David Johansen - Conspicuous Consumption (Live Chicago '79) (2025)

Born January 9, 1950, in Staten Island, NY, David Johansen joined his first band, the Vagabond Missionaries, in his mid-teens. A tenure with Fast Eddie & the Electric Japs, as well as a brief career as an actor working with Charles Ludlum's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, followed before a club-hopping Johansen met bassist Arthur Kane, who extended an invitation to join his band, Actress. They soon changed their name to the New York Dolls, and the group began building a notorious reputation for their menacing, edgy music, drug-fueled lifestyle, and outrageously campy, drag queen-inspired glam image through a long residency at Manhattan's Mercer Art Center. The buzz behind the Dolls led to a deal with Mercury Records, and although neither their eponymous 1973 debut nor 1974's Too Much Too Soon even cracked the Top 100, the Dolls established an avid and enduring cult following, and their influence on the rise of punk was unmistakable.

The Dolls officially broke up in 1975, although Johansen and guitarist Syl Sylvain continued performing under the group's name for two more years. Finally, in 1977, Johansen entered the recording studio with his new backing band, the Staten Island Boys, to cut his self-titled solo debut; while 1978's David Johansen sold no better than the Dolls' records, it did renew the critics' love affair with the singer and his gritty, soulful voice. With producer Mick Ronson, he returned in 1979 with the R&B-influenced In Style, followed in 1981 by Here Comes the Night, an uneven effort to give him a more commercially viable image. While 1982's concert set Live It Up won some airplay for its medley of the Animals hits "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," "It's My Life," and "Don't Bring Me Down," Johansen was forced to reassess his career when 1984's dance-flavored Sweet Revenge tanked. At the end of 1984, while taking a break from his grinding touring schedule with the Staten Island Boys, he planned a short series of shows where he could indulge his fondness for jump blues, ballads, soca and calypso, and other retro sounds with a small acoustic combo. He created a character for the show, a sharp-suited, highly-pompadoured "ethnomusicologist" named Buster Poindexter, and what was originally planned to be a four-show run became a success that would reshape Johansen's career.

As Poindexter's popularity grew, he began fronting a large band dubbed the Banshees in Blue and building a devoted following on the New York club circuit. In 1987, he issued an LP, Buster Poindexter, which featured the party classic "Hot Hot Hot," an effervescent cover of an obscure 1984 soca hit. In addition to reviving Johansen's career as a musical performer, Buster also renewed his long-dormant acting bug, and he was tapped to co-star in the 1988 features Married to the Mob and Scrooged. The character remained Johansen's focus in subsequent years as well, but while 1989's Buster Goes Berserk was a modest success, 1994's Buster's Happy Hour didn't make much of an impression, and after 1997's Buster's Spanish Rocketship, he began stepping away from the character. Johansen took his love of blues in a different direction with his next project, David Johansen & the Harry Smiths, with the group named for the man who compiled the wildly influential 1952 collection of vintage roots music, Anthology of American Folk Music. The semi-acoustic group would release two albums, 2000's David Johansen & the Harry Smiths and 2002's Shaker.

In 2004, Smiths vocalist Morrissey, who in his youth founded the British New York Dolls fan club, persuaded Johansen and the other surviving Dolls – guitarist Syl Sylvain and bassist Arthur Kane – to stage a reunion show as part of that year's Meltdown Festival, which Morrissey curated. The concert was a major success, and the group was soon inundated with offers for further live work. While Kane died only weeks after the Meltdown concert from undiagnosed leukemia, the resurrected Dolls soldiered on, and in 2006, they issued a studio album of fresh material, One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. The Dolls 2.0 would tour regularly and record two more studio LPs, 2009's 'Cause I Sez So and 2011's Dancing Backward in High Heels, but the group folded again in early 2012.

After the second run of the Dolls ended, Johansen maintained a low profile, taking on occasional acting jobs, hosting a radio show, and contributing to albums by others, including Joe Perry's 2018 release Sweetzerland Manifesto (Johansen co-wrote "Going Crazy" and sang on the track) and 2020's Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex (delivering a swinging take on "Bang a Gong"). After performing a series of cabaret-style shows at New York City's prestigious Café Carlyle, which he described as "Buster Poindexter performing the songs of David Johansen," filmmakers Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi filmed several early 2020 gigs and they became the basis of 2023's Personality Crisis: One Night Only, a documentary that integrated Johansen's Café Carlyle performances with interviews and archive footage offering an overview of his life and career. At the time, Johansen had not revealed to the public that he was being treated for Stage Four cancer which would later travel to his brain. Beyond rare public appearances and his weekly Mansion of Fun radio show, Johansen stayed out of the spotlight in his last years, and in early February 2024, his family launched a crowdfunding campaign to help with his medical and living expenses after he broke his back in a fall. On February 28, 2025, David Johansen, the final surviving member of the New York Dolls, died at the age of 75. © Mark Deming