David Johansen, singer from the seminal punk band the New York Dolls, dead at 75

CNN

01-03-2025

David Johansen, the wiry, gravelly-voiced singer and last surviving member of 1970s glam and protopunk band the New York Dolls who later performed as his campy, pompadoured alter ego, Buster Poindexter, has died. He was 75.
Johansen died Friday at his home in New York City, according to Rolling Stone, citing a family spokesperson, the Associated Press reported on Saturday. It was revealed in early 2025 that he had stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor.
The New York Dolls were forerunners of punk and the band's style – teased hair, women's clothes and lots of makeup – inspired the glam movement that took up residence in heavy metal a decade later in bands like Faster Pussycat and Mötley Crüe.
'When you're an artist, the main thing you want to do is inspire people, so if you succeed in doing that, it's pretty gratifying,' Johansen told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2011.
Rolling Stone once called the Dolls 'the mutant children of the hydrogen age' and Vogue called them the 'darlings of downtown style, tarted-up toughs in boas and heels.'
'The New York Dolls were more than musicians; they were a phenomenon. They drew on old rock 'n' roll, big-city blues, show tunes, the Rolling Stones and girl groups, and that was just for starters,' Bill Bentley wrote in 'Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen.'
The band never found commercial success and was torn by internal strife and drug addictions, breaking up after two albums by the middle of the '70s. In 2004, former Smiths frontman and Dolls admirer Morrissey convinced Johansen and other surviving members to regroup for the Meltdown Festival in England, leading to three more studio albums.
In the '80s, Johansen assumed the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-styled lounge lizard who had a hit with the kitschy party single 'Hot, Hot, Hot' in 1987. He also appeared in such movies as 'Candy Mountain,' 'Let It Ride,' 'Married to the Mob' and had a memorable turn as the Ghost of Christmas Past in the Bill Murray-led hit 'Scrooged.'
Johansen was in 2023 the subject of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi's documentary 'Personality Crisis: One Night Only,' which mixed footage of his two-night stand at the Café Carlyle in January 2020 with flashbacks through his wildly varied career and intimate interviews.
'I used to think about my voice like: 'What's it gonna sound like? What's it going to be when I do this song?' And I'd get myself into a knot about it,' Johansen told the Associated Press in 2023. 'At some point in my life, I decided: 'Just sing the (expletive) song. With whatever you got.' To me, I go on stage and whatever mood I'm in, I just claw my way out of it, essentially.'
David Roger Johansen was born to a large, working class Catholic family on Staten Island, his father an insurance salesman. He filled notebooks with poems and lyrics as a young man and liked a lot of different music – R&B, Cuban, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding.
The Dolls – the final original lineup included guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan – rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1970s.
They took their name from a toy hospital in Manhattan and were expected to take over the throne vacated by the Velvet Underground in the early 1970s. But neither of their first two albums – 1973's 'New York Dolls,' produced by Todd Rundgren, nor 'Too Much Too Soon' a year later produced by Shadow Morton – charted.
'They're definitely a band to keep both eyes and ears on,' read the review of their debut album in Rolling Stone, complementary of their 'strange combination of high pop-star drag and ruthless street arrogance.'
Their songs included 'Personality Crisis' ('You got it while it was hot/But now frustration and heartache is what you got'), 'Looking for a Kiss' ('I need a fix and a kiss') and 'Frankenstein' ('Is it a crime/For you to fall in love with Frankenstein?')
Their glammed look was meant to embrace fans with a nonjudgmental, noncategorical space. 'I just wanted to be very welcoming,' Johansen said in the documentary, ''cause the way this society is, it was set up very strict – straight, gay, vegetarian, whatever… I just kind of wanted to kind of like bring those walls down, have a party kind of thing.'
Rolling Stone, reviewing their second album, called them 'the best hard-rock band in America right now' and called Johansen a 'talented showman, with an amazing ability to bring characters to life as a lyricist.'
Decades later, the Dolls' influence would be cherished. Rolling Stone would list their self-titled debut album at No. 301 of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, writing 'it's hard to imagine the Ramones or the Replacements or a thousand other trash-junky bands without them.'
Blondie's Chris Stein in the Nolan biography 'Stranded in the Jungle' wrote that the Dolls were 'opening a door for the rest of us to walk through.' Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe called them early inspirations.
'Johansen is one of those singers, to be a little paradoxical, who is technically better and more versatile than he sounds,' said the Los Angeles Times in 2023. 'His voice has always been a bit of a foghorn – higher or lower according to age, habits and the song at hand – but it has a rare emotional urgency.'
The Dolls, representing rock at its most debauched, were divisive. In 1973, they won the Creem magazine poll categories as both the year's best and worst new group. They were nominated several times for The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but never got in.
'Dirty angels with painted faces, the Dolls opened the box usually reserved for Pandora and unleashed the infant furies that would grow to become Punk,' wrote Nina Antonia in the book 'Too Much, Too Soon.' 'As if this legacy wasn't enough for one band, they also trashed sexual boundaries, savaged glitter and set new standards for rock 'n' roll excess.'
By the end of their first run, the Dolls were being managed by legendary promoter Malcolm McLaren, who would later introduce the Sex Pistols to the Dolls' music. Culture critic Greil Marcus in 'Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century' writes the Dolls played him some of their music and he couldn't believe how bad they were.
'The fact that they were so bad suddenly hit me with such force that I began to realize, ''I'm laughing, I'm talking to these guys, I'm looking at them, and I'm laughing with them; and I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer concerned with whether you could play well,' McLaren said. 'The Dolls really impressed upon me that there was something else. There was something wonderful. I thought how brilliant they were to be this bad.'
After the first demise of the Dolls, Johansen started his own group, the David Johansen band, before reinventing himself yet again in the 1980s as Buster Poindexter.
Inspired by his passion for the blues and arcane American folk music, Johansen also formed the group The Harry Smiths, and toured the world performing the songs of Howlin' Wolf with Hubert Sumlin and Levon Helm. He also hosted the weekly radio show 'The Mansion of Fun' on Sirius XM and painted.
He is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessey, and a stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey.