David Johansen, the wiry, gravelly-voiced singer and last surviving member of the glam and protopunk band the New York Dolls who later performed as his campy, pompadoured alter ego, Buster Poindexter, has died at age 75, per the AP. Johansen died Friday at his home in New York City, according to Rolling Stone, citing a family spokesperson. It was revealed in early 2025 that he had stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor. The New York Dolls were forerunners of punk, and the band's style—teased hair, women's clothes, and lots of makeup—inspired the glam movement that took up residence in heavy metal a decade later in bands like Faster Pussycat and Mötley Crüe. (See them perform here.)
"When you're an artist, the main thing you want to do is inspire people, so if you succeed in doing that, it's pretty gratifying," Johansen told the Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2011. Rolling Stone once called the Dolls "the mutant children of the hydrogen age," and Vogue called them the "darlings of downtown style, tarted-up toughs in boas and heels." "The New York Dolls were more than musicians; they were a phenomenon. They drew on old rock and roll, big-city blues, show tunes, the Rolling Stones, and girl groups, and that was just for starters," Bill Bentley wrote in Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen.
The band never found commercial success and was torn by internal strife and drug addictions, breaking up after two albums by the middle of the decade. In 2004, former Smiths frontman and Dolls admirer Morrissey convinced Johansen and other surviving members to regroup for the Meltdown Festival in England, leading to three more studio albums. In the '80s, Johansen assumed the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-styled lounge lizard who had a hit with the kitschy party single "Hot, Hot, Hot" in 1987. He also appeared in such movies as Candy Mountain, Let It Ride, Married to the Mob, and had a memorable turn as the Ghost of Christmas Past in Bill Murray hit Scrooged.
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