The reinventions of two unlikely icons

Marianne Faithfull died in January at the age of 78, David Johansen in February at 75. Their paths seldom crossed, but both singers had a knack for self-reinvention that allowed them to survive for decades in a business fueled by short attention spans, and they exerted an influence disproportionate to their sales.

Only three of Faithfull’s 22 studio albums made Billboard’s Top 100. Johansen—whether as a New York Doll, a solo rocker, a blues singer fronting the Harry Smiths, or his pompadoured alter ego Buster Poindexter—only dinged that chart once. They didn’t fare much better singles-wise.

Faithfull scored four Top 40 hits, but she went 0 for 21 after 1965. Johansen liked to joke that he’d been a one-hit wonder twice, but his 1987 cover (as Buster Poindexter) of the soca classic “Hot Hot Hot” stalled at 45 while his 1982 live Animals medley (a minor Mainstream Rock hit) stalled even lower.

Nevertheless, the two became icons, Faithfull because of her eventual triumph over promiscuity, heroin, alcohol, and cocaine, Johansen because of his ability to shape-shift and his ability to survive the mid-1970s implosion of the New York Dolls then, 30 years later, fan the embers into a reasonable facsimile thereof.

The original Dolls were a one-band Big Bang, and Johansen was their face and voice. Music-industry gatekeepers and much of the public reacted with bemused indifference to their then outrageous combination of ear-splitting volume and garish androgyny, but in paving the way for punk, KISS, and ’80s hair metal, they proved seminal.

Faithfull was a shape-shifter too. A gossamer-voiced folk singer in the swinging London of the ’60s, she reemerged in 1979 with a punk edge after years of foundering, years in which she suffered her second and third miscarriages (the first occurred during her affair with Mick Jagger in 1968) and underwent her second, third, and fourth abortions (the first occurred after her 1965 fling with Gene Pitney).

In her final and lengthiest phase, which began in ’85 when she shaped up for good, she matured into a cabaret-­noir pop chanteuse with an increasingly dowager-like demeanor, her fraying delivery a certificate of authenticity.

Johansen had a big, roaring voice that, with subtle modulations, fit every style he embraced. Already battling cancer and a brain tumor, he’d toned down his approach by the time that he was filmed in 2020 (as Buster Poindexter doing a David Johansen revue) at Manhattan’s Café Carlyle for the Martin Scorsese–directed documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only. But his showmanship and joie de vivre remained.

Like Johansen, Faithfull had been a heavy smoker, and she endured various ailments in her later years. Her final album was the 2021 spoken Romantic-poetry project She Walks in Beauty. “Surprised by Joy,” “The Bridge of Sighs,” “So We’ll Go No More a Roving”—almost every poem was a kind of, and an entirely fitting, adieu.