David Johansen, punk icon and Buster Poindexter alter ego, dies at 75 | Global News Avenue

David Johansen, a cereal, gravel-voicing singer and the last surviving member of the New York Doll, later performed his camping, affluent self, and Buster Poindexter passed away. He is 75 years old.

A family spokesman told the Associated Press that Jeff Kilgour died Friday at his home in New York City. In early 2025, he suffered from stage 4 cancer and brain tumor.

The New York Doll is the pioneer of punk and band style – ridiculed hair, ladies’ clothes and lots of makeup – inspired the glamour movement that occupied heavy metal in bands like Pussycat and Mötley Crüe a decade later.

“The main thing you want to do when you are an artist is to inspire people, so if you do it successfully, it’s very satisfying.” Johnson told Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2011.

Rolling Stones once called dolls “the mutation of hydrogen”, and Vogue called them “the darling of the city style, struggling with difficulties in Boas and Heels”.

“New York dolls are more than just musicians,” Bill Bentley wrote in “Smithsonian Rock and Roll and Live and Live and Dee.”

The band never achieved commercial success and torn apart by internal conflict and drug addiction, breaking up on two albums in the mid-decade. In 2004, former Smiths lead singer and doll admirer Morrissey convinced Johansen and other surviving members to reunite the Meltdown Festival in England, thus releasing three more studio albums.

In the 1980s, Johansen took on the role of Bombardo-style lounge lizard nemesis Buster Poindexter, who in 1987 single with Kitschy, “Hot, Hot, Hot” (Hot, Hot, Hot).

Johansen is a theme for Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi in 2023 The documentary “Crisis of Personality: Only One Night”, This is a mixed footage of two nights of the ground at Café Carlyle in January 2020, with his career huge and intimate interviews flashbacks.

“I used to think of my voice: ‘What will it sound like? What will happen when I sing this song?’ I will tie a knot for it,” Johansen told the Associated Press in 2023. “In my life, I decided to sing (Expletive). For me, I went on stage, and no matter I was on stage, I was essentially free from my own path.”

David Roger Johansen was born into a large working-class Catholic family on Staten Island, and his father was an insurance salesman. He filled his notebooks with poetry and lyrics when he was young and loved many different music – R&B, Cuban, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding.

Dolls – The final original lineup included guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan – rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol on the lower east side of Manhattan in the early 1970s.

They took the name from a toy hospital in Manhattan and are expected to take over the throne of the Velvet Underground in the early 1970s. But neither did their first two albums—the 1973 “New York Doll” produced by Todd Rundgren, nor “too early, too early,” a year later by Shadow Morton.

“They are definitely a band that keeps eyes and ears,” their review of their debut album in The Rolling Stones introduces their “strange combination of high pop singer trailers and brutal street arrogance.”

Their songs include “Crisis of Personality” (“You got it in the hot time, but now the frustration and heartache are what you get”), “Looking for Kiss” (I need to fix and kiss”) and “Frankenstein” (Is this a crime/Is it you fall in love with Frankenstein?”)

Their radiant look is designed to bring fans with non-judgmental, non-categorical space. “I just want to be very enthusiastic because the way this society is very strict – straightforward, straightforward, gay, vegan, anyway… I just imagine those walls on those walls, there’s a kind of party.”

The Rolling Stone reviewed their second album, calling them “the best hard rock band in America now,” and called Johnson “a talented performer with amazing abilities to bring the characters to life.

In decades, the influence of the doll will be cherished. Rolling Stone will list their debut album of the same name in No. 301 of the 500 greatest albums of all time, writing: “It’s hard to imagine Ramones or Replacements or a thousand other junk bands without them.”

The blonde Chris Stein wrote in Nolan’s biography “In a Trouble” that the doll is “opening a door for the rest of us.” Tommy Lee by Motley Crue Call them early inspiration.

The Los Angeles Times said in 2023: “Johnson is one of those somewhat paradoxical singers, technically better and more versatile than his voice.

The doll that represents Locke’s most slutty is split. In 1973, they won the CREEM Magazine Poll category, the best and worst new group of the year. They were nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but never entered.

“The doll’s dirty angel face opens the box, usually reserved for Pandora, and releases the baby rage that will grow into punk,” Nina Antonia wrote in the book. “It seems like the band isn’t enough, they also waste sexual boundaries, waving flashes, and setting new standards for rock music.”

By the end of their first run, the doll has Legendary facilitator Malcolm McLarenand later he would introduce the doll’s music to the sex pistol. Cultural critic Greil Marcus wrote in Lipstick Traces: Secret History of the Twentieth Century that the doll played some of his music and he couldn’t believe how bad they were.

“They were so bad, suddenly I started to realize, ‘I was laughing, I was chatting with these guys, I was watching them, I was laughing with them; I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer worried about whether you could play well,'” “I was impressed by the dolls. There were other things. Some wonderful things. How bad I thought they were.”

After the first demise of the doll, Johansen formed his own team, the band David Johansen, and then reinvented himself in the 1980s to become Buster Poindexter.

With his passion for blues and arcane American folk music, Johnson also formed the Harry Smiths group and performed the world with Hubert Sumlin and Levon Helm. He also hosted the weekly radio show “The Mansion of Fun” on Sirius XM and painted it.

His wife, Mara Hennessey, and stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey, survived.