RIP David Johansen of the New York Dolls. He was 75.
Photo credit: Photosynthesis Studio
About twenty years ago, I had two separate occasions where a member of the New York Dolls unexpectedly showed up in my office. The first happened when I was the program director of Y108/Hamilton. Out of the blue, Sylvain Sylvain was at my door. He was in the city to hang out with his good buddies in Teenage Head and thought he’d pay the local radio station a visit. He was a lovely man.
The second time came about two years later when I was the program director of 102.1 The Edge/Toronto. One afternoon in 2006, Dave Johansen popped by. He was all legs, hair, and lips, ready to talk about One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, the third NYD album and first since Too Much Too Soon in 1974. He was funny, quick-witted, and, like his bandmate, lovely. We hung around for about an hour, talking about the Dolls, music, his parallel music career as Buster Poindexter, and his acting gigs.
The man did a lot over his life. The important proto-punk work of the Dolls is at the top. Not only did the Dolls lay much of the groundwork for the New York punk scene, but he and the Dolls were the first act to wear spandex onstage–not to mention a lot of makeup and big hair.
He will forever make me laugh in his role as the ghostly cabdriver in Scrooged.
The band attracted the attention of an eccentric British clothing store owner named Malcolm McLaren. Determined to break into the music business as a manager, McLaren made some horrible decisions for the band and drove them into the ground, causing their breakup 1976. Unbowed, McLaren vowed to learn from his mistakes and moved on to another group he dubbed The Sex Pistols. No Dolls, no Pistols. No Pistols, no…well, insert your own alternative history.
Meanwhile, Johansen kept working. The Poindexter material. A gig in the house band on Saturday Night Life. The many movie and TV roles. A satellite radio show. Martin Scorsese directed a Showtime doc called Personality: One Night Only came out in 2023.
But in 2020, he was diagnosed with stage four cancer that metastasized into a brain tumor. In November 2024, he fell and broke his back in a couple of place, needed surgery, and remained mostly bedridden. America being America, he fell into financial difficulty over medical bills and his daughter had to launch a fundraiser.
The cancer, however, was too entrench and Johansen died on the afternoon of Friday, February 28, at his home surrounded by his family.
