In 1973, the readers of Creem magazine voted New York Dolls the year’s Best New Band. They also voted them the year’s Worst New Band. The poll succinctly captured the polarizing effect of the group’s brief but marked reign over the Lower Manhattan rock scene, a post-Warhol Factory crowd that flocked to gritty gigs at Max’s Kansas City and the Mercer Arts Center. That year, the proto-punk enfants terribles released their self-titled debut and split their niche fanbase into even slimmer factions. There were those who loved the record—including veteran rock critics and Dolls devotees like Robert Christgau and Ellen Willis—and those who felt that the studio environment had sapped their live set and diluted their potent slurry of blues, early rock’n’roll, and girl group melodies.

And then there were the folks who just didn’t like the Dolls to begin with. The press in Memphis clocked their rouged cheeks and platform boots and wrote them off as “faggots.” Beer-swillers in Boston left in droves, marooning the band onstage in the 5,000-capacity Boston Armory. Years after the Dolls’ 1975 falling-out, charismatic frontman David Johansen explained the band’s highly “colloquial” sense of humor, which didn’t translate beyond “St. Mark’s and 2nd.” But punk entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren, who briefly managed the Dolls in their decline, might have summed up the group’s trainwreck charm best in a 2004 op-ed: “They were so, so bad they were brilliant.”

Before they were New York Dolls, the bandmates were outer-borough rogues who joined forces like the various mobs stalking pavement in The Warriors. Queens-born guitarist Johnny Thunders was a high school baseball player who, according to him, was scouted by the Dodgers. But when the pro team demanded he lob off his nest of jagged jet hair, Thunders refused. He dabbled in delinquency, roaming the streets with a petty gang called the 90th Street Fast Boys. Ill-starred drummer Billy Murcia was a Bogotà-to-Queens transplant and Thunders’ classmate. Bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane, a soft-spoken Bronx native who towered over his bandmates, was recruited in part for his imposing look (like a “mutated Marlene Deitrich,” as one critic put it). Sylvain Sylvain, a Queens boy by way of Cairo, replaced the group’s earlier guitarist Rick Rivets, who was booted for fucking off and showing up late to practice.

Johansen, the sole member from Staten Island, was born to a librarian mother and an opera singer-turned-insurance-salesman father. Despite this middle-class milieu, he was a puckish kid, taunting the nuns at his Catholic school, engaging in minor turf warfare by riding his bike into territorial neighborhoods, and sneaking spins of his older brother’s blues and doo-wop singles; the Diablos, Howlin’ Wolf, and Lightnin’ Hopkins were in heavy rotation. By age 17, Johansen had relocated to the East Village and was splitting his time between working at an outré clothing store on St. Mark’s Place and running the sound and lights at Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, an outpost of camp, avant-garde drama that often cast amateur actors in gender-swapped roles. The experience might have influenced Johansen’s streetwalker chic, but by his account, the Dolls were cross-dressing long before they considered forming a band.

Reporters often treated New York Dolls’ tough-chick attire as a calculated aesthetic, but the members had been dressing in at least half-assed drag since high school, snagging blouses from girlfriends, buying nun shoes, and caking on makeup. “We used to pick clothes out of the garbage can,” Johansen said in a 1981 interview with Musician. “We never sat down and planned it.” Among this pack of self-described street kids, platform boots and skinny silk scarves were a signal—a transmission of distaste for Top 40 acts of the era. The Osmonds. John Denver. Bread. This was how Arthur Kane spotted David Johansen—a rangy kid with a poufy coif and Jagger pout—at a screening of Beyond the‬‭ Valley of the Dolls. Before long, Kane and Billy Murcia showed up on Johansen’s doorstep with a proposition to join their band.

Anything about the New York Dolls that seemed theatrical, possibly glamorous, had grubbier origins. Even the name, redolent of matinee idols or sequined Rockettes, was nicked from the New York Doll Hospital—an Upper East Side toy repair shop crammed with disembodied doll heads and severed plastic limbs. At first glance, the Dolls looked like acolytes of David Bowie and T. Rex, and while they were certainly exposed to the glitter bands emerging from England, their own music drew heavily from blues, doo-wop, and 1960s girl groups like the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, and the Crystals. If Bowie and Marc Bolan were celestial waifs beamed in from a distant planet, New York Dolls had both heels planted firmly in a Manhattan gutter—an attitude that distinguished them from every major musical trend at the time.

