Johnny Thunders: Last News

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticPunk-rock nostalgia has an oxymoronic quality. Ah, the toasty, cozy good old days…of shooting up in the bathroom at CBGB as the Dead Boys lay waste to Western Civilization onstage! Sid Vicious, we hardly knew ye! Yet the nostalgia for punk, as much of a contradiction as it can seem, has only grown with the decades.

New York Dolls, has died at the age of 75.The news was announced by his daughter Leah Hennessey, who confirmed that he passed away on Friday (February 28) at his home in New York. He had been diagnosed with stage four cancer in 2020.As the singer in the New York Dolls, Johansen was fundamental in the shaping of the aesthetic that would go on to define punk rock, merging elements of glam and hard rock with a distinctively anti-establishment attitude and resonating with an emerging generation of music fans.Born on January 9, 1950, the Staten Island native began his music career with the band The Vagabond Missionaries in the late ‘60s, before forming the Dolls in 1971 with Johnny Thunders, Sylvain Sylvain and Arthur Kane.They released two highly influential studio albums together – ‘New York Dolls’ (1973) and ‘Too Much Too Soon’ (1974) – before splitting in 1976 and not performing together again until 2004.Johansen went on to lead a successful solo career, opening for The Who, before swerving in the late ‘80s into the alter ego Buster Poindexter, a louche lounge singer that performed regularly with the Saturday Night Live band.

Sylvain Sylvain, songwriter and founding guitarist with punk icons the New York Dolls, died Wednesday following a battle with cancer. He was 69.

Tiger King and kidding ourselves that hanging out on House Party wasn’t totally soul-destroying.Meanwhile, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong used his time in quarantine to a do a little crate-digging and share covers of some of the more obscure gems from his record collection, each and every week.