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David Johansen, the singer and songwriter who was at the vanguard of glam rock and punk as the frontman of the New York Dolls, died yesterday at his home on Staten Island. He was 75.<\/p>\n
His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey.<\/p>\n
Mr. Johansen revealed last month that he was suffering from Stage 4 cancer, a brain tumor and a broken back. He announced a fund-raising campaign through the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund to assist with his medical bills, saying, \u201cI\u2019ve never been one to ask for help, but this is an emergency.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Johansen was prolific in multiple genres, from blues to calypso, and achieved his greatest commercial success in the late 1980s and early \u201990s with his pompadoured lounge-lizard alter ego, Buster Poindexter. But his 1970s heyday with the New York Dolls, a band of lipstick-smeared men in love with trashy riffs and tough women, had the most cultural impact, inspiring numerous punk, heavy metal and alternative musicians.<\/p>\n
One of those musicians was the singer-songwriter Morrissey of the Smiths, who first witnessed the band as a 13-year-old living in Manchester, England. It was 1973, and the BBC was broadcasting a Dolls show. As the young Morrissey watched the Dolls flail through \u201cJet Boy,\u201d<\/a> he had what he called his \u201cfirst real emotional experience,\u201d according to Nina Antonia\u2019s 1998 book, \u201cThe New York Dolls: Too Much Too Soon.\u201d Morrissey soon became the president of the band\u2019s British fan club.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The New York Dolls were notorious for transgressive behavior; they were especially notorious for cross-dressing. \u201cBefore going onstage, the Dolls pass around a Max Factor lipstick the way some bands pass around a joint,\u201d Ed McCormack wrote in Rolling Stone in 1972.<\/p>\n \u201cWe used to wear some really outrageous clothes,\u201d Mr. Johansen said in the prologue to the 1987 music video for Buster Poindexter\u2019s hit song \u201cHot Hot Hot.\u201d<\/a> \u201cThese heavy mental bands in L.A. don\u2019t have the market cornered on wearing their mothers\u2019 clothes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Musical polish and professionalism weren\u2019t the Dolls\u2019 strong suit \u2014 bassist Arthur Kane<\/a> sometimes played multiple songs without remembering to plug in. But they compensated with swagger, shock value and songwriting, performing indelibly fast and loud anthems about trash, outer-borough outcasts and falling in love with Frankenstein.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIf I\u2019m acting like a king,\u201d Mr. Johansen sang, \u201cwell, that\u2019s \u2019cause I\u2019m a human being.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDavid had a bit of the vaudevillian in him,\u201d Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group said in a 2023 interview for this obituary. \u201cHe was a carnival barker, and he wasn\u2019t afraid to be the center of attention.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n David Roger Johansen was born on Jan. 9, 1950, on Staten Island, the third of six children. His mother, Helen (Cullen) Johansen, was a librarian; his father, Gunvold Johansen, was a life insurance salesman who had been an opera singer in Norway.<\/p>\n Around 1964, Mr. Johansen left St. Peter\u2019s Boys School. By his own account, he was expelled: \u201cThey just realized I was not the right person for them,\u201d he told Will Hermes for his 2011 book, \u201cLove Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever.\u201d He finished his education at Port Richmond High School, graduating in 1967.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After graduation, Mr. Johansen fell in with the New York City hipster scenes centered on Andy Warhol\u2019s Factory, the nightclub Max\u2019s Kansas City and Charles Ludlam<\/a>\u2019s Ridiculous Theater Company.<\/p>\n The teenage Mr. Johansen did sound and lights for Mr. Ludlam, and appeared as an extra in some performances. \u201cCharles taught me a lot about making a show and making a spectacle,\u201d he told the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever in 2007.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He employed those lessons at maximum volume when he joined the New York Dolls. \u201cMusically, we wanted to bring back stuff with that Little Richard<\/a> punch to it,\u201d he told The New York Times in 2006<\/a>. <\/p>\n The highbrow Mercer Arts Center booked the Dolls for a Tuesday-night residency in its Oscar Wilde Room because it wanted to boost the bar receipts. \u201cAt first there were 10 or 20 people, and then 30, and then word spread,\u201d Mr. Kaye said. \u201cAll of a sudden there was a scene.\u201d<\/p>\n The band, with a lineup of Mr. Johansen, Mr. Kane, the drummer Billy Murcia and the guitarists Johnny Thunders<\/a> and Sylvain Sylvain<\/a>, toured England in 1972. But tragedy struck when Mr. Murcia overdosed and drowned in a bathtub. (Drug addiction would hobble the band throughout its brief career.) When they returned to the United States, they recruited Jerry Nolan as a replacement and signed with Mercury Records.