The Dolls played their first gig at an Upper West Side homeless shelter on Christmas Eve, 1971, but they became known as the unofficial house band at the Mercer Arts Center, a complex of theaters tucked within the Broadway Central Hotel. David Bowie was a frequent attendee at early gigs, and while Lou Reed had publicly tossed the Dolls aside as “cute,” Bowie held them in high esteem. “[Bowie] would turn up at Dolls shows, like, you know, with a notebook!” proto-punk queen Jayne‬‭ County told Mojo in 2006. Whether it was hearsay or gospel, a popular piece of Dolls lore holds that Bowie wrote “Watch That Man” after seeing the band play at the Mercer Arts Center in ’72. One night after a show, Bowie reportedly told Johansen that the Dolls had “as much energy as six English bands.” That comment signaled something bubbling under the surface of the downtown scene—the primordial ooze of punk just beginning to simmer.

In an era when Bee Gees and Carole King were crowning the charts, New York Dolls were proudly streetwise, brassy, and chaotic. Their music was utterly unconceptual; it was primal. They were camp and sloppy in a way audiences at the time didn’t quite appreciate. As Johansen once told NME’s Nick Kent: “We attract only degenerates‬‭ to our concerts… We want to be known as the tackiest boys in New York.”

Live, the Dolls stumbled and banged through their setlist. Thunders thrashed his guitar like a rottweiler gnashing a rabbit, his 8-ball eyes large and black; his stage presence was frightening at a time when “frightening stage presence” was still a liability. Johansen, rubber-limbed and cheeky, was the band’s quotable mouthpiece and wellspring of witty ripostes. As noted in Barney Hoskyns’ 1998 book Glam!, Johansen shocked the British press with his progressive take on sexuality:

Everyone here seems to be…homosexual. Kids are finding‬‭ out there isn’t much difference between them sexually. They’re finding out that the sexual terms—homo, bi,‬‭ hetero—are just words in front of “sexual.” They accuse me of transsexuality because I kissed [second drummer Jerry Nolan], but I love‬‭ Jerry. I think boys should kiss boys, don’t you?

New York Dolls, like the glitter gods before them, were experimenting with gender expression without any pretense or agenda. They weren’t meticulous drag performers like Divine or Jayne County; their trashy takes on the era-defining style of Ronnie Spector or Mary Weiss were instinctual, as was the Dolls’ absorption of the 1960s girl group songbook. Their drag had a communal aspect, too. As Rolling Stone’s Ed McCormack once wrote, “The Dolls pass around a Max Factor lipstick the way some bands pass‬ around a joint.”

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After a year of gigging, New York Dolls had become underground royalty, and record labels were flocking to sign them. But industry interest soured in November 1972, when disaster struck on the band’s first UK tour. After a show supporting the Faces at Wembley Stadium, a 21-year-old Billy Murcia took off for a London house party, where he passed out after reportedly mixing liquor and barbiturates. A woman tried to revive him by putting him in a cold bath and pouring coffee down his throat. He died of accidental asphyxiation.

Immediately after the tragedy, the band returned to New York, where drummer Jerry Nolan replaced Murcia. “Nothing ever happened with the Dolls until shocking things took place. People love scandals,” Sylvain Sylvain told Musician in 1981. “When Billy‬ died, all of a sudden the band was playing the bigger room in the Mercer Arts Center. Instead of the‬ 150-person room, we were playing weekends for 500.” Murcia’s passing would be the first of several untimely and unfortunate deaths, including Thunders and Nolan, both of whom died relatively young after years of heroin addiction. Only Kane, Sylvain, and Johansen would make it past their 50s.

The Dolls’ reputation for debauchery had scared off every label save for Mercury, and when it came time to record their debut, they had almost as much difficulty securing a producer. Bebe Buell had to drag her boyfriend, musician Todd Rundgren, to see them live. Rundgren was already working with hitmakers like Badfinger and Grand Funk Railroad, and he reluctantly signed on to produce the Dolls’ debut. His hesitation only became more justified as recording commenced at the Record Plant on 44th Street. Rundgren likened his role to that of a “circus ringmaster” tasked with keeping the band focused as pals and journalists paraded through. There was an issue of competence; Rundgren had hoped to maintain the hectic thrill of the Dolls’ live performances, but in the studio the band struggled to stay in sync. Nolan’s tempo was unreliable. The musicians plied themselves with booze and grass. Rundgren’s dog reportedly pissed on the mixing console. Worst of all, the Dolls were classic New Yorkers: impatient and pushy.

