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 in 1972, including Jerry Nolan, standing left, Johnny Thunders, Killer Kane and Sylvain Sylvain. Seated: singer David Johansen.
Getty Images
After releasing a second album, 1974’s “Too Much Too Soon,” the New York Dolls broke up in 1976. 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.”
The song “Hot Hot Hot” became ubiquitous in 1987, with its No. 45 peak on the Billboard Hot 100 hardly reflecting how popular it became as an MTV staple. Johansen ultimately came to have mixed feelings, at best, about the tune. “That was, like, the bane of my existence, that song,” he said in the Scorsese film. “I don’t know how I feel about it now. I haven’t heard it lately. It was ubiquitous… they play it at weddings, bar mitzvahs, Six Flags.”
The New York Dolls had not played together for decades when Morrissey convinced the surviving members, who also included guitarist Sylvain Sylvain and bassist Arthur Kane, to reunite for a festival he was curating in the U.K. in 2004. “He called me, and he said, ‘I understand you’re a pretty big Maria Callas fan’,” Johansen said in the Scorsese documentary. “And I said, ‘Yes, I happen to be known for that in certain circles.’ He said, ‘Well, you know that film she made where she did a fantastic concert at the Royal Festival Hall?’ I said, ‘Yes, by heart.’ He said, ‘How would you like to play the Royal Festival Hall?… All you have to do is get the Dolls back together.’ And I thought, ‘Royal Festival Hall, Maria Callas…’ I combed every opium den in Chinatown, and I pulled that band together. We were fantastic.”
Kane fell ill and died shortly after the 2004 reunion gig. But after a pause, Johansen soldiered on with Sylvain in a reconstituted version of the group. The new version of the Dolls released three albums — 2006’s “One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This,” 2009’s “Cause I Sez So” (which reunited the with debut album producer Rundgren) and a swan song, 2011’s “Dancing Backward in High Heels.” The irony was not lost on many that the second incarnation of the group lasted much longer and had more recorded output than the first.
While the Dolls never announced a second breakup, the band went dormant again after a 2011 tour that included Earl Slick in the lineup and had the group opening for Motley Crue and Poison — ironically, two bands whose initial coiffed looks were influenced by the Dolls. Sylvain died in January 2021.
Talking at the time the Dolls were reuniting, Johansen said, “It’s a tonic for the blues. People can walk around living a life of quiet desperation, but maybe if they started shouting about it, they’d be happy.”
Survivors include his wife, Mara Hennessey, and his daughter, Leah Hennessey.