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The band\u2019s debut album, produced by Todd Rundgren and called simply \u201cThe New York Dolls,\u201d was released in 1973. In Creem magazine\u2019s year-end poll, its readers named the Dolls both the best new band and the worst band. The following year brought \u201cToo Much Too Soon,\u201d produced by Shadow Morton<\/a>, famed for his work with the 1960s girl group the Shangri-Las. It sold poorly, as their first album had, and Mercury dropped the Dolls in 1975.<\/p>\n Malcolm McLaren<\/a> briefly managed the Dolls as they began to fall apart, dressing them in red patent leather, before returning to London and managing the Sex Pistols. The New York Dolls broke up in 1975 while on tour in Florida, although Mr. Johansen and Mr. Sylvain staggered on with replacement musicians for another year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Paul Nelson, the group\u2019s A&R man, wrote a post-mortem in the Village Voice in 1975<\/a> about their difficulties outside New York City: \u201cIn the end, they rode on real rather than symbolic subway trains to specific rather than universal places, played for an audience of intellectuals or kids even farther out than they were; and when they eventually met the youth of the country, that youth seemed more confused than captivated by them.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Johansen released five solo albums between 1978 and 1984; professional bar-band rock with bohemian flourishes, the highlights included the declamatory style anthem \u201cFunky but Chic.\u201d<\/p>\n A friendship with the actor Bill Murray led to Mr. Johansen\u2019s appearance in the 1988 movie \u201cScrooged\u201d as the taxicab-driving Ghost of Christmas Past. It was his most prominent role in an acting career that encompassed dozens of movies and TV shows.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It was around this time that Mr. Johansen began cultivating the stage persona Buster Poindexter, a tuxedo-wearing crooner who specialized in jump blues and R&B party songs. Mr. Johansen made four albums as Buster Poindexter between 1987 and 1997, including the Latin-tinged \u201cBuster\u2019s Spanish Rocketship.\u201d As Jon Pareles wrote in The Times in 1994<\/a>, \u201cWhat had seemed a sideline became his public musical face, often brilliant in the songs he personalized but sometimes verging on minstrelsy when he mimicked Black performers like Louis Armstrong.\u201d<\/p>\n His signature cover of \u201cHot Hot Hot,\u201d originally recorded by the soca musician Arrow,<\/a> became a party anthem and a minor hit, peaking at No. 45 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1987.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He had always displayed good taste in covers, dating back to the Dolls\u2019 versions of Bo Diddley\u2019s \u201cPills\u201d and Archie Bell & the Drells\u2019 \u201c(There\u2019s Gonna Be a) Showdown.\u201d After he retired the Buster persona, he started a new group, David Johansen and the Harry Smiths, which performed songs drawn from Harry Smith\u2019s 1952 \u201cAnthology of American Folk Music\u201d and released albums in 2000 and 2002.<\/p>\n In 2004, Morrissey induced the surviving New York Dolls \u2014 Mr. Johansen, Mr. Sylvain and Mr. Kane \u2014 to reunite for two shows in London. Feeling unwell a few weeks later, Mr. Kane checked into a hospital, was diagnosed with leukemia and died within hours. Nevertheless, Mr. Johansen and Mr. Sylvain made three more New York Dolls albums together between 2006 and 2011. Mr. Sylvain died in 2021<\/a>, leaving Mr. Johansen as the last original Doll.<\/p>\n In addition to Ms. Hennessey, his stepdaughter, Mr. Johansen is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessey, a visual artist he married in 2013, who produced and designed many of his live shows, and five siblings: Michael, Christopher, Elizabeth and Mary Ellen Johansen and Karen Holman. He was previously married to the actress and publicist Cyrinda Foxe from 1977 to 1978 (she left him for Steven Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith) and to the photographer Kate Simon from 1983 to 2011.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Johansen was the subject of \u201cPersonality Crisis: One Night Only,\u201d a 2023 documentary directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi centered on a Buster Poindexter show at the Caf\u00e9 Carlyle in New York. \u201cExistence is maimed happiness,\u201d he said in the film, paraphrasing the philosopher William James \u2014 but he wasn\u2019t able to conceal the joyful spirit and relentless productivity that animated his decades-long career. There was a irrepressible outlook that drove the New York Dolls in their evanescent moment, which Mr. Johansen applied to the rest of his long life.<\/p>\n \u201cOur total attitude towards art, was, like, get up and do something \u2014 quit sitting there whining,\u201d Mr. Johansen told The Times in 2006<\/a>. \u201cThat\u2019s what we stood for, that do-something spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n