David Johansen, frontman for the New York Dolls and the last surviving original member of that pioneering punk band, has died at the age of 75.
The death of the singer who also moonlighted as his swing music alter ego Buster Poindexter and, as an actor, appeared in films like Scrooged and Let It Ride, was confirmed Saturday by Mara and Leah Hennessey, Johansen’s wife and stepdaughter.
“David Johansen died at home in NYC on Friday afternoon holding hands with his wife Mara Hennessey and daughter Leah, surrounded my music, flowers, and love,” they said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “He was 75 years old and died of natural causes after nearly a decade of illness.”
Johansen’s death comes less than a month after he revealed he was battling Stage Four cancer and a brain tumor, and had been bedridden and incapacitated following a fall in November where he broke his back in two places. A fund was launched by Johansen’s family to raise money for his around-the-clock care.
The New York City-born Johansen was best known for his work in the pioneering punk group the New York Dolls, with whom — during the band’s initial run in the first half of the Seventies — he recorded a pair of influential glam punk albums, 1973’s New York Dolls and 1974’s Too Much Too Soon, with Johansen co-writing the bulk of the albums with guitarist Johnny Thunders.
Johansen started singing professionally when he fronted the Staten Island group the Vagabond Missionaries in the late Sixties, but didn’t find any real success until late 1971 when he teamed up with guitarists Thunders and Rick Rivets, bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane, and drummer Billy Murcia to form the New York Dolls. (Sylvain Sylvain replaced Rivets after just a few months.)
Heavy metal and prog rock were ascendant at the time, but they concocted a completely unique sound that fused together glam rock and proto-punk with attitude and a fashion sense borrowed from Sixties girl groups. The New York rock scene had never seen anything quite like them, and they quickly became regulars at the Mercer Arts Center, the trendy downtown club frequented by Andy Warhol and David Bowie.
“Not since the original Velvet Underground has any local band cultivated such a loyal cult following among neo-decadents in New York,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Ed McCormack in an October 25, 1972, report from the Mercer Arts Center, “and more surprisingly – managed to do so without benefit of a record contract.”
“All the record companies have been to see us,” Johansen told McCormack, who noted that the singer looked like “Mick Jagger’s pug-nosed kid sister. “They think we’re too outrageous. They know we’re real and we’ll stop at nothing, and it scares the shit outta them.”
The first of many tragedies struck the band when Murcia died of asphyxiation following a drug overdose during a tour of England in November 1972. The band regrouped with new drummer Jerry Nolan, inked a deal with Mercury Records, and went into the studio with producer Todd Rundgren to cut their self-titled debut.
Johansen was the primary creative force behind Dolls classics like “Personality Crisis,” “Looking For a Kiss,” “Jet Boy,” and “Vietnamese Baby.” “The only question I have is if the record alone will impress as much as seeing them live (they’re a highly watchable group),” wrote Rolling Stone’s Tony Glover in a review of the self-titled LP, one of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. “They’re definitely a band to keep both eyes and ears on…I guess it has to do with being real, and caring enough to do it right. There are a lot of approaches to reality now; the Dolls is one you can dance to. You can love them or hate them, but they’re not gonna go away. I’m waiting for their next album.”
Glover added, “The Dolls are a lot more than just another visually weird band. In much the same way that the Stones and the Who began as symbols of and for their club audiences. Somebody once described them as ‘the mutant children of the hydrogen age’: boys and girls of indeterminate gender, males with earrings and flashing orange hair, females with ducktails and black leather, interchangeable clothes, makeups and postures, maybe gay, maybe not — and what’s it to ya, mothafuckah?”
“Society was set up very strict — like straight, gay, vegetarian — whatever you want to say, anything you want to say,” Johansen later recalled of the band’s early days. “I just wanted to bring those walls down and have a party kind of a thing.”
Positive reviews like that did little to help the album find a mainstream audience, as it peaked at #116 on the album charts. A performance on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test did, however, play a key role in kickstarting England’s punk movement even though host Bob Harried dismissed them as “mock rock.” It also turned Morrissey into a lifelong fan. “Both of my parents watch unimpressed,” he wrote in his 2013 memoir. “Pride and joy electrify my body as the revenge motif dates every other modern pop artist in an instant. Snarl matches visual art and the New York Dolls were mine.”
