Musician David Johansen of the New York Dolls has died at the age of 75. Photo / Getty Images
Johansen led the New York Dolls as a vanguard of the punk scene and later took as his alter ego the tuxedo-clad, pompadoured Buster Poindexter.
David Johansen, a genre-shifting musical nomad who roared to fame in thrift-store drag as leader of the proto-punk New York Dolls and later donned a tuxedo and took the name Buster Poindexter with lounge-style swing that included a hit remake of the calypso-themed Hot Hot Hot, died on February 28 at his home in Staten Island. He was 75.
His stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey, confirmed the death. In February, Johansen’s family disclosed that he had Stage 4 cancer and a brain tumour.
Johansen was as much a split personality among his fans as he was in his two main onstage incarnations – part of a five-decade career that included solo albums and film roles, including the taxi-driving Ghost of Christmas Past in the 1988 Bill Murray comedy Scrooged.
During the 1980s, Johansen was known as a playful throwback to the Rat Pack era, belting out nightclub classics, sporting a towering pompadour and skinny bow tie, leading conga lines and zipping off rabbi jokes at Catskills resorts. His 1987 cover of Hot Hot Hot became a dance-floor staple in the late 1980s.
For others, he would always be shrouded in the gritty aura of downtown New York, circa early 1970s. Johansen and the Dolls – decked out in boas, stiletto heels and anything else they could scrounge – jolted the Greenwich Village scene with an audacious look and growling sound.
The band unleashed rapid-fire songs of angst and alienation, anchored by Johansen’s thick “New-Yawk” accent and gravelly vocals. Rock historians later enshrined the Dolls as the urtext of punk and the groups that followed such as the Ramones and Sex Pistols.
“Dirty angels with painted faces, the Dolls … unleashed the infant furies that would grow to become punk,” wrote music biographer Nina Antonia in Too Much Too Soon, a 1998 book on the Dolls’ rise and fall.
Johansen was the final addition to the band. A group of aspiring rockers at a Bleeker Street bar heard about a guy with a meat-grinder voice who had been the charismatic frontman for bands in Staten Island.
The drummer and bass player showed up at Johansen’s apartment on East Sixth Street. They wore tight jackets and high-heel boots. “Liked them right away,” Johansen was quoted as saying in Antonia’s book. “I thought, ‘Oh, God, this is great, what a pair of lunatics’.”
For the band’s signature style, the men first raided their girlfriends’ wardrobes and makeup. Next came thrift stores and bargain racks. The more outrageous the find, the better.
On Christmas Eve 1971, the New York Dolls (named after a doll repair shop) had their first gig: Johansen as lead singer; guitarists Johnny Thunders and Rick Rivets; Arthur “Killer” Kane on bass; and Billy Murcia on drums.
At Manhattan’s Endicott Hotel, a shelter for the homeless, the band’s benefit concert had the place dancing to rhythm and blues covers. “Little Richard, and the girl groups, and the soul bands, and [we] put it all together,” Johansen recalled in a 2010 interview with the music blog Musoscribe.
Soon they were playing New York clubs and anywhere else (once in a gay bathhouse) with their defiant gaudiness and down-and-dirty songs co-written by Johansen. The Dolls seemed to capture the dichotomy of the moment: the hedonism of the Me Decade against the backdrop of a city leaning into hard times, en route to near fiscal collapse in 1976.
“Something must have happened over Manhattan / Who can expound all the children this time?” Johansen sang in Frankenstein (1973), co-written with Sylvain Sylvain, who replaced Rivets on guitar. “Could they ever, could they ever / Expect such a Frankenstein?”
British rocker Rod Stewart gave the Dolls their big break: opening for his band the Faces in October 1972 at a hall next to London’s Wembley Stadium. Tragedy quickly followed: drummer Murcia overdosed on sedatives at a London party about a week later. Attempts to revive him by pouring coffee down his throat caused him to reportedly choke to death.
Yet Johansen said the loss did little to steer the band away from hard drinking and heroin – even though Sylvain and Johansen wrote about the dangers in the single Trash (1973). “I think my lunch of choice at the time was bottle of whiskey, no glass,” Johansen said.
In New York that December, the Dolls had a new drummer, Jerry Nolan. Village Voice music columnist Patrick Carr gushed about the band’s buzzsaw power – “among the topmost elite of rock” – and mocked record company executives and reviewers who were alarmed and confused by the pastiche of tough-guy rockers wrapped in chiffon and pearls.
“Everything,” Johansen told the Guardian, “was about liberation and how far you could go with it.” Still, sales for their 1973 debut album New York Dolls were slow, particularly in the Midwest and South, where some stores were reluctant to display the cover showing the band in preening regalia. (Johansen thought he looked a bit like French movie star Simone Signoret.)
