The New David Johansen Doc: A Mixed Bag?
Where Martin Scorsese’s anticipated film about the New York Doll goes right…and wrong
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.
A nice set up and an effective double entendre. “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. 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.
I was a fan of both personae. Johansen, we believed, was the real deal and Poindexter a fabrication – funny certainly but not a goof or a parody act. But before we get to the doc, a bit of my backstory with Johansen.
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. 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.
But, man, in my bedroom played the shit out of that first album on my crap stereo – rough and raw and naughty and crazed. An audio tale of what the alluring grit and grime of the big city might be. A Jagger-y looking singer, an androgynous glam band playing hard rock that foreshadowed the punk rock wave to come. Fit right in with my Stooges and MC5 records.
The Dolls split after two albums, the second titled (not ironically in turned out) In Too Much Too Soon. When Johansen went solo (with band) I caught him in 1979 at Boston’s Paradise club. His solo debut LP (yep, another eponymous one) fit the tenor of the New Wave times perfectly. 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. The club was packed; the set was rocking, uplifting.
Post-show, Johansen, then 29, was sitting with me backstage. 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.
“We were colloquially naive,” Johansen muses, of the Dolls, “like we thought that maybe everybody had a sense of humor like New York. 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. They had this machismo thing that they took very seriously.”
“Everybody had a part to play. It was like a play in progress that was evolving. We were out to be a complete package artistically – an art package. You’ve got to remember: we didn’t come from the school of corporate trust. We came from the 14th Street art school. People say the [our band] was a failure, because they think that commercially if you don’t make a zillion dollars, you’re a failure. That’s not where it was at. We did it to prove something artistically through rock ‘n’ roll. It took two albums to do it.
“We all benefitted from it to varying degrees. From there I took off to be a rock musician. I appreciate the freedom [now], but it’s not like I was yearning for it before. I wasn’t aware of it. It’s not like I was limited with the Dolls. I was just, like, learning. I didn’t know I could sing a ballad or a love song.”
Which brings us to the Scorsese/Tedeschi film. The basic idea is that Poindexter has assembled the four-piece The Boys in the Band to back him (one night only) at New York’s Carlyle Club. As he explains, he didn’t want to learn 20 new-to-him classics to cover so he decided he’d cover songs from his Dolls and solo years. This was in January 2020, and no one knew, but the COVID-19 shutdown was just ahead. Interspersed with songs and spoken bits from the show, are flashbacks to the Dolls years – sometimes the old version of the song blends into the new – with Johansen, at 70, ruminating about his upbringing, life and art.
There is, I thought going in, so much potential for this being a wild ride through wild times. Sadly, though I’m always interested in what Johansen has to say, it’s more of a slog. I found myself pausing the show at several points to do something else before returning.
This is not quite like Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story – with fact and fiction all scrambled up, nod and a wink to all – but there are both gaps in the narrative and curious choices about what matters and what, evidently, doesn’t. Among the latter: No talk of the Dolls demise – the conflict between Johansen and guitarist Johnny Thunders. (After Johansen achieved some mainstream success around 1981, I was at a Thunders gig where he tore into his old band-mate, mocking him with a taunting “David Jo! David Jo!” whine.
Thunders was, of course, fucked up to some degree and cut the set short to go backstage and do what he does. Having done his business, he came back for a sloppy finish.) And what about Malcolm McLaren taking over the Dolls and staging them as red-clad Communist rockers. And, really, the post-Dolls Johansen solo career gets extremely short shrift. (See top of story; I mean he and the band were aces. You don’t hear or see that here.)
There are sporadic jolts, but there are certainly things revealed that I didn’t know, but there’s an overall tonal flatness to the film, both in Johansen’s sometimes rambling recollections on stage and in the sameness of the song treatments at the Carlyle.
And, fuck it, might as well say it: There’s that goddamn Morrissey. Yes, the one-time teenage founder of the Dolls fan club in England and the guy who got the remnants of the Dolls back together to play at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2004 for the Meltdown Festival … which led to the reanimated group touring through 2011. Morrissey pops up to moan about the dark rock ‘n’ roll days of 1973 – “no sense of danger” – and rhapsodizes about how the Dolls were intelligent, wicked and violent “and most pop stars are not.”
Johansen wryly notes Morrissey is “kind of a Gloomy Gertie but he loved him some Dolls and still does.”
There are some good bits, one of them being Johansen’s theory that the Dolls “were such a shock troop battalion but had rhythm and blues roots.” Duly noted, not wrong. He how dispiriting it was to be packaged on hockey arena tours with Pat Benatar – nothing against her, he says, but the audience looking at them as if they were bugs. He notes the wry agony of Buster being termed a one-hit wonder on VH1 (as had been Johansen) for scoring with “Hot, Hot, Hot,” aka “the bane of my existence.”
In Facebook land after the screening, guitarist Scott Severin chimed in. Severin was a friend of Johansen’s back in the day, as said on a post, “he was the closest friend of mine to ever become a ‘rock star.’” They met when Severin was about 15.
“It’s hard for me to critically evaluate the music from a guy that l partied HARD with for the 2nd half of the 80’s,” Severin wrote. “More than once, he and l stumbled home at noon, wired to the gills, after a night and morning at Tramps, or the titty bar, or that weird after-hours illegal gambling joint/coke den on 53rd and 3rd. Many cocktails, many faux pas, and more shenanigans than we had any right to survive.”
We all knew about the Dolls and decadence, the drug-related deaths of drummer Billy Murcia and of course Thunders. Johansen, we didn’t know so much about his wild side and we don’t get that here either. Perhaps the fact that his step-daughter, Leah Hennessey, is the main interviewer is a reason for that.
Hennessey told Cultured magazine that as the cabaret performance was filmed right before the pandemic, “it was really only starting to find its form during lockdown. I was the only person my parents were seeing, and I think that’s what gave [Martin] the idea to have me start filming. Initially we just talked about using my interviews as research, but, as I kept shooting, David started to open up a little, and the rather intimate footage became a throughline in the film.”
Hennessy and (then) Scorsese and Tedeschi gave Johansen a lot of room to roam. And while some of it’s illuminative and entertaining, other parts should have been cutting room floor material. One of the best bits, though, is learning Johansen had movie star aspirations and auditioned for Milos Forman’s Hair. Forman and advisor Twyla Tharp liked his audition, but he was rejected by composer Galt McDermott.
Severin had some gripes, most of which I agree with (some grammar corrected).
“The original Banshees of Blue (the Poindexter band) are never mentioned, and are only shown on screen for about five seconds. Likewise, the post-Dolls David Johansen Band,” he writes. “The music? There was something extremely incongruous about a 73-year-old man playing punk rock in a thousand-dollar tux, in possibly the most expensive nightclub in NYC. But ‘Personality Crisis’ (the tune) still sounded amazing after all these years. But with the exception of ‘Frenchette.’ which l still cover periodically, the post Dolls stuff, and especially the Dolls reunion material, has neither aged well, nor did it translate all that well in this context.
“So, a mixed bag. David was and remains and extremely gifted entertainer, with a strange combination of a genuine old school rock-n-roller, and enough borscht belt schtick for three acts. He seems to be happy with [his wife] Mara, and has the luxury of only working when he wants to. I’m sure the consultants fee he received will keep his Woodstock home and garden well stocked.”
VIDEO: Personality Crisis: One Night Only trailer
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