The Martin Scorsese-directed Personality Crisis: One Night Only debuted Friday, April 14th on Showtime.
(For an intro to this blog, please see Ricki’s 50 Years With The New York Dolls from earlier this week.)
Right off the bat, I’ve gotta say that the I feel like the advance press about Personality Crisis (and even the description of the movie on Showtime’s website) was/is inaccurate. The film is hardly a Martin Scorsese-directed documentary about The New York Dolls. It is – as David Johansen describes it himself in the first five minutes of the film – “Buster Poindexter sings the songs of David Johansen.” It’s essentially one live performance from the rather tres chic (meaning hoighty-toighty to this West Side of Columbus, OH. boy) Café Carlyle in Manhattan. Plus the live footage is from January 9th, 2020 (Johansen’s 70th birthday) and I guess has been sitting on Scorsese’s “to-do” shelf since the beginning of the Covid pandemic.
All that being said, it’s pretty fucking great for a die-hard Johansen fan like myself. Interspersed with the Café Carlyle performance are Johansen interview segments from the 70’s right up until 2020, and Johansen is a consummate interviewee and story-teller. (Some of that interview footage is conducted by Johansen’s wife Mara and stepdaugher/filmmaker Leah Hennessey. Scorsese – or co-director David Tedeschi – do none of the interviews.)
Downsides: maybe a third of the Café Carlyle versions of Johansen tunes are unlistenable. For every “Melody” or “Lonely Planet Boy” that are revelatory in Buster Poindexter’s vocal stylings (and the lounge-band tinklings of his “The Boys In The Band Band” backing group) there’s a “Funky But Chic” and (in particular) the song “Personality Crisis” itself that represent a travesty that should never be seen or heard again. Surprisingly, some of the “second-era Dolls incarnation” of 2004-2011 tunes fare the best in the cabaret remakes (“Maimed Happiness” for one) partly because you can finally HEAR Johansen’s brilliant lyrics clearly above the sacred din of the band.
(aside; Sometime after I joined the Watershed road crew in 2005 we fell into a “discussion” of Buster Poindexter that only makes sense if you’ve hung out with six guys in a small van on a nine-hour drive. The Watershed guys – who are 17 years my junior – only became aware of Johansen in his “Hot Hot Hot” incarnation, and so believed that the “One Track Mind” era Johnny Thunders was the heart & soul of The New York Dolls. I was never able to dis-abuse them of that notion and this film is not about to help me do so.)
I guess my biggest question would be, “WHO is this film for?” Unless the viewer has a more-than-passing knowledge of or interest in The New York Dolls or Buster Poindexter I believe they might be left asking, “Why did Martin Scosese make a movie about this guy?” And a pure Martin Scorsese film aficionado would just wonder, “WHO IS this guy, and why is my precious Marty making a movie about him?”
Okay, that’s almost 500 words and I could easily write another 500 and lose our audience completely, so let me just say this; David Johansen is brilliant, and hilarious, and that’s not a combination you get very often. (I don’t recall Albert Einstein having any good one-liners, and I don’t remember Henny Youngman ever expounding on relativity.) The interview segments of this film are priceless. You will learn more about the hip, radical underbelly of New York City in the 1960’s & 70’s (and beyond) than anywhere else now that Lou Reed is gone from our planet.
However, if you’re looking for a documentary about The New York Dolls or David Johansen’s career as a whole (especially his criminally overlooked solo years of the late 1970’s with The Staten Island Boys, which included Watershed’s Epic Records A&R man, Frankie LaRocka on drums) you would be wise to look elsewhere. – Ricki C. / April 19th, 2023.
parting shot; In 2012 I got a call to handle guitar tech duties for a Todd Rundgren appearance at the Midland Theater in Newark, Ohio. There’s an entire blog about it somewhere on Pencil Storm, but here’s a paragraph that sums up my love of and gratitude to The New York Dolls;
At 6:55 pm I walked out onstage to put the “B” guitar on its stand and somebody in the Midland audience yelled out, “HEY, WATERSHED!” I was enormously heartened by that, but couldn’t see the crowd through the stage lights to determine if it was anybody I knew. “What’s a Watershed?” Rundgren asked when I got back to the wings. “It’s the band I roadie for in Columbus,” I replied. Taking this as an opening since he had spoken to me first, I said, “I know I’m not supposed to bother you, but I just wanted to thank you for your production work on the first New York Dolls album. That record changed my life. If it wasn’t for The New York Dolls I would be wearing granny glasses, my hair would be in a white pony-tail hanging halfway down my back and I’d still be listening to Dick’s Picks Grateful Dead records.” Todd Rundgren looked at me and said, “Out of all of the dozens of records I’ve produced and all the music I’ve made, you only want to thank me for the first New York Dolls album?” “Well, yeah, that and your song ‘Couldn’t I Just Tell You,’ that’s a GREAT power-pop tune.”
A LITTLE HISTORY LESSON, IN THREE VIDEOS
(All three of these songs are in the movie, to varying degrees of success.)
THE NEW YORK DOLLS, 1973
THE DAVID JOHANSEN GROUP, 1978
(I question the date on this video; there are two other YouTube clips from this Musikladen program that are listed as 1978.)
THE “21st Century” NEW YORK DOLLS, 2006
(My buddy Kyle & I saw this incarnation of the Dolls in 2006 at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland, and it was killer start to finish.)
Ricki C. is 70 years old and has two drawers full of black rock & roll t-shirts, which he wears incessantly. He also has a hand-tooled leather hippie belt from 1972 that still fits. He has a bad heart and prostate cancer and KNOWS that all of this rock & roll nonsense has to stop someday.
But not yet.