New York Dolls’ David Johansen Dead at 75

Confirmed by his daughter Leah Hennessey, David Johansen, the frontman and last surviving member of the New York Dolls, has passed away at the age of 75. The news comes mere weeks after Johansen himself announced that he was suffering from stage four cancer (he was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2020) and a broken back. Johansen was among the most crucial figures in New York’s 1970s rock and roll scene, fronting the Dolls and working with Todd Rundgren. The band were far more glamorous than that of their city contemporaries, gender-bending in drag while playing proto-punk songs like “Personality Crisis” and “Jet Boy.” Without the Dolls, there’d be no Ramones, and the lionized legacy of that era of NYC rock music would be significantly weaker.

Born in Staten Island, Johansen was the son of a librarian mother and insurance rep father, who had once performed as an opera singer. He got his music career started in the 1960s as the lead singer of a local band called the Vagabond Missionaries. In 1971, he founded the New York Dolls with Johnny Thunders, and the band became a staple of the Mercer’s scene. The Dolls’ first two albums, New York Dolls and Too Much Too Soon, did well with critics but sold poorly.

Johansen would continue playing with the Dolls until 1976, performing with Sylvain Sylvain, Pete Jordan, Chris Robison and Tony Machine after Thunders and Jerry Nolan left the band in 1975. He embarked on a solo career shortly after, releasing albums under his own name and performing Dolls songs with Sylvain until, in the 1980s, he reinvented himself as Buster Poindexter, leaning into the retro fad of jazz singer wannabes. Perhaps you might remember his Saturday Night Live performance of “Hot Hot Hot”? He was also an actor, starring as the Ghost of Christmas Past in 1988’s Scrooged, and also appearing in Candy Mountain, Married to the Mob, Let It Ride, Freejack, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, Car 54 Where Are You, and episodes of Oz, Miami Vice, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and others.

The New York Dolls reunited in 2004, putting out three albums between 2006 and 2011 and touring extensively before disbanding for good. In his later years, Johansen hosted David Johansen’s Mansion of Fun on Sirius Radio. He and his band were the subjects of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s Personality Crisis: One Night Only documentary in 2023. Johansen is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessey, and his daughter, Leah Hennessey.

As Paste contributor Elise Soutar wrote in her incredible essay about the New York Dolls’ debut album, “The New York Dolls’ work was a bombastic celebration of the people who are still viewed by many as outsiders, as existing on the margins—queer communities, immigrant communities, gender non-conformers of all kinds. It’s no coincidence that those groups made up a sizable chunk of the Dolls’ fervent New York audience while the band existed. They trafficked the world of ‘other’ and worked at a grotesque level of camp that masqueraded as glamor, picking it apart and exaggerating its whims in their own efforts to ask why they couldn’t do the same. Their inherent otherness was their super power. They thought it could be yours, too.”