David Johansen: The Last Doll
Honoring the man sometimes known as Buster Poindexter
The last Doll has left the building.
David Johansen passed away Friday at 75 at his Staten Island home after a nearly decade-long battle with cancer.
The sad outcome had been feared since his daughter, Leah Hennessey, went public a few weeks ago with his situation due to the family needing financial help with his treatment and care.
The cancer had progressed to his brain during the pandemic, with the dreaded words “Stage Four.” Last November, he injured his back in a fall that left him bedridden.
If the circumstances aren’t the same, it was the same feeling of dread for anyone who’s lost a loved one to cancer — the feeling that no matter how much fight, hope and love, there’s that moment that far in, where the cancer is going to win. You know it. Your loved one knows it. All that remains is making the remaining time as bearable as possible.
At the least, there was enough time for people to get in contact with Johansen, to no doubt share memories, jokes and let them know how much they loved him.
“David and his family were deeply moved by the outpouring of love and support they’ve experienced recently as the result of having gone public with their challenges. He was thankful that he had a chance to be in touch with so many friends and family before he passed,” said a statement at Sweet Relief, which had been handling the fundraising.
No matter the ending, Johansen will be remembered as a force of life, a New Yorker through and through.
“As a kid from Queens, New York, this one hurts,” Guitarist and long-time Billy Idol collaborator Steve Stevens said Saturday. “Never about technique for New York rock and rollers. It was always about the sound of the subway, the stinking overflowing garbage cans, the misfits of Times Square. The Dolls did it to perfection.”
He grew up in Staten Island. His father sang opera. Being the third of six kids, there were a variety of records in the house. He went to see package shows put on by Murray the K, where one could see The Who, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and Mitch Ryder on the same bill. He knew what he wanted to do, even as he worked odd jobs like being an extra, musician and fill-in lighting sound guy for Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. He just needed the right vehicle.
One day, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Billy Murcia knocked on Johansen’s door, asking him if he wanted to rehearse with their band, who needed a lead singer. He said “yes” and they were on their way.
The New York Dolls would play anywhere that would take them — no dive too dingy, no room too small.
Musically, “punk” hadn’t been named as a genre, but the Dolls were definitely a forerunner, taking the music they loved from the ’50s and ’60s, putting it into a blender and spitting it back out three chords (max) at a time.
“At the time, it was like a lot of hippy bands and long drum solos and stuff. We wanted to kind of bring back the short songs and ‘Don’t bore us. Get to the chorus’ kind of a tune,” Johansen said on a 1995 appearance on Late Night With Conan O’Brien.
Their image threw some gender fuckery into the mix, a function as much of cost-effectiveness as a desire to thumb noses at the establishment. It was cheaper to raid thrift stores, flea markets and girlfriends’ closets.
Not that it came across everywhere. A 1973 show in Memphis was swarming with cops who, because the city was apparently lacking in actual crime, were there because of reports the Dolls were “female impersonators,” which was bizarrely illegal at the time. During the encore, a male fan ran onstage and kissed Johansen on the cheek, setting off the homophobic cops who dragged him offstage as he blew kisses to the crowd.
Johansen, full of confidence, had a swagger combined with, unlike Adam Levine, actual moves like Jagger. He was the perfect frontman for this motley crew of New Yorkers.
The first Doll to fall was Murcia, who would aspirate from too much coffee in a misguided attempt to revive him after he passed out from a combination of champagne and Mandrax while the band was on tour in England.
The band quickly regrouped with Jerry Nolan as the new drummer, signing a deal with Mercury and going into the studio with Todd Rundgren assigned as producer.
Johansen’s attitude came through in the sessions. Jack Douglas, who engineered, related the story of this exchange after the singer had barreled through a take of “Looking For a Kiss.”
Rundgren: “Man, that’s going to be so good with a lot of harmony?”
Johansen: “Harmony? Are you accusing me of having melody?”
Rundgren wisely stayed out of the way for the most part and the self-titled debut was an instant classic, contrary to what the sales figures said.
