Marc Bolan didn’t invent Glitter Rock, but he did perfect it. With nothing but a corkscrew-shaped mass of hair, a battered acoustic guitar, and a barefoot hippie bongo, the young elf Bolan has reshaped himself from a vanquished past. Brown warbler from the 60s in an electrified sci-fi superhero with silver boots, shimmering cheekbones, and bright pink feather boas. Their pop-metal music perfectly; Small, bright bursts of flash rock and psychedelic poetry, the ultimate treat for 1970s sex-saturated ears. And everyone enjoyed it. And then he died.
Marc Bolan (originally Mark Feld, but let’s not live off this sad reality) was born in East London in 1947. He claimed to have been a mod in the early ’60s, but Ozzy was too and that’s probably not true either. As a teenager, she worked on her cheekbones and modeled for a while. Legend has it that he also spent time in Paris with a magician who taught him to levitate, but in the end his soul belonged to rock ‘n’ roll. A brief stint with garage-punk legends John’s Children in 1967, he formed the hippie band Tyrannosaurus Rex with percussionist Steve Took.
The acoustic Tyrannosaurus Rex ran for 3 years and garnered critical acclaim, had a few Top 40 singles but sold very few albums. That all changed when Marc fired Steve, smeared glitter on his cheeks, and wrote a glam-pop song called Ride A White. The rest, as they say, is history.
Bolan fever swept across the UK, almost surpassing Beatlemania in its froth, and the T. Rex has enjoyed several years of runaway success. After a turbulent year or two in the mid-’70s, in which Marc experimented with short hair, vodka and disco. , returned to fame with a spectacular comeback album and a punk TV show in 1977, but their resurgence was short-lived. On September 16, 1977, he died in a car accident in London, two weeks before his 30th birthday. .
Despite its tragic end, Bolanmania never waned. There are an impressive number of T. Rex compilations, reissues, remasters, and junk collections, and many more are on the way, Marc’s many fan clubs continue to thrive in the business, and most importantly, his music continues to play. Like crazy.
So here’s your ultimate advisor to get and, if you feel like it, even play a gong.
There couldn’t be a more appropriate name than Electric Warrior. Bolan sheds his hippie skin, reinvents himself as a golden god with a sparkling, squeaky electric guitar, and writes his two biggest hits in one sitting.
“Jeepster” and “Get It On” (pimped for car and queue ads for 30 years) are just about T’s only songs. Rex that many Americans have heard at some point. These two tracks overshadow what is, in a different way, a stellar collection of sun-drenched narco-rockers like Planet Queen and The Motivator, as well as lighter, dreamier dishes, like Monolith and the autobiographical Cosmic Dancer. This album influenced everyone at the time. This is still the case.
At this point, T. Rex is the most glamorous band of all time, and that’s what they looked like. The Slider is a masterpiece of blessed brilliant rock. It’s so clever that even songs that are awful are still great. Main Man is simply a riff placed over and over again, a seemingly last-minute track, and it’s as classic as the infectious summer anthem Rock On or Buick McKane’s orchestral flash metal.
While albums that gave the impression that sooner or later in the T. Rex timeline had become obsolete over the years, The Slider is still as fresh, sexy, and exciting as when it first came out pouting, posing, and straightening out again in 1972.
Far less formal than the string of hit singles that preceded it, Tanx represented an unexpected maturity in Bolan’s songwriting, revealing layers of humor and humanity never before noticed.
Included are several gory and vampiric stories such as Left Hand Luke, Highway Knees, and Broken Hearted Blues, played on guitars and punctuated by waves of female choirs. There’s also plenty of unfathomable glamour that T. Rex is known for, adding an infectious sleazefest called Mad Donna and the rock anthem Shock Rock.
Decidedly eclectic, Tanx wasn’t critical fortune when it launched, but history proved those fools wrong. It’s sublime.
Released a few months before Bolan’s untimely death, the criminally underrated Dandy In The Underworld is a dazzling collection of glamorous old-fashioned rockers and back-to-basics like the sneaky Jason B. Sad, the Hang Ups pinball machine, and the gloriously vulgar Crimson Moon. .
