\n<\/p>\n
When his career as Poindexter was running its course, Johansen reclaimed his own name on two albums of prewar American folk music. \u201cDelia,\u201d 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 \u201cDelia\u201d into a transfixing six-and-a-half minutes.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cOne Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This,\u201d Kane had died of leukemia. \u201cWe\u2019re All in Love\u201d is the most quotable song on an incisive, quotable album. Johansen celebrates the band\u2019s return: \u201cJumpin\u2019 around the stage like teenage girls \/ Castin\u2019 our swine before the pearls,\u201d he sings, as well as, \u201cExcommunicated, then canonized.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fully grown version of the Dolls was reflective, in addition to delirious, and \u201cOne Day\u201d includes two of Johansen\u2019s best ballads: the broke and lonely farewell \u201cI Ain\u2019t Got Nothin\u2019,\u201d and \u201cMaimed Happiness,\u201d a 1950s style waltz, complete with string arrangement, in which a chastened Johansen questions the purpose of life and declares that all he\u2019s ever known is \u201csorrowful joy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johansen wasn\u2019t caught in the past \u2014 on \u201cCause I Sez So,\u201d he sings about government surveillance, cellphone chatter, religious grifters and the war on drugs, and he\u2019s disgusted with all of them. The Dolls\u2019 sound expands to include reggae, country twang and spaghetti Western guitars, plus back-alley blues on \u201cThis Is Ridiculous,\u201d in which Johansen bemoans woeful poverty and considers jumping out of a window.<\/p>\n
\u201cDancing Backward in High Heels,\u201d the last of the Dolls\u2019 three comeback albums, displays a ripened sound that\u2019s more reflective than ecstatic, and there\u2019s a clearer sense that to an idealist like Johansen, this world has proved to be a vale of tears. On the up-tempo \u201cI\u2019m So Fabulous,\u201d he mocks the dull attire of most New Yorkers, champions his own sense of style, rhymes \u201carriviste\u201d and \u201cnebulous,\u201d and proves that the right way to express disgust is with a laugh and a toss of your boa.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s careening guitar. He drops references to the Bible, dragons, Hinduism, sex and Hamlet, and sums himself up better than any biographer could: \u201cTried to get straight, Lord, I tried to fit in \/ Can\u2019t stop and I can\u2019t win.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n