David Johansen, host of New York Dolls, is a singer and songwriter in the vanguard of glam rock and punk, died yesterday at his home on Staten Island. He is 75 years old.
His stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey, confirmed his death.
Mr Johnson revealed last month that he suffered from stage 4 cancer, brain tumors and fractures. He announced a fundraiser to assist his medical expenses through the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, saying: “I never asked for help, but it was an emergency.”
Mr. Johnson has a variety of genres from the Blues to Calypso and has achieved his greatest commercial success in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with his grand lounge – Lounge-Lounge-Lounge-Lizard Alter Alter Ego, Buster Poindexter. But his 1970s at the heyday of New York dolls, a band that was obsessed with rubbish riffs and tough women had the greatest cultural influence, inspiring many punks, heavy metals and alternative musicians.
One of the musicians is Smiths singer-singer Morrissey, who first witnessed the band’s 13-year-old living in Manchester, England. It was 1973, and the BBC was broadcasting the doll show. According to Nina Antonia's 1998 “Tooke Out Sumoke,” the young Morrissey looked at the flail dolls of the “Jet Boy's The Dolls”. Morrisey soon became president of the band’s British fan club.
New York dolls are notorious for their violations. They are particularly notorious. “Before getting on stage, dolls bypass the biggest element of lipstick,” Ed McCormack wrote in 1972 in the Rolling Stone.
“We used to wear some very outrageous clothes,” Mr. Johnson said in the prelude to the 1987 Buster Poindexter hit “Hot Hot Hot,” “These heavy psychological bands in Los Angeles were caught in the market without wearing their mother's clothes.”
Music Polish and professionalism are not the doll's strong point – bassist Arthur Kane sometimes plays multiple songs without remembering to insert.
Mr. Johnson sang, “If I act like a king, it’s because I am a human.”
“David has some acrobats in it,” Lenny Kaye of Patti Smith Group said in an interview with the prose in 2023. “He is the barker of the carnival and he is not afraid to be the center of attention.”
David Roger Johansen was born on Staten Island on January 9, 1950, the third of six children. His mother, Helen (Cullen) Johansen, was a librarian. His father, Gunvold Johansen, was a life insurance salesman and a former Norwegian opera singer.
Around 1964, Mr. Johnson left St. Peter's Boys School. According to himself, he was fired: “They just realized I wasn’t the right person for them,” he told Will Hermes in his 2011 book, “Love gave the building to fire: New York for five years, which changed the music forever.” He completed his studies at Port Richmond High School in 1967.
After graduation, Mr. Johnson is associated with Andy Warhol's factory, nightclub Max's Kansas City and Charles Ludlam's ridiculous theater company.
The teenage Mr. Johnson made the sound and lights for Mr. Ludram and showed it in some performances. “Charles taught me a lot about making performances and making wonders,” he said in the 2007 Online Magazine.
When he joined the New York Doll, he hired the courses in the largest number. “Musically speaking, we want to bring back something with that little Richard Punch,” he told the New York Times in 2006.
The Fine Arts Center in Gobro booked the dolls for Oscar Wilde's room on Tuesday night because it wanted to add bar receipts. “At first there were 10 or 20 people, then there were 30 people, and then the words spread,” Kaye said. “Suddenly there was a scene.”
The band, with Mr. Johnson, Mr. Kane, drummer Billy Murcia and guitarists Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain, toured England in 1972. (Drug addiction will be in trouble throughout their short career.) When they returned to the United States, they recruited Jerry Nolan as a replacement and signed with Mercury Records.
The band's debut album was produced by Todd Rundgren, titled “The New York Doll” and was released in 1973. The following year, “Too Early Too Early”, produced by Shadow Morton, who is known for the 1960s women's group The Shangri-Las. It sold poorly, just like their first album, Mercury gave up on the doll in 1975.
Malcolm McLaren briefly managed the doll when he started to collapse and wore red patent leather before returning to London and managing the sexual pistol. The New York Doll broke up while on a tour in Florida in 1975, though Mr. Johnson and Mr. Sylvan spent a year with the substitute musicians.
Paul Nelson, an A&R man from the group, wrote an autopsy in 1975 in Country Voice, introducing their difficulties outside of New York City: “End of the day, they rode a real rather than symbolic subway train to specific rather than universal places, playing for intellectuals or children, even further away than they were. When they ended up meeting the young man in the country, that young man seemed more confused than being charmed by them.”
Mr. Johnson released five solo albums between 1978 and 1984. Bohemian-style professional bar rocks flourished, with highlights including the promotional style of the national anthem “Fashionable but Chic”.
Friendship with actor Bill Murray led to Mr. Johnson's appearance in the 1988 film Scrooged, a Christmas past taxi-driving ghost. This is his most important role in his acting career, covering dozens of movies and TV shows.
Around this time, Mr. Johnson began to develop the stage character Buster Poindexter, a cro dancer in a tuxedo who specializes in Jump Blues and R&B party songs. Mr. Johansen wrote four albums between 1987 and 1997, becoming Buster Poindexter, which included the Latin “Buster's Spanish Rocketship.” As Jon Pareles wrote in Times in 1994's Times, “It seems like a side job to be his public musical face, usually outstanding in his personalized songs, but sometimes imitating black performers like Louis Armstrong on Minstrelsy.”
His iconic cover is “Hot Hot Hot” recorded by Soca musician Arrow, becoming a party's national anthem and a minor hit, ranking No. 45 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1987.
He always showed good taste on the cover, dating back to the version of Bo Diddley’s “Pills” and Archie Bell & The Drells’ “(There Will Be A) Showdown”. After he retired from his nemesis role, he formed a new group David Johansen and Harry Smiths, which sang Harry Smith's 1952 “American Folk Music Anthology” and released albums in 2000 and 2002.
In 2004, Morrissey lured the surviving New York dolls – Mr. Johnson, Mr. Sylvan and Mr. Kane – to reunite two shows in London. A few weeks later, Mr. Kane felt uncomfortable, was diagnosed with leukemia, and died within a few hours. Nevertheless, Mr. Johansen and Mr. Sylvain worked together to produce three New York doll albums between 2006 and 2011. Mr. Sylvain died in 2021, making Mr. Johansen the last original doll.
In addition to Ms. Hennessey, his stepdaughter, Mr. Johansen, was survived by his wife Mara Hennessey (a visual artist he married in 2013), who married in 2013 and produced and designed many live shows as well as five siblings: Michael, Christopher, Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Mary Ellen Johansen and Karen Holman and Karen Holman. From 1977 to 1978, he previously married actress and propagandist Cyrinda Foxe (she left Aerosmith's frontman Steven Tyler), and joined photographer Kate Simon from 1983 to 2011.
Mr. Johnson is the theme of “Crisis of Personality: Only One Night,” a 2023 documentary directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, centers on the Buster Poindexter performance of Café in New York. “Survival is the happiness of disability,” he said in the movie, and his interpretation of the philosopher William James – but he cannot hide the joyful spirit and ruthless productivity that angered his decades of career. There is an irresistible prospect that makes the New York doll drive the New York doll in their escape moments, which Mr. Johnson applies to the rest of his life.
“Our whole attitude to art is like getting up and doing something – sitting there complaining.
