David Johansen, the skinny, gravelly-voiced vocalist and last surviving member of the glam and protopunk band the New York Dolls who later went by the name Buster Poindexter, his flamboyant, pompadour-haired alter ego, has died at 74.
According to Rolling Stone, citing a family representative, Johansen passed away on Friday at his home in New York.
In early 2025, it became known that he had stage four cancer and a brain tumor.
The New York Dolls were forerunners of punk, and their style—with teased hair, feminine clothing, and heavy makeup—inspired the glam movement that would influence heavy metal acts like Faster Pussycat and Motley Crue in the following decade.
“When you're an artist, the most important thing is to inspire people, so if you can do that, it's really rewarding,” Johansen told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2011.
Rolling Stone once described the Dolls as “mutant children of the hydrogen age,” while Vogue called them “urban style darlings, dressed in cool outfits with boas and high heels.”
“The New York Dolls weren't just musicians; they were a phenomenon. They drew inspiration from classic rock 'n' roll, urban blues, musicals, the Rolling Stones, and girl groups, to name just a few,” Bill Bentley wrote in Smithsonian Rock And Roll: Live And Unseen.
The group never achieved commercial success and suffered from internal conflicts and addictions, disbanding after releasing two albums in the mid-1970s.
In 2004, former Smiths frontman and Dolls fan Morrissey convinced Johansen and the other members to reconvene for the Meltdown festival in England, which resulted in three more studio albums.
In the 1980s, Johansen adopted the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-haired party boy whose popular party hit “Hot, Hot, Hot” was released in 1987.
He also starred in films such as Candy Mountain, Letting Go and Married to the Mob, and is remembered for his role as the Ghost of Christmas Past in Bill Murray's Scrooged.
Sourse: breakingnews.ie
