In Memoriam: David Johansen (1950-2025), Part One

The next few days, The ‘Stack goes long for the late New York Dolls singer, in bite-sized chunks.

David Johansen in all his New York Dolls pomp at Biba's Rainbow Room, London, 1973. (📷Pic: Ian Dickson/Shutterstock)

Mama said she saw my picture in the local paper…

DATELINE: MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, SEPTEMBER 21, 1973 — The good sons and daughters of the city that the blues, Sam Phillips, and Elvis Presley built are gathered at Ellis Auditorium South Hall, watching punk rock being invented in real-time.

The bill? Iggy and The Stooges opening, the New York Dolls headlining. Memphis’ mothers and fathers are not pleased.

Maybe it was those album covers. Raw Power displayed Iggy as a sexually ambiguous, silver-tinted Egyptian god in raccoon-eye makeup and black lipstick. New York Dolls presented The Last Proper ‘60s Garage Band as the cross-dressing delinquents the world already feared they were—but they weren’t. They just liked mixing the contents of their girlfriends’ closets and makeup bags with leather, velvet, and spandex, before stomping onto the stages of Mercer Arts Center and Max’s Kansas City.

They knew exactly what they were doing—Dolls singer David Johansen all but admitted it: “When a kid comes in and sees that picture, he’s gonna forget about the Allman Brothers and he’s gonna have to buy it.”

And they knew exactly how much panic they’d inspire. Johansen winked at it, playing the “are they or aren’t they?” game by billing himself as “David Jo Hansen.” But the self-appointed moral watchdogs of Memphis—the ‘Mothers of Memphis’—had been sharpening their pitchforks long before the Dolls rolled into town.

You gotta wonder why the New York Dolls never covered The Barbarians’ garage punk immortal, “Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl?”

As Johansen sipped his coffee en route to Ellis Auditorium, flipping through fire-and-brimstone headlines condemning the Dolls, he smirked. All sound and fury, signifying nothing—just another case of small minds seeing the future and recoiling in fear.

The Dolls’ camp knew this was the best kind of marketing.

“Before they went to Memphis, we were told that the police department and the Mothers Of Memphis felt that this was not a group to be seen—mothers, mind your children, keep them away from the New York Dolls, they are corrupt and evil,” manager Marty Thau recalled to Dolls biographer Nina Antonia. “Naturally, that kind of talk excited every kid in Memphis, and the arena sold out in two minutes. In front of the stage? A line of policemen standing at attention, holding clubs.”

Iggy Pop, in his opening set, couldn’t have gotten arrested if he’d set the cops on fire and tossed the audience into the flames. No sir—those truncheons only started swinging once the Dolls hit the boards.

The breaking point? A local gay kid broke through the police cordon and planted a kiss on Johansen.

For daring to defend the kid as Memphis cops cracked their batons against his skull, Johansen was dragged off in handcuffs—charged with inciting a riot when all he’d really done was refuse to let the law brutalize a fan for loving his band a little too much.

“The cops started beating up the kids and I was trying to make them stop,” Johansen later recalled. “I was saying stuff like, ‘That could be the mayor’s son you’re beating up on!’ and they hauled me away.”

For his trouble, the local Barney Fifes slapped him with lewd public behavior charges. Johansen blew kisses to the audience as Memphis Police slapped on the cuffs.

“I’m sitting in the back of the car in handcuffs, and I’m dressed like—oh, forget it!” Johansen laughed. “You do not want to go to jail in Memphis the way I was dressed. Norma Kamali pants, women’s shoes… Oh God, I’m going to jail!”

They were on Elvis Presley Boulevard when he made one last plea: “You wouldn’t do this to Elvis Presley!”

The cops sneered. “We’d love to get him.”

The guy the Memphis cops got instead of Elvis died at home in NYC on February 28, 2025, at 75, after a decade-long battle with cancer only recently made public.

He had come a mighty long way from Staten Island.

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How To Build A New York Doll

From the Dolls’ 1973 Mercury Records publicity folio:

DAVID JOHANSEN

Real name: David Johansen
Birthplace: West Brighton, Staten Island, NY.
Birthdate: January 9th, 1954 [NOTE: Actually, 1950.]
Function: Vocals, harmonica, gongs
Background: Middle-class Catholic with two brothers and three sisters.
His father an insurance salesman, mother a Dan Berrigan fan.
Previous groups: The Vagabond Missionaries, Fast Eddie & The Electric Japs
Personal points: Youthful Simone Signoret, ‘savoir faire,’ self-elected Dolls spokesman.
Observation: “The boys will hate us but the girls love us. We make the boys…umm, …insecure…”

Born David Roger Johansen in 1950, he grew up in a loud house—six kids, everyone singing, everyone doing the school musicals.

Except him.

“I was in the corner, smoking cigarettes,” he once laughed. "Funny that I’m the one who wound up in show business."

That insurance salesman father was an opera fan who loved to sing. He instilled in his son a love of Maria Callas that lasted his entire life. Callas was frequently among the eclectic fare the junior Johansen spun on his Sirius XM radio show, David Johansen's Mansion of Fun—everything from highlife to zydeco, Duke Ellington to Phil Spector.

A beatnik kid at heart, he spent his teenage years reading too much, thinking too much (both of which later informed the “Poindexter” half of his Buster Poindexter persona), and playing in bands—anywhere with an outlet to plug into.

The setlists? Wilson Pickett. Soul stompers. Raw R&B. No noodling.

By 16, he landed a gig at a St. Mark’s Place junk shop that doubled as a pop-art trinket factory. His job? Punching holes in beer cans to turn them into earrings.

The real magic, though, was downstairs, in a musty basement filled with garish sequined costumes. Johansen was floored. “Wow, what is this stuff?”

