![]() I’ve been playing with the drummer Ray Grappone, and it’s great because I can do shtick with him. Have you been playing with these guys for a long time? I’m considering doing all songs I’ve written, or that have been associated with Johansen or the Dolls. Before a song becomes ensconced it’s gotta go through a couple of hoops for me. Sometimes I’ll sing a song for a night or two and get rid of it and bring it back in a couple of weeks. Sometimes I think, Well, here’s a song that’s a little more well-known, and then I’ll do a little investigation and find out, like, Oh my God, if I do these songs I’m going to be doing Michael Bubl é. Maybe I’ll do one song that I wrote myself, but a lot of the material that I like is fairly obscure. I don’t do original compositions so much. How do you put a show like this together? I couldn’t stop laughing at your show, but then you have these moments when you cover Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” and it’s just so beautiful. We talked with Johansen about his current run at the Carlyle, his thoughts on Martin Scorsese’s upcoming HBO series Vinyl (it takes place the same year the Dolls released their classic self-titled debut, produced by Todd Rundgren), working with Bill Murray, and whether or not New York sucks now. In recent years Poindexter has found a home at the Carlyle, which is also the location of his pal Bill Murray’s latest film with Sofia Coppola, A Very Murray Christmas (Johansen has a small role as a fly-on-the-wall-type barkeep at Bemelmans Bar). He’s a total survivor.”Įver since the early 1970s, when he made a name for himself as the bare-chested, ribbon-tie-wearing, glammed-up front man for the New York Dolls, David Johansen - Poindexter’s offstage name - has found a way to survive by keeping us entertained, whether he’s bringing a calypso tune to the mainstream with “Hot Hot Hot,” wisecracking as the Ghost of Christmas Past in Scrooged, hosting a radio show, or putting a new spin on the lounge lizard thing by way of his Buster Poindexter act. It’s amazing to see performers living in the fickle life of entertainment, where you could die in ten hours after any bad review or bad performance, surviving. Tonight we’re seeing him as he would have been 40 years ago. There aren’t many places in New York City where you can watch Gay Talese and Paul Shaffer join a conga line while John Cameron Mitchell looks on grinning from his seat, but last night’s Buster Poindexter show at the Café Carlyle in Manhattan is one of them. “I’m a Buster Poindexter fan, so I’m not exactly a novice,” Talese told me after the show.
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