David Johansen, frontman for the New York Dolls and the last surviving original member of that pioneering punk band, has died at the age of 75.
The death of the singer who also moonlighted as “Buster Poindexter” and, as an actor, appeared in films like Scrooged and Let It Ride, was confirmed Saturday by a spokesperson for Johansen, who said in a statement to Rolling Stone, “David Johansen died at home in NYC on Friday afternoon holding hands with his wife Mara Hennessey and daughter Leah, surrounded my music, flowers, and love. He was 75 years old and died of natural causes after nearly a decade of illness.”
Johansen’s death comes less than a month after he revealed he was battling Stage Four cancer and a brain tumor, and had been bedridden and incapacitated following a fall in November where he broke his back in two places. A fund was launched by Johansen’s family to raise money for his around-the-clock care.
The New York City-born Johansen was best known for his work in the pioneering punk group the New York Dolls, with whom — during the band’s initial run in the first half of the Seventies — he recorded a pair of influential glam punk albums, 1973’s New York Dolls and 1974’s Too Much Too Soon, with Johansen co-writing the bulk of the albums with guitarist Johnny Thunders, who died in 1991.
Following the band’s breakup in 1975, Johansen embarked on a solo career that included albums recorded under his own name and, in the Eighties, LPs by his swing alter ego Buster Poindexter, including a rendition of calypso song “Hot Hot Hot” that became an unlikely Hot 100 hit for Johansen.
Johansen’s larger-than-life onstage persona soon drew the attention of Hollywood: After making his acting debut in a 1985 episode of Miami Vice, Johansen was cast as the Ghost of Christmas Past in the Bill Murray-starring comedy Scrooged and as the priest in Married to the Mob, both in 1988. Roles in films like 1989’s Let It Ride (playing Richard Dreyfuss’ sidekick in the horse racing comedy), Freejack, Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, and Mr. Nanny soon followed.
In 2004, Johansen reunited with the surviving members of the New York Dolls. The reformed lineup toured all over the world and cut three more albums before quietly dissolving in 2011. After the deaths of bassist Arthur Kane in 2004 and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain in 2021, Johansen became the last surviving member of the original band.
In 2020, directors Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi filmed Johansen’s show at New York’s Café Carlyle, which became the backbone of their 2022 documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only, tracing the story of Johansen’s entire life and career
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