NEW YORK ā David Johansen, the wiry, gravelly-voiced singer and last surviving member of the 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, Jeff Kilgour, a family spokesperson told The Associated Press. It was revealed in early 2025 that he had stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor.
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The New York Dolls were forerunners of punk and the bandās style ā teased hair, women's clothes and lots of makeup ā inspired the glam movement that took up residence in heavy metal a decade later in bands like Faster Pussycat and Mƶtley Crüe.
āWhen youāre an artist, the main thing you want to do is inspire people, so if you succeed in doing that, itās pretty gratifying,ā Johansen told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2011.
Guitarist Steve Stevens, a kid from Queens who went on to work with Billy Idol and Robert Palmer, said the Dolls were never about technique: āIt was always about the sound of the subway, the stinking, overflowing garbage cans, the misfits of Times Square. The Dolls did it to perfection. Safe travels David Johansen,ā he wrote on X.
āMutant children of the hydrogen ageā
Rolling Stone once called the Dolls āthe mutant children of the hydrogen ageā and Vogue called them the ādarlings of downtown style, tarted-up toughs in boas and heels.ā
āThe New York Dolls were more than musicians; they were a phenomenon. They drew on old rock ānā roll, big-city blues, show tunes, the Rolling Stones and girl groups, and that was just for starters,ā Bill Bentley wrote in āSmithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen.ā
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 decade. 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 ā80s, Johansen assumed the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-styled lounge lizard who had a hit with the kitschy party single āHot, Hot, Hotā in 1987. He also appeared in such movies as āCandy Mountain,ā āLet It Ride,ā āMarried to the Mobā and had a memorable turn as the Ghost of Christmas Past in Bill Murray-led hit āScrooged.ā
Johansen was in 2023 the subject of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschiās documentary āPersonality Crisis: One Night Only,ā which mixed footage of his two-night stand at the CafĆ© Carlyle in January 2020 with flashbacks through his wildly varied career and intimate interviews.
āI used to think about my voice like: āWhatās it gonna sound like? Whatās it going to be when I do this song?ā And Iād get myself into a knot about it,ā Johansen told The Associated Press in 2023. āAt some point in my life, I decided: āJust sing the (expletive) song. With whatever you got.ā To me, I go on stage and whatever mood Iām in, I just claw my way out of it, essentially.ā
Named after a toy hospital
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 ā R&B, Cuban, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding.
The Dolls ā the final original lineup included guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan ā rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol in the Lower East Side of Manhattan 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 ā 1973ās āNew York Dolls,ā produced by Todd Rundgren, nor āToo Much Too Soonā a year later produced by Shadow Morton ā charted.
āTheyāre definitely a band to keep both eyes and ears on,ā read the review of their debut album in Rolling Stone, complementary of their āstrange combination of high pop-star drag and ruthless street arrogance.ā
Their songs included āPersonality Crisisā (āYou got it while it was hot/But now frustration and heartache is what you gotā), āLooking for a Kissā (I need a fix and a kissā) and a āFrankensteinā (Is it a crime/For you to fall in love with Frankenstein?ā)
Their glammed look was meant to embrace fans with a nonjudgmental, noncategorical space. āI just wanted to be very welcoming,ā Johansen said in the documentary, āācause the way this society is, it was set up very strict ā straight, gay, vegetarian, whatever... I just kind of wanted to kind of like bring those walls down, have a party kind of thing.ā
Rolling Stone, reviewing their second album, called them āthe best hard-rock band in America right nowā and called Johansen a ātalented showman, with an amazing ability to bring characters to life as a lyricist.ā
Decades later, the Dollsā 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 āitās hard to imagine the Ramones or the Replacements or a thousand other trash-junky bands without them.ā
Blondieās Chris Stein in the Nolan biography āStranded in the Jungleā wrote that the Dolls were āopening a door for the rest of us to walk through.ā Tommy Lee of Motley Crue called them early inspirations.
āJohansen is one of those singers, to be a little paradoxical, who is technically better and more versatile than he sounds,ā said the Los Angeles Times in 2023. āHis voice has always been a bit of a foghorn ā higher or lower according to age, habits and the song at hand ā but it has a rare emotional urgency.
'Dirty angels with painted faces'
The Dolls, representing rock at itās most debauched, were divisive. In 1973, they won the Creem magazine poll categories as the yearās best and worst new group. They were nominated several times for The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but never got in.
āDirty angels with painted faces, the Dolls opened the box usually reserved for Pandora and unleashed the infant furies that would grow to become Punk,ā wrote Nina Antonia in the book āToo Much, Too Soon.ā āAs if this legacy wasnāt enough for one band, they also trashed sexual boundaries, savaged glitter and set new standards for rock ānā roll excess.ā
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 Dollsā music. Culture critic Greil Marcus in āLipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Centuryā writes the Dolls played him some of their music and he couldnāt believe how bad they were.
āThe fact that they were so bad suddenly hit me with such force that I began to realize, āāIām laughing, Iām talking to these guys, Iām looking at them, and Iām laughing with them; and I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer concerned with whether you could play well,ā McLaren said. āThe Dolls really impressed upon me that there was something else. There was something wonderful. I thought how brilliant they were to be this bad.ā
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 Howlinā Wolf with Hubert Sumlin and Levon Helm. He also hosted the weekly radio show āThe Mansion of Funā on Sirius XM and painted.
He is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessey, and a stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey.