#personality crisis

[dearmistermuse]

Rest in peace David Johansen 🕊️

[chiyone]

DO I WANT TO BE A BOY OR GIRL DO I WANT TO BE A BOY OR GIRL DO I WANT TO BE A BOY OR GIRL DO I WANT TO BE A BOY OR GIRL

[spilladabalia]

Personality Crisis - New York Dolls | The Midnight Special

[punkrockhistory]

51 years ago

Mercury Records released "Personality Crisis" by the New York Dolls as a double A-side single with "Trash" in August 1973

[003n3]

hey I

[myimaginaryradio]

Personality Crisis - New York Dolls

Good morning and happy Sunday.

Happy Sunday 70s. Got a story about David Johansen of the New York Dolls. This goes back almost exactly, to the day, 17 years. Just after my oldest son was born we took him out for the first time. I had to pick up new glasses. We lived in Staten Island ,NY at the time. So we go to Lens Crafters by the mall. My wife and son waited in the car while I went in. So I'm sitting there, no glasses on while they are adjusting and doing whatever it is they do when I hear a voice that made my head turn. I couldn't really see other then a blurry man across the room, but the voice! So I actually leave the store and go out to the car to ask my wife is that is David Johansen. She said, "Who?". Buster Poindexter, she said, "Who?" The cab driver from Scrooged, "Oh... maybe". So I go back inside and before I get my glasses, he was gone. Not a great story, I know, but... So after I get my glasses we decide to go to Bed Bath And Beyond. Who should follow us in but Mr. David Johansen. We ended up shopping with David Johansen and his lady friend. It was so much fun, everything he saw was the most amazing thing he'd ever seen. He freaked out over towels! I don't think he ever really shopped before, seriously. So that's my David Johansen story.

Be Safe Be Kind And Be Awesome

[principiumindividuationis777]

[greensparty]

Remembering David Johansen and Joey Molland

Sad weekend for music fans as we lost two legends. I'm listening to a ton of New York Dolls and Bandfinger this week! Here is my combined remembrance:

Remembering David Johansen 1950-2025

Sad news that singer / actor David Johansen has died at 75. Just a few weeks ago he announced that he had terminal cancer and needed some financial assistance with medical bills and there was an outpouring of support.

He was the singer for seminal early punk pioneers New York Dolls. If you haven’t listened to the band’s 1973 self-titled album, go listen to it right now. It completely laid the ground work for punk and metal that followed. Saddest of that you look at that lineup of NYD and now they are all gone: Johnny Thunders died in 1991, Jerry Nolan died in 1992, Arthur "Killer" Kane died in 2004, Sylvain Sylvain died in 2021 and now Johansen. After the band's initial run until 1975, Johansen began a solo career. He was friends with Aerosmith and Joe Perry played on Johansen's 1978 debut. One song that Steven Tyler was co-writing with Johansen "Sight for Sore Eyes" made its way onto Draw the Line. Great song! They were also intertwined in that Johansen's first wife Cyrinda Fox and he married in 1977 and in 1978, she left him for Steven Tyler (their daughter is Mia Tyler). In the 1980s, Johansen reinvented himself as Buster Poindexter, a swing singer completely different from NYD. He made multiple appearances on SNL and had a hit with "Hot Hot Hot", which gets played at just about ever wedding and bar mitzvah you go to even today, and "Zat You Santa Claus?". In 2004, NYD reunited to the surprise of fans everywhere. In 2004, I attended Little Steven’s Underground Garage Festival at Randall’s Island in NYC and the newly reunited New York Dolls were one of the headliners. It was about two months after bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane had died (check out the documentary about him New York Doll if you haven’t seen it), but the band sounded great. Glad I got to see them with Johansen and Sylvain when I did. The NYD actually put out more albums from the 00s to 10s than they did in the 70s. Kind of cool to see they had a second act.

