Farewell, David Johansen, the Ultimate New York Doll: He Was Good-Bad But Not Evil

Saying goodbye to New York Dolls frontman David Johansen, whose glam-punk swagger changed rock forever

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Goodbye to David Johansen, the last jet boy standing from the New York Dolls. It wasn’t just his madman energy that helped invent punk rock — it was his warmth and soul. He got a loving send-off in the final weeks of his life, after his daughter Leah Hennessy announced that he was dying of cancer. The news inspired a worldwide outpouring of grief and gratitude. This man was a lifelong personality crisis, preaching his rock & roll gospel that posing and strutting and peacocking through life is not merely fun, it’s a moral duty. “I may be the type who’s just maaaaad about every little thing that I see!” he yelped in “Human Being,” the ultimate New York Dolls anthem, and it’s great that he got one last chance to see how mad the world was about him. 

Johansen started out in the early 1970s as the pioneering glam-punk diva of the New York Dolls, turning heads with his androgynous thrift-store flash, pouting classics like “Personality Crisis” and “Who Are the Mystery Girls?” They were lost boys looking for fun in the urban wasteland, but almost accidentally inventing punk rock. The Dolls worshipped tough New York pop queens like the Ronettes and the Shangri-Las, cosplaying as bad girls and teetering on their high heels. As Johansen told Rolling Stone in 1972, “We like to look 16 and bored shitless.”

The Dolls didn’t last long — they banged out two 1970s albums of high-speed sex-crazed guitar trash, then fell apart. But that’s all they needed to make history. They showed younger bands like the Ramones, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols how it was done — though by the time those bands blew up, the Dolls were already finished. Johansen came on swaggering and sneering like a slutty young Mick Jagger — except full of human warmth, which meant he sounded nothing like Mick Jagger. 

He was the heart of the Dolls, alongside Johnny Thunders’ maniac guitar feedback. He seemed to incarnate the raw emotion and gaudy desire of those old Shangri-Las records — the Dolls loved to cover their 1964 girl-group classic “Give Him A Great Big Kiss,” quoting it in “Looking for a Kiss,” where he announced, “When I say I’m in love, you know I’m in love, L-U-V!” But like the always-wearing-shades outlaw in that song, David Johansen was good-bad, not evil.

The Dolls got their start playing every Tuesday night at NYC’s downtown Mercer Arts Center, in the Oscar Wilde Room. “When we first started playing, we used to wear a lot of blush, more garishness with the eyes,” he says in a 1974 interview, in the documentary All Dolled Up. They quickly drew a hardcore regular crowd as outrageous as the band was, dressing up to act up. “Everybody out there — I could just watch them from the stage and reflect them.”

Johansen grew up on Staten Island, where his father was an opera fanatic. “I know all the operas by heart,” he tells an L.A. fan in the doc. “Would you like to hear some Carmen?” Gangly, effusive, with his rubber grin and lopsided pout, he radiated youthful insolence but also boyish enthusiasm. “We want to make 45s and make a lot of money,” he gushed before they’d even graduated from the Oscar Wilde Room. 

But the outrage they inspired was real. The first time the Dolls played Memphis in 1973, with Iggy Pop, the gig was crawling with cops out to ascertain if the Dolls were technically “female impersonators” (illegal in Memphis at the time). During the encore of “Jet Boy,” a male fan climbed onstage and kissed Johansen on the cheek, triggering a cop riot; Johansen got dragged offstage by police, while blowing kisses to the audience. “A symbol of rock & roll oppression,” he told Rolling Stone’s Random Notes. He spent the night in jail. “They loved me in the cellblock.”

The Dolls might have been straight boys, yet they trashed gender cliches with an inflammatory spirit that drove people crazy. By comparison, even peers like Iggy or Lou Reed were willing to fall back on tough-guy machismo when addressing women, in ways that Johansen had absolutely no use for. He wanted to be the “Bad Girl” as much as he wanted her. He flaunted his pansexual lust in “Trash,” “Jet Boy,” and “Babylon,” while famously dubbing himself “trisexual,” as in “I’ll try anything.” 

The Dolls’ 1973 debut album had one of the era’s most confrontational covers, a genderfuck statement with the band vamping in full makeup. “It was the greatest LP cover that had ever come out,” avant-garde composer Glenn Branca (of all people) proclaimed in the zine Forced Exposure. “With the word ‘New York’ stuck on it—it was the ultimate! And then the music!” When the interviewer dismisses it as just glitter rock, Branca gives a beautifully passionate explanation of what made this band so shocking.“The Dolls were definitely beyond glitter, because I used to go out in my glitter clothes, but I would have bought more than twice before going out like the bass player of the Dolls!…They’d wear yellow pants like my aunt used to wear in the Fifties, yellow clam diggers with the little slits. Those are women’s pants!”

That debut always rips, kicking off with the demented sex howls of “Personality Crisis” (“A-wooooo! Yeah yeah yeah! No no no no no no no no!”), touching down for Johansen’s vulnerable acoustic doo-wop confession, “Lonely Planet Boy.” They’d steal from anywhere—pop harmonies, old-school R&B, Chicago blues, Havana rumba, girl-group romance — with Thunders’ feedback, Syl Sylvain’s rhythm-guitar overdrive, Jerry Nolan’s primal drums, Arthur Kane’s two-string power-thud bass. Unfortunately, the album flopped — not ready for radio airplay in 1973, to say the least. 

