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NEW YORK (AP) — David Johansen, Wiley, gravel voice singer and the last surviving member of the band Glamour and Protopunk, the New York Dolls later performed as his Campy and gorgeous alter ego, Buster Poindo Exeter. He was 75 years old.
Johansen passed away Friday at his New York City home, according to Rolling Stone. Citation from a family spokesman. In early 2025 it was revealed that he had stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor.
New York dolls were a pioneer in punk and the style of the band – teasing, hair, women’s clothing, lots of makeup – inspired the glamorous movement that lived in heavy metal in bands like Faster Pussycat and Mötley Crüe after 10 years.
The image, released by Showtime, shows David Johansen streaming on “Personality Crisis: One Night Only,” a documentary directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, on Showtime on April 14th. (showtime via AP)
“When you’re an artist, the main thing you want to do is inspire people, so if you succeed in doing that, it’s pretty satisfying,” Johansen told the Knoxville News Cintinel in 2011.
Rolling Stone once called the doll “a hydrogen era mutant child” and Vogue called it “downtown style darling, boa and heel tart-up tough.”
“The dolls in New York were more than musicians. They were a phenomenon. They drew on Old Rock and Roll, the metropolitan blues, the show tune, the Rolling Stones, and the girl group. It was for the first and foremost,” Bill Bentley wrote in “Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Wing An.”
The band never found commercial success, and by the mid-10 years they were torn apart by broken internal conflicts and drug addiction after two albums. In 2004, former Smith frontman and Dolls admirer Morrissey convinced Johansen and other surviving members to reorganize the UK Meltdown Festival, leading three more studio albums.
In the 1980s, Johansen took on the Buster Point Dexter persona, a pompadour-style lounge lizard that hit the kitsch party “Hot, Hot, Hot,” in 1987.
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Johansen was the subject of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeski’s documentary, “Personality Crisis: One Night One,” in 2023. He mixed footage of a two-night stand at Cafe Carlyle in January 2020, giving flashbacks through his highly diverse career and intimate interviews.
“I was thinking about my voice: What will happen when I play this song?” Johansen told The Associated Press in 2023. “At some point in my life, I decided, whatever you have.” For me, I go on stage and in any mood, essentially out of it. ”
David Roger Johansen was born into a large working-class Catholic family on his father, Staten Island. He filled his notebook with poetry and lyrics as a young man, and loved a variety of music, including R&B, Cuba, Janis Joplin, and Otis Reading.
The Dolls – The final original lineup included guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassists Arthur Kane and Drummer Jerry Nolan.
They took their names from Manhattan’s Toy Hospital and were expected to take over the throne, which was vacant by underground velvet in the early 1970s. However, neither of the first two albums of the 1973 New York Dolls produced by Todd Rundgren nor the “Too Too Soan,” produced by Shadow Morton a year later.
“They are definitely a band to keep their eyes and ears,” read a review of their debut album on Rolling Stone.
Their songs include “Personality Crisis” (“While it was hot, you got it, but now frustration and heartache is what you got”), “Looking for a kiss” (I need corrections and kisses”), “Frankenstein” (Is it the way you fall in love with Frankenstein?”).
Their attractive appearance was intended to embrace fans in a non-judgmental, non-categorising space. “I just wanted to be very welcome,” Johansen said in the documentary:
Rolling Stone reviewed his second album, dubbed “The Best Hardrock Band in America Now,” and called Johansen “a talented showman and an incredible ability to bring the character to life as a lyricist.”
A few decades later, the influence of dolls will become important. Rolling Stone lists his self-titled debut albums on No. 301 of the 500 best albums of all time, writing, “It’s hard to imagine a Ramones or alternatives, or a thousand other trash can bands without them.”
Blondie’s Chris Stein in Nolan’s biography, “Landed in the Jungle,” writes that the doll “opens the door for the rest of us to walk.” Tommy Lee of Motley Crue called them early inspiration.
“Johansen said in 2023, the Los Angeles Times.
The doll, representing the rock that stumbled the most, was split. In 1973, they won the Creem Magazine Poll Categories. They were nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame several times, but never entered.
“The dirty angels with painted faces, dolls have opened boxes normally reserved for Pandora and unleashed the massacre of young children growing up to become punk,” writes Nina Antonia in the book “Too quickly.” “As if this legacy wasn’t enough for one band, they broke sexual boundaries, saved glitter, and set new standards for rock and roll overload.”
By the end of their first run, the dolls were being managed by legendary promoter Malcolm McLaren. In “Lipstick Traces: Secret History of the 20th Century,” cultural critic Grail Marcus writes that the dolls played some of their music to him and couldn’t believe how bad they were.
“They were so bad that I suddenly hit me, and I started to notice.” I’m laughing, I’m talking to these people, I’m watching them, and I’m laughing with them. And I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I no longer care about whether you play well or not,” McLaren said. “I was really impressed with something else the dolls. There was something great. I thought they were so bad.”
After the first end of the doll, Johansen reinvented himself again in the 1980s as a buster pointer, after starting his own group, the David Johansen Band.
Inspired by his blues and his inexplicable passion for American folk music, Johansen formed the Harry Smith group and toured the world playing songs by Hubers Samlin, Levon Helm and Howlin Wolf. He also hosted and painted the weekly radio show “The Mansion of Fun” on Sirius XM.
He is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessy and stepdaughter, Leah Hennessy.
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