“Get the glitter out of your asses and play” barks Todd Rundgren, firmly strapped into his pilot’s seat behind the board in Studio B of the Record Plant in New York City. Coming from that flaming multi-colored head such words are already suspect, but the group of individuals they are aimed at, known professionally as the New York Dolls, react with contemptuous laughter and offer suggestions that can’t be recounted in a family publication. Rundgren and the Dolls, you see, share this private joke; a joke they’re in the midst of making public. Written off by many as just another in the wearisome line of glitter pretenders, the New York Dolls are cooking up a bit of brass-knuckled astonishment for those people.

Singer David Johansen strolls over to the plate glass partition which separates the studio from the control room, and scotch-tapes an advertising flier he’s just found to the window so that it faces the booth. “Too fast to live, too young to die,” it reads, “LET IT ROCK!” He spins around the band launches fullthrottle into “Trash,” an electric explosion that seconds his gesture with a vengeance, and without which his action would’ve been empty and melodramatic. In that moment it becomes perfectly apparent that the New York Dolls - far from being an easy target for anybody's labels — are in the midst of creating a category that doesn’t even have a name yet.