If only there had been enough time to properly publicize it, Dandy. . . it would have been Bolan’s comeback special of ’68, maximum probably propelling him to his rightful throne as the boy king of all things brilliant. But even though the tragedy is played, Dandy In The Underworld is still a fun and fun album, and the best coda to T’s remarkable story. Rex.
Recorded shortly after the toppling of the original Tyrannosaurus Rex bongo, Steve Took, A Beard Of Stars has only a handful of hand drums from his replacement, Mickey Finn.
In essence, it is Marc Bolan’s only solo album. Stylistically, it still has the same cross-legged cosmic folk vein as the early Tyrannosaurus Rex albums, yet the songs here are layered with fuzzy acid rock guitars and rumbling electric basses.
On pleasingly mind-blowing tracks like Woodland Bop and Pavilions Of The Sun, it simply creates a richer, fuller sound, but on the jaw-dropping bongos/fuzz of Elemental Child, the electric guitar shows the way for what’s to come.
Pre-glamorous and pre-electric T. Rex, this is the most productive example of Bolan’s early aesthetic. Wonderfully replaced now, and practically meaningless, it’s like the soundtrack to Alice’s tea party with the Mad Hatter; A likely random series of simple conversations and entanglements
awkward acoustic guitar and bongo rhythms. The most endearing component of all of this is how serious the young Bolan sounds as he sings obviously nonsensical lyrics like “The Toad’s Road Licked My Wheels Like a Sword” and “Daubed in doom in his Language Tombed Room. “”
Surprisingly, it spawned two semi-hits: Cat Black (The Wizard’s Hat) and the sinister King Of The Rumbling Spires. Inspired madness.
By 1975, the T. Rex was in trouble. The steady stream of singles had dried up and the disastrous 1974 pseudo-concept album, Zinc Alloy. . . It flowed like a stone. So the band wisely played it straight into Zip Gun, with a sampling of simple, catchy glam rock pleasures generously sprinkled out. with the most flowery and danceable songs of the burgeoning disco movement.
Vintage feather boas, such as Light Of Love, the spunky Space Boss, the cheeky Think Zinc, and even Motown’s Token Of My Love are incredible. Disc-dyed garbage, on the other hand, is deplorable. Once heard, the horrors of The Girl in the Thunderbolt Suit can’t be erased from your mind.
On the one hand, it is evident that by 1976 Marc Bolan had completely lost touch with what was happening in rock’n’roll. He wasn’t a guy who could have predicted punk rock. His music was puffy and bizarre, full of superfluous orchestrations and exaggerated inclinations of the genre. He’d gone absolutely insane, and much of Futuristic Dragon shows that blatantly.
On the other hand, he’s still the fucked-up Marc Bolan, which means there are still several glamorous gems here, adding up the spring-like fantasy New York City, the funky summer rock’n’roll of All Alone, and the wonderful Jupiter Liar.
This self-titled album follows their groundbreaking hit Ride A White Swan. Still a guitar-and-bongo duo at the time, they cut their call from the nondescript Tyrannosaurus Rex and switched to an electric guitar, two moves that alienated the sandal-wearers who had brought them here.
They more than made up for this loss with the good luck of this one. Musically, it’s the palliative between the flower-smelling people of its early days and the high-heeled band Electric Warrior, a warm and delicious collection of electric pop songs. like the elf One Inch Rock and Beltane Walk. No is an extraordinary rock’n’roll, but absolutely charming.
I once paid $50 for a pirated copy of Marc and John Lennon sitting in the back of a taxi, drunk, doing a song “Be Bop A Lula” and other doo-wop songs. on the radio. I would still pay more attention to this ridiculous waste of money than to this hell of glamorous, undercooked garbage.
Marc wisely asked the label to forget about his cover call, which he prefers to hide under the nickname Zinc Alloy, but he was forced to confess to this filthy act, and it almost sank the entire operation. T-Rex? Or rather T. Wrecks.
Fallen from the sky as a 747. La lesser-known vintage rock signature since 2003. Several decades at the center of the music industry. I got fired from one of the first incarnations of Anal C**t after a show. 30 years later, I was fired from the New York Times after a week. He loves rock and hates everything else. He still believes in Zodiac Mindwarp and Love Reaction.
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