David Johansen, Frontman for New York Dolls, Dies at 75

David Johansen, frontman for the punk band the New York Dolls, died at his home in New York City weeks after revealing his diagnosis of stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor. He was 75.

Johansen’s death, which occurred Friday, was confirmed by his daughter, Leah Hennessey.

Hennessey previously shared that her father had become “incapacitated” after a recent fall and the family needed help with his medical bills. “David is a legend but he’s also my very real, very sick dad,” she explained. Hennessey also added that her father “has been in intensive treatment for stage 4 cancer for most of the past decade.”

“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,” she also explained.

The New York Dolls were among the forefathers of punk, playing hard rock in often androgynous, gender-bending stage costumes and making noise with singles like “Personality Crisis,” “Trash” and a cover of the old doo-wop song “Stranded in the Jungle.” They were part of the glam rock movement of the 1970s, which also included the likes of David Bowie and T-Rex, but their music was rougher and rawer.

Not only did the Dolls inspire the punk bands of the 1970s, their influence also lived on in the glam hard rock of bands such as Mötley Crüe and Poison in the ’80s. Despite that acclaim, the band never found mainstream success and broke up after their second record was released.

Johansen released a handful of solo albums after the breakup of the group, drawing rave reviews but only modest sales for works like “David Johansen” in 1978 and “In Style” in 1979. His only song to make the charts was a live medley of the Animals hits “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” “Don’t Bring Me Down” and “It’s My Life.”

Johansen began to perform as Buster Poindexter in the 1980s and had his biggest hit as a recording artist with his 1987 version of the soca song “Hot Hot Hot,” which received wide exposure on MTV and got to No. 11 on the Billboard dance-club charts. He continued to perform as Poindexter for decades, though he also made appearances under his own name. In 2016, he spoke to Vulture about his career.

Johansen told the outlet that his performances with the Dolls were “not as expansive as far as talking is concerned between songs” because “people are standing, and they’re drunk, and they just want to jump up and down.” In contrast, he enjoyed the work as Poindexter because “it gives me a chance to say whatever comes to my mind, and to get a response from it instead of people going, Huh? It’s refreshing.”

The singer was the subject of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s 2023 documentary “Personality Crisis: One Night Only.” The film blended footage from Johansen’s two-night performance at Café Carlyle in January 2020 with archival clips from his career.

“With David Johansen, it started with the music, of course. Actually, with a New York Dolls song, ‘Personality Crisis.’ I heard that song, I can’t remember when or where, and it stayed with me,” Scorsese said in a lengthy statement shared with TheWrap.

“I listened to it obsessively. The sound was rough, the playing was raw, the voice was wildly theatrical and immediate. And the energy was New York, 100% pure and uncut, right off the streets. After the Dolls broke up, I kept watching and listening to David. He never stopped growing as a songwriter and a singer, always exploring, always staking out new paths.”

“There was the Buster Poindexter alter ego. And the radio show ‘Mansion of Fun,’ which amazed me and which I listened to obsessively,” he continued. “That was when I understood just how wide and deep David’s knowledge of music history was—all of music history, from Debussy to the Cadillacs to Loretta Lynn to the Incredible String Band to Gregorian chants to David’s beloved Maria Callas, all of it mysteriously connected.”

“And then there were the cabaret performances at the Carlyle, which David Tedeschi and I were lucky enough to capture with our film ‘Personality Crisis: One Night Only’. As the years went by and David became increasingly fragile, he would always be there for screenings and gatherings, with his beloved Mara and Leah by his side. He would sit quietly, preserve his energy, but he was always fully there, right up to the end. What a remarkable artist. What an amazing man. I was so lucky to have known him. I just wish there had been more time.”

David Johansen was born on January 9, 1950, on Staten Island, New York. He founded the New York Dolls with guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan in the 1970s. The group has been nominated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame multiple times but not been inducted.

Johansen is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessey, and a stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey.

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