David Johansen has died. Although best known and celebrated for his work as lead singer of formative American punk band New York Dolls, Johansen was an unabashed artistic chameleon, who also achieved mainstream chart success under his Buster Poindexter pseudonym, and worked frequently as an actor. (Including a memorable turn as the cab-driving Ghost Of Christmas Past in 1988 Christmas Carol riff Scrooged.) Per Deadline, his death this week was confirmed by his daughter, Leah Hennessy, and comes just a few weeks after Johansen revealed that he was suffering from Stage 4 cancer. Johansen was 75.
Born in New York City in 1950, Johansen joined New York Dolls not long into its existence, after guitarist Johnny Thunders decided he no longer wanted to be the band’s frontman. After achieving some early success while playing in the U.K. in the early ’70s (and auditioning new drummers after their founding one, Billy Murcia, died following an overdose while partying in the country), the band was signed to Mercury Records, where they’d ultimately release two albums, New York Dolls and 1974’s Too Much Too Soon. Although financially unsuccessful, both albums achieved cult success, propelled in part by Johansen’s distinctive, raw vocals. Mercury dropped the band in 1975, leading to its dissolution, but Johansen would continue to perform with its surviving members—especially guitarist Sylvain Sylvain—for the rest of his life, including a New York Dolls reunion that ran for several years in the 2000s.
In the aftermath of the band breaking up, Johansen embarked on a wide-ranging solo career, which steadily evolved—across four studio albums, released between 1978 to 1984—from the punk sound of the Dolls to something more mainstream and up-tempo. That trend reached an apotheosis in 1987, with the release of the jump blues-inspired, swing-ish Buster Poindexter, the most commercially successful album of Johansen’s long career. In some ways, the Poindexter character—who favored tuxedos, gelled-up pompadours, and sipping martinis—was no more invented than the previous glam-esque sexuality that had defined Johansen’s Dolls era; even so, Johansen admitted that he adopted the name in part to defy expectations fans of his earlier work would bring to his latest interests. In a 2015 interview with Brooklyn Vegan, Johansen noted that, “The Poindexter thing, though, there’s so many songs that I hear that I wanna sing, and there’s really no place for me to sing them unless I’m making a special kind of show where this is a show where I’m gonna sing whatever I wanna sing, so people don’t come expecting to hear preconceived ideas about what I’m gonna do.”
Although the Poindexter songs were undeniably more kitschy than Johansen’s earlier work—especially his massively successful cover of Arrow’s “Hot Hot Hot,” which he later called “the bane of my existence” after it achieved cultural ubiquity—they’re united by the strength of Johansen’s voice, which remained as powerful belting out old standards like “Hit The Road, Jack” as it did bemoaning teenage heartache on “Personality Crisis.” Johansen would ultimately release four albums under the Buster Poindexter persona, before returning to his own name—and a more traditional folk and blues sound—with 2000’s David Johansen And The Harry Smiths. In 2004, he reunited with Sylvain (and, briefly, bassist Arthur Kane, who died of leukemia shortly after) as New York Dolls for the first time in 30 years. The reunited band would ultimately stick together for nearly a decade, releasing three albums, including the critically celebrated bluesy rock offering One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This. In a 2011 interview with The A.V. Club, Johansen was unpretentious about the band’s resurgent success: “When we started back up again, we were just going to do play some shows. There was no grand scheme to gear up and make a record and hit the road and all of this kind of stuff. It kind of took off, as opposed to us trying to achieve some prescribed outcome. Essentially, we weren’t trying to achieve anything, which wound up being a lot more pleasant. It was more like, ‘We’re a good band. Let’s play. Let’s see what happens.’”
Outside music, Johansen also worked as a painter, a radio host, and, most notably, as an actor, where he capitalized on his distinctive appearance and thick, gravelly voice. Scrooged remains his most memorable part, playing a nigh-malevolent take on the Ghost Of Christmas Past, but he also (like many underground music superstars) had a guest stint on Nickelodeon’s The Adventures Of Pete And Pete, and appeared in a three-episode turn on HBO’s Oz. In 2020, Johansen teamed up with Martin Scorsese for a documentary about his life: The resulting film, Personality Crisis: One Night Only, explored Johansen’s various personas, as well as showing off his gifts as a storyteller.
In early 2024, Johansen revealed that he was suffering from Stage 4 cancer, launching a fundraising effort through musician aid organization Sweet Relief. The campaign was updated on Saturday morning with a notice announcing his passing: “David Johansen passed away peacefully at home, holding the hands of his wife Mara Hennessey and daughter Leah, in the sunlight surrounded by music and flowers… 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. He knew he was ecstatically loved.”
