least one gospel tune; she could scare the half-drunk patrons with her fierce admonitions and disarming, swooping phrasing. Though not all of the live performances on YouTube have great sound, just about all of them capture her singular intensity.

Johansen proposed a tape swap: My Diamond Teeth Mary cassette for a tape he made of a radio station called 97X that he enjoyed while in Trinadad, presumably doing his Buster Poindexter research. Nowadays we have miracles like Radio Garden offering an endless menu of global tastes instantly; in the 1980s, this was a portal into an entirely different world. The morning DJ talking about lunch specials at sponsoring restaurants, records randomly skipping, weather updates giving way to brilliant, hard-charging soca music.

Listening to the tape after Johansen died, I was struck by something I (and other critics) missed: His scholarship. The coverage of Buster Poindexter played up the nuttiness of a punk rocker doing Carnival-parade classics (he had a hit covering soca star Arrow’s “Hot Hot Hot”), but the reality was more nuanced. As a singer and musician, he and his expert band, which featured vocalist/violinist Soozie Tyrell, got inside the distinct, exactingly syncopated sway of soca rhythm. Johansen somehow split the difference between the pulsing exuberance of soca as practiced by Arrow and others and the utter cheese of its subsequent Catskills derivations. Close your eyes and you could be sipping fruity drinks in the islands, or in some suffocating summer resort lounge on Tropics Dance Party night. And it worked either way, as art and meta commentary. Same goes for his rollicking, hard-swinging campy blues numbers.

I played the tape from where it was last stopped – on a topical calypso/soca song called “Sinking Ship” recorded by Gypsy in the ‘80s to protest an inept leader in Trinidad. Johansen recorded a version during the pandemic lockdown, changing lyrics slightly to address the American political climate. As he told The Vinyl District, “Calypso is the way they used to tell the news essentially, so a lot of people keep up that tradition in the calypso world,” adding that it seemed fitting to “sing this song and make it about the U.S.”

Beyond that, inspiration from the 97X tape and no doubt countless others like it inevitably filtered into Johansen’s tremendous run as Sri Rama Lama Ding Dong, host of The Mansion of Fun on Sirius XM. Designed to be a zany radio pastiche built around a dizzying stylistic gamut of great music, this show celebrated the magnetic lure of radio on every level – the jolt of a new-to-you song that becomes an obsession before it ends; the mythic voices and murky backstories of DJs who could be kooky one minute and confiding souls the next; the feeling of a journey into strange waters, unfolding segue by masterful segue. It was fun in an extravagant, outsized, leering, irreverent, delirious, exuberant package. Just like everything David Johansen did.