David Johansen Takes Us Inside His ‘Personality Crisis’

At 73, David Johansen has lived many lives—most notably as the lead singer and primary shit-stirrer of the legendary New York Dolls, then as his doppelganger Buster Poindexter, the hard-living, raucous lounge singer who scored an international smash in the mid-1980s with the song “Hot, Hot, Hot.” And yet, many people might only have a cursory knowledge of the music he’s made during his lengthy, legendary career.

Personality Crisis: One Night Only, streaming now on Showtime and directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, aims to rectify that—though its subject remains humble about his trailblazing proto-punk band.

“We played music to the best of our ability and that’s the way it came out,” Johansen casually tells The Daily Beast about the Dolls. “And a lot of people who were fans, they took it as, ‘This is revolutionary! It’s wonderful!’ We didn’t really have any plans like, ‘Let’s have this effect on people,’ or anything like that. We just played.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.