Johansen and Scorsese in 2023

In the mid-80s, Johansen began a long acting career as well. Beginning with an appearance on Miami Vice, as the Priest in Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob, the Ghost of Christmas Past in Scrooged, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (I can never un-see his final scene in the Cat from Hell segment), 200 Cigarettes, and on A Very Murray Christmas. In 2023, Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi did an excellent documentary about Johansen Personality Crisis: One Night Only, which I included in my Best Documentaries of 2023 list.

The link above is the obit from Hollywood Reporter.

Remembering Joey Molland 1947-2025

Musician Joey Molland has died at 77. He was the singer / guitarist / keyboardist for Badfinger. Much like Johansen and the New York Dolls, Molland was the last of the classic early 70s lineup.

The band started out as The Iveys. Then in 1968, they signed to The Beatles’ record label Apple Records. They were pals with The Beatles and Paul McCartney even collaborated on some of their tunes. Molland joined when they became Badfinger in 1969. Between 1969 and 1972, they had a string of power pop hits: “come and get it”, “no matter what”, “day after day” and of course, “baby blue”. Check out No Dice and Straight Up if you haven't. The band broke up following leader Peter Ham’s suicide in 1975. They’ve reunited here and there since then. Molland started Joey Molland's Badfinger in 1981. I'm kinda kicking myself for having missed seeing him live when I had the chance.

It is also worth noting that in addition to Badfinger, Molland was a part of George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh, played acoustic guitar on Harrison's All Things Must Pass album (check out my review of the 2021 reissue), and he also played on John Lennon's Imagine album too. Not too bad to appear on both Harrison and Lennon's best solo albums!

Molland

In 2013, after Badfinger's "Baby Blue" was featured in the finale of Breaking Bad, I wrote a piece (an early blog piece here) praising Badfinger. To my surprise, Badfinger actually liked that on Facebook! In 2021, I got to review Badfinger's No Matter What - Revisiting the Hits, a re-recording of hits with various guests.

The link above is the obit from Ultimate Classic Rock.

[porcelainsuit]

Frutiger Aqua aero on vegan leather jacket. Available on Depop @personalitycrysis

[rastronomicals]

2:13 AM EST January 7, 2025:

Sonic Youth - "Personality Crisis" From the album Dirty (Deluxe Edition) (April 8, 2003)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

Cover of the New York Dolls song, what took them so long?

[bitter69uk]

“The New York Dolls, unlike Aerosmith, did have the critics on their side. It was the public that never got behind them – perhaps because of their early glam rock image with its unsubtle hints of transvestism. Forgetting that the Stones, too, had been blatantly derivative during their days as a struggling blues band, [Mick] Jagger scornfully observed, “The Dolls are awright if you want a good laugh, but they’re so very camp and silly. I mean, one of them is quite pretty [the one who looked like him, naturally] but he can’t sing” … While fronting the Dolls, David Johansen (the pretty one) patterned himself after the ’69 model Jagger via top hats, floor-length feather boas and a tantalizing bisexual swagger. Johansen threw away his top hats and boas when the band broke up in 1975 … Still, he and the Dolls are credited with inspiring much of the late seventies onslaught of punk and New Wave – setting an example that would influence no less a personage than Jagger himself, who responded to the trend by laying on his own mascara and bad boy burlesque extra thick.”

/ From the book Rock’n’Roll Confidential (1984) by Penny Stallings /  

Still reflecting on the recent death of the last surviving member of the lipstick terrorists The New York Dolls, the flamingly flamboyant, savagely pouting frontman (who later reinvented himself as lounge lizard crooner Buster Poindexter), occasional actor and undisputed architect of punk - David Johansen (9 January 1950 – 28 February 2025). Further reading: in his mammoth 2024 tome The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979), author Jon Savage devotes a chapter to the Dolls – and it’s compulsory reading. Now sing along with me: “When I say I'm in love, you best believe I'm in love, L-U-V …” Pic: Johansen performing with The New York Dolls at Biba's Rainbow Room in London by Ian Dickson, 1973.

[spilladabalia]

New York Dolls - Personality Crisis

[catskewl]

rip David

[weather-still-ferocious]

[myimaginaryradio]

Personality Crisis - New York Dolls

David Johansen graffiti painting on stretched canvas