David Johansen, the frontman of the New York Dolls, is “bedridden and incapacitated,” after a recent fall in which he broke his back and is asking for the public’s help to pay his medical bills. He also shared he’s been battling Stage 4 cancer.
“David is a legend but he’s also my very real, very sick dad,” his daughter Leah Hennessey wrote in an Instagram story on Monday in which she announced she had started a fundraiser with the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, which provides financial assistance to artists struggling with health issues.
The 75-year-old punk icon “has been in intensive treatment for stage 4 cancer for most of the past decade,” Hennessey said on the charity’s site. She explained, “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.”
Johansen fell down the stairs on Thanksgiving and “broke his back in two places,” she said. Despite surgery, he is now “bedridden and incapacitated” and “his illness has progressed exponentially.”
“We’ve been living with my illness for a long time, still having fun, seeing friends and family, carrying on, but this tumble the day after Thanksgiving really brought us to a whole new level of debilitation. This is the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. I’ve never been one to ask for help, but this is an emergency. Thank you,” the singer said in a statement shared with Rolling Stone.
Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi co-directed the 2022 documentary about Johansen, “Personality Crisis: One Night Only.”
The New York Dolls, an all-male punk and glam rock band, were known for wearing make-up and high heels. In the ’80s, Johansen reinvented himself as the lounge lizard character Buster Poindexter, scoring a hit with “Hot Hot Hot.”
He also memorably played a taxi-driving Ghost of Christmas Past opposite Bill Murray’s jaded TV executive in the 1988 holiday comedy “Scrooged.”
