Buster Poindexter’s Love Affair With the Music of America
David Johansen, who died Friday at the age of 75, will probably remain best known for Act I of his musical career, singing lead for the androgynous New York Dolls in the early 1970s. Few who saw the Dolls commandeer a stage would argue otherwise.
The Dolls weren’t the first act to dress up on stage — a few blocks north, the Apollo’s Jewel Box Revue had done it for years — but they still challenged more than a handful of norms in the macho rock ’n’ roll game.
Beyond the lipstick and the teased hair, the band’s raw rock ’n’ roll provided an unsubtle alternative to the mellow pop of the early ’70s. Johansen himself shared not only a narrow, craggy face with Mick Jagger, but more than a little of his stage charisma.
Also like Mick, Johansen was in the game to stay, and his Act III, the decade he spent as Buster Poindexter, took him in many ways on an even bolder musical exploration.
The Dolls had always interspersed their own songs (“Personality Crisis,” “Looking for a Kiss,” “Trash,” etc.) with often obscure and wonderful earlier rock ’n’ roll songs like “Stranded in the Jungle,” the 1956 Jayhawks cliffhanger about a man who finds himself the intended entrée at a cannibal dinner.
The Dolls broke up in 1976 and after Johansen spent the next decade working under his own name (Act II), he developed Buster Poindexter, a bottomless repository of American popular music stylishly dressed as a suave lounge singer. This time the hairspray produced only a well-coiffed pompadour.
“Buster Poindexter is very much me,” Johansen said in a 1987 interview, soon after the release of Buster’s self-titled first album. “But it is a character. You get social consciousness from him, but on a more sophisticated level. You don’t have to spell it out. Plus I can step out and swing. It’s refreshing. You get more bang for your buck with a character.”
You certainly got more music for your buck. Buster’s sets would include Dolls’s material and some of Johansen’s later songs, like “Heart Of Gold” or “Funky But Chic,” but then he would break into Bo Diddley’s “Pills,” or Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” or Bessie Smith’s “Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer.”
Or, if those sound too mainstream, maybe he’d croon the 1946 Basin Street Boys ballad “I Sold My Heart to the Junk Man.”
Great song. Probably not on everyone’s Walkman.
Working on a Budweiser and smoking Winston Lights, Johansen explained that dusting off the forgotten and semi-forgotten good stuff was mission accomplished for Buster Poindexter.
“American intellectuals kick themselves in the ass and say, ‘Oh, we don’t have a Sistine Chapel or a Louvre’,” he said. “But we have an ethnic culture to be celebrated. I want to celebrate Americana.
“I want to do all kinds of albums. I want to do a ballads album, a Soca album, an album of drinking songs. I’d like to do a Gershwin album. I could do a Perry Como album. I’d like to do a children’s album of Stephen Foster songs.”
With the whole history of American music out there, he mused, his only limitation was that he wouldn’t have time to get to them all. “My favorite music is R&B,” he said, “but there are hundreds of other songs in my head, some of them for 20 years. Like Bing Crosby in ‘High Society.’ In a show I might do the Kinks, Big Maybelle and Wynonie Harris. One Sunday I was listening to Norm N. Nite on WCBS-FM, and while I was doing the dishes, [the Jive Bombers’s] ‘Bad Boy’ came on. I realized there’s a song for Buster Poindexter.
Buster, and later Johansen back under his own name, worked his way through an admirable chunk of those songs. From Ray Charles, whom he called his “hero,” he picked up “Hit the Road, Jack” and “Mess Around.” He plucked a great vocal group ballad, the Charts’s “Deserie,” from the late-‘50s streets of New York. He would do a show with a dozen versions of old-time blues, from Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me To Talking” to Jim Jackson’s “Old Dog Blue” to Mississippi John Hurt and Blind Lemon Jefferson. After he was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2020, he would close some of his shows by singing the incredibly obscure blueswoman Geeshie Wiley’s 1930 tune “Last Kind Words Blues” before finishing with his own “Ain’t Got No Death To Die.”
Plucking vintage songs from American music’s misty past was also just the first part of the challenge, Johansen said. The second was to keep them from sounding like museum pieces, which he said started with finding musicians who understood their spirit. Buster’s first album featured, among others, the Uptown Horns, bassist Tony Garnier and violinist Soozie Tyrell. Backup vocalists included Patti Scialfa.
And then the singer has to get it right.
“When you sing, there’s always something coming up,” he said. “As a singer/entertainer, a zillion things go through your mind all the time. You always have three choices to make, and a millisecond to make them.”
Unsurprisingly, he said he enjoyed that challenge. He also said he wouldn’t have wanted his performance career to play out anywhere other than the Dolls, David Johansen and Buster Poindexter took it: in modest-sized friendly places. He only cracked the pop mainstream once, with Buster’s Soca remake “Hot Hot Hot” in 1988, and he said even that mid-level success reminded him of a music world he didn’t want to live in.
“We opened for the Who [in 1982],” he said. “We played football stadiums. You looked out and you saw the kids’ eyeballs popping out. They were hosing them down with water. I don’t know how the kids do it. I was thinking, there but for the grace of God go I.
“I like to put people in a nice room where they can relax. I like playing Tramps, the Bottom Line. I could imagine playing Radio City. We did one show at the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware. It’s a beautiful old rococo opera house. I just sat on the stage and I was in heaven. There are places like that all over the country.”
Not that he wanted to spend his life going all over the country.
“For 10 years I did 250 nights a year,” he said. “That’s no way to live. You need a balance. Now it’s more like two, three weeks out and then two weeks at home.”
By home, he meant New York. He lived and died on Staten Island, without ambivalence. Asked in 1987 if he would ever go elsewhere, he laughed.
“What are you, nuts?” he said. “Live anywhere but New York?”
Especially, he added, because the feeling was mutual.
“With the Dolls, we owned this town,” he said. “We were revered as practitioners of local culture.
“When I set up the Buster Poindexter thing, I wanted to reclaim my turf.”
There are worse weapons with which to claim turf than the entire catalog of American popular song.