For their second LP, 1974’s Too Much Too Soon, the group teamed up with legendary girl group producer Shadow Morton. Despite being weighed down by unnecessary covers like “Bad Detective” by the Coasters, Johansen-penned originals like “Human Being” and “Babylon” turned the album into another classic that wouldn’t be fully appreciated for decades. It peaked at #167 on the Billboard 200 before dropping off completely.
Desperate to stop their downward trajectory, the band hired future Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren to manage them. They also started performing in red leather outfits in front of the communist flag. “We decided, since everything was getting red, in this show, to put a communist flag behind us, let’s have a communist party,” Johansen said in 2006. “And apparently it was controversial. Communist party is kind of oxymoronic. We meant the party kind of party.”
By this point, Thunders, Nolan, and Kane were all dealing with significant addiction issues. They left the band in 1975, and Johansen and Sylvain briefly attempted to soldier on as a duo. “We made a go at it, the two of us,” Johansen told Rolling Stone in 2021. “We did a lot of great things in that period after the original band dissolved. In those days, we didn’t have anyone looking after our career or whatever. In an ideal world, there would have been someone there that everyone trusted to a degree, someone that said, ‘Why don’t you guys take six months off?’” But there was no such person and the band folded in 1976, right at the beginning of a punk rock era they played a huge role in launching.
Following the band’s breakup in 1975, Johansen embarked on a solo career that included albums recorded under his own name and, in the Eighties, by his swing alter ego Buster Poindexter, including a rendition of the calypso song “Hot Hot Hot” that became an unlikely Hot 100 hit for Johansen.
“With Buster, I can do anything I want,” Johansen said in the 2020 documentary Personality Crisis. “People aren’t expecting something else. They come because it’s unexpected what I’m gonna do. They kind of trust that it’s gonna be good, and it’s always good.” (However, Johansen grew to despise “Hot Hot Hot” and its success: “That was, like, the bane of my existence, that song. I don’t know how I feel about it now. I haven’t heard it lately. It was ubiquitous… they play it at weddings, bar mitzvahs, Six Flags.”)
Johansen’s larger-than-life onstage persona soon drew the attention of Hollywood: After making his acting debut in a 1985 episode of Miami Vice, Johansen was cast as the Ghost of Christmas Past in the Bill Murray-starring comedy Scrooged and as the priest in Married to the Mob, both in 1988. Roles in films like 1989’s Let It Ride (playing Richard Dreyfuss’ sidekick in the horse racing comedy), Freejack, Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, and Mr. Nanny soon followed.
By 2004, a reunion of the New York Dolls seemed like little more than an impossible dream. Thunders and Nolan died less than a year apart in 1991 and 1992, and Kane was long retired from music and working at the Mormon church’s Family History Center in Los Angeles. But longtime super-fan Morrissey was curating London’s Meltdown Festival that year, and he talked the three surviving members into giving it a go nearly 30 years later they last stood onstage together.
“It just kinda, like, happened,” Johansen told Vinyl District in 2013. “It wasn’t a plan. Morrissey called us to do this show in London, and we decided to do it. We were going to stay a really nice hotel by the Ferris wheel [the London Eye] and play this show at the Royal Festival Hall, which is a great room. We decided to do that, and it sold out, so they made two shows, and then we thought, well, that was great!”
Offers began pouring in for other shows. Before they could book any of them, Kane died of leukemia in 2004. Johansen and Sylvain continued on with a new lineup of the Dolls and eventually cut three more albums: 2006’s One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, 2009’s Cause I Sez So, and 2011’s Dancing Backward in High Heels.
Shortly following the release of the last record and a long summer tour opening up for Poison and Mötley Crüe – two groups that nicked the New York Dolls look in the Eighties and rode it to astounding success – Johansen decided he had enough. “We were exhausted,” he told Rolling Stone in 2021. “We’d been on the road for about eight years. It wasn’t ever a point of, ‘This is it forever.’ We just kind of cooled it for a while and it just kind of lasted.”
In 2020, directors Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi filmed Johansen’s show at New York’s Café Carlyle, which became the backbone of their 2022 documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only, tracing the story of Johansen’s entire life and career.
After the death of guitarist Sylvain in 2021, Johansen became the last surviving core member of the original band. When reminiscing about his band mates’ early deaths in the documentary, Johansen was asked whether he too ever feared an early death. “No,” he said. “I never learned my lesson.”
