In Tribute: David Johansen

Or how Personality Crisis: One Night Only Made Me Appreciate Buster Poindexter.

I belong to the microgeneration who was introduced to David Johansen as Buster Poindexter so it took me a while to connect that the lounge lizard with a pompadour was the same singer smeared with makeup and sporting platform heels on the cover of New York Dolls.

New York Dolls, the 1973 debut album from Johansen's gang of reprobates, appeared smack dab in the middle of Rolling Stone's 100 Best Albums Of The Last 20 Years issue in 1987, a magazine edition I treated as a bible in high school. I heard "Hot Hot Hot," the fluke hit from Buster Poindexter, long before I tracked down New York Dolls because it was impossible to escape "Hot Hot Hot" in 1988. Television, radio, MTV, movies, commercials—it seemingly was everywhere, forcing frivolity on all unsuspecting passerby. Like many high school freshmen who fancy themselves serious, I found "Hot Hot Hot" profoundly irritating, so I blocked out anything involving Buster Poindexter…but I still bought a New York Dolls album as soon as I found a CD copy of Too Much Too Soon languishing in a cutout bin in a local grocery store.

Growing up in the pre-internet era, it took me a while to connect the dots between David Johansen, lead singer of the shambolic New York Dolls, and Buster Poindexter. From Pumps To Pompadour: The David Johansen Story, a cross-licensed Rhino compilation from 1995, provided a cheat sheet, emphasizing the records he cut between the Dolls and Buster—a period of time when he polished his racket in hopes of snaring a radio hit, eventually finding a home on a nascent MTV. Even with the aid of From Pumps To Pompadour, there didn't seem to be a straight line connecting the Dolls to Buster Poindexter.

Then again, there wasn't much straight about David Johansen's art. Sure, there's the aggressive androgyny of the Dolls—unlike, say, the bricklayers with boas in Slade, the Dolls seemed to enjoy wearing all the dimestore outfits they cobbled together—but his music also bent boundaries. Johansen discovered the transcendent in trash and divined the disreputable in the respectable, a talent evident in every phase of his career.

Maybe this fluidity is the reason he was able to sustain a career in showbiz. Unlike other original members of the New York Dolls, Johansen didn't crash to the ground when the band imploded not long after the release of Too Much Too Soon. He rallied, securing a contract with Columbia offshoot Blue Sky, then doing his damndest to streamline the chaos of the Dolls. Initially, he had the help of his old bandmate Sylvian Sylvian, who helps give 1978's David Johansen a serious kick, but he had good fortune in his collaborators: Mick Ronson co-produced the snappy In Style and Beach Boy associate Blondie Chaplin gave Here Comes The Night a gloss that reflected the mainstream without quite inhabiting it.

It didn't matter how hooky his songs were: if Johansen sang loud rock'n'roll, he stayed at the fringes of the mainstream. His charisma almost overpowered the music: he exaggerated his every move, taking no effort to modulate either his humor or heart. His dramatic instincts served him well on screen and in the guise of Buster Poindexter, a persona designed to entertain. When "Hot Hot Hot" succeeded beyond anybody's imagination, Johansen backed away from his invention, claiming that the song was "the bane of my life" in 2006. At that point, he made a clean break from Buster Poindexter. After recentering himself with his blues project the Harry Smiths, he improbably teamed with Sylvain Sylvain and Arthur Kane to reunite the New York Dolls. Kane died days after the first concert from the revamped Dolls but his bandmates soldiered on. One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This, the title of the first album from the reunited Dolls, suggests Johansen and Sylvain were keenly aware of the fleeting nature of time and the value of perseverance: this moment too shall pass, so celebrate it while it lasts.

That manifesto kept the Dolls alive through two further records—including 'Cause I Sez So, a 2009 reunion with their original producer Todd Rundgren—then Sylvain died in 2021. By that point, Johansen made peace with his Buster Poindexter character, launching the cabaret show Poindexter Sings Johansen. Martin Scorsese used one of those concerts at Café Carlyle as the foundation of Personality Crisis: One Night Only, a 2023 portrait of Johansen. Personality Crisis: One Night Only is one of those documentaries that become more valuable after the passing of its subject. While it doesn't quite convey the cataclysmic energy of those early Dolls shows—a nearly impossible task—it does remove the boundaries separating the artist and personas. Unlike any article I've read or album I've heard, it explains what connects the New York Dolls to Buster Poindexter and beyond, capturing a uniquely American musician who could sense what makes Delta blues and girl group pop equally invigorating.