At a 1973 gig in Memphis, Johansen was arrested after allowing the crowd onstage. “I had to go to jail dressed like Liza Minnelli,” he said in the 2022 documentary, Personality Crisis: One Night Only, directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi.
The band’s follow-up album, Too Much Too Soon (1974), also failed to climb the charts even as the Dolls built a cult following with songs such as Jet Boy and Looking for a Kiss. Some band members peeled away. The band experimented with a communist-inspired look, suggested by future Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, complete with hammer-and-sickle banner.
The last show by the Dolls was late December 1976 at Max’s Kansas City, a club in Manhattan where Johansen had hung out in his pre-Dolls days. “Before us,” he said, “rock stars were in gilded cages and untouchable. I brought it down to the street. If I can do this, you can do this.”
He formed the David Johansen Group with a bluesy rock fusion and produced popular singles including Heart of Gold (1981) and Sweet Revenge (1984). He cut five solo albums and opened for bands such as the Who in 1982 at arena venues including the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland.
He also was exploring an alter ego. At a New York club, Tramps, he began regular Monday-night gigs as Buster Poindexter, backed by a horn section playing jump blues, jive and cool-cat numbers such as Mack the Knife. He sipped dry martinis between sets. “An old showman’s sense of timing,” New York Times music critic Robert Palmer wrote in 1984.
The story about how Johansen arrived at the name depended on the day he was telling it. Sometimes, he said it was from childhood nicknames because of his egghead reading habits; other times, he said it was simply to enhance the lounge lizard vibe.
He embellished the character with fables about Buster hanging out with Liberace and Noel Coward. He delivered one-liners and cringy jokes, including one about a rabbi telling another about how he went on benders of debauchery each Saturday. “That’s not a good Shabbos,” the other rabbi says. “That’s a great Shabbos.”
“It’s great when you can invent yourself like that,” Johansen told the Chicago Tribune. Or as he explained to another interviewer, “It’s me kind of unchecked.”
By then, the act known as Buster Poindexter and His Banshees of Blue was performing around the country. Their debut album, Buster Poindexter (1987), featured the remake of Hot Hot Hot by the Montserrat soca master Arrow (Alphonsus Cassell). The Poindexter version hit No. 45 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the video went into heavy rotation on MTV. He once called the song’s enduring popularity “the bane of my life”.
On The Tonight Show in 1988, as Poindexter and puffing a cigarette, he told host Johnny Carson he hoped to star one day in a Broadway musical. That never happened. But Johansen (as Poindexter) sang on Saturday Night Live. He also appeared in more than a dozen films, including co-starring with Richard Dreyfuss in the comedy Let It Ride (1989) and playing a tiki bar mixologist in the fin-de-siecle romp 200 Cigarettes (1999).
In the Scorsese-Tedeschi documentary, Johansen looked back at his time with the Dolls and as Poindexter. “I was a one-hit wonder,” he smirked, “twice.”
David Roger Johansen was born in Staten Island on January 9, 1950. His father sold insurance, and his mother was a librarian.
He described himself as a by-the-book student in high school with homework done and exams aced but who was also drawn to rock after seeing a gig by Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels at a show hosted by New York disc jockey Murray the K. “Ryder just blew my mind, and I thought, ‘Oh man, this is what I gotta do. This is it’,” he said.
He fronted local bands, including the Vagabond Missionaries, in the late 1960s before, as he described it, heading to Manhattan to “do that rock-and-roll thing.”
In the late 1990s, he formed the folk-blues band the Harry Smiths, named after Harry Everett Smith, who edited the Anthology of American Folk Music. In 2004, Johansen joined with Sylvain and Kane for a Dolls reunion tour – with their costumes toned down to fit their age.
That led to the album One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This (2006), the band’s first recording in three decades. The Dolls released two more albums, Cause I Sez So in 2009 and Dancing Backward in High Heels in 2011. (Johansen was the last surviving member of the original group. Thunders died in 1991 from a drug overdose, Kane in 2004 from leukemia, Rivets in 2019 from an undisclosed cause, and Sylvain of cancer in 2021.)
Johansen later hosted the SiriusXM show David Johansen’s Mansion of Fun, which indulged in his eclectic musical interests. For film, he contributed songs including Ain’t Cha Glad for the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator (2004), directed by Scorsese.
His marriages to actress Cyrinda Foxe and photographer Kate Simon ended in divorce. In 2013, he married artist Mara Hennessey, who had a daughter from a previous relationship. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
As a rule, Johansen discouraged too much rehearsal time with his bands, saying overpreparation was the enemy of spontaneity. “Life is just so much more interesting when it’s not so rehearsed,” he said. “It’s almost like a way to live.”
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