“The record would have been a lot better had they not got in such a hurry to finish it,” Rundgren divulged in a 1995 interview with Q. “They insisted it was mixed‬‭ in the same studio we were working in…where the only room available to mix in was at the‬‭ top of the building and I always thought the sound was dodgy. Then they insisted on being there when it was‬‭ mixed, which was the worst mistake. They did what was typical for a band: Everyone only hears themselves,‬‭ so everyone’s standing over your shoulder saying they wanted to be louder, and at the end of a mix the faders‬‭ are all at the top of the board.”

After whining at Rundgren and getting their way, the Dolls went on to repeatedly blame him for fucking up the album’s mix. (Johansen later reflected that they’d been “lucky to have someone who could get the‬ band to play all at once.”) In hindsight, the anxiety over the mix feels both earnest and a bit comical: New York Dolls didn’t seize the attention of Lower Manhattan because of their high production values. In fact, fans and critics complained that New York Dolls didn’t sufficiently capture the raw energy of their live sets. If anything, it should have sounded shittier.

Like most artists ahead of their time, New York Dolls were too extreme for mass appeal. Yet their scrappy, street-scuffed rock’n’roll primed downtown crowds for the onslaught of punk bands that would flock to CBGB after the Dolls’ demise. Punk nihilism would hack away at any lingering reverence for Brill Building classics or jukebox standards, but the Dolls didn’t care enough to be nihilistic. Their first album is awash in nostalgia for the music they grew up on; their blushing affection for early rock’n’roll and three-part harmonies has the juvenile charm of an anonymous love letter slipped into a crush’s locker.

“Looking for a Kiss” is the Dolls’ seedy homage to the Shangri-Las’ 1964 single “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” a song that heaped praise on a loveable bad boy. Both tracks commence with that immortal line: “When I say I’m in love, you best believe I’m in love, L-U-V,” a wink at teenage defiance heightened by the throes of forbidden romance. The Dolls take that prompt a tad further; while Mary Weiss swooned over tight pants and dirty fingernails, Johansen roams the streets to score a “fix and a kiss,” letting each word stretch across his tongue as Thunders’ guitar revs and spins out. “Everyone’s going to your house to shoot up in your room,” he sings. (A number of the Dolls had already dabbled with heroin, which was then engulfing the city in an epidemic.) The tension between teenybopper tropes and grimy urban reality is a recurring theme on the album—as if the lyrics in Grease had been re-written by Bukowski.

Hardly any song on New York Dolls doesn’t reference the golden oldies. The swaying ballad “Subway Train” is the Dolls’ most accurate doo-wop impression, with sweet, taffy-pulled backing vocals and a 4/4 snare beat. It is also one of the album’s better mixed tracks; Johansen’s gnarled, snarky vocals actually sound slightly set apart from the instrumental, and Thunders’ guitar is at its most crisp and expressive. The significantly more muddied “Personality Crisis,” the Dolls’ best-known single, kicks off with a flashy piano slide à la Little Richard or the Big Bopper. (While Sylvain Sylvain is also credited on keys, it is likely Rundgren’s agile ragtime on this track.) Even on “Lonely Planet Boy,” a jangly, sax-laden number that feels more akin to Bowie and T. Rex’s cosmic glam, Johansen manages to slip in a breathy reference to Del Shannon’s 1961 hit “Runaway.”

Like so many rock bands of the ’60s and ’70s, the Dolls were heavily indebted to the blues. But their interpretations weren’t studied like the Rolling Stones’ or urgently political like the MC5’s were. The band recognized a raggedness in the blues—its brutal subject matter and unvarnished delivery. “Pills,” the sole cover on New York Dolls, is a fairly straightforward rendition of a 1961 Bo Diddley joint about pain meds and substance abuse. It’s the only cut to feature Johansen on harmonica, ripping a blustery solo at the top. “Pills” is a kind of curio on the album; it nods to Johansen’s lifetime love affair with the blues, which he later performed with backing band the Harry Smiths and as his lounge lizard alter ego, Buster Poindexter. That several members of the Dolls would struggle with addiction up until their untimely deaths gave the song a tragic prescience.

“Trash” and “Jet Boy” are the finest offerings from New York Dolls. Both sound unique to the band—a culmination of its influences, chewed up, swashed with Night Train and spat into the crowd. “Jet Boy” is among the band’s toughest cuts—in a choreographed-knife-fight, West Side Story way. The synchronized claps and burly guitar are sturdy enough to support Johansen’s gristly baritone, and the goofy machismo of it all predated self-serious bands like Aerosmith and Guns N’ Roses, both of whom cited the Dolls as an influence. Hair metal bands quaked at the mere thought of sexual ambiguity; the Dolls had already been there, done that.