Turns out, the shop owner was the costume designer for Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre. Through him, Johansen fell in with the troupe, doing sound, lights, guitar, even carrying a spear when needed.

“Charles taught me a lot about making a show,” Johansen told Perfect Sound Forever’s Jason Gross in 2007.

That experience served him well when he fell in with bassist Arthur Kane, guitarist Johnny Thunders, and the future Dolls.

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Standing on a pole, starting a riot

In late-'60s New York, if you were hip, you paraded around Central Park, dressed to the nines. That’s where Kane first spotted Thunders—flashing Day-Glo corduroy suits and a Rod Stewart rooster-cut on steroids. “I couldn’t figure out where he got his clothes,” Kane later told me. Turns out, Thunders had a secret weapon—his mom and sister, who refashioned women’s pantsuits into his own demented mod-glam Frankenstein looks.

The clothes drew them together. The music sealed the deal.

Guitarist Sylvain Sylvain, another Central Park regular, named them after a toy repair shop: New York Doll Hospital. According to interviews conducted for ace rock photographer Bob Gruen’s NYC public access TV special New York Dolls: Looking For A Kiss, Syl and drummer/childhood friend Billy Murcia played with Thunders on bass in a short-lived band: “They kicked me out because I was a creep,” joked Thunders. “I hated those guys!”

Thunders now playing guitar, the trio jammed with Kane on bass in a basement beneath Rusty’s Bicycle Shop, bashing out garage takes on old R&B cuts. But they needed a voice. Initially, Thunders sang, but fronting and playing lead proved too much. Enter David Johansen, recommended by a mutual friend: “He plays harmonica and everything!”

“I used to wanna be Allen Ginsberg,” Johansen swears in those Looking For A Kiss interviews. “Much more sophisticated.”

“I met David in front of the Gem Spa,” jokes Sylvain, without missing a beat. “He was standing on a pole, starting a riot.”

Johansen showed up at Rusty’s with a notebook full of lyrics—complete with guitar chord diagrams underneath. Kane was baffled. “The funny thing is, he didn’t know how to play the guitar,” Kane told me in a 1997 interview for a Guitar World oral history of the Dolls published in 2005. “Where did this come from? Did someone just scribble ‘A D G B’ on a piece of paper? What happened? I never did ask.”

Among the songs in that notebook? “Looking for a Kiss,” “Bad Girl,” possibly “Personality Crisis.” They thrashed through some chords, and before long, they had eight songs that actually sounded like songs.

Christmas Eve 1971, they debuted at the Endicott Hotel Ballroom—an old welfare hotel. The set? Otis Redding’s “Don’t Mess with Cupid,” Archie Bell & The Drells’ “(There’s Gonna Be A) Showdown,” and their own filthy, fabulous originals. It was barely a real gig, but by May ‘72, they were the hottest thing in town.

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Something must’ve happened over Manhattan

Johansen summed up their ethos: "We were part of the anti-progressive rock thing.”

He sneered to Lenny Kaye that “to go see [Led Zeppelin] would be almost… laborious. Drum solos, bass solos—you’d be out there yelling, ‘Play some fucking music!’”

But before that? Murray The K matinees, where "you’d see Mitch Ryder and Wilson Pickett. They’d come on for six minutes, do three songs, and destroy the place. That was rock ‘n’ roll: Little Richard—bam, bam, bam. We all had that ethic.”

So did the punk rockers who lapped up every note the Dolls played like starving wolves. But we’re jumping too far ahead.

By May 1972, when they first played the Mercer Arts Center, 240 Mercer Street. Dolls standards such as “Personality Crisis,” “Looking For A Kiss,” “Subway Train,” and Bo Diddley's “Pills” were already in place. They were instantly the darling of these strange downtown creatures, teenage stylists flexing new muscles: “Boys and girls of indeterminate gender,” began Rolling Stone writer Tony Glover’s shopping list. “Males with earrings and flashing orange hair, females with ducktails and black leather, interchangeable clothes, makeups and postures, maybe gay, maybe not — and what’s it to ya, mothafuckah?” Two months further, these “mutant children of the hydrogen age” gathered every Tuesday at the Mercer’s Oscar Wilde Room to dance to the Dolls, seeing if they could outdo the band in the outrage department, if not in their fusion of the Stones, The Shangri Las, and the L train.

October 15, 1972: The Dolls landed in London, aiming to generate the same buzz they had in New York—despite lacking a record deal. They recorded demos at Escape Studios before embarking on a short UK run: three dates with Lou Reed (who canceled two after they upstaged him in Liverpool), a one-off at The Speakeasy, and an October 29 opening slot for The Faces at Wembley Pool. Mick Jagger caught them on November 4, opening for Status Quo at Imperial College: “The Dolls are The Pretty Things reincarnated—only prettier.”

Three nights later, as Thau negotiated with Who managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp for a Track Records deal, Murcia passed out at a party, a Mandrax-and-booze cocktail knocking him unconscious. His new British party pals, panicking, tried to wake him up by forcing coffee down his throat. He choked to death instead. The next day, Thau put the band on the first flight home. Wasting no time mourning, the Dolls auditioned drummers, ultimately choosing Gene Krupa devotee Jerry Nolan over future Voidoid/Ramone Marc Bell. With the well-seasoned Nolan onboard, they could take on the world as true rockin’ professionals.

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End Part One

Thank you for bearing with me. Obviously, the New York Dolls are my favorite band (alongside The Clash), and it’s been hard dealing with the death of The Last Doll Standing. I struggled, attempting to corral his rich, extensive life into 1500 words, then 2500, knowing how the internets have truncated attention spans. I finally had to say “fuck it” and go long, chopping the entire piece up into installments. Part Two comes tomorrow.

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