Glam Rock
Page 9
When electrified, they encompass the basic rudiments of rock. . . . They emit a naïve enthusiasm one would expect from a bunch of blokes who had just acquired their first instruments and were having a good old blow down the local church hall or someone’s front room. (Qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 186)
If this made T. Rex sound like a garage band, then Bolan was not in the least bit fazed. For him, it would be taken as a compliment. He did, after all, share in garage rock’s then-unfashionable faith in the 45 rpm disc. “You can sell all the albums you like,” he told a reporter in August 