Johansen died Friday at his home in New York City, Jeff Kilgour, a family spokesperson told The Associated Press. It was revealed in early 2025 that he had stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor.
The New York Dolls were forerunners of punk and their style included teased hair, women's clothes and lots of makeup — without know that they were inspiring the glam movement that took up residence in heavy metal a decade later in bands like Faster Pussycat and Mötley Crüe.
The band were more than musicians; they were a phenomenon. They drew on old rock 'n' roll, big-city blues, show tunes, the Rolling Stones and girl groups, and that was just for starters, Bill Bentley wrote in "Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen."
Unfortunately, the band never found commercial success and was torn by internal strife and drug addictions, breaking up after two albums by the middle of the 70s called them once the band with the worst luck in rock history. In 2004, former Smiths frontman and Dolls admirer Morrissey convinced Johansen and other surviving members to regroup for the Meltdown Festival in England, leading to three more studio albums.
In the '80s, Johansen assumed the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-styled lounge lizard who had a hit with the kitschy party single "Hot, Hot, Hot" in 1987. He also appeared in such movies as "Candy Mountain," "Let It Ride," "Married to the Mob" and had a memorable turn as the Ghost of Christmas Past in the Bill Murray-led hit "Scrooged" in 1988.
Johansen was in 2023 the subject of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s documentary "Personality Crisis: One Night Only," which mixed footage of his two-night stand at the Café Carlyle in January 2020 with flashbacks through his wildly varied career and intimate interviews.
David Roger Johansen was born to a large, working class Catholic family on Staten Island, his father an insurance salesman. He filled notebooks with poems and lyrics as a young man and liked a lot of different music — R&B, Cuban, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding.
The Dolls — the final original lineup included guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan. They took their name from a toy hospital in Manhattan and were expected to take over the throne vacated by the Velvet Underground in the early 1970s. But neither of their first two albums — 1973's "New York Dolls," produced by Todd Rundgren, nor "Too Much Too Soon" a year later produced by Shadow Morton — charted.
Their songs included "Personality Crisis", "Looking for a Kiss", "Trash", "Jet Boy" and "Frankenstein". Their glammed look was meant to embrace fans with a nonjudgmental, noncategorical space. "I just wanted to be very welcoming," Johansen said in the documentary, 'cause the way this society is, it was set up very strict — straight, gay, vegetarian, whatever... I just kind of wanted to kind of like bring those walls down, have a party kind of thing.
The magazine Rolling Stone, reviewing their second album, called them "the best hard-rock band in the United States right now" and called Johansen a "talented showman, with an amazing ability to bring characters to life as a lyricist." Decades later, the Dolls' influence would be cherished, if you checked bands like Ramones and The Replacements, you'll see the spirit of the band remains alive.
The Dolls, representing rock at it's most debauched, were divisive. In 1973, they won the Creem magazine poll categories as the year’s best and worst new group. They were nominated several times for The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but never got in as usual.
By the end of their first run, the Dolls were being managed by legendary promoter Malcolm McLaren, who would later introduce the Sex Pistols to the Dolls' music. Culture critic Greil Marcus in "Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century” writes the Dolls played him some of their music and he couldn’t believe how bad they were.
"The fact that they were so bad suddenly hit me with such force that I began to realize, "I’m laughing, I’m talking to these guys, I’m looking at them, and I’m laughing with them; and I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer concerned with whether you could play well," McLaren said. "The Dolls really impressed upon me that there was something else. There was something wonderful. I thought how brilliant they were to be this bad."
After the first demise of the Dolls, Johansen started his own group, the David Johansen band, before reinventing himself yet again in the 1980s as Buster Poindexter. Inspired by his passion for the blues and arcane American folk music Johansen also formed the group The Harry Smiths, and toured the world performing the songs of Howlin' Wolf with Hubert Sumlin and Levon Helm. He also hosted the weekly radio show “The Mansion of Fun” on Sirius XM and painted.
He is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessey, and a stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey.
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