The New Yorker:

As the front man of the New York Dolls, Johansen was instrumental in the genesis of punk in the nineteen-seventies. His solo work was equally audacious.

By Amanda Petrusich

​​This past Friday, the singer David Johansen, perhaps best known as the debauched, preening front man of the New York Dolls, a band essential to the genesis of punk rock in New York City in the nineteen-seventies, died of cancer, at age seventy-five. The Dolls released five studio albums over a thirty-eight-year period, beginning in 1973, with their loose and raunchy Todd Rundgren-produced début, “The New York Dolls.” In “Please Kill Me,” Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s definitive oral history of the scene, Johansen talks about the lawlessness of the band’s earliest days, when they were regular performers at the Mercer Arts Center, a venue on the Lower East Side: “The audiences were pretty depraved,” Johansen said. “We couldn’t come out in three-piece suits and entertain that bunch. They wanted something more for their money. And we were very confrontational. We were very raw.” (Incidentally, the Mercer had to be torn down soon after, when a neighboring hotel collapsed “like a pancake,” per the fire chief—an event that feels indicative of the dereliction and indelicacy of both the punk scene and of downtown New York in the summer of 1973).

Johansen was born on Staten Island, on January 9, 1950. After graduating from high school, he became interested in the provocative countercultural art collectives coalescing around Manhattan, including Andy Warhol’s Factory and Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Johansen helped form the New York Dolls in 1971. Persona was crucial to early punk—it was the cornerstone of the whole chaotic endeavor—and Johansen, who often wore makeup and women’s clothing, could be an audacious showman, carnal and stagy in the spirit of James Brown or Little Richard. In 1973, the Dolls performed a brief set on NBC’s “The Midnight Special,” a variety show that aired on Friday nights after Johnny Carson. I’ve probably watched this particular performance of “Trash,” a single from “The New York Dolls,” several thousand times. Johansen is wearing shiny leather pants, a bangle on each wrist, a wide red belt, a cropped blouse (unbuttoned), and heeled boots. He was twenty-three. Is he chewing gum? Yes, I think so. He plays it cool, all sinew and confidence, hands on his hips.

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