The Dolls never wanted to be underground — they saw themselves as a pop band, the ultimate cheap, sexy rock & roll trash. As Richard Hell wrote in 1991, after Johnny Thunders’ drug death, “They were the first group that regarded themselves as stars rather than thinking of themselves as musicians, or writers, or vocalists.” This was especially true for Johansen, the truest pop devotee in the bunch, the one who sang, “I’m blowing my change on the fan magazines with all the Hollywood refugees.” “We want to make 45s and make a lot of money,” he gushed to Rolling Stone before they’d even graduated from the Oscar Wilde Room. “When David Bowie came backstage to see us the other night, he said we had as much energy as six English bands.”

But they made a U.K. splash playing “Jet Boy” on the BBC’s Old Whistle Test, with Johansen chewing gum and clapping his paws and sex-sulking into the camera, a moment as iconic in its way as Bowie doing “Starman” on Top of the Pops. Morrissey saw that performance and immediately started the band’s U.K. fan club. As Kiss’ Ace Frehley said in 1976, “The Dolls were the hottest thing and we always wished we could be the Dolls.” This band epitomized New York cool at a time when it was scarce in the music world. “Marty Scorsese was a fan from the Mercer days,” Johansen told Mojo’s Jon Savage in 2022, “and he told me that when he was shooting Mean Streets, he used to play our record on set, really loud, to get the actors riled up for a fight scene or whatever.”

Their second album, Too Much Too Soon, sold even worse, but it’s got even more heart, with bangers like “It’s Too Late,” “Puss N’ Boots,” and “Who Are the Mystery Girls?,” sneering at prudes and smug scenesters. Good question: “I got that invitation to your Seventies exposé/But how she ever gonna love you when she can’t parlez-vous your francais?” It ends with “Human Being,” a defiant last stand, with Johansen yelling proudly, “If I’m acting like a king/That’s ‘cause I’m a human being/And I want too many things!” For fifty years, it’s been a song that consoles and cheers noisy people facing hard times in a hostile world.

By the Eighties, their albums were impossible to find. As a kid in Boston, I heard “Personality Crisis” on the radio three times, and yes, I remember each time, praying the song wouldn’t end, the way it kept building with Johansen cramming in crazy hooks and cornball jokes and flirty asides. When I went into my local record store and asked about the Dolls, the dude told me, “If you ever see it, grab it.” One night, visiting a friend at Oberlin and crashing on the couch, I got zero sleep because his housemate had the greatest milkcrate vinyl collection I’d ever seen, including the absurdly rare Too Much Too Soon. I taped it on the cheapshit stereo, with X-Ray Spex’s Germfree Adolescents on the other side, a double-whammy tape that totally warped my music obsessions and transformed the rest of my life. (I never even got to meet or thank the housemate — for all I know she might have been Liz Phair?)

After the Dolls, Johansen segued into a solo career, on cult hits like “Funky But Chic,” “Bohemian Love Pad,” and “Frenchette.” Ironically, the Dolls kept getting more influential than ever via Sunset Strip glam-metal bands like Poison or Motley Crue, who’d studied all their movies. When Nikki Sixx hopped the Greyhound bus from Idaho to L.A. to be a rock star, all he brought was his guitar and three cassettes: David Bowie, T. Rex, and the New York Dolls.

Johansen started over with a NYC lounge act as Buster Poindexter, crooning R&B oldies in a tux and pompadour. But he fluked into a bizarre Eighties novelty hit with “Hot Hot Hot,” covering a soca/calypso hit from the great Trinidad singer Arrow. (Not even Arrow’s best song — “Groove Master” was ten times hot-hot-hotter.) In the video, he showed the MTV audience a few Dolls LPs for reference. As Buster, he was all over the 1988 Grammy Awards, mugging with Little Richard and singing doo-wop harmonies with Lou Reed and Dion. He also kept acting, showing up everywhere from Miami Vice to Scrooged to 200 Cigarettes; he’s fabulously creepy alongside Sherilyn Fenn in the 1993 erotic thriller Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel. He started a surprisingly rootsy folk group, the Harry Smiths, growling Rabbit James’ blues classic “James Alley Blues. “I seen better days,” Johansen sang. “But I’m putting up with these.”

Sometimes the Dolls could seem like an albatross for him. He played the Apollo Theater in Harlem, in 2004, opening for lifelong superfan Morrissey, who kept the band’s legend alive during the lean years. Johansen was hilariously bitchy about how much he hated this gig, in an ill-fitting leather jacket, sneering, “You’re a very sophisssss-ticated audience” in between 1970s songs he couldn’t wait to get over with. But the surviving Dolls finally reunited that year, thanks to Morrissey’s sponsorship. Director Greg Whiteley turned the reunion into the documentary New York Doll, from the perspective of bassist Arthur Kane, who rebuilt his life working at a Mormon library. Johansen comes off at first as a prima ballerina, bewildered by Kane’s humble religious devotion, yet their warmth and affection makes it one of the most poignant rock docs ever. Kane died just 22 days after the show; nobody even knew he was sick.

Johansen and Sylvain stuck together for three more New York Dolls albums, doing impeccably entertaining live shows right up to 2011. I’ll never forget seeing them play an in-store gig at Tower Records in the East Village in 2006, so packed that most of us were watching and listening from the sidewalk. My favorite moment: A high-school kid on the corner of 4th and Broadway, hopping up and down with his friends to get a look, asked me, “Hey, which one’s Johnny Thunders?”

“The world wasn’t ready for them,” Morrissey said in 2004. “Often it takes death within a group and then people say, ‘Ah, yes. We do like those people now that they’re not here.’” That didn’t happen with David Johansen. He went out knowing how much the world was grateful to have him. And as long as his songs are playing somewhere, the lonely planet boy will never be far away — always a human being, always wanting too many things.

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