A Man for All Swingin’ Seasons : The high-haired alter ego of definitively New York rocker David Johansen, : Buster Poindexter doesn’t quite fit into any neat music category but he’s got a timeless quality that makes him . . .

Buster Poindexter is bidding adieu to a publicist from MTV Networks in the lobby of his Westwood hotel.

“Thanks, honeybunch,” he coos in a sub-basso profundo rasp. “Don’t get that brain thing from that cellular phone.” He waits till she’s out of earshot to add, “L.A. people--you see ‘em coming when you’re driving, it’s like, holy (expletive), that guy’s on the phone!”

With his Brooklynese dialect and his anti-automatic-dialing bias, Poindexter is definitely not of Los Angeles, and not really of this cellular world as we know it. He is, of course, the high-haired alter ego of definitively New York rocker David Johansen, a seemingly time-transported character created to bridge the gap between swing time and the swine era.

Poindexter’s swaggeringly arch timelessness seems to carry an intergenerational appeal--which may explain why he was chosen as the sole artist to perform Saturday afternoon at the local opening ceremony for the World Cup soccer games at the Rose Bowl, a prominent gig that follows hot on the heels of his Palace show tonight.

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When the character shares an anecdote, it’s usually apocryphal and impossibly anachronistic, like the story he likes to tell about the time he and reggae singer Eek-a-Mouse and Noel Coward had a swell night out together. Not at all contemporary, but not quite conceived as a time-capsule character, either, Buster Poindexter represents some kind of nostalgic post-modernism, maybe.

“You mean like as opposed to prima donna, like post-Madonna?” he offers in response. “I’m no prima donna, that’s for sure. No, I don’t know much about contemporary-ism, if you want to know the truth.”

He pauses to gather up ironic momentum.

“I hear they’re doing some marvelous things, the young people, these days,” he adds, like a real Rat Packer.

Pompadoured Poindexter hasn’t had much chance to impress the kids lately, nor has his floppier-banged real-life doppelganger. Johansen first came to cult stardom as the lead singer of the New York Dolls in the mid-’70s. After that seminal glam band flamed out, he went on to a solo career under his own name, but never had a radio hit till he struck with “Hot Hot Hot” under the Buster nom de plume in 1987.

But, not surprisingly, perhaps, follow-up hits have been slow in coming for Poindexter, whose “pre-Hays Code” bop doesn’t exactly lend itself to house remixes.

He has a new recording contract and a new album out, but isn’t kidding himself about the prospects of a novelty record gliding into the mainstream again. That’s why he’s doing “a cross-promotional kind of deal,” hosting a new weekly series for cable network VH-1 called “Buster’s Happy Hour,” which also happens to be the name of the album.

The series--a half-hour mixture of Poindexter’s singing and guest comedians’ riffing--premieres June 24 on the music-video network, and Poindexter hopes it will help build interest in his album, which may have a hard time getting radio airplay.

The set at the former Chevy Chase Theatre in Hollywood, as newly decorated for Poindexter’s show, looks terrific, capturing a sort of elegant Cocoanut Grove vibe. The previous evening’s taping had the host hosting, trading quips at the faux bar with a faux waitress and bartender and introducing comics, but not jumping in with any jive tunes due to laryngitis.

“I coulda sang last night, but I woulda sounded like crap, and the only reason I’m doing this show is to promote this unpromotable record.

“It’s just totally my trip,” he says of the disc, on the Rhino subsidiary Forward Records. “I mean, who’s gonna play this record?”

Who indeed? Public radio? He scoffs at the thought. And not likely Top 40--not when nearly all the tunes come from the late ‘40s and very early ‘50s, the most recent of the vintage being “Rocket 88,” which, he notes, some musicologists consider the first rock ‘n’ roll song.

And the beginning of the rock era is pretty much the cutoff point for what Poindexter goes back to as his musical source material, though his brand of stage patter--which is filled with rousingly delivered non sequiturs--is as close to the modern tone of Janeane Garofolo (one of the hot young comics appearing on “Buster’s Happy Hour”) as to Jackie Gleason.

Poindexter has been a fixture on the New York club scene over the last decade, often doing shows on a weekly basis at the Bottom Line, while rarely taking his 12-piece big band out on the road because the sheer size of the combo makes for grievous touring economics.

Recently, as part of a Bottom Line anniversary celebration, Johansen put together a different band, wrote some new material in an Americana-ish vein and actually performed four shows as David Johansen, which he hadn’t done in about a decade.

Though his deal with Forward/ Rhino is for three albums, he does have a clause that allows him to make albums under his real name elsewhere should he choose to again. Can he emerge from behind his now-better-known alter ego and have at least a dual career again?

“I tell ya, I had a lot of fun,” he allows about the shows as Johansen, “but it was a lot of work, because I put together a whole new band in a whole new style of music for me, kind of Americana; we had pedal steels and banjos and mandolins and stuff like that. I’m good friends with (folk singer) Bill Morrissey, and he turned me onto a lot of (rootsy) stuff. I got a band there--we rehearsed like, Jesus, three or four times. So I might do it a couple more times and see if there’s any interest in it.”

Not that he’s resented Poindexter’s effectively eclipsing the real him in the public eye. “I’ll take it any way I can get it, I think,” Johansen says. “I think Buster has a more universal appeal. I don’t know about now; I’m probably back to square one,” he admits, with admirable cynicism. “But the Johansen thing and the Dolls thing and all that was kinda for the hip kids, you know.

“The whole idea of this record is to play at parties. Say you’re a flustered yup and you’ve got too much on your mind and you’re gonna have a party. You can just kick up that record and you’re in business.”