POP MUSIC REVIEW : Buster Poindexter Toasts His Martini Image in Roxy Show

It’s tempting to convict Buster Poindexter for being the embodiment of rampant yuppie-ism.

When he was the New York Dolls’ singer David Johansen in the early-’70s, he was rock ‘n’ roll’s prime subversive. Now he’s traded in the mascara and the gender sabotage and the defiantly rowdy music for a silly name, a tux, a martini glass and a nostalgic song bag whose quaint charm is matched only by its irrelevance.

Why hang Poindexter high as a symbol of retreat, complacency and discarded ideals when there are worse offenders around? Probably because the magnitude of his cultural crimes appears exaggerated when you contrast the triviality of his current shtick with the power of his old Dolls stance.

When Johansen junked his faltering solo rock ‘n’ roll career a few years ago and became the lounge lizard Buster Poindexter, New York really went for it. But he doesn’t figure to prosper in less enlightened burgs--at least with the show he unveiled Tuesday at the Roxy.

For quite a while, the rubber-faced singer and his nine-piece band didn’t add any flash, splash or brightness to his array of rhythm and blues, soul and tropical sounds. Little of Poindexter’s abundant natural charm was able to work its way through the slickly rehearsed and calculated performance.

The songs that work best on his recently released debut album are the wiggy numbers that tap his broad, cartoonish personality--things like the big-band novelty “Screwy Music” and Leiber & Stoller’s jivy “Whadaya Want.”

But for the heart of the set, he resisted the novelty aspect of his gig, instead trying to make points as a fairly conventional blues and R&B; interpreter. That’s not his strong suit, especially when he picks chestnuts like “House of the Rising Sun” and “Hit the Road Jack.”

As a singer, Poindexter’s signature is a blaring energy--he doesn’t have a lot of touch or range. That’s one reason he has a hard time making the crucial jump from the novelty wavelength to something truly touching, the way Tom Waits, Kid Creole and Dave Alvin--all of whom mine similar musical eras--can.

Poindexter came closest on “Heart of Gold,” the tough ballad from his Johansen days that serves as his soul-baring coda, a sort of “My Way” that sheds a compassionate light on everything that’s come before. He shouldn’t save it for his third encore.

As it neared its end, Poindexter’s set loosened up, becoming interesting and unpredictable. There was one of your more inventive drum solos (resulting in at least one shattered martini glass), and finally Poindexter’s long monologue about a memorable afternoon in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, with Noel Coward and reggae singer Eek-a-Mouse.

Poindexter was suddenly a Bowery Boy version of Jackie Mason, showing a gift for storytelling and a myth-making instinct that he hadn’t as a singer. The tale cast a benign spell over the final song (an amiable ragtime trifle about bad beer) and the subsequent encores.

If Poindexter does some serious thinking (or, as he’d say, tinking ) over a serious pitcher of martinis, he might realize that more talk and less of this serious music would be his best bet. “An Evening With Buster Poindexter”? “Late Night With Buster Poindexter”? “Buster’s Playhouse”?

Get those going and people might even forget the New York Dolls.