Crash Course, No. 12: T.Rex, The Dinosaur That Boogied

It's funny what turns a man around...

Personal
While I’d heard of them before a decade ago, my own personal T.Rextasy (BP Fallon TM; that was that publicist’s second-bite evocation of “Beatlemania”) didn’t hit until a friend passed off Electric Warrior, The Slider and Futuristic Dragon. Besides ripping, oh, about a dozen favorite tracks (or north thereof) onto a handful of CDs, the only fully-formed thought I could offer on T.Rex was “Marc Bolan.” That phase lasted a couple years – a rarity for me, even before Spotify really messed me up – and it’s ridiculous that I never learned anything more about a band I fell for that hard.

A Little History
“Audiences had screamed at plenty of pop stars before, but Bolan was the first pop star to make it abundantly clear that he knew exactly why they were screaming.”

I didn’t scour the internet for every last detail and oddity about T.Rex – nearly all the notes and details below came from either T.Rex’s Wikipedia page and the BBC documentary I (the wonderful quote above excepted) - but still feel comfortable saying that the band happened because Marc Bolan, the lead singer and the one and only songwriter (by fiat), wanted to be famous very, very badly. It took him a lot of networking (the BBC doc is strong on this), studying, a little worshipping (see: epiphany watching Eric Clapton), and a couple inartful stabs at fame through the wrong vehicles before he found the formula that launched him to “a popularity in the UK comparable to that of the Beatles.” Once he figured out how to get what he wanted out of an electric guitar after years on acoustic, he juiced it with sexuality.

Bolan’s ample ego had to wait on the right vehicle and/or persona. He started as a pre-electric Bob Dylan knock-off (and would later get hit with his own version of “Judas”), before getting inserted into a band called John’s Children, an “interesting, if minor, blip on the British mod and psychedelic scene,” because they shared a manager with Bolan, and they needed a guitarist. They blew up big enough for The Who to invite them on a German tour…and it was in the middle of said tour that The Who kicked them off for either trying to upstage them, or causing a(n actual) riot, depending on who was opining. When John’s Children broke up almost immediately after performing at the “14 Hour Technicolor Dream” in April 1967, Bolan carried his notes from that experience with him (with a detour past Ravi Shankar).

His next act, Tyrannosaurus Rex, threw back to Bolan’s earlier, straight-up Dylan phase (he demoed “Blowin' in the Wind” but with no takers). Sensing the arrival of hippie culture, he teamed with Steve Peregrine Took (born Steve Porter) and made a pitch to that audience. The entire band was Bolan on guitar and Took on bongos (mainly) and, with legendary John Peel pitching them (too often, apparently), and creative competition with David Bowie lashing his ego, they did all right. If VH1 could have done a Behind the Music for them, this would be the charmingly idyllic period – i.e., the struggling artist, his girlfriend June Child a creative and professional influence, the consequential meeting of Tony Visconti, etc. Their shows featured Tyrannosaurus Rex sitting on the floor, playing to an audience doing the same; it was virtually all acoustic and the lyrical content lousy with fantasy tropes. The end came when Took, quite talented in his own right, asked about getting a couple of his own compositions on the band’s next album. Bolan immediately booted him. In Bolan’s defense, or in keeping with his ambitions, it didn’t help that Took went deeper into nihilist drug culture (here, Wikipedia is better), and he would, apparently, go missing for days at a time. For all that, friends and collaborators all agreed with something very close to “there could be only one star in any band with Marc Bolan in it, and that was Marc Bolan."

Bolan studied the pop music market as avidly as he studied guitar and never stopped prospecting for his seam into it. He found that seam when he shortened Tyrannosaurus Rex to T.Rex and found T.Rex’s sound: old rock structures (Bolan loved his Elvis and Eddie Cochran), dripping with sex and swaggering rhythms (and with a dash of funk later), and with the guitar rock sound of the late 60s to give it a little dangle. He replaced Took with Mickey Finn, a percussionist in Took’s vein with more technical ability, a weaker voice (when you hear a falsetto, it's Finn), and, crucially, zero songwriting ambition. He drafted Steve Currie to play bass and Bill Legend to pound the drums.

That sound rocketed T.Rex into its 1970-73 glory days. They scored 11 UK number ones across three albums – Electric Warrior, The Slider and Tanx – ditched the hippies from screaming teens and just generally blew up - hence T.Rextasy. (They mattered in the States – and wanted to badly enough to rename “Get It On” “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” because a band called “Chase” had a song by the same name - but topped out at No. 20). The best summary of their impact and influence I saw showed up in comments by a guy named Marc Almond on that BBC doc:

“I think it was Marc who was really responsible, for opening the door to people like Bowie as well. He really opened that door to the 70s, and he was that bridge from the 60s to the 70s, from the 60s hippyism and the kind of hippie rock to the pop of the 70s. And Marc kind of made it OK for you to like Pop Music.”

Bolan always looked the rock star, but he tanked the band’s fortunes when he started acting like one. Friends, girlfriends, and bandmates (first, Finn) fell away one by one, but his split with Visconti was the dumbest and most damaging. Per the BBC, they made T.Rex’s sound together – Bolan on writing and music, Visconti on production – only to have Bolan throw that away by letting the quality slip and going rockstar/pulling rank in the same recording session (start watching at 59:30 in the BBC doc…and then go back and watch the beginning, so you can really feel the pain). It’s easiest to hear how much that mattered by listening to, say, The Slider, and then putting on Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow. Bolan got deep into drugs, fat, and defensive – aka, the combination that reliably promotes complacency and/or failure. There were affairs, a new wife (Gloria Jones), a couple bad albums, etc. As the albums tanked and the singles failed to chart, Bolan did some ill-advised television (which so fucking fits his profile), and generally turned into a kind of “fat Elvis” punchline in the music/UK press.

