Personality Crisis

David Johansen and Johnny Thunders wrote "Personality Crisis", the lead track of the debut, 3:41. It was released as a double A-side with "Trash" on Mercury in August 1973 (August 27 by one chronology) and reissued in 1978 by Bellaphon, in 1982 as a Kamera 12-inch and as a See For Miles CD single in 1990; neither the original single nor the reissues charted. An early demo is on Lipstick Killers: The Mercer Street Sessions 1972 (ROIR, 1981). Johansen said in a 2004 Fresh Air interview that the phrase came from Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, where Ludlam used it at a rehearsal and Johansen wrote it down: that's really all I remember about writing the song, and the song came from that.

Richard Buskin's Classic Tracks piece in Sound On Sound in December 2009 gives the studio detail: Studio C on the tenth floor of the Record Plant, a custom Datamix console and a 16-track Ampex MM1000, Marshalls for the guitars and a modified Ampeg B15 for the bass, with Rundgren rarely attending. The band played live together, Thunders's leads were partly overdubbed, Jack Douglas recorded four or five passes and compiled them, Sylvain's piano was miked with a Shure 57 wrapped in foam inside the piano and recorded in mono, and Douglas played cowbell to keep the tempo. He said of Thunders, Johnny never played the same thing twice, and of the band, they had no patience for getting a sound on anything. Douglas calls it his favorite on the album.

Rolling Stone ranked it 267th among the 500 greatest songs in 2004 and 271st in 2010; Far Out calls it one of the most definitive glam-punk tracks of all time. Setlist.fm lists it as the band's most performed song, 157 times as read on one page in October 2026, and as Johansen's most played solo, 64 times. It was also the closing track of his live album Live It Up (1982, recorded in Boston on February 4 and 5). Sonic Youth, with Kim Gordon singing, recorded it in July 1990 for a Sassy magazine promotional 7-inch, then on the 1993 EP Whores Moaning; Teenage Fanclub, with Donna Matthews of Elastica, covered it for the film Velvet Goldmine (1998); Scott Weiland and Todd Rundgren have too. We could not tell whether our upload is the studio take, a live version or a reunion version.