The Song Remains: David Johansen (1950-2025)

David Johansen was a man of many guises: lead singer for the glam-rockers The New York Dolls, lounge lizard in his Buster Poindexter act, the wisecracking Ghost of Christmas Past in the movie “Scrooged” and simply himself – a very talented rocker comparable to, say, Willie Nile.

Johansen’s life was the subject of a documentary by Martin Scorsese called “Personality Crisis: One Night Only,” where a film crew followed Johansen as he prepared for a performance as Buster Poindexter, his musical alter ego. He debuted Poindexter at the Bottom Line club in NYC. He had been looking for something to fill his time while not on tour under his own name. He met Bill Murray there, which eventually led to his role in “Scrooged.”

Scorsese remembered the grit and energy that defined Johansen’s work. While filming the documentary, the director said: “With David Johansen, it started with the music, of course. Actually, with a New York Dolls song, ‘Personality Crisis.’ I heard that song, I can’t remember when or where, and it stayed with me. I listened to it obsessively. The sound was rough; the playing was raw, the voice was wildly theatrical and immediate. And the energy was New York, 100% pure and uncut, right off the streets.”

The Dolls were this band that a lot of people, not just musicians, came to see. Artists, designers, filmmakers, all aspects of the arts world that was going on in downtown NYC came to see Johansen and his bandmates, Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders. The idea behind the band was to put a Little Richard kind of jolt back into rock ‘n roll. “He wouldn’t just go out there in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, you know?” Johansen said in an interview for the “Village Voice.” “We wanted to make a show out of it. I liked the Shangri-Las, the presentation that they had. It was fun. I was a big Howlin’ Wolf fan. I saw a great show of his at Max’s Kansas City. I was sitting like three feet away from him, and his head was the size of a watermelon. It was like he was breathing fire.”

Johansen says the switch to Poindexter was a way to branch out beyond the Dolls’ rough-and-ready format. “I had been itchin’ to sing some of these jump-blues songs, so I booked a place for four Mondays to do a little cabaret, and that’s how I started doing Buster,” he said in a magazine interview. As Poindexter, he rarely did original compositions. He had a way with obscure covers like his calypso version of ‘Hot, Hot, Hot’ by the Montserratian singer Arrow. It was on the playlist at wedding receptions everywhere. In an interview on National Public Radio, Johansen called the song “the bane of my existence” for its pervasive popularity. Poindexter was very free, very playful and an act that had an absurdist side to it. It was incredibly original, though, a gleaming paragon of the indie punk sensibility and played equally well uptown or downtown. In the same interview, he said: “When I was really young, we used to joke, when I go above 14th Street, I get a nosebleed! That’s a very New York thing. People are kind of Zip Code-y, but for a performer, at least the way I am, when you go onstage, it just sort of all of a sudden naturally becomes attuned to your surroundings and the vibe. It just happens naturally. You are kind of subconsciously deciding, ‘How far can I go with this?’”

He got his start in a band in high school, playing dances for the kids, playing the hootenannies, strumming the guitar and singing folk and blues, especially a Lead Belly song. At 18, he moved to the East Village from Staten Island and started working for a guy who had a tchotchke store on St. Mark’s Place. It turned out the shop owner was making these bejewelled and sequinned costumes for the Ridiculous Theatre, and through that connection, Johansen started a sort of theatre apprenticeship.

While with the Dolls, he became friends with Wolfman Jack, who was doing a Top 40 AM radio type show in New York at the time. Toward the end of his show, Johansen would go on the air and kibbitz a little bit. They got the idea to broadcast the show from the highbrow Mercer Arts Center, where the band was booked for a Tuesday residency. Johansen once said, “Wolfman Jack was broadcasting from our gigs and telling people, “Come down here! It’s unbelievable!” in his Wolfman Jack voice. “Thousands and thousands of people came. And, of course, all of them couldn’t get in, so there was pandemonium. It was a lot of fun. We had a costume contest, and we had a distinguished panel, judges like Rex Reed. Ridiculous prizes. A weekend for three at a lovely motel close to the Newark airport.”

In 1978, Johansen released his solo debut, moving toward Seventies rock with the help of a large cast of backing musicians, including Sylvain Sylvain, Aerosmith’s Joe Perry and Sarah Dash of Labelle. He was brash, loud, funny, self-aware, funky and chic all at once. As a solo artist, one of his best songs was the bar band stomper, ‘Girls.’ Johansen always had a love for outcasts and the defenceless. In this song, he makes it clear that hard rock misogyny isn’t for him: “Girls, I like ’em seizing the power / With girls, it takes me more than an hour.” He released five solo albums between 1978 and 1984, the highlights included a Dolls leftover, the declamatory style anthem “Funky but Chic.” He hosted a radio show, “Mansion of Fun,” which showed just how wide and deep was his knowledge of music history, from Debussy to The Cadillacs to Loretta Lynn to the Incredible String Band to CSNY to Maria Callas, all of it mysteriously connected.

After he retired the Buster persona, he started a new group, David Johansen and the Harry Smiths, releasing two albums. “I don’t really like to sit around the house listening to my own records,” he noted. “They’re not that good.”

Johansen was in his mid-fifties in 2006 by the time the Dolls reunited for “One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This.” Still, his eternal-kid energy shone through. He sang gleefully as if the Dolls’ Seventies party never ended. “Don’t fuck with us, what people say / They go to work, we go to play!” In an interview with “Vanity Fair” to discuss the band’s reunion tour, Johansen said of the Dolls’ divisive nature, “We weren’t trying to be confrontational. It’s just what was going on in the Lower East Side. We were representing our constituency.”

He was the last surviving member of the original 1971 lineup for the band. On the last day of February 2025, Johansen asked for assistance with his medical bills through the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, sharing he had Stage 4 cancer as well as a brain tumour and a broken back. “David Johansen passed away peacefully at home, holding the hands of his wife Mara Hennessey and daughter Leah, in the sunlight surrounded by music and flowers,” the fund updated on the page for his donations.

I shall miss David Johansen. I had the good fortune to see him on three occasions in the East Village clubs, as well as a slot opening for The Clash in New York. A friend and I took the train from Massachusetts to Port Authority. Saw a couple of Buster Poindexter shows, too. The last time I saw him was during the Dolls reunion in a Syracuse, NY, nightspot. So many tickets were sold the fire marshal had to be called to send a couple hundred people out where they congregated in the parking lot, singing and dancing to the rock ‘n roll inside.

He never stopped growing as a songwriter and a singer, always exploring, always staking out new paths. What a remarkable artist and an amazing part of rock ‘n roll history!