Punk pioneer David Johansen, the famed New York Dolls frontman, died on February 28, 2025. He was 75.
Hitching a ride to a 1978 performance at the Blue Note in Boulder, Johansen sat upright in his seat and grabbed for the car-radio volume dial. “Lookin’ for a Kiss,” one of the New York Dolls’ signature tunes, was being played by an astute disc jockey to celebrate the band’s ex-singer’s arrival. As the song’s power chords faded away three minutes later, Johansen’s expression was one of revelation. “That’s incredible,” he mused. “After five years, that song almost sounds normal!”
After five years, Johansen almost seemed normal, too. After the dissolution of the Dolls, he held back from recording, only to return with a solid album, David Johansen, and a new status among punk and new wave fans.
Nobody was ready for the New York Dolls in the early 1970s. The group exposed a whole new realm of pretentions with their glitter, makeup and androgynous appeal. When the Dolls appeared at Ebbets Field in 1974, Coloradans got a taste of how off-the-wall a bunch of frail New Yorkers could get playing loud, sloppy rock ’n’ roll. Johansen was the band’s bratty leader.
“Back then it was all so innocent—there’d be a place to play, there’d be a crowd, so we’d do a concert,” Johansen recounted. “Our records are considered classic, but the looseness of the recording sessions was responsible for that.”
Eventually, the Dolls failed in their bid for rock stardom and split up after garnering a lot of attention from the rock press as the latest love-’em-or-hate-’em sensations. “It was kind of exhilarating,” Johansen recalled. “It just got to a point where it was limiting each one of us into a role that we were finished with. It came down to whether we were gonna make a third album or not. We decided not to. You get weary after touring for three years. You want to go home and see your mother.”
Although the band never met with any degree of commercial success, it planted the seeds of what became the American punk scene. The Ramones came along afterward and showed kids the form, but it was the Dolls who gave everyone the idea of being different. “We weren’t ahead of our time,” Johansen insisted. “Someone had to break down the barriers and show kids that you didn’t have to be commercial, that you could just go out and do what you felt. We gave a lot of New York bands the chance to get out and play.”
Johansen had survived a bout with demon alcohol and kept in shape with a band featuring old Dolls cohort Sylvain Sylvain on guitar. When the singer decided the time was right to launch his solo career, David Johansen put him back in the limelight. The album, which contained the powerful “Funky but Chic,” showed Johansen hadn’t lost his swagger or street smarts, and it gave him immediate status as an elder statesman of punk.
“It don’t grate on me—I’m kinda proud of it,” he said. “I’m really flattered when kids include me in those categories. Every town has pockets of real aware music fans, like the kids who go to Waxtrax in Denver. I’m glad they’re still with me, because the music has come a long way.”
