New York Dolls’ David Johansen Dies At 75 After Revealing Stage 4 Cancer Diagnosis​on March 1, 2025 at 5:03 pm

David Johansen, the frontman of punk band the New York Dolls, has died. He was 75.

The musician, who also performed under the pseudonym Buster Poindexter, died on Friday at his home in New York City, his daughter Leah Hennessey confirmed to multiple outlets, weeks after revealing his stage 4 cancer diagnosis.

Hennessey announced her father’s diagnosis last month after Johansen’s healthcare left the family with an “increasingly severe financial burden” after he had been in “intensive treatment” for a majority of the past decade.

“Five years ago at the beginning of the pandemic we discovered that David’s cancer had progressed and he had a brain tumor. There have been complications ever since. He’s never made his diagnosis public, as he and my mother Mara are generally very private people, but we feel compelled to share this now, due to the increasingly severe financial burden our family is facing,” she wrote.

Johansen and his pioneering of punk music was explored in the Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi-helmed Personality Crisis: One Night Only, following the lead singer and songwriter through the lens of the influential New York Dolls band, widely acknowledged as one of the first in the genre.

“I only cringed two or three times during this film,” he said of the doc to Deadline at a screening event at the time.

Afterward, he began an eponymous group and reinvented himself in the ’80s as Buster Poindexter. He later formed The Harry Smiths, leaning into his passion for blues and folk music to tour the world. He is also known for a handful of films, like Christmas classic Scrooged with Bill Murray and the Richard Dreyfuss-starring race track comedy Let it Ride.