New York Dolls’ David Johansen’s bizarre alter-ego Buster Poindexter
When identifying the foundational sparks that led to punk’s seismic upheaval in 1977, it’s typically boiled down to The Stooges, MC5, and New York Dolls. Providing the perfect intersection between the city’s trashy glam rock and punk’s raucous urgency, frontman and singer David Johansen’s debauched tales of adolescent sexuality and urban alienation struck a chord with a generation of kids bored of the double-denim seriousness that plagued the charts, this cultural clash coming to head on the band’s infamous appearance on BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test, presenter Bob Harris revealing his cultural disconnect when sniffily accusing them of “mock rock”.
The cover to their eponymous 1973 debut said it all: all five members strung out on a chaise lounge, sharing an easy physical proximity that borders sensual, platforms and beehive hairstyles that straddle glamour and junk, a look of nonchalant indifference, and the pitch-perfect logo of a scrawled lipstick graffiti displayed everything alluring and provocative about this New York gang. Launching the careers of Johansen, Johnny Thunders, and, for a moment, Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane, Todd Rundgren produced New York Dolls was an essential document of their hometown’s societal fringes.
After flirting with communist chic on the follow-up Too Much Too Soon after the advice of a pre-Sex Pistols Malcolm McLaren, the band imploded in 1976 after all the rock cliches hit them at once: drug abuse, creative differences, and inept management. Thunders went on to form The Heartbreakers and Kane, The Killer Kane Band, but Johansen took an entirely different route.
After achieving moderate success with two solo records and work with jazz saxophone player Big Jay McNeely, Joahnsen decided to play dress up again, swapping lippy and wigs for snappy suits and gelled-up hair as the bombastic Martini-swilling Buster Poindexter.
A confounding cartoon creation of a character, Poindexter released his self-titled debut in 1987, a collation of tacky jump blues including a cover of Arrow’s ‘Hot Hot Hot’ which did the rounds on MTV and saw Poindexter feature in the house band for a period on Saturday Night Live.
Alongside Johansen’s novel career success, Kane had hit rock bottom. In the ruins of his failed music career and gnawing envy of the former New York Dolls’ successes, a chance encounter on TV with Johansen’s cameo in Bill Murray’s 1988 comedy Scrooged triggered such a rage of despair he immediately threw himself out a second-story window, affecting his speech up until his death in 2004.
Speaking to Brooklyn Vegan in 2015, Johansen revealed why he’s drawn to his eccentric alter-ego: “The Poindexter thing, though, there’s so many songs that I hear that I wanna sing, and there’s really no place for me to sing them unless I’m making a special kind of show where this is a show where I’m gonna sing whatever I wanna sing, so people don’t come expecting to hear preconceived ideas about what I’m gonna do.”
He divulged further: “It’s a great adjunct in my life because so many people I know who are musicians are not singers mostly because musicians can play in a lot of different bands and do lots of different kinds of music, but singers, a lot of them get stuck in their audience’s expectation of what they’re gonna do.”