As if this rockstar arc couldn’t get any more generic, Bolan thinned down (had a son) and tried to tap back into what made T.Rex so successful (related, is it possible that Bolan laid down the template of the rockstar career arc?). He turned things around (if mostly critically) with Futuristic Dragon (1976) and Dandy in the Underworld (1977). He used studio musicians for that last stab – pulling in Dino Dines on keys, etc. and Davey Lutton on drums (Currie stuck around) – and even talked about reuniting with Finn, Visconti, and even Took.

Literally everything fell apart when Marc Bolan met his untimely end when girlfriend/collaborator/mother-of-his-child, Jones, crashed their car on the way home from a night out. (Jones survived, btw, and, based on that BBC documentary, seems perfectly pleasant, and she recorded the original “Tainted Love” by Ed Cobb besides.) Given the weight of his contribution and/or artistic control, it’s no surprise that T.Rex died with him…though I see something called “Mickey Finn’s T.Rex” in the sidebar to T.Rex’s Wikipedia page, but that’s enough history.

Fun (and Less Fun) Details

- Ringo Starr filmed the 1972 Born to Boogie documentary, built mostly around concert footage at Empire Pool and Wembley. People called this “passing the torch” more than once during my research.

- “He’d taken the Damned on tour with him, and snuck Generation X and the Jam on to kids’ TV.” Yes, T.Rex has one toe in the punk era. In the BBC documentary, a long-time friend (Steve Harley) mocks him for it (“he was as cynical as any marketing man was, and I say that as his mate”), but that only confirms Bolan’s knack for spotting the next wave.

- People credit Bolan for “sneaking” The Jam and (Billy Idol’s) Generation X on TV for a reason: he invited them onto his TV show, Marc. It lasted only one season, sadly, because the car crash came before the second season. He also appeared on a short-lived kids/teen show called Supersonic. You can see him performing (I mean, really performing) “Dreamy Lady,” but The Damned showed up too.

- “Marc was a peacock. Completely obsessed with his clothes and his look.”

Bolan had a fashion Svengali (among many) named Chelita Secunda, who put two big drops of glitter under his eyes somewhere during 1971-72. His credit for launching glam rock came from there, but, as someone pointed out in the BBC documentary, The Rolling Stones started wearing make-up shortly after that time.

- John Peel loved Tyrannosaurus Rex, but hated T.Rex. He stopped caring when they went full pop. A lot of those fans called T.Rex “sellouts.” Which wasn’t all wrong.

- Bolan wrote a book of poetry titled Warlock of Love (and affected a poet’s persona). Related, he once told a friend to read J.R.R. Tolkein as the best way to understand him.

- T.Rex’s burnout rate was high: “Took died in 1980 from asphyxiation caused by choking on a cocktail cherry, and Currie the following year in a car crash. Finn died of possible liver and kidney failure in 2003.”

Last Words After a Week of ‘Em

I benefitted enough from learning the timeline, if nothing else – by which I mean, Futuristic Dragon returned T.Rex to its original sound with enough fidelity that I would never have guessed it came after Zinc Alloy and Marc Bolan’s Zip Gun. I found a quote that encapsulates what I hear when I listened to those albums (and in the same article argued that said critics had something up their asses when they knocked them; also, this was the source for the quote up top):

“Between the funky clavinet, the Jerry Lee Lewis piano, the backing vocals of his new partner Gloria Jones, the strings, the horns and the trebly, distorted guitar on which Bolan would fire off extravagant, Hendrixesque solos and fills he didn’t quite have the technical ability to play, Zinc Alloy and Bolan’s Zip Gun sound terribly cluttered.”

Bolan tried too much, and without a familiar platform (Visconti), so, basically, people hold up Electric Warrior and The Slider as iconic for a reason. All the pistons fired across both albums, and that built and cemented their reputation. They’re not the same album, either: The Slider’s lower pitch gives it a heavier sound – for instance, “Chariot Choogle” and “Buick McCane” don’t feature the trebly accents/bridges that brighten “Jeepster” and even “Mambo Sun” – but Bolan expanded the same inspiration across both, as well as a follow-up album, Tanx (that I entirely ignored), and he got more and more grief for that as time went on. (The BBC includes some deeply awkward interviews with Bolan defending T.Rex’s middle catalog.)

Knowing what I know now leaves me more impressed with Futuristic Dragon than I was going into this project. From what I hear, it takes some of what Bolan learned from Gloria Jones and/or his extravagant snatches at the next big thing on Zinc Alloy and Marc Bolan’s Zip Gun, and combines that with T.Rex’s original sound. I might be all alone in rating “All Alone” among T.Rex’s best work (hey-oh!), but those later influences slipped some improved atmospherics into Futuristic Dragon that make it sound different than most of what’s on the earlier straight-rock albums. Contrasting “Dawn Storm” against “Cosmic Dancer” and “Ballrooms of Mars” feels like the shortest short-cut to drawing out the distinction (but “Jupiter Liar” and the flatly disco-inspired “Ride My Wheels” should finish the job).

Finally, I join pretty much everyone in rating Dandy in the Underworld as better than the middle two albums (the title track and, especially, “Universe” stand out), but the adventurousness of Futuristic Dragon might have leeched out a little by then.

Well, that seems ample. T.Rex were one hell of a band, pure pop from the time when hard rock still felt like it had a future. I’m confident it still can, but T.Rex was pretty goddamn original, something that no one had quite heard before couple with a sexuality that hadn’t been foregrounded quite like that before. As noted above, they found their seam. And Bolan found it.