Some looked at them with disdain. Then-Stones guitarist Mick Taylor dismissed them as “the worst high school band I ever saw.” Creem readers named them the worst new band of 1973, though it has often been noted, they were also named the best in the same poll.
The Dolls may not have been virtuosos (Sylvain Sylvain came closest), but they knew their limitations and played within them (and sometimes beyond them) with irresistible energy and verve.
Johansen was the perfect delivery vehicle for what the band was selling, with smarts and charisma to burn.
“We just wanted to make an explosion of excitement,” Johansen told NPR in 2004. “So that’s what was missing. Rock ‘n’ roll had become very kind of pedantic and meandering, and it was looking for something, but it was like an actor in search of a play or something, you know?”
It was the kind of package other bands would be able to ride to greater success, but not the Dolls.
A second album, 1974’s Too Much Too Soon, produced by famed girl group producer Shadow Morton (who was dealing with alcoholism at the time), sold less than the first. The lack of success, combined with the various addictions of some members of the band led to the Dolls’ end in 1976.
The Dolls were gone, remaining as an influence for those lucky enough to see them and those who’d discover their records later – some of them punk and alternative, others future hair metal denizens of the Whiskey-a-GoGo or Coconut Teaszer.
Johansen remained humble when the topic of the Dolls’ influence came up, telling Uncut in 2023, “I don’t take any hubristic pride in any of that. I hear it from other people but it just goes through me.”
The band was gone, but Johansen kept a friendship and working relationship with Sylvain, who appeared on his first two solo albums — 1978’s self-titled and 1979’s In Style.
The two records contained some material dating back to the Dolls’ last days, but he was more refined. He still rocked and carried the spirit, but allowed room for ballads and blues as his solo career continued, a realignment of his earlier musical attitude.
“I kind of went through a Jungian phase of life kind of change thing where… I think towards the end of the Dolls, I had gotten, it sounds silly but… I think I’d gotten a little full of myself and thought ‘oh man, I’m like a rock star…’ I think around the time when I was getting that thing together and writing those songs, in retrospect, I was going through this looking at myself and thinking like ‘You’re really a kind of a fool. You should get down with the people a bit more.'” Johansen told Perfect Sound Forever in 2007. “Which was kind of like our (the Dolls’) ethic when we started but then you start getting full of yourself or something… So I think I was trying to get a little right-sized. So, I just wanted to make an entertainment that was… I got into this thing where people would say ‘You’re a rock star’ and I would say ‘No, I’m a rock singer’ and stuff like that.”
If the hits weren’t coming, it wasn’t for lack of trying, as Johansen remained as magnetic as ever as he toured extensively.
The biggest hit of Johansen’s career wasn’t exactly planned. He’d started performing shows in 1982, under the persona of Buster Poindexter, a highly-coiffed lounge lizard purveyor of a mix of all sorts of music that he didn’t perform otherwise. It was a way to perform live without going far from home after years of touring, including the David Johansen Group opening for the likes of Pat Benatar and The Who. The Poindexter name was a cue to fans that, no, they were not going to hear “Personality Crisis” that night.
VIDEO: Buster Poindexter “Fool for You”
The Poindexter shows drew more notice, to the point where he signed a record deal. He and his backing band, the Banshees of Blue, appeared on Saturday Night Live twice, the first a surprise on the Season 11 premiere when Tina Turner had to back out as musical guest at the last minute.
In between appearances, he’d released a Poindexter album, which contained a cover of “Hot Hot Hot,” from Montserratian singer Arrow. The song just missed the Top 40, but was a club hit that became a pop culture fixture.
“That was, like, the bane of my existence, that song,” Johansen said in the 2023 concert film/documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only. “I don’t know how I feel about it now. I haven’t heard it lately. It was ubiquitous… They play it at weddings, bar mitzvahs, Six Flags.”
The Poindexter persona took center stage, as Johansen wouldn’t release an album under his name for 18 years.
