New York Dolls with Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears

When the Dolls whipped their first long-player on an unsuspecting world in 1973, they were positively terrifying. Next to the Dolls, the other so-called glam boys who clogged the pages of Creem magazine looked like spoiled children who had just toodled home from ballet class. It was as if they were daring you to call them names and start a fight. They weren’t prep-school dweebs dabbling in drag for the springtime variety show — in the bucket-of-blood rock’n’roll clubs of New York City, if you somehow felt that you had to wear bedroom pumps and a halter top to get your message across, you had better be the best goddamn rock’n’roll band in the world, or get ready to die.