Sunday 12 pm – 3 pm
Wednesday 12 am – 3 am (encore)
David Johansen’s Mansion of Fun on Sirius Radio
Expert opinions from some New York magazine:
The best radio DJ in the city crafts his show with a global perspective that could have been honed nowhere else. Between songs, he spouts Hindu mysticism
laced with vaudeville shtick in a woozy barroom growl. And like almost everything else good in New York, he’s hard to find and you gotta pay to hear him. But even if you never listen to another program on Sirius Satellite Radio, the $3.25 weekly admission to The David Johansen Mansion of Fun Show is a bargain indeed.
Johansen is a throwback to the era of progressive radio when the people running the board and spinning the songs actually chose the music they played, enabling them to create particular moods with the natural flow of their sets. In his case, he opens new horizons for the already quirky nonformat of the Sirius Disorder channel.
You want free-form? Try Olu Dara, Dave Brubeck, the Bush Tetras, Mary Wells, Big Bill Broonzy, Bread, Chuck Berry and Maria Callas all strung together. According to Johansen, it’s all NYC’s fault. “Ever since I was a kid, I noticed this Gershwinesque vibe, that every neighborhood you walked through, there’s music blaring out of speakers, from front doors, from stores. You could walk down 14th Street and hear Tito [Puente] and Ismael Rivera blasting out, and you’d go ‘My God! What’s that?’ You walk into the Village and you hear Country Joe and the Fish come out of a store, and go, ‘Ahhhh…,’ and on and on and on. Good music stops you in your tracks.”
The program is also informed by his other pursuits—his gig as lead singer of the recently re-formed New York Dolls, his days as lounge fixture Buster Poindexter and more recently, crooning blues classics as frontman of the Harry Smiths. The influences show up on the playlist. The only constants are the Electric Flag’s “Groovin’ Is Easy” as the opener and Billy Joe Shaver’s nugget o’ wisdom “Old Chunk of Coal” at the end.
The Mansion of Fun title comes from the Indian sage Ramakrishna—“ That’s what he called the planet, the earth,” Johansen explains—but the mystical mumbo jumbo between songs (“Particles to atoms to cells to organisms, letters to words to sentences to paragraphs, you’re in Johansen’s Mansion of Fun where everything transcends and includes”) is harder to explain. “I remember Rosko [a legendary New York disc jockey in the 1960s] did that kind of stuff, but he was very mellow. I just think there’s like so much negativity being spewed into the world in every possible form of technology. I just want to do a positive, fun, feel-good-about-you-and your-world-type of a show.”