''You go through periods when you think you`ve heard it all, and then you find whole gold mines of stuff that you never even heard about. Since we`ve been doing the show live, a lot of people, you know, archivists, have come up with tapes and tapes of stuff. ''I started doing it as a hobby, just going through my record collection and taking the songs I really wanted to sing. He began inventing Poindexter two years ago. ''It`s great when you can invent yourself like that,'' Johansen says with a straight face. He tells jokes in highbrow diction and spins free-associative yarns about his Buster upbringing, meeting Liberace and learning songs from Noel Coward in Jamaica. He motions for a sing-along and the next minute the people in the audience yelp in unison, as if they knew the words all along. His eyebrows convey the drama of song, Poindexter style. He starts with a flurry of high camp, mixing Wynonie Harris` ''Good Morning, Judge'' with his original jump-rumba ''Everybody`s Going Cannibal'' and a thick bayou version of ''House of the Rising Sun.'' He bubbles around the stage like a hyperactive Ed Sullivan, at once singer and master of ceremonies. Even in my wildest rock and roll days, people thought of me primarily as an entertainer-the medium isn`t the most important thing to me.'' After about five minutes, the rock audience is having so much fun with Buster that it doesn`t matter they don`t think I`ve abandoned the ship or anything. We didn`t want them to expect a David Johansen show. I do some acting on occasion,” Johansen said.''We did the name change (Poindexter was borrowed from Johansen`s music publishing company) so that when people came in they wouldn`t get hit with this personality crisis or something. I do a lot of stuff - painting and things like that. It’s not like I have some kind of five-year plan. It’s not like anything else.”īeyond his next couple of performances as Buster, Johansen said he couldn’t really predict what he’ll do next. For truth in advertising, the act is not really like the Buster records that we made many years ago. Sometimes we’ll do it, because it’s appropriate, and sometimes we’ll forget to do it. That’s the beauty of it for me as an artist.”īut surely, audiences demand to hear “Hot Hot Hot” every time? But as Buster, I can sing absolutely anything I want at any given moment. If I go and sing as David, I am expected to sing songs that are associated with me. “Any kind of music that there is, pretty much.
Johansen allows that Buster “may have matured” but it’s the material he performs while occupying his alternate identity sings that matters most now. “We’re going out to play at a friend’s party, so we decided to play a couple gigs in San Francisco and Petaluma.” “We rarely venture forth, but this trip to California is just for fun,” he said. I’ve been doing it for about three years in this new incarnation,” Johansen said.Īlthough Johansen certainly has done his share of touring and recording (including two albums as Buster) that’s not really his priority right now. It’s more like a jazz combo, and we do a cabaret act in smaller theaters, nightclubs and hotels around the New York area. “When we came back and gave it a rest, I just started singing as Buster with a different approach than I had formerly.
Most of the Poindexter performances in recent years have been in New York, where Johansen still lives, following a long reunion with the New York Dolls in the early 2000s. Johansen contends that Poindexter is not truly his alter-ego - “It’s just a nickname, really” - but Buster’s videos, including the classic “Hot Hot Hot,” make it clear that Buster is his own man.?Johansen, 67, will bring Buster back to life June 2 at Petaluma’s Mystic Theatre, singing pretty much whatever he feels like singing, which was the motive behind his creation of the Buster persona back in the early ’80s. David Johansen, famed as the front man for the early ’70s cult band the New York Dolls, is a recognizable name and face on his own, but when he sweeps his long hair up into a pompadour, he becomes another guy entirely - tuxedo-clad, martini-sipping Buster Poindexter.
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