Looking back beyond punk and pompadours

You kept looking for one thing when David Johansen ambled onstage Sunday at UCLA’s Royce Hall, accompanied by four sharp-dressed sidemen, and began singing an obscure country blues tune, “I’ll Go With Her”

The wink.

This is, after all, the same guy who leaped onto the pop music radar screen in the ‘70s in 4-inch platform-heeled boots, makeup, ratted hair and full drag as leader of the proto-punk New York Dolls, then morphed for the ‘80s into pompadour-topped lounge lizard in excelsis Buster Poindexter.

So this vision of David Johansen as bluesman had to be a gag, right?

Yet the wink didn’t come -- not in that first song nor in the others that followed, by long-gone, little-known performers Richard “Rabbit” Brown, Ramblin’ Thomas and Rube Lacy.

Instead, Johansen offered raw, elemental music played without a trace of irony. Indeed, Johansen’s ragged, at times hurricane-force baritone allowed him to come across as a direct descendant of Howlin’ Wolf in several of the darkest, demon-exorcising numbers.

“For a while I’d gotten so sick of the blues that if I’d never heard another blues record it would have been fine,” Johansen, 53, said before the show, a rootsy bill with Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks.

“The blues got so homogenized, especially that rock boogie-till-you-puke kind of blues,” he continued. “That’s what soured me to it.”

Stepping outside the theater, taking a breath and firing up one in a steady stream of Camels, Johansen sported a scruffy beard and dirty brown hair that fell past his collar. Denim jacket, knit shirt, pinstriped bell-bottoms and black suede boots have replaced the formal wear he’s often worn since striking pop gold in 1987 with the Caribbean party tune “Hot Hot Hot.”

The question looms: Why the blues?

“I like them again,” he said matter-of-factly. “I started playing this kind of stuff when I was a kid. When I came into the Dolls, this was the element I brought in -- the R&B; and the blues.”

The idea came to him about four years ago. Having immersed himself in Cuban music for the previous two years for another Buster Poindexter record, “Buster’s Spanish Rocket Ship,” that was released two weeks before his label folded, he had returned to exploring his extensive blues collection. That’s when Allan Pepper, owner of the Bottom Line in New York, asked him what he’d like to do for his part of a celebration the club hosts with its regulars twice a decade.

“I had started listening to all those old records again. It was like a sorbet course,” Johansen said, referring to the dish that gastronomes use to cleanse the palate between main courses. “All that millennium stuff was going on, and it seemed to make sense.”

One thing he didn’t do was simply round up a batch of rock players and shout, “OK, boys, blues in A.”

“Rock guys playing the blues make everything sound the same,” he said with disdain.

So he asked guitarist Brian Koonin, his collaborator since the early ‘80s, to help him assemble a band of accomplished jazz-rooted players. He dubbed them “the Harry Smiths” in a nod to the celebrated musicologist whose “Anthology of American Folk Music” of 1952 remains a touchstone for all roots-inclined musicians.

Johansen maintains several groups that play regularly around his native New York: a swing band that keeps the Poindexter persona alive, a rock group that dips into the Dolls repertoire and the Harry Smiths. He even had a country band for a time that focused on the songs of Billy Joe Shaver.

“Every night we play differently,” Johansen said. “That’s what makes it fun and interesting. If you were in a rock ‘n’ roll band -- and let me tell you, I’ve been in rock ‘n’ roll bands! -- sometimes you wanna die. This is the way to play music -- it’s constantly evolving. We have to completely destroy our belief systems so we can see reality for what it really is.”

The Harry Smiths concept itself is evolving. The group has put out two albums, one carrying the group’s name in 2000 and “Shaker” in 2002, for a small New York audiophile record label. They were filled with vintage acoustic country blues by genre icons such as Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, Mississippi John Hurt and Son House.

Now the band is ready to take the next step and put out an album applying the same style to new songs Johansen and Koonin have written. “It’s like we were learning a language for those first two records. Now we can start speaking that language.”

At Sunday’s show, Johansen gave more than half his set to the original material, from the haunting “Wandering Spirits Prayer,” which could have been an overlooked blues nugget from the ‘30s, to “Do Ya Wanna Party,” a sort of country blues funk workout with just a hint of hip-hop sensibility. It was as close to that wink as Johansen ever got.

Just as the Dolls were among the first out of the punk-rock starting gate and Buster Poindexter paved the way for renewed interest in swing music and the whole culture of the cocktail, his excursion into the blues seems ideally timed to anticipate the upsurge likely to accompany the Martin Scorsese-produced blues series coming to PBS later this month.

But even though he vowed, “Someday, I’m gonna cash in,” as he readied himself in his dressing room just before show time, Johansen knows himself better than to think his ship’s come in.

“When everybody else gets interested in something,” he said with just a hint of swagger, “that’s when I get out.”