David Johansen, singer from the Punk The New York Dolls, dies at 75

NEW YORK – David Johansen, The singer in a saw voice and the biggest surviving member of the band Glam and Propot the New York Dolls, who later interpreted as his alter ego Campy, Pompadourd, Buster Pondexter, died. He was 75 years old.

Johansen died on Friday at his home in New York, Jeff Kilgour, told The Associated Press, a family spokesman. At the beginning of 2025 it was revealed that he had cancer in stage 4 and a brain tumor.

New York dolls were submitted by punk and band style – teasing hair, women’s clothes and lots of makeup – inspired the glam movement that took the residence in the heavy metal later in bands such as Faster Pussycat and Mötley Crüe.

“When you are an artist, the main thing you want to do is inspire people, so if you manage to do this, it’s pretty good,” Johansen told Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2011.

“Mutant children of the Hydrogen Age”

Rolling Stone once called the “moved children of the hydrogen era” and Vogue called them “Darlings of Downtown Style, rooted with heels in Boas and Heels.”

“New York dolls were more than musicians; They were a phenomenon. They pulled Old Rock ‘N’ Roll, Big-City Blues, Show Tunes, The Rolling Stones and Girl Groups, and that was just for the beginning, “Bill Bentley wrote in” Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Neveen “.

The band has never found commercial success and was torn by internal addictions of conflicts and drugs, separating after two albums until the middle of the decade. In 2004, former Frontman Smiths and admirer Dolls, Morrissey, convinced Johansen and other surviving members to regroup for the Meltdown Festival, which led to three other studio albums.

In the 1980s, Johansen assumed the person of Buster Poindexter, a lounge lizard in Pompadour, who had a hit with the single Kitschy Party “Hot, Hot” in 1987. He also appeared in films such as “Candy Mountain”, “Let It Ride”, “Married with Mob” The past of Christmas in Bill Murray, “scrooged”.

Johansen was in 2023 the subject of the documentary of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi “Personality crisis: only in a night”, “ Which is fulfilled by its two-night stands at Carlyle Cafe in January 2020, with flashbacks through its wild career and intimate interviews.

“I was thinking of my voice:” How will it sound? What will it be when I do this song? And I would put in a knot about it, “Johansen told The Associated Press in 2023. With whatever you received. For me, I go on stage and any disposition I am in, I just get my way out of it, essentially. “

Named after a toy hospital

David Roger Johansen was born of a large Catholic family on Staten Island, his insurance seller. He filled notebooks with poems and lyrics as a young man and he liked a lot of different music – R&B, Cuban, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding.

The dolls – the original final line counted guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, the bassist Arthur Kane and the drummer Jerry Nolan – rubbed the shoulders with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol at the bottom of the East in Manhattan, at the beginning of the 1970s.

And they took the name from a toy hospital in Manhattan and were expected to take over the underground velvet vacant throne in the early 1970s. But none of their first two albums – “New York Dolls” in 1973, produced by Rundgren Todd, not too soon “a year later produced by Shadow Morton – Charted.

“I am definitely a band to keep both eyes and ears,” reads the review of their debut album in Rolling Stone, complementary from “their strange combination of high pop star and ruthless arrogance.”

Their songs included the “personality crisis” (“you got it while it was hot/but now frustration and heart pain are what you have”), “looking for a kiss” (I need a solution and a kiss “) and a” Frankenstein “(is a crime/for you to fall in love with Frankenstein?”)

Their glad appearance was meant to embrace fans with a non -judged, non -categorical space. “I just wanted to be very welcoming,” Johansen said in the documentary, “because it is the way this society is, it was set up very strict – straight, gay, vegetable, whatever … I wanted to bring those walls, to have a party thing.”

Rolling Stone, reviewing his second album, called them “The Best Hard-Rock Band right now” and called Johansen a “talented showman, with an amazing ability to bring characters to life as a lyricist.”

Deads later, the influence of dolls would be cherished. Rolling Stone would list their self-titled debut album on the 301st place of the 500 largest albums of all time, writing “it is hard to imagine The Ramones or The Replacements or a thousand trash troops without them.”

Chris Stein from Blondie in the Nolan biography “Stranded in the Jungle” wrote that the dolls “opened a door for the rest of us to walk.” Tommy Lee from Motley Crue called them early inspiration.

“Johansen is one of those singers, to be a little paradoxical, which is technically better and more versatile than it sounds,” said Los Angeles Times in 2023.

“Dirty angels with painted faces”

The dolls, representing rock at the most disappointed, were divided. In 1973, they won the categories of polls of the Creem magazine as the best and worst group of the year. Have been nominated several times for Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but never entered.

“The dirty angels with painted faces, the dolls opened the box usually reserved Pandora and unleashed the fury of the baby who would grow to become punk,” Nina Antonia wrote in the book “Too much, too soon.” “As if this inheritance were not enough for a single band, they also threw sexual borders, wild glitter and set new standards for excess rock ‘n’ roll.”

By the end of their first running, the dolls were managed by the legendary promoter Malcolm McLaren, who will later introduce Pistols sex into the music of the dolls. The Greil Marcus culture critic in “Ruj The traces: a secret history of the 20th century” writes the dolls played some of their music and did not believe how bad they were.

“The fact that they were so bad hit me suddenly with such a force, that I began to realize:” I laugh, I talk to these guys, I look at them and laugh with them; And I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer concerned if you can play well, “said McLaren. “The dolls really impressed me that there is something else. It was a great thing. I thought how bright they would be so bad. “

After the first disappearance of the dolls, Johansen began his own group, David Johansen Band, before reinventing itself once more in the 80s as Buster Pondexter.

Inspired by his passion for blues and American Arcane Folk Music Johansen formed the group and Harry SmithsAnd he visited the world by playing the songs of Howlin ‘Wolf with Hubert Sumlin and Levon Helm. He also hosted the weekly radio show “The Mansion of Fun” on Sirius XM and painted.

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