Johnny Thunders' career is virtually a one-man history of American New Wave rock & roll. Not entirely coincidental, it's also the story of one fuckup and blown chance after another. The New York Dolls, which he cofounded with David Johansen in 1972, never got anywhere commercially, though they were probably the best American band of the early Seventies. After the Dolls finally fell apart in 1975, Thunders formed the Heartbreakers, one of the first and best groups in the New York punk renaissance. They never got anywhere commercially either. The Heartbreakers lived under a constant cloud of dangerous drug rumors and kamikaze self-destructiveness: almost every performance after their return to the U.S. from England was advertised as a farewell gig. Their one album, L.A.M.F., marred by weak vocals and atrocious production, was never even released in this country. And last fall, a piece in the Village Voice actually measured Thunders for a coffin. At this point, one feels less curiosity about his future than a sense of wonder that he still has a present.

So Alone, Thunders' first solo LP — cut in England with some Heartbreakers, Paul Cook and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, Steve Marriott, Phil Lynott, and a British New Wave group called the Only Ones, among others—will probably never supersede its import status. It's a minor work, designed for aficionados only, and there's no one track that'll blow anyone away. But it's also, surprisingly, one of the most likable records of recent years. After what he's been through, you'd expect Thunders to be so steeped in bitterness and self-pity that he couldn't even function. Instead, So Alone is relaxed and lullingly elegiac—a bittersweet testament.

There's a great, driving version of the grimy anthem, "Subway Train" (which was pretty thoroughly mangled by producer Todd Rundgren on the Dolls' first album), a new "Chatterbox" (now called "Leave Me Alone") and a previously unreleased Johansen/Thunders composition, "Downtown." Johnny Thunders has never been a particularly prolific songwriter on his own, and a couple of his tunes here would qualify as pure filler but for the excellence of the band and a chance to hear some of the star's guitar work. Thunders' chaotic, lurching style is one of the most classical and original in rock & roll (it's everything Keith Richards is supposed to be, yet often isn't), and So Alone contains some of his most assured, least overwrought playing in years. But the real surprise is in the singing. Vocally, Thunders could never live up to the Heartbreakers' macho posturing, but now, especially on "(She's So) Untouchable" and the lovely "You Can't Put Your Arms round a Memory," his nasal, nagging, street-punk tenderness is strikingly unaffected, even poignant.

The two cuts that give So Alone its real flavor, though, are the cover versions of the Shangri-Las' "Great Big Kiss" and Otis Blackwell's Daddy Rolling Stone." Unlike ex-cohort David Johansen, who would have been an artiste under any regime, Johnny Thunders is a total offspring of rock & roll: he literally doesn't have anything else to live for, and the feeling in his performances of these songs goes far beyond nostalgia. The teenybop romanticism of "Great Big Kiss" ("Hey, Johnny, what color are her eyes?" a girl asks, and he answers, "I don't know, she's always wearing shades") is just as real to him, just as much a part of his story, as the defeat and frustration of "Leave Me Alone." Indeed, the whole LP is suffused with a pure longing for the promises that rock & roll made in its age of innocence, and Thunders' hard-won awareness of how impossible those promises were to keep only makes his regret all the more acute and moving.

So Alone has the feel of a swan song. Even while you're listening to it, it sounds like it's taking place in the past tense—remembered rather than heard. Like so many other records, it calls to mind the great exchange at the close of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai: "Again we survive," says one of the warriors, but another corrects him: "Again we lose." Of course, they're both saying the same thing. For them, as for Johnny Thunders, the only remaining victory lies in still being alive to pronounce your own epitaph. (RS 287)

TOM CARSON