The New York Dolls played in platform boots, lipstick and women’s clothes, made two albums and broke up having sold very few records. Their influence on the punk bands of New York and London was enormous. David Johansen, their singer and the last surviving member of the band, died at his home in New York City on Friday, February 28, 2025. He was 75. His family said he died surrounded by them after a long illness. Weeks earlier it had been revealed that he had stage 4 cancer and a brain tumour, and that he had been bedridden since breaking his back in a fall.
The Dolls
Johansen was born on Staten Island in 1950 and joined the Dolls in the early 1970s, with the guitarist Johnny Thunders. Their 1973 debut, New York Dolls, produced by Todd Rundgren, and its 1974 follow-up, Too Much Too Soon, were loud, sloppy and funny, with songs like “Personality Crisis” and “Trash”. They never had commercial success, and the band fell apart after the second record. Their manager for a while was Malcolm McLaren, who went on to manage the Sex Pistols in London.
Buster Poindexter
In the 1980s Johansen created an alter ego, Buster Poindexter, a childhood nickname, and began singing blues, jump and lounge music in a tuxedo with his hair slicked back. As Poindexter he had his biggest hit, a 1987 cover of the soca song “Hot Hot Hot”, which was played constantly on MTV and at parties and weddings. He also led the house band on Saturday Night Live for a time.
Acting and later years
Johansen acted in films including Married to the Mob, Let It Ride and Candy Mountain, and played the cab-driving Ghost of Christmas Past in Scrooged. He reunited a version of the Dolls in 2004, and in 2023 Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi made Personality Crisis: One Night Only, a documentary built around his cabaret show at the Café Carlyle.
In the Scorsese film, made two years before his death, Johansen sang songs from both of his lives on the same small stage: the punk pioneer and the lounge singer were the same man.