He also found a second career as an actor. He played the wisecracking New Yawk Ghost of Christmas Past in Scrooged, Richard Dreyfuss’ buddy in the gambling comedy Let It Ride and a hitman who meets a grisly end in a segment based on a Stephen King short story in Tales From the Darkside: The Movie.
There were also the credits that didn’t pan out. He was one of the leads in a movie version of the mostly forgotten early ’60s sitcom Car 54, Where Are You? Originally intended as a musical comedy, but chopped and hacked after test screenings, the movie made a little over 20 percent of its cost back.
There was also the villain turn in the “wacky” comedy Mr. Nanny starring then-popular wrestler Hulk Hogan in the days before he was known for spewing the N-word, which also flopped.
Johansen took another musical turn in the new century, forming a backing band he named The Harry Smiths, named after the musical anthropologist.
The group released two well-received albums of acoustic folk and blues, with Johansen, now in his 50s, having the songs fit his arrangements like a well-worn pair of boots.
Over the years, two more Dolls had fallen. Nolan, whose main addiction was alcohol, died at 45 from complications due to a stroke. Guitarist Johnny Thunders had died months before from an overdose of cocaine and methadone while his body was being ravaged by leukemia.
The surviving Dolls were brought together by a seemingly unlikely source. Well before the days of the Smiths, blowing off gigs and supporting white supremacists, young Steven Morrissey was an avowed New York Dolls fan, once president of their fan club.
Curating the Meltdown Festival in London in 2004, he convinced the surviving three – Johansen, Sylvain and Kane — to reunite for a set.
The show went over well and the three decided to keep the reunion going, only for Kane to die less than a month later, two hours after being diagnosed with leukemia.
Sylvain and Johansen carried on with new musicians under the Dolls name, not just flogging the old days. They recorded a trio of albums that, if not at their ’70s peak, did nothing to sully the legacy. Tracks like “Dance Like a Monkey,” “Nobody Got No Bizness” and “I’m So Fabulous” (sample lyric: “I’m so fabulous, you arriviste … The way you dress is so insidious — how do they even let you on the subway? … you’re so Cincinnati … I don’t even want to look at you”) showed there was still plenty of spirited fun to be had.
For his part, Johansen seemed energized to be singing the type of material he hadn’t sung regularly in years.
It also allowed him a rare chance to appreciate the band’s legacy, given that he was not one for looking back.
“So I started listening to the records to prepare for the show and I was quite surprised at how good they were,you know,” Johansen told MSNBC in 2023. “‘Cause I usually don’t sit around at home listening to my own records, you know. They were very musical, pretty genius lyrics, if I do say so myself and fun, a lot of fun.”
The new Dolls called it a day in 2011, with Johansen moving back to performing live, mostly not far from New York. He managed to sidestep gentrification by moving back to the old family house in Staten Island, which allowed him to still be able to live in the city that was his lifelong home.
He also did occasional voice acting work but as his illness worsened, he was able to perform less. He last appeared onstage at Carnegie Hall in November, 2023, singing Phil Ochs’ “There But For Fortune” at Music + Revolution: Greenwich Village in the 1960s.
As he was privately fighting cancer, Johansen’s love of music never left, even when he was no longer able to perform, sharing his enthusiasm on Mansion of Fun, a regular show on Sirius XM’s The Loft, which he hosted until his final days.
As quintessentially New York as Johansen was, he never stopped being the musical omnivore he became in his childhood, saying in a conversation with latter-day doll Rami Yaffa, “It becomes a part of me, and then it almost becomes a way to live, you know what I mean. It’s almost like having a Bible or something.”
Had Johansen just been a New York Doll, he would have had a secure musical legacy. But his open musical worldview, keen intelligence and sharp wit showed there was more than just the flamboyantly snotty lead singer and lyricist of 1973 and 1974.
More than a New York Doll, Johansen stood tall. Singer, actor, painter, he leaves the building as one of New York’s quintessential artists, proof that chart success isn’t a requirement to be respected and beloved.
VIDEO: David Johansen on Late Night With David Letterman
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