>From today's NY TImes: David Johansen: A Man of Two Names By JON PARELES David Johansen
’s career has traveled back through time: from the 1970’s protopunk of the New York Dolls to the straightforward rock of his solo albums, and then, as Buster Poindexter, in rediscoveries of old rhythm-and-blues and party songs. (Lately, Buster Poindexter has led a Latin-tinged band, Buster’s Spanish Rocketship.) Under his own name at the Bottom Line on Thursday night, Mr. Johansen looked back another few decades, strumming an acoustic guitar and singing blues and hillbilly songs that date back as far as the 1920’s. His band was called the Harry Smiths, after the record collector who put together the Anthology of American Folk Music, a trove of songs recorded commercially from 1926 to 1934 and released as a collection in 1952; the anthology was rereleased on CD’s in 1997. Smith favored songs that matter-of-factly summed up hard lives and grim events, from heartbreak to murder to premonitions of death. Mr. Johansen’s 30-song set drew a few songs from the anthology and others with a similar stoic clarity: lesser-known songs by Muddy Waters, Mississippi John Hurt and Bo Diddley along with selections from the more obscure likes of Daddy Hotcakes, Dock Boggs, Sloppy Henry, Louise Johnson and Jim Jackson. Mr. Johansen didn’t try to recreate the eerie old recordings. Instead, he treated the songs with affection and respect, singing with an avuncular ease that let the songs speak for themselves. He had chosen bleak songs about solitude, betrayal and loss, but like the old singers he refused to make melodrama out of observations like “All the friends I ever had are gone” or “I’ve seen better days but I’m putting up with these.” Instead, he found gallows humor and quiet sympathy in desperate songs like Peg Leg Howell’s “Low Down Rounder Blues,” in which the singer fears others and even distrusts himself. When he got around to a few of his own songs as encores, they seemed sentimental by comparison. The band turned the music into unplugged folk-rock, putting an easy lilt behind banjo or slide-guitar lines from the old recordings. They occasionally tried a modernist touch; in Ramblin’ Thomas’s “Poor Boy Blues” while Mr. Johansen sang in unison with Larry Salzman’s dobro, Joey Baron on drums and Kermit Driscoll on bass set up rumbles and thumps. More often, they were a supple string band that could handle Celtic banjo picking (from Mr. Salzman) for an Appalachian song or slide guitar (by Brian Koonin) in a ragtimey blues. Until now Mr. Johansen had been nobody’s idea of a folkie, but his rocker’s insouciance was just right for the songs.
