David JohansenFrontman and the latest surviving member of Proto-Punk Band New York dollsWho continued to become a lounge singer under the name Buster Poindexter and act in films such as “Scrooged”, has died. His daughter Leah Hennessey confirmed that he died Friday at home in New York. He was 75.
In February 2025, Johansen announced that he suffered from steps four cancer, a brain tumor and a broken back. He was diagnosed in 2020 and could not perform during the last years of his life.
The state of Island native began to sing with a local band, The Vagabond Missionaries, in the 1960s. He joined the emerging New York dolls in 1971, and their first performance came to a Christmas Eve concert on a homeless protection. Their first album, entitled “New York Dolls” and was produced by Todd Rundgren, was released in 1973 and presented the members in features on the cover, which reflects the gender -bending style of rockers like David Bowie.
The album’s Grungy Hard Rock-Meets-Glam Pop Sound on songs like “Personality Crisis” reflected the theme Alienated Youth and served as a template for bands like Ramones. But even though their albums were critically acclaimed, they did not sell well, and the dolls became known as much for some members’ drug abuse and wild discoveries as for their music.
New York dolls in 1972, including Jerry Nolan, standing left, Johnny Thunders, Killer Kane and Sylvain Sylvain. Sitting: Singer David Johansen.
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After releasing a second album, 1974’s “Too Much Too Too Soon”, The New York Dolls went up in 1976. Johansen continued and released album as a solo act, often played New York Dolls songs and performed with colleagues Sylvain Sylvain. Johansen opened for WHO on an East Coast tour in 1982.
He styled himself as a lounge singer Buster Poindexter in the late 1980s, as part of a wave of jazzy sounds and retro artists. As a pointer, he performed with the “Saturday Night Live” band and had a hit with the song “Hot Hot Hot.”
Johansen also worked in film and television and played the Ghost of Christmas Past 1988’s “Scrooged” opposite Bill Murray. He participated in the movie “Car 54, where are you?” And appeared in movies including “Let it ride” and “Mr. Nanny.” He also had part of the HBO series “Oz.”
New York Dolls reunited in 2004 with Johansen, Sylvain and Arthur Kane and released three albums and toured.
For several years Johansen hosted the eclectically programmed “David Johansen’s mansion of fun” on Sirius Radio. In 2023, Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi led “personality crisis: One night only”, a showtime documentary.
Looking back on his career during a 2004 interview with Terry Gross For “fresh air” Johansen reminded how relaxed the beginning was transformed into manifest for the New York dolls. “When we started the dolls … we were really such a bunch, and it was like us against the world, and we really tried to develop music into something new, and it was, you know, a lot of almost militant for us. And then over the years you know, in the history books, such as “Rolling Stone Complete Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll” or something, you look in the appendix and see where your name is and see what they say about you … and (it) would always say: ‘They were trashy. They were spotted. They were drug users. They were tow women. ‘And the whole type of trashy blah, blah, blah thing over the years sat in my mind like, oh, yes, that’s what it was, do you know? And then by going back to it and deconstructing it and then putting it back together, I realized that it, you know, it really is art. “
He added, “We just wanted to make an explosion of excitement. So that was what was missing. Rock ‘n’ roll had become very kindly pedantic and winding, and it was looking for something, but it was like an actor in search of a game or something, do you know? “
Johansen’s Poindexter -Persona came about after he set up a store in an Irish bar in his Gramercy Park area in New York to make an undercover -heitage where he could cover the eclectic material he favored outside Rock Idiom. “I thought I would use a pseudonym so people would not come in and scream for” funky but chic. “… I had listened to a lot of jump blue at that time, but I did it too,” the seven deadly virtues “from” Camelot “and whatever I wanted to sing. And at the end of four weeks … it started as a three-piece band and was discontinued as a 15-part band. So I think when it came to the National Consciousness, it had it, it had it, it It It It It It was it, which it had it, which it had it, which it had it, which it had it, it was Prima -Days in the 50s in Vegas. ”
The person provided a kind of freedom for Johansen that he had not known neither as Doll’s frontman nor appeared under his own name.
“I have this friend, Elliott Murphy, who is a singer … When I started making Buster Poindexter he used to say to me: ‘David, Buster Poindexter is so much more as you than David Johansen is’, you know, if you get what I say. ‘… in other words, with Buster, I really went on stage and really didn’t edit myself and just said everything that came to my mind and did not have many filters. While before that … I had David Johansen group or the band or whatever it was called, and we used to open for many bands in the hockey track. At that time I went out there and presented this what I thought was an ideal picture of myself … while Buster was really more warts and everything, you know. And I think that by doing that, it helped me to be myself more. “
The song “Hot Hot Hot” became omnipotent in 1987, with its top # 45 on Billboard Hot 100 which hardly reflects how popular it became like an MTV booklet. In the end, Johansen came to have mixed emotions, at best about the melody. “It was, who, path in my existence, that song,” he said in the Scorsese movie. “I don’t know how I feel it now. I haven’t heard it recently. It was ubiquitous … they play it at a wedding, wore mitzvahs, six flags. “Of how fast that success came and went, he said,” I was a hit for twice. “
The New York dolls had not played together for decades when Morrissey convinced the surviving members, who also included guitarist Sylvain Sylvain and bassist Arthur Kane, to be reunited for a festival he curated in the UK in 2004. “He called me,” I said, “I understand that you are quite a very much Maria Maria. “And I said,“ Yes, I’m known for it in some circles. “He said,” Well, you know the movie she did where she did a fantastic concert in the Royal Festival Hall? “I said,” Yes, of the heart. “He said,” How would you like to play the Royal Festival Hall? … all you have to do is get the dolls back again. “And I thought, ‘Royal Festival Hall, Maria Callas …’ I combed every opium it in Chinatown, and I took that band together. We were fantastic.”
All immediate plans to continue the reunion were stopped when Kane became ill and died only 22 days after the reunion’s gig in 2004, of previously undiagnosed leukemia. But after a pause soldier Johansen with Sylvain in a reconstituted version of the group. The new version of DOLLS released three albums – 2006’s “One Day it will Need Ceating Us to Remem Through this,” 2009’s “Cause in Sez So” (who reunited with the debut album producer Rundgren) and a swan -song, 2011’s “dancing backward in high heels.” Irony was not lost on many that the second incarnation of the group lasted much longer and had more recorded production than the first.
While the dolls never announced a second division, the band went resting again after a tour of 2011 which included Earl Slick in the lineup and caused the group to open to Motley Crue and Poison – ironically, two bands whose first coiffed appearance was affected by the dolls.
With Johansen’s death, there are no longer any surviving original members of the dolls. Sylvain died in January 2021. The group’s very first drummer, Billy Murcia, died in 1972, before the band’s recording career began. His successor in the classic lineup of the group, Jerry Nolan, died in 1992. Guitarist Johnny Thunders died in 1991, and Kane died shortly after the reunion in 2004.
When he spoke when the dolls were reunited, Johansen said: “It’s a tonic for blues. People can walk around and live a life with silent desperation, but maybe if they started shouting about it, they would be happy. “
The survivors include his wife, Mara Hennessey, and his daughter, Leah Hennessey.
