The leader and last living member of the Punk New York Dolls band, David Johansen, died Friday at age 75 at his home in New York, his daughter Leah Hennessey Johansen reported on Saturday, who had announced weeks ago had had been in stage 4, a brain tumor and a back fracture for years. Johanssen was one of the great figures of the aforementioned Proto-Punk style group and acted in films such as The ghosts counteratacan (Richard Donner, 1988).
The musician, David Roger Johansen, was a native of Staten Island (New York) and had turned 75 on January 8 and leaves behind a whole trajectory linked to music, since he began being a teenager in the local band Vagabond Missionary and then joining the New York Dolls in 1971. Two years later his first album would arrive, New York Dollsin which they showed an aesthetic disruptive dressed in drag and with a sound of hard rock and glam pop that served as an ode to a youth with eagerness for freedom. But, although their albums were acclaimed by critics, they did not sell well, and the Dolls became known both for drug addiction and for the wild misuse of some of its members. Among his famous songs are Personality Crisis, Looking for a Kiss y Frankenstein.
The New York Dolls separated in 1976 and Johansen continued acting and launching albums as a soloist, often playing songs from his previous band jointly with his colleague from Grupo Sylvain Sylvain. At the end of the eighties, he renamed the singer Buster Poindexter, as part of a wave of jazz sounds, acting with the band of Saturday Night Live And achieving success with the song Hot Hot Hotcompletely away from the style for which he was known. The New York Dolls met in 2004 with Johansen, Sylvain (who died in 2021) and Arthur Kane (died in 2004), and threw three albums and embarked on several tours. Johansen lavished as an actor in films such as Car 54 Where are you?, At home and Mr. Nannywith Hulk Hogan, as well as in series like Oz. In 2023, Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi directed the documentary One night with David Johansen. By Martin Scorsese, where they portrayed the figure of the musician as a capital piece of the punk and glam movement in the United States.