David Johansen/ Instagram
Sources: High Times and Variety
As lead singer and mastermind of the New York Dolls, David Johansen was among some of the most influential musicians of the 1970s. Though the Dolls never had a Top 40 hit, what they did in the early ’70s in rock clubs around the country was eventually picked up and elaborated on and—voila—punk was born. After the breakup of the Dolls, Johansen began a solo career and has since released a number of successful albums, even reinventing himself as Buster Poindexter along the way.
David Johansen, the frontman and last surviving member of proto-punk band New York Dolls, who went on to become a lounge singer under the name Buster Poindexter and act in films such as “Scrooged,” has died. His daughter Leah Hennessey confirmed that he died Friday at home in New York. He was 75.
In February 2025, Johansen announced he was suffering from stage four cancer, a brain tumor and a broken back. He was diagnosed in 2020 and was not able to perform for the final years of his life.
The Staten Island native started out singing with a local band, the Vagabond Missionaries, in the 1960s. He joined the nascent New York Dolls in 1971, and their first performance came at a Christmas Eve concert at a homeless shelter. Their first album, titled “New York Dolls” and produced by Todd Rundgren, was released in 1973 and featured the members in drag on the cover, reflecting the gender-bending style of the time of rockers like David Bowie.
The album’s grungy hard rock-meets-glam pop sound on songs like “Personality Crisis” reflected the theme of alienated youth and served as a template for bands like the Ramones. But though their albums were critically acclaimed, they didn’t sell well, and the Dolls became known as much for some members’ drug addiction and wild antics as for their musicianship.
The New York Dolls broke up in 1976 and Johansen went on to perform and release albums as a solo act, often playing New York Dolls songs and performing with fellow Dolls member Sylvain Sylvain. Johansen opened for the Who on an East Coast tour in 1982.
He re-styled himself as lounge singer Buster Poindexter in the late 1980s, as part of a wave of jazzy sounds and retro performers. As Poindexter he performed with the “Saturday Night Live” band and had a hit with the song “Hot Hot Hot.”
Johansen also worked in film and television, playing the Ghost of Christmas Past in 1988’s “Scrooged” opposite Bill Murray. He co-starred in the movie “Car 54, Where Are You?” and appeared in films including “Let it Ride” and “Mr. Nanny.” He also had a part in the HBO series “Oz.”
The New York Dolls reunited in 2004 with Johansen, Sylvain and Arthur Kane, releasing three albums and touring.
For several years, Johansen hosted the eclectically-programmed “David Johansen’s Mansion of Fun” on Sirius Radio. In 2023, Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi directed “Personality Crisis: One Night Only,” a Showtime documentary.
Looking back on his career in a 2004 interview with Terry Gross for “Fresh Air,” Johansen reminisced on how casual beginnings turned into manifestos for the New York Dolls. “When we started the Dolls… we were really such a gang, and it was like us against the world, and we were really trying to evolve music into something new, and it was, you know, very kind of almost militant to us. And then over the years, you know, in the history books, like the ‘Rolling Stone Complete Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll’ or something, you look in the appendix and see where your name is and see what they say about you…. and (it) would always say, ‘They were trashy. They were flashy. They were drug addicts. They were drag queens.’ And that whole kind of trashy blah, blah, blah thing over the years kind of settled in my mind as, oh, yeah, that’s what it was, you know? And then by going back to it and deconstructing it, and then putting it back together again, I realized that, you know, it really is art.”
He added, “We just wanted to make an explosion of excitement. So that’s what was missing. Rock ‘n’ roll had become very kind of pedantic and meandering, and it was looking for something, but it was like an actor in search of a play or something, you know?”
Johansen’s Poindexter persona came about after he set up shop in an Irish bar in his Gramercy Park neighborhood in New York to do an undercover residency where he could cover the eclectic material he favored outside of the rock idiom. “I figured I’d use a pseudonym so people wouldn’t be coming in screaming for ‘Funky But Chic.’… I had been listening to a lot of jump blues at the time, but I also did, ‘The Seven Deadly Virtues’ from ‘Camelot’ and whatever – just whatever songs I wanted to sing. And by the end of four weeks… it started out as a three-piece band and wound up as a 15-piece band. So I think by the time it got to the national awareness, it did have this kind of Vegas-y kind of idea to it. But it started off more kind of like the Louis Prima days in the ’50s of Vegas.”
The persona provided a kind of freedom for Johansen he hadn’t felt either as the Dolls’ frontman or performing under his own name.
“I have this friend, Elliott Murphy, who’s a singer…. When I started doing Buster Poindexter, he used to say to me, ‘David, Buster Poindexter is so much more like you than David Johansen is’, you know, if you get what I’m saying.’… In other words, with Buster, I really kind of went on stage and really didn’t edit myself and just kind of said whatever came to my mind and didn’t have many filters. Whereas prior to that… I had the David Johansen group or band or whatever it was called, and we used to open for a lot of bands in hockey rink. At that point, I was going out there and kind of presenting this what I thought was ideal picture of myself… whereas Buster was really kind of more warts and all, you know. And I think by doing that, it helped me to be myself more.”
Survivors include his wife, Mara Hennessey, and his daughter, Leah Hennessey.