“Five years ago at the beginning of the pandemic we discovered that David’s cancer had progressed and he had a brain tumor. There have been complications ever since,” Hennessey wrote. “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.” In the post, Hennessey shared that the musician had broken his back in two places after falling down the stairs the day after Thanksgiving. Johansen was “bedridden and incapacitated” as a result, Hennessey wrote, and the “trauma” of that experience caused his illness to progress “exponentially.” His wife, Mara, is now caring for him around the clock.
“We’ve been living with my illness for a long time, still having fun, seeing friends & family, carrying on, but this tumble the day after Thanksgiving really brought us to a whole new level of debilitation. This is the worst pain i’ve [sic] ever experienced in my entire life. I’ve never been one to ask for help but this is an emergency. Thank you,” Johansen shared in his own statement, via Billboard. The family’s most immediate needs right now are nursing, physical therapy, and funding for day to day living expenses, through which Hennessey hopes her father can “regain some mobility and independence.”
Johansen co-founded the New York Dolls—”widely acknowledged as one of the first (and coolest) punk bands,” according to Hennessey—in the early 1970s. The band eventually broke up after putting out a pair of albums in 1973 and 1974, but have reunited to record and play together again throughout the years. At different points through his career, Johansen has also reinvented his act as Buster Poindexter and founder of the folk and blues group the Harry Smiths. Recently, he was the subject of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s 2023 documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only, which captured a night of Johansen’s songs and storytelling at New York’s Café Carlyle.
You can donate to the David Johansen fund here.
