David Johansen, the charismatic frontman of influential protopunk band the New York Dolls and later the creator of 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.Â
Johnson’s health status had been updated by his stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey, in January, as part of a fundraiser with the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund. Hennessy said Johansen had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer during the pandemic and also had a brain tumour. A fall several weeks earlier had left him bedridden and requiring around-the-clock care.
“This is the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. I’ve never been one to ask for help but this is an emergency,” Johansen said in an accompanying statement.
Johansen’s death ends a unique career as a quintessential New York City artist, with turns that also included a recent stint as a deejay on a Sirius XM show and some acting roles, most notably as the cigar-chomping cab driver with rotting teeth (the Ghost of Christmas Past)Â in 1988’s Scrooged starring Bill Murray.
Johansen’s colourful life was captured in 2023’s Personality Crisis, co-directed by Martin Scorcese and David Tedeschi, and executive produced by Ron Howard and Brian Glazer.
The title of the documentary came from a handful of enduring songs from the Dolls, a band that was described by leading New York City rock critic Robert Christgau as mixing “early-’60s popsong savvy with late-’60s fast-metal anarchy.”
A handful of the band’s songs became touchstones for punk, alternative and rock bands to know — versions of Personality Crisis would be recorded by Scott Weiland, Sonic Youth and Teenage Fanclub, while Guns ‘n’ Roses included Human Being on their The Spaghetti Incident covers album.
The band, volatile off stage and often leaving destruction in their wake, also favoured heels, makeup and women’s clothing. Only Johansen among them could be remotely described as androgynous, resembling Mick Jagger and — to his bandmates — Butch from Our Gang (the Little Rascals).
“I had to go jail [once] dressed like Liza Minnelli,” Johansen quipped to a British talk show, captured in Personality Crisis.
Johansen was the last to join the band after initially demurring, as described by bandmate Sylvain Sylvain in his 2018 memoir, There’s No Bones in Ice Cream.
“He dressed like we did, he liked the same music as we did, and he had the same dramatic effect when he walked into a room as we did,” said Sylvain. “The girls would stare and the guys would glare.”
Improbably, despite Johansen’s subsequent further afield stints as Poindexter as well as albums of Americana music with backup group Harry Smiths, the three living Dolls at the time reunited for a 2004 Meltdown Festival lineup curated by superfan Morrissey.
“England always got the Dolls, and that show was bordering on euphoria,” Johansen told Mojo magazine years later. A version of the Dolls piloted by Johansen and Sylvain would go on to record three more studio albums.
‘Brats from the outer boroughs’
Johansen was born to a Norwegian father and Irish mother in the New York City borough Staten Island on Jan. 9, 1950, the oldest of six kids.
“Most of the people in my family sing, dance, are always in plays,” he told the Associated Press in the late 1980s. “I was the least inclined in that direction. I’m the one who took it up as a profession.”
But he grew up entranced by music heard on the radio and from record shops — blues, doo-wop, R&B and early rock — and played in bands as a teen. By 1971, when the New York Dolls began to rehearse, he was eking out a living in underground clothing stores and theatre groups.
The original lineup coalesced from acquaintances and high school friends from the outer New York City boroughs – guitarists Johnny Thunders (John Gezale), Sylvain (Ronald Mizrahi), drummer Billy Murcia and bass player Arthur (Killer) Kane.
Soon after debuting to paying customers in early 1972, they were making the biggest splash of an underground New York band since the Velvet Underground in the mid-1960s.Â
“They brought a sense of fun and self-awareness to rock and roll, at a time when perhaps things were getting a bit more serious than they needed to be,” said Lenny Kaye, rock journalist and Patti Smith Group guitarist, in the 2014 documentary Looking For Johnny: The Legend of Johnny Thunders.
David Bowie in September 1972 famously attended a Dolls show at one of their main haunts, the Mercer Arts Centre, housed in a dilapidated hotel that would partially collapse months later, killing four people.
They also gained notice in the British music press, with Johansen the most voluble in the band; he once described their proclivities as “trysexual.”Â
“It wasn’t like we would talk about what we were going to sound like or what we were going to look like or anything, we just kinda did it,” Johansen told Mojo decades later.
But during a tour in November 1972, Murcia — described as the least likely member of the band to engage in self-destructive behaviour — died of an accidental overdose.
With Jerry Nolan as drummer, the band would debut on disc with a self-titled release produced by Todd Rundgren in 1973.
“It takes brats from the outer boroughs to capture the oppressive excitement Manhattan holds for a half-formed human being the way these guys do,” Christgau, who wrote in Village Voice and CREEM, said in doling out a rare A-plus review.
Future Good Morning in America film critic Joel Siegel, then a reporter for New York’s CBS television affiliate, was more bemused, describing a band concert at the time as “always belligerent, hostile and definitely loud.”
Conflicts with band mates
The following year saw the release of Too Much Too Soon, but neither album sold massively, and the band was paired on the road with any number of acts, including odd fits with Canadian bands Rush and Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
Personality conflicts arose and both Thunders and Nolan were addicted to heroin, with Johansen and Kane said to be heavy drinkers.
British music and fashion impresario Malcolm McLaren, who would guide the Sex Pistols, briefly bolstered the Dolls’ enthusiasm for several months, though his choice of red leather suits for the band raised eyebrows.
The final show of the original lineup was in late 1976, and less than two years later, Johansen was releasing the first of four solo albums that featured contributions from Joe Perry, Ian Hunter, Nona Hendryx and Patti Scialfa.
Solo career
The solo career saw him open for the Who but didn’t lead to commercial success. Tiring of life on the road, by the mid-1980s he was dabbling incognito in New York clubs as Poindexter, with a repertoire of songs, usually decades old, that jumped genres.
The song that would launch him to a wider audience in 1987 was actually only a handful of years old — Hot Hot Hot, originally recorded by Caribbean artist, Arrow.
Johansen then promoted the first studio album as Poindexter with a series of appearances with the Saturday Night Live house band and a duet with SNL guest host Sigourney Weaver on Baby, It’s Cold Outside.
Four albums of Poindexter material were recorded in 10 years, though it sometimes felt like he had created a monster. Hot Hot Hot, he said in Personality Crisis, became the “bane of my existence.”
Post-Scrooged acting roles didn’t make as much impact for Johansen, as he appeared in commercial flops Mr. Nanny with Hulk Hogan, Freejack — both he and Jagger had supporting roles — and Let It Ride.
The 21s century saw him bounce from passion projects musically, with the Dolls reunited with Rundgren as producer on 2009’s Cause I Sez So.
In the years before his death, he was sharing his eclectic music knowledge on the Sirius radio show David Johansen’s Mansion of Fun.
Johansen was the last surviving member of the original New York Dolls lineup.
Thunders died of a heroin overdose in 1991, with Nolan following months later after a prolonged illness. Kane died three weeks after the 2004 reunion of leukemia, with Sylvan dying aged 69 in 2021 from cancer.
