Nuthin' like broke-ness to get you digging through the personal library: not a bad thing, really, when it means rediscovering books and discs that have been lying unacknowledged for way too long. Recently I've been playing and replaying a disc from 1984 that didn't get much attention when it was released, Sweet Revenge (Passport Records). Per VH-1, it was Revenge's failure to find an audience that pushed the former New York Dolls frontman to adopt the Buster Poindexter persona which he parleyed into a performing gig on "Saturday Night Live" in the mid-eighties. Wouldn't be the first or last time that I've fallen in love with music that hardly no one else knows about, so let's take a closer look at this 'un, okay?

Revenge was the last new studio album to appear under Johansen's name until he resurfaced in 2000 playing the traditional blues belter with a band called the Harry Smiths. Many rock fans have an ambivalent attitude toward Dave the Solo Artiste: as frontman for punk/glam pioneers New York Dolls, he was part of a music-making moment so seminal that there's probably no way he could have matched it going off on his own. Even his 1978 solo debut, which featured songs that had been part of his old band's repertoire, don't measure up to the divine blooz-rock noise of the Dolls. The two Dolls albums are touchstones of punk; the early Johansen discs are "merely" great hard rock records.

By the time Johansen released Revenge for indy label Jem Records, he'd moved even further from the joyous cacophony that had made him infamous. Produced by keyboardist and future film composer Joe Delia, whose piano and synth fingerings are all over this disc, the release has more of a New Wave feel than any of Johansen's earlier releases: some tracks ("Big Trouble," "Too Many Midnights") have the same pop pomp feel of the best Blondie dance-rock, while two cuts apparently done for avante-disco impresarios (Davitt Sigerson & Michael Zilkha (whose Ze Records was home to Kid Creole & the Coconuts and James Chance) show our man engaging in early rap. Some fans called it heresy and sell-out (when Rhino Records put together a career-spanning "Best Of" set, no tracks from this disc were included), but Revenge was only a hint of where David Jo would go once he doffed Buster Poindexter's tux: from retro swing to r-&-b novelty numbers to salsa to the overplayed novelty tune "Hot Hot Hot."