Being voted best and worst new group of 1973 in a Creem magazine readers' poll must surely have delighted the New York Dolls.
They were up for the job of acting like stars, despite the fact that for most Americans it was a case of too much, too soon when attempting to digest the Dolls' trash aesthetic.
The release of the band's second album the following year did little to broaden the band's appeal beyond the fraternity of New York's nascent glitter-rock scene, and within a further 12 months they had traded their androgynous look for red leathers at the behest of new manager Malcolm McLaren in a last-ditch attempt to break through.
But Too Much Too Soon remains an invigorating, raucous record of the classic Dolls line-up and a colourful pointer to the wave of anti-blandness they would set in motion.
Little is truly new on the album.
Four of the 10 tracks are primitive covers that dress up the Dolls' rhythm and blues, soul and doo-wop influences in scraps of rouge-stained Lurex, and the band's originals simply take that ball and run with it.
The Rolling Stones' shadow hovers in the background but fades when the Dolls lurch into ragged instrumental breaks.
The revolutionary spirit lies in singer David Johansen's cocky swagger, in the malevolent hacksaw guitars of Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain and in the rudimentary walloping of the rhythm section, each of which would be echoed by bands of the New York punk scene and, after that, by their UK counterparts.
Aspects of the band's look, provocative outside New York's cultural melting pot, would later be borrowed by hard-rockers Aerosmith and Kiss, and by hair bands of the 1980s.
Top tracks on this rousing platter of proto-punk jams are Archie Bell and the Drells' (There's Gonna Be A) Showdown, the riff-heavy Who Are The Mystery Girls and the crude but vital Thunders showpiece Chatterbox.