Pithy and brash, “Trash” rumbles along to rockabilly rhythm guitar and ghostly “ooh-oohs” that haunt the perimeter. But it’s Thunders’ and Rundgren’s whiny backup vocals—the shrill, drawn-out “traaaaaassssh”—that bristles against the melody and makes it memorable. The song’s punchline borrows from another formative single: Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange.” “How do you call your lover-boy?” Johansen asks, invoking a line from the original. To wit, Thunders hollers back: “Traaaaaassssh!”

Intentionally or not, New York Dolls were recontextualizing their source material for the concrete bohemia. I’m reminded of Johansen’s teenage job selling bizarro fashion at an East Village clothing shop: “We used‬‭ to, like, cut the Budweiser logo off a beer can and then fix it like a pop-art earring,” he told Mojo in 2015. In the same way that transforming literal garbage into jewelry mocks aesthetic valuation, converting rock’n’roll canon into shaggy dispatches from the dirtbag life democratizes the medium.

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Upon release in July 1973, New York Dolls sold roughly 100,000 copies, falling short of band manager Marty Thau’s outsized expectations. Days later, part of the Broadway Central Hotel collapsed, taking the Mercer Arts Center with it. But though American audiences were viciously split on the band, viewers of the British music program The Old Grey Whistle Test were about to undergo conversion. On November 27, New York Dolls took the stage at BBC Television Center in west London, clad in strangulating leather pants, frilled blouses, and perilously high heels. After back-to-back performances of “Looking for a Kiss” and “Jet Boy,” the camera cut to host “Whispering Bob” Harris, known for his gentle voice and proclivity for mellow tunes. “Mock rock,” he tutted after the Dolls wrapped their set. Backstage, Johansen had apparently told the presenter he had “bunny teeth.”

A teenage Morrissey was tuned in, enraptured by the Dolls’ androgyny and belligerence. Eventually, he started a petition protesting Harris’ reaction to the band, and presided over their British fanclub. “I was 13 and it was my first real emotional experience,” Morrissey wrote in a 1981 fanzine he assembled from the Dolls’ press clippings. “The Dolls gave me a sense of uniqueness, as if they were my own personal discovery. Back in ’73 the Dolls were total outcasts, and no-one with any sense even mentioned their name. As it was, I became the only visible proof that someone actually listened to them.”

Paul Cook, future Sex Pistols drummer, was another teenage spectator gobsmacked by the Dolls’ Old Grey Whistle Test performance. “I couldn’t believe it, they was‬‭ just all falling about all over the place, all their hair down, all knocking into each other,” Cook remembered in Fred and Judy Vermorel’s book Sex Pistols: The Inside Story. “They was really funny. And they just didn’t give a shit.” What Cook didn’t yet realize was exactly how significant the band would be for the formation of Sex Pistols; Malcolm McLaren fell in love with the Dolls when they practically ransacked his and Vivienne Westwood’s London clothing boutique, then called Let It Rock.

In McLaren’s telling, after the band’s visit, he replaced rock’n’roll oldies on the in-house jukebox with New York Dolls singles, rechristened the shop “Sex,” and rebranded it as an “emporium of perversity.” The love affair curdled with McLaren’s subsequent attempt at managing the group (the Dolls’ red patent leather “communist” era didn’t fare well amid the ongoing war in Vietnam), and by summer of ’75 the band had dissolved. According to Sylvain Sylvain, McLaren had promised him the lead position in a new group McLaren was assembling in London. Sylvain lent his Les Paul to a guitarist named Steve Jones, who was practicing along to the Dolls’ debut. But Sylvain never made the cut. A young ruffian named Johnny Rotten got the gig instead.

In 2015, following a handful of Dolls reunion shows, Mojo reporter Alan Light asked Johansen if he felt “a kind of justice” in selling out large venues decades after the band’s “commercial disappointment.” Johansen might have focused on the Dolls’ undeniable clout, or counted the punk and hair metal bands they’d inspired. He might have heaped the blame on a dim audience, or heroin, or Malcolm McLaren. But he just rejected the construct of success altogether. “‭This is the frigging psychosis of the times,” he said. “We were certainly not shooting for commercial success; we were in the ground floor of this‬‭ revolution that was going on, and it was the opposite of commercial.” He continued: “People can’t wrap their head around that, [it’s] an idea that’s alien to most people. People are so into‬‭ getting and spending that I don’t even know if, when they’re on their deathbed, they realize that they’ve been shoveling shit for the man for the last 70 years. But there’s a lot more to life than that.‬” Johansen, who died earlier this year at 75, spurned the shovel, and New York Dolls flamed out before commercial success was even on the horizon. How very punk rock.

Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.