David Johansen as Buster Poindexter performs onstage at The Day by 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.
Nicholas Hunt/Getty Photographs
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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 almost a decade of sickness,” based on the publicist’s assertion.
Johansen died at his New York Metropolis residence “holding fingers along 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 oldsters 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 Unbiased.
As a youngster, Johansen began performing in rock ‘n’ roll bands and at a weekly hoot evening at an area Jewish group middle; 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 Recent Air in 2001. “I used to be extra into, , 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 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 — numerous combos of skintight pants, sky-high platform boots, make-up, loud animal prints and girls’s clothes.
The New York Dolls carry out on the Waldorf-Astoria Lodge 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 think about ourselves glitter rock; we had 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 had been purported to be should you had 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 allure, 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 lined 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 “Drugs.”) New York Dolls ended up a proto-punk masterpiece: shambling bar-band boogie (“Persona Disaster”), swaggering glam (“Wanting 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 had 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 had been actually such a gang, and it was like us towards the world,” he informed Recent Air host Terry Gross in 2004. “And we had been actually making an attempt to evolve music into one thing new, and it was, , very type of nearly militant to us.”
However whereas lots of their glammy friends went on to take pleasure in nice business success, the Dolls remained a cult favourite, albeit one which had an infinite affect on ’70s and ’80s rock. The ’80s hair steel 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 had been, , extra all for 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 information continued to refine his shimmying, bar-band glam, with the Mick Ronson co-produced 1979 LP In Fashion, 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 surprising profession resurgence — beneath the moniker Buster Poindexter, a childhood nickname.
“On the road, they known as me Buster,” he informed Individuals 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 Recent Air in 2004, he formed this musical persona throughout a low-key Monday evening 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 bounce blues songs and Camelot‘s “The Seven Lethal Virtues.”
This intimate engagement ultimately led to him fronting an enormous band within the guise of a louche Las Vegas membership performer, full with a pompadour, fancy go well with, and accoutrements like cigarettes and martinis.
“By the point it received to the nationwide consciousness, it did have this sort of Vegas-y type of thought to it,” he mentioned in 2004 of his act. “Nevertheless 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 Dwell and earned an surprising hit with 1987’s horn-peppered “Sizzling Sizzling Sizzling,” a canopy of a tune by the soca artist Arrow. The track was the “bane of my life,” Johansen informed Terry Gross in 2004, after asking her to not play the tune through the interview.
Through the years, Buster Poindexter toured with a gaggle 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 Individuals in 1988. “Nevertheless it’s me, actually. Typically 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, but it surely’s one thing. It is leisure.”
Exterior of music, Johansen acted in numerous movies, together with Married to the Mob and Scrooged. And within the early 2000s, he shaped a band known 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 (Dwell 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 accordance with a press release posted by his daughter Leah Hennessey, Johansen had navigated severe 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, Persona 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 shiny go well with 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 Persona 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 wanting again and telling tales about his previous.
“It is a wonderful objet, and I am very appreciative,” he protested frivolously, 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, ‘Properly, that is a model of myself I can stay with.'”
