David Johansen, New York Dolls Frontman, Dead at 75
David Johansen, frontman of the pioneering punk group New York Dolls and solo “Hot Hot Hot” hitmaker as his alter ego Buster Poindexter, has died. He was 75.
“David Johansen died at home in NYC on Friday afternoon holding hands with his wife, Mara Hennessey, and daughter Leah, surrounded by music, flowers and love,” his rep said in a statement shared with Billboard. “He … died of natural causes after nearly a decade of illness.”
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The news of Johansen’s death comes after the punk pioneer announced in early February that he was battling stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor. The musician was diagnosed in 2020, and after a fall that broke his back in two places in November 2024, he decided to share his story.
“We’ve been living with my illness for a long time, still having fun, seeing friends and family, carrying on, but this tumble the day after Thanksgiving really brought us to a whole new level of debilitation,” revealed Johansen, who also acted and has appeared in films such as Scrooged and TV shows including Oz. “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. Thank you.”
The family also launched a Sweet Relief fund in his name to help raise money for his ongoing care at the time. “He’s never made his diagnosis public, as he and my mother Mara are generally very private people, but we feel compelled to share this now, due to the increasingly severe financial burden our family is facing,” his daughter Leah wrote on the fundraiser’s page.
It’s hard to imagine New York City in the ‘70s becoming ground zero for punk and new wave music without the existence of the New York Dolls. Favoring simple, sloppy rock n’ roll over the increasingly complex and conceptual rock music of the early ‘70s, New York Dolls made up for what they lacked in technical mastery and professionalism with attitude, gender-bending fashion (women’s clothes and high heels) and gobs of lipstick.
The Staten Island-born Johansen joined the Dolls in 1971, playing his first show with the group at a homeless shelter on Christmas Eve that year. Gigging around Manhattan in 1972, the group steadily increasing in popularity among young, disaffected audiences looking for something different and the NYC art crowd. “We used to do Otis Redding songs, Sonny Boy Williamson songs, Archie Bell and the Drells songs,” said Johansen in Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s essential punk tome Please Kill Me. “The audiences [at the Mercer Arts Center] were pretty depraved, so we had to be in there with them. We couldn’t come out in three-piece suits and entertain that bunch. They wanted something more for their money. And we were very confrontational. We were very raw.”
The group’s self-titled 1973 album is a no-notes distillation of their rough-and-tumble, campy take on the straight-forward, blues-boosted rock n’ roll of the ‘50s. “Personality Crisis” is a wild, careening send-up of self-obsessed people manufacturing drama for attention that rings as true today as it did half a century ago; “Looking for a Kiss” opens with a cheeky reference to the Shangri-Las; and while the Dolls weren’t renowned for their lyricism, “Frankenstein” is a clever metaphor for the lumbering, confused and patched-together New York City of the ‘70s.
Despite inspiring countless punks, glam rockers, heavy metal bands and Morrissey (who cites seeing the band on TV as a watershed moment in his life), the band’s debut only reached No. 116 on the Billboard 200, and its follow-up, In Too Much Too Soon (another seminal classic), peaked at No. 167. The band broke up in the mid ‘70s, and thanks in no small part to superfan Morrissey, eventually reunited in the ‘00s, playing several reunion shows before hitting the studio for three well-received albums: One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This (2006), Cause I Sez So (2009) and Dancing Backward in High Heels (2011).
“It was kind of a mess, but it was fun. We did enjoy ourselves; it was a nice hometown crowd,” Johansen told Billboard in 2021 of the band’s reunion shows at Bowery Ballroom in 2011 (“Keep an eye out for fascists,” Johansen warned the crowd after a ripping version of “Personality Crisis” at one of the March 2011 Bowery Ballroom gigs). “Syl[vain Sylvain, Dolls guitarist and pianist who died in 2021] and I, we took a break for 27 years or something, and then we got back together to do just one show in London, at the Meltdown festival that Morrissey was curating. So we got together to do one show and then it snowballed into many years of touring.”
Johansen released four solo albums between 1978 and 1984, the first three of which included members of the New York Dolls in some capacity. While his self-titled solo debut found him delivering a slightly more polished version of the Dolls’ rock (“Funky But Chic” is a treat), he began experimenting with disco (“Swaheto Woman”) on its follow-up, In Style, and by 1981’s Here Comes the Night, he was contemporizing his rock palette in a fashion that set him up for a commercial breakthrough with 1987’s Buster Poindexter, the debut LP from his martini-swigging, lounge lizard alter ego Buster Poindexter.
Reaching back even further than early rock, Johansen channeled jump blues, Caribbean rhythms and lounge jazz-pop with an exaggerated, vaudevillian wink. His cover of the calypso tune “Hot Hot Hot” became an unexpected hit, enjoying heavy rotation on MTV and hitting No. 45 on the Billboard Hot 100. Characteristically uncompromising, Johansen grew to loathe his biggest hit, which is touched on in the 2023 documentary about him, Personality Crisis: One Night Only, co-directed by Martin Scorsese (another superfan) and David Tedeschi.
He was similarly dismissive of the New York Dolls’ nominations for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “To me the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame appears to be a racket,” he told Billboard in 2021. “I think about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as some homeless guy who comes in with a raincoat and a bottle of Sneaky Pete in his pocket. These guys have shaken him upside down till all the coins came out of his pocket over the years, and now they’re gonna give him an award? ‘Why don’t you sing that old song you sang?’ ‘OK, sir.’”
“We were a band’s band in a lot of ways,” Johansen said of the New York Dolls in an interview featured in Personality Crisis: One Night Only. “We influenced a lot of bands and a lot of kids were influenced by us who started bands. Take the Ramones. The Ramones saw us and they looked at each other said, ‘Hey, if these guys can do this, we can do that.’ To have an influence like that on people is really good. To give people the idea, like, ‘Hey, I can do that.’”
David Johansen is survived by his wife, Mara, and daughter, Leah.
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