Which brings us to the Scorsese/Tedeschi film. I didn’t know I could sing a ballad or a love song.” It’s not like I was limited with the Dolls. I appreciate the freedom, but it’s not like I was yearning for it before. From there I took off to be a rock musician. “We all benefitted from it to varying degrees.

We did it to prove something artistically through rock ‘n’ roll. People say the was a failure, because they think that commercially if you don’t make a zillion dollars, you’re a failure. You’ve got to remember: we didn’t come from the school of corporate trust. We were out to be a complete package artistically – an art package. It was like a play in progress that was evolving. They had this machismo thing that they took very seriously.”

In New York everybody loved our first album cover, but we never thought beyond that – that people around the rest of the country would get flipped out by something like that, that it’d offend them. “We were colloquially naive,” Johansen muses, of the Dolls, “like we thought that maybe everybody had a sense of humor like New York. The Dolls were, certainly, a love ‘em or hate ‘em bunch – they’d won Creem magazine’s Readers Poll for Best Band and Worst Band one year – but now he’s now looking at some semblance of mainstream success as a solo act with backing band. Post-show, Johansen, then 29, was sitting with me backstage. The club was packed the set was rocking, uplifting. Slicker than the Dolls, but not too slick and chockablock with a range of songs to the declarative fashion-forward kickoff, “Funky, But Chic,” the paean to the joys of urban life, “Cool Metro” to the witty, lovelorn and resigned “Frenchette.” The latter begins as a ballad, but builds to a rock frenzy, with the singer abandoning the search for real love and downscaling to the cry, “Let’s just dance!” He played most of that album at the show the Dolls’ “Looking for a Kiss” and “Personality Crisis” showed up, too. His solo debut LP (yep, another eponymous one) fit the tenor of the New Wave times perfectly. When Johansen went solo (with band) I caught him in 1979 at Boston’s Paradise club. The Dolls split after two albums, the second titled (not ironically in turned out) In Too Much Too Soon. Fit right in with my Stooges and MC5 records. A Jagger-y looking singer, an androgynous glam band playing hard rock that foreshadowed the punk rock wave to come. An audio tale of what the alluring grit and grime of the big city might be. Thus, the chances of the Dolls coming anywhere near me to play (Maine) was nil and even if they did, like I said, I was a teenager, i.e., underage, not fit for clubland.īut, man, in my bedroom played the shit out of that first album on my crap stereo – rough and raw and naughty and crazed. I wasn’t exactly too young for the New York Dolls – I bought their eponymous debut album as soon as Creem and Rock Scene raved about it – but was a teenager in high school and I did not live in New York. But before we get to the doc, a bit of my backstory with Johansen. Johansen, we believed, was the real deal and Poindexter a fabrication – funny certainly but not a goof or a parody act. And, in the mid-80s Johansen who’d gone quite successfully solo, put his post-Dolls David Johansen Band on hiatus and created this droll, loquacious pompadoured lounge/standards singer named Buster Poindexter.

“Personality Crisis” was the killer lead track off the proto-punk/glam-rocking Dolls’ eponymous 1973 debut album, a band-defining song, you might say. Truth in titling: Personality Crisis: One Night Only is a clear and obvious choice for the Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s documentary about New York Dolls singer David Johansen, up now on Showtime.Ī nice set up and an effective double entendre. Poster art for Personality Crisis: One Night Only (Image: Showtime)

Buster poindexter dolls side by side