DAVID JOHANSEN
(1950 - 2025)MUSIC ::: PUNK ::: NEW WAVE :::

David Johansen emerged from the wreckage of late-1960s New York as one of the great shape-shifters of American music—a singer who treated identity itself as performance art. As the frontman of the New York Dolls, Johansen helped detonate punk before it had a name, combining glam excess, streetwise humor, and ragged rock & roll into something both dangerous and absurd. The Dolls weren’t polished revolutionaries; they were beautiful disasters, channeling Chuck Berry, girl-group melodrama, and downtown sleaze into a sound that rewired the future of rock.

After the Dolls imploded, Johansen did something even more radical: he refused to become a nostalgia act. Instead, he reinvented himself as Buster Poindexter, a tuxedoed lounge lizard with a pompadour and a wink, crooning jump blues, calypso, and novelty standards with ironic sincerity. What looked like a joke was actually a deep act of cultural archaeology—Johansen reclaiming pre-rock American music and proving that camp, tradition, and danger could coexist. Buster wasn’t an escape from punk; he was punk’s afterlife.

Threaded through all of this was the Mercer Arts Center, the doomed Lower East Side performance complex where the New York Dolls honed their chaos in the early 1970s. The Mercer—part theater, part rock incubator—collapsed literally and symbolically in 1973, taking with it an entire downtown ecosystem of artists, actors, and musicians. Johansen survived the collapse and carried that fractured spirit forward for decades, becoming a living bridge between vaudeville, glam, punk, and American song. Few artists have embodied New York’s talent for self-reinvention so completely—or so joyfully.