David Johansen, the wiry, gravelly-voiced singer and final surviving member of the glam and protopunk band the New York Dolls who later carried out as his campy, pompadoured alter ego, Buster Poindexter, has died. He was 75.
Johansen died Friday at his house in New York Metropolis, in line with Rolling Stone, citing a household spokesperson. It was revealed in early 2025 that he had stage 4 most cancers and a mind tumor.
The New York Dolls have been forerunners of punk and the band’s type — teased hair, ladies’s garments and plenty of make-up — impressed the glam motion that took up residence in heavy steel a decade later in bands like Sooner Pussycat and Mötley Crüe..
FILE – The New York Dolls are photographed in New York, July 25, 2006. From left are David Johansen, Sami Yaffa, Steve Conte, Sylvain Sylvain, Brian Delaney, rear, and Brian Koonin. (AP Picture/Jim Cooper, File)
Rolling Stone as soon as referred to as the Dolls “the mutant children of the hydrogen age” and Vogue referred to as 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,” Invoice Bentley wrote in “Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen.”
The band by no means discovered business success and was torn by inside strife and drug addictions, breaking apart after two albums by the center of the last decade. In 2004, former Smiths frontman and Dolls admirer Morrissey satisfied Johansen and different surviving members to regroup for the Meltdown Pageant in England, main to a few extra studio albums.
Within the ’80s, Johansen assumed the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-styled lounge lizard who had successful with the kitschy get together single “Hot, Hot, Hot” in 1987. He additionally appeared in such films as “Candy Mountain,” “Let It Ride,” “Married to the Mob” and had a memorable flip because the Ghost of Christmas Previous in Invoice Murray-led hit “Scrooged.”
Johansen was in 2023 the topic of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s documentary “Personality Crisis: One Night Only,” which combined footage of his two-night stand on the Café Carlyle in January 2020 with flashbacks by means of his wildly diverse profession and intimate interviews.
David Roger Johansen was born to a big, working-class Catholic household on Staten Island, his father an insurance coverage salesman. He crammed notebooks with poems and lyrics as a younger man and preferred loads of totally different music — R&B, Cuban, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding.
FILE – Rock group “The New York Dolls” carry out on the Waldorf Halloween Ball, Waldorf-Astoria Resort, NYC, Oct. 31, 1973. At proper is lead singer David Johansen, with guitarist Sylvain Sylvain. (AP Picture/Richard Drew, File)
The Dolls — the ultimate unique lineup included guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan — rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol within the Decrease East Facet of Manhattan the early Nineteen Seventies.
They took their title from a toy hospital in Manhattan and have been anticipated to take over the throne vacated by the Velvet Underground within the early Nineteen Seventies. However neither of their first two albums — 1973’s “New York Dolls,” produced by Todd Rundgren, nor “Too Much Too Soon” a yr later produced by Shadow Morton — charted.
“They’re definitely a band to keep both eyes and ears on,” learn the evaluate 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 want a repair and a kiss”) and a “Frankenstein” (Is it against the law/So that you can fall in love with Frankenstein?”)
Their glammed look was meant to embrace followers with a nonjudgmental, noncategorical house. “I just wanted to be very welcoming,” Johansen stated within 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, referred to as them “the best hard-rock band in America right now” and referred to as Johansen a “talented showman, with an amazing ability to bring characters to life as a lyricist.”
Many years later, although, the Dolls’ affect can be cherished. Rolling Stone would checklist their self-titled debut album at No. 301 of the five hundred Best 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 within the Nolan biography “Stranded in the Jungle” wrote that the Dolls have been “opening a door for the rest of us to walk through.” Tommy Lee of Motley Crue referred to as them early inspirations.
“Johansen is one of those singers, to be a little paradoxical, who is technically better and more versatile than he sounds,” stated the Los Angeles Instances in 2023. “His voice has at all times been a little bit of a foghorn — increased or decrease in line with age, habits and the music at hand — however it has a uncommon emotional urgency.
The Dolls, representing rock at it’s most debauched, have been divisive. In 1973, they gained the Creem journal ballot classes because the yr’s finest and worst new group. They have been nominated a number of occasions for The Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame however by no means obtained 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 within the e 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 top of their first run, the Dolls have been being managed by legendary promoter Malcolm McLaren, who would later introduce the Intercourse Pistols to the Dolls’ music. Tradition critic Greil Marcus in “Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century” writes the Dolls performed him a few of their music and he couldn’t imagine how dangerous they have been.
“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 stated. “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 primary demise of the Dolls, Johansen began his personal group, the David Johansen band, earlier than reinventing himself but once more within the Eighties as Buster Poindexter.
Impressed by his ardour for the blues and arcane American folks music Johansen additionally fashioned the group The Harry Smiths, and toured the world performing the songs of Howlin’ Wolf with Hubert Sumlin and Levon Helm. He additionally hosted the weekly radio present “The Mansion of Fun” on Sirius XM and painted.
He’s survived by his spouse, Mara Hennessey, and a stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey.
