David Johansen as Buster Poindexter performs onstage at The Every day Entrance Row’s celebration of the tenth Anniversary of CBS Watch! Journal in New York Metropolis on Feb. 9, 2016. Johansen died Friday at age 75.
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Nicholas Hunt/Getty Photographs
David Johansen, the chameleonic and charismatic vocalist who fronted the New York Dolls and located solo success beneath the moniker Buster Poindexter, died on Friday, his publicist confirmed to NPR. He was 75.
Final month, his household revealed that he had been in “intensive remedy” for stage 4 most cancers. The punk pioneer “died of pure causes after practically a decade of sickness,” in accordance with the publicist’s assertion.
Johansen died at his New York Metropolis dwelling “holding palms together with his spouse Mara Hennessey and daughter Leah, surrounded by music, flowers, and love,” it learn.
Born in 1950, Johansen grew up on Staten Island with 5 siblings and fogeys who met whereas working at a Barnes & Noble. “My father was a Norwegian tenor and my mom a New York Irish librarian,” he informed The Impartial.
As a teen, Johansen began performing in rock ‘n’ roll bands and at a weekly hoot night time at a neighborhood Jewish group heart; on the latter, he sang the Delta blues songs he grew up loving.
“Some individuals would do, like, Kingston Trio-type stuff and the Greenbrier Boys,” he informed Contemporary Air in 2001. “I used to be extra into, you realize, Lightnin’ Hopkins and issues like that.”
He additionally joined the Ridiculous Theatrical Firm within the West Village within the years previous the formation of the New York Dolls.
That band rose to prominence within the first half of the Nineteen Seventies, related to the glitter-rock motion spearheaded by Alice Cooper, David Bowie and T. Rex, amongst others. Led by Johansen, the Dolls stood out from even their most colourful friends because of hanging stagewear and androgynous seems — varied mixtures of skintight pants, sky-high platform boots, make-up, loud animal prints and ladies’s clothes.
The New York Dolls carry out on the Waldorf-Astoria Resort in New York on Oct. 31, 1973. At proper is lead singer David Johansen, with guitarist Sylvain Sylvain.
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Richard Drew/AP
“We did not contemplate ourselves glitter rock; we have been simply rock & roll,” Johansen mentioned within the guide Please Kill Me, an oral historical past of punk music. “And we thought that is the best way you have been alleged to be when you have been in a rock and roll band. Flamboyant.”
Johansen was a lithe onstage presence who strutted and peacocked with the boldness of Mick Jagger, however possessed earnest insouciance that was tough across the edges. The Dolls’ lack of polish was a significant a part of their appeal, as they traded in raucous glam riffage and ragged takes on early rock ‘n’ roll and R&B. However, in a nod to his foundational sonic texts, Johansen pointedly famous that the band coated Otis Redding, Archie Bell & The Drells, and Sonny Boy Williamson.
Produced by Todd Rundgren, the Dolls’ 1973 self-titled album featured songs written or co-written by Johansen. (The lone exception was a slipshod tackle Bo Diddley’s “Capsules.”) New York Dolls ended up a proto-punk masterpiece: shambling bar-band boogie (“Character Disaster”), swaggering glam (“Trying For A Kiss”), hot-rodding garage-punk blueprints (the Johnny Thunders co-write “Jet Boy”) and deconstructed rockabilly-soul (the howling “Trash”).
Johansen’s lyrics have been vivid and hungry, capturing the stressed vitality of each the band’s New York Metropolis hometown and the political and societal fissures rupturing America.
“We have been actually such a gang, and it was like us in opposition to the world,” he informed Contemporary Air host Terry Gross in 2004. “And we have been actually making an attempt to evolve music into one thing new, and it was, you realize, very type of nearly militant to us.”
However whereas lots of their glammy friends went on to get pleasure from nice industrial success, the Dolls remained a cult favourite, albeit one which had an unlimited affect on ’70s and ’80s rock. The ’80s hair metallic scene owes a sartorial debt to the band, whereas Duran Duran, Morrissey and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe are avowed followers. Within the guide Please Kill Me, music impresario Malcolm McLaren, who briefly labored with the group, even admitted, “I used to be making an attempt to do with the Intercourse Pistols what I had failed with the New York Dolls.”
The Dolls broke up in 1976, with Johansen citing “inertia” and “factions within the group that have been, you realize, extra curious about medicine than in taking part in music” within the 2004 NPR interview.
