David Johansen, Flamboyant New York Dolls Vocalist and Co-Founder, Dies at 75
David Johansen, the gravelly-voiced showman who helped ignite the punk rock movement as the vocalist of the New York Dolls before he recorded “Hot Hot Hot” as the lounge lizard Buster Poindexter and acted in Scrooged, has died. He was 75.
Johansen died Friday “in the sunlight surrounded by music and flowers” at his home in Staten Island, his family announced.
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His stepdaughter, Leah Hennessy, revealed Feb. 10 that Johansen had been battling Stage 4 cancer for a decade, had a brain tumor and had broken his back in a fall just after Thanksgiving. The family asked for donations to help with their medical expenses.
“David and his family were deeply moved by the outpouring of love and support they’ve experienced recently as the result of having gone public with their challenges,” they said. “He was thankful that he had a chance to be in touch with so many friends and family before he passed. He knew he was ecstatically loved.”
The outlandish and raw New York Dolls, fond of vulgarity and dressing in drag, were comprised of Johansen, guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan when they laid down in eight days their eponymous breakthrough album, produced by Todd Rundgren for Mercury Records, in 1973.
“We went into a room and just recorded,” he said in a 2013 interview with Esquire. “It wasn’t like these people who conceptualize things. It was just a document of what was going on at the time.”
The first song on the first side of that first album was “Personality Crisis,” co-written by Johansen and Thunders, to be followed by such songs as “Looking for a Kiss,” “Vietnamese Baby,” “Frankenstein” and Bo Diddley’s “Pills.”
While their messy first LP, seen by many as an antidote to progressive rock, didn’t sell very well, it would wind up on countless best-of lists over the years and influence such acts as the Ramones, Kiss, the Sex Pistols and Morrissey.
When the Dolls’ follow-up, 1974’s Too Much Too Soon, produced by Shadow Morton, also failed commercially, they were dropped by Mercury after a chaotic national tour and would disband after a December 1976 show at Max’s Kansas City, a club near their East Village stomping grounds.
“We got sick of looking at each other. Schlepping all over the place,” he explained in a 2022 interview.
“The New York Dolls were the purest form of rock ’n’ roll, and they invoked the kind of energy that can’t be sustained without damaging the hosts and is virtually impossible to distil for mass consumption,” Nina Antonia wrote in Too Much Too Soon, her 1998 book about the band.
Johanson released six solo albums through 1984’s Sweet Revenge, then changed personas, sported a pompadour and sang standards for the 1987 album Buster Poindexter. From that, the rollicking “Hot Hot Hot” peaked at No. 42 on the Billboard Hot 100 and got lots of airplay on MTV — though he often called his biggest hit “the bane of my existence.”
It all led to an acting career, with the fun-loving Johansen playing the Ghost of Christmas Past — here a chain-smoking taxi driver — in the Richard Donner-directed Scrooged (1988), starring Bill Murray. He then portrayed another cab driver, Looney, the best friend of Richard Dreyfuss’ gambler, in the horse-racing comedy Let It Ride (1989).
Johansen also played Officer Gunther Toody in the 1994 big-screen remake of Car 54, Where Are You — that rubber-faced role was handled by Joe E. Ross on the original 1960s NBC comedy — and the sociopathic Jewish inmate Eli Zabitz on three episodes of HBO’s Oz in 2000.
“Every singer who’s worth his salt is an actor,” he once said. “You play different characters in different songs. Sometimes you’re a romantic lead, sometimes you’re this madcap party barbarian. You play all these roles, running through every aspect of emotion.”
One of six kids, David Roger Johansen was born on Staten Island on Jan. 9, 1950. His mother, Helen, was a librarian, and his father, John, sold insurance and liked to sing opera around the house.
Johansen played in local bands and acted in plays for Charles Ludlum’s Ridiculous Theater before Kane and original Dolls drummer Billy Murcia knocked on the door of his apartment on East 6th Street and recruited him to be their singer.
As they earned a cult following in lower Manhattan, the Dolls played R&B with reckless abandon and wore makeup, high heels and satin — some thought they were gay —and got to open for Rod Stewart in London. (During that trip, Murcia died of an accidental drug overdose.)
After the Dolls signed with Mercury in March 1973, they took to the road. In a 2004 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Johansen said he was arrested onstage in Memphis and spent a night in jail for inciting a riot. He was “dressed like Liza Minnelli at the time, and it wasn’t the most relaxing night I ever had,” he noted.
As Poindexter, he performed on six episodes of Saturday Night Live during its 12th season (1986-87) and released four albums over a decade as his alter ego after signing with RCA.
David Johansen & the Harry Smiths — named for the man who compiled 1952’s Anthology of American Folk Music — recorded country blues albums in 2000 and 2002 before he took part in a Dolls reunion, sparked in 2004 by Morrissey, that spawned the highly regarded 2006 LP One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. That version of the band lasted about eight years,
Johansen showed up on episodes of Miami Vice in 1985 and The Equalizer in 1987, and he also appeared in Candy Mountain (1987) — fellow musicians Tom Waits, Leon Redbone, Dr. John, Joe Strummer and Arto Lindsay were in that, too — Married to the Mob (1988), Freejack (1992), The Tic Code (1998) and 200 Cigarettes (1999).
In addition to his stepdaughter, survivors include his third wife, Mara Hennessey, whom he wed in November 2013, and his siblings, Michael, Christopher, Elizabeth, Mary Ellen and Karen. He was previously married to actress Cyrinda Foxe (an ex of Steven Tyler, too) and photographer Kate Simon.
With his health issues, he hadn’t been able to perform for the past five years or so. There will be several events “celebrating his life and artistry,” his family said.
Most recently, Johansen hosted a SiriusXM program called Mansion of Fun and was the subject of the 2023 documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only, co-directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi and built around a Café Carlyle show. (He had done songs for Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire and Vinyl HBO series.)
“There’s been a lot of reviews [of the doc] that have been very positive and I’ll start reading them,” he said in a recent interview. “But by the time I get through a few of them, I’ll be like, ‘Alright, that’s enough of that.’ I’m looking for someone who actually has a beef with me so I can get down in the dirt.”
Hilary Lewis contributed to this report.
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