After about five minutes, the rock audience is having so much fun with Buster that it doesn`t matter they don`t think I`ve abandoned the ship or anything. We didn`t want them to expect a David Johansen show. ''We did the name change (Poindexter was borrowed from Johansen`s music publishing company) so that when people came in they wouldn`t get hit with this personality crisis or something. He just wants everyone to have a good time. Buster doesn`t have a cause-the concerns of the everyday world don`t concern him. ''It`s very much me, sans the social and political feeling. His sole criteria for the showrooms: ''A nice room for the act, where your shoes don`t stick to the floor.''īut is it an act? ''My friend (guitarist) Elliot Murphy says Buster is the real David Johansen,'' he says. The Poindexter show now plays in cities throughout the Northeast. It`s a lucrative one: At the New York Music Awards in March, Johansen-as-Poindexter took an unprecedented seven awards, beating out Luther Vandross for best R&B singer, and veteran lounge-jazz singer Blossom Dearie for best cabaret act. Though the transformation to Poindexter was gradual, the cabaret show has become a full-time job for Johansen, 35. ''I remember one night about a year ago in Cleveland (while in his Johansen mode), I looked up and wondered `Do these kids know what I`m singing about?` It`s just a kind of youth rite now, or something, very humorless.'' ''I just had to get out of the scene with the leather wristbands and the studs,'' he said recently, relaxing during a weeklong Poindexter engagement on a private island near Miami. Buster Poindexter, a lounge lizard with punk rock panache, is reinventing the nightclub act. Louis Blues''-played by a band called the Banshees of Blue. His music is vintage music-''Mack the Knife,'' ''St. Donning a tux and a bouffant in New York clubs like Tramps and the Bottom Line, Johansen becomes Poindexter, snazzy purveyor of mirth and music. He`s hitched his star to an alter-ego, cabaret kingpin Buster Poindexter.