He subsequently went solo, releasing a swaggering, Rolling Stones-esque 1978 self-titled album with singles like “Funky However Stylish.” Future data continued to refine his shimmying, bar-band glam, with the Mick Ronson co-produced 1979 LP In Model, sometimes dabbling in disco. Johansen additionally toured closely and landed opening slots for Pat Benatar and The Who.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, Johansen revisited his love of the blues — and had an sudden profession resurgence — beneath the moniker Buster Poindexter, a childhood nickname.
“On the road, they referred to as me Buster,” he informed Folks in 1988. “Then they’d catch me with books and name me Poindexter, so it is type of an mental punk or one thing.”
As Johansen informed Contemporary Air in 2004, he formed this musical persona throughout a low-key Monday night time residency at an Irish bar in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, a “barrelhouse type of roadhouse present” the place he carried out music he had been listening to, like leap blues songs and Camelot‘s “The Seven Lethal Virtues.”
This intimate engagement finally led to him fronting an enormous band within the guise of a louche Las Vegas membership performer, full with a pompadour, fancy swimsuit, and accoutrements like cigarettes and martinis.
“By the point it bought to the nationwide consciousness, it did have this sort of Vegas-y type of concept to it,” he mentioned in 2004 of his act. “However it began off extra type of just like the Louis Prima days within the ’50s of Vegas.”
Buster Poindexter grew to become an everyday presence on Saturday Night time Reside and earned an sudden hit with 1987’s horn-peppered “Scorching Scorching Scorching,” a canopy of a tune by the soca artist Arrow. The music was the “bane of my life,” Johansen informed Terry Gross in 2004, after asking her to not play the tune through the interview.
Over time, Buster Poindexter toured with a bunch dubbed the Banshees Of Blue and launched 4 studio albums, encompassing classic R&B, blues, salsa and merengue.
“I do know some individuals suppose, ‘Oh, Johansen places on a tuxedo and thinks he is anyone else,’ ” he informed Folks in 1988. “However it’s me, actually. Generally I’ve discovered that by getting right into a sure drag, or a sure feeling, you may forged off your mortal coil and actually do one thing. I do not know if it is vital, however it’s one thing. It is leisure.”
Outdoors of music, Johansen acted in quite a few movies, together with Married to the Mob and Scrooged. And within the early 2000s, he fashioned a band referred to as the Harry Smiths to carry out his childhood favourite blues songs (together with by Lightnin’ Hopkins) and tunes by the group’s namesake, folks archivist Harry Smith.
Considerably improbably, Morrissey satisfied the New York Dolls to reunite in 2004, a efficiency that was documented on Morrissey Presents the Return of the New York Dolls (Reside from Royal Competition Corridor 2004). This led to a few extra studio albums — the primary, 2006’s One Day It Will Please Us To Keep in mind Even This, included visitor vocals from Michael Stipe — and tour dates that included Alice Cooper.
In line with an announcement posted by his daughter Leah Hennessey, Johansen had navigated critical well being challenges since 2020, together with a mind tumor, however stored this information personal and remained busy. He stored up his internet hosting gig at his weekly SiriusXM radio present “Mansion of Enjoyable,” opened for Morrissey in 2023 in London, and did a heartfelt cowl of Phil Ochs’ “There however for Fortune” at a late 2023 celebration of Nineteen Sixties Greenwich Village.
He additionally helped promote Martin Scorsese’s and David Tedeschi’s 2023 documentary on him, Character Disaster: One Night time Solely. The loving chronicle of Johansen’s life and profession was anchored by footage from a January 2020 set on the cozy Café Carlyle. Sporting a classy tackle his trademark Buster Poindexter look (a wolfish pompadour and a glittery swimsuit jacket), he entertained the group with tales and songs from his profession, his voice as comfy and weathered as a worn-in leather-based jacket.
After a 2022 New York Movie Competition screening of Character Disaster, a panel dialogue with Scorsese, Johansen and others concerned within the movie developed into some lighthearted back-and-forth about making the movie, with Johansen’s daughter Leah Hennessey noting how a lot her father disliked trying again and telling tales about his previous.
“It is an exquisite objet, and I am very appreciative,” he protested flippantly, referring to the movie.
In response, Johansen’s spouse, Mara Hennessey, gently backed him up with a touching clarification: “The primary time David and I noticed the penultimate screening, he mentioned, ‘Nicely, that is a model of myself I can reside with.'”
