F*** you, New York Dolls! Especially you, Buster Poindexter!

So I check into my hotel today on a road trip, and I notice the dude checking in at the terminal beside me isn't your usual Millennium Hotel client. He looked like he was there to score heroin.

At first I'm like, who fused Rikki Rockett and Perry Ferrell? I couldn't place it.

It took a check of the wonderful hotel literature to see that the New York Dolls were playing tonight where I'm at. The man checking in was Sylvain Sylvain, who along with Dave "Buster Poindexter" Johansen, is one of the original New York Dolls still in the band.

I overhear him asking about how late the hotel bar was open. Fuck yeah! I'm drinking with a cross-dressing seminal glam band, with a lead singer who sold out about as extremely as one could, not to mention his cinema-changing role in Scrooged!

So after my game, I mosey down to the hotel bar (despite having work to do) and wait for my brush with rock dinosaur-dom greatness.

But they never showed. The only folks in the bar was some Southwest Airlines flight crew, remarking on their ugliest attendants' fake breasts. It had two beers and went back to my room, crying out to Johnny Thunders, why, Johnny, why?

Eat a dick, New York Dolls! I had at least $10 in my wallet devoted to getting you plastered. Buncha Roxy Music ripoffs anyway!

As for you, Buster Poindexter, I HATED Hot! Hot! Hot! There I said it! I know it's universally beloved right up there with Hey Jude, but I no likey, OK, Andy Rodgynous!

Incidentally, I'm temporarily bubbler.exe because a virus took out my usual laptop. Carry on.

 

In Nashville?

 

I can tell you that of all the screen names I expected to see tonight, bubbler.exe was just about last on the list.

 

You're infected, bitch!

 

This is quite clearly an obvious grab for newbie of the year.

 

I don't give two shits about winning newbie of the year. bubbler.exe dies as soon as this road trip is kaput.

Right now, my mind is trying to wrap itself around the fact that Buster Poindexter is probably getting mad ass in the same building as I.

Meanwhile I'm posting on SJ and watching the Weather Channel. But I will proceed to tear this hotel down ... if I don't fall asleep.

 

All well and good but what happens if something incredible happens on this road trip? Like what if you shoot heroin with Buster Poindexter then wake up in a bathtub bloodied and next to a dead, naked, shit-all-over-his-mouth Buster? Are you going to use it under the new moniker, in order to get it some exposure--you know, like ESPN sending Keith Olbermann over to espn2 in 1993--or are you going to save it for the real bubbler?

This is a real dilemma. It's like the whole freelance vs. full-time thing: Do you save your best efforts for those who don't sign your regular checks?

 

You sound like Dools, getting all verklempt over SJ minutiae.

bubbler.exe won't get many posts as I'll be driving all day tomorrow, but yeah, I suppose if I see the Kentucky blue people or something, I run the risk of posting something oddball.

 

Sadly, you can't put your arms around a memory.

 

The Many Lives Of Bubbler, Part The Twelfth.
You realize, of course, that there is has-been rock star goo al over that hotel now.
Are the Dolls playing the Ryman?

 

In my last non-journalism job while going to school I worked the register at a WaWa where Johansen was a regular. This was in early 1979, not long after the Dolls broke up. Good guy, really, and I'll admit to being something of a fan. Frankie LaRocca (drummer who died about a year and a half ago) also stopped by pretty often, sometimes both of them together. Used to order the rice pudding. Cigarettes, beer and various other things, too, of course, but almost always the rice pudding. The trick with the rice pudding, by the way, is that the more cinammon you put on top, the more people buy it. Sort of like salting the fries at McDonalds.

 

You probably never saw them because their prostates were acting up or they had to make sure to take their teeth out by 12. This "reunion" is despicable. I guess I can't blame them for trying to make a money grab after so much time being influential and poor, but have some dignity! I mean, Johansen grows her hair long again to look glammed up, except he looks like a corpse -- your hair keeps growing for a while after you die, right? And the lead single, "Dance Like a Monkey," is awful, awful, awful.