NEW YORK (AP) — 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 metallic a decade later in bands like Sooner Pussycat and Mötley Crüe.
Rolling Stone as soon as known as the Dolls “the mutant children of the hydrogen age” and Vogue known 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 industrial success and was torn by inner 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 Competition in England, main to 3 extra studio albums.
Within the ’80s, Johansen assumed the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-styled lounge lizard who had a success with the kitschy get together single “Hot, Hot, Hot” in 1987. He additionally appeared in such motion pictures as “Candy Mountain,” “Let It Ride,” “Married to the Mob” and had a memorable flip because the Ghost of Christmas Previous within the Invoice Murray-led hit “Scrooged.”
In 2023, Johansen was 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 intimate interviews and flashbacks by way of his wildly diverse profession.
David Roger Johansen was born Jan. 9, 1950 to a big, working class Catholic household on Staten Island, his father an insurance coverage salesman and his mom a librarian. He stuffed notebooks with poems and lyrics as a younger man and favored loads of totally different music — R&B, Cuban, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding.
He started his profession within the late ’60s because the lead singer of the native Station Island band Vagabond Missionaries, earlier than becoming a member of the New York Dolls as singer/songwriter.
The Dolls — the ultimate authentic 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 Aspect of Manhattan the early ’70s.
They took their title from a toy hospital in Manhattan and have been anticipated to take over the throne vacated by the Velvet Underground. 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.
Rock group “The New York Dolls” carry out on the Waldorf Halloween Ball, Waldorf-Astoria Lodge, NYC, Oct. 31, 1973. At proper is lead singer David Johansen, with guitarist Sylvain Sylvain. (AP Photograph/Richard Drew, File)
“They’re definitely a band to keep both eyes and ears on,” learn the evaluation 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 would like 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, known as them “the best hard-rock band in America right now” and known as Johansen a “talented showman, with an amazing ability to bring characters to life as a lyricist.”
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 Photograph/Jim Cooper, File)
A long time later, although, the Dolls’ affect could be cherished. Rolling Stone would checklist their self-titled debut album at No. 301 of the five hundred Biggest 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 Mötley Crüe known 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 Occasions 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 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 acquired in.
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P. Felix/Getty Photos
Influential American glam rock band New York Dolls of their dressing room on October 30, 1972. Standing, left to proper: Jerry Nolan, Johnny Thunders, Killer Kane and Sylvain Sylvain. Seated: singer David Johannsen. (Photograph by P. Felix/Getty Photos)
“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 ebook “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,” she stated.
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” wrote that the Dolls performed him a few of their music and he couldn’t consider 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.”
Buster Poindexter performs onstage at The Day by day Entrance Row’s celebration of the tenth Anniversary of CBS Watch! Journal on the Gramercy Terrace at The Gramercy Park Lodge on February 9, 2016 in New York Metropolis. (Photograph by Mike Coppola/Getty Photos)
After the primary demise of the Dolls, Johansen began his personal group, the David Johansen Group, earlier than reinventing himself but once more within the Nineteen Eighties as Buster Poindexter.
Impressed by his ardour for the blues and arcane American people 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 painted and hosted the weekly radio present “The Mansion of Fun” on Sirius XM.
He’s survived by his spouse, Mara Hennessey, and a stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey.
Initially Printed: March 1, 2025 at 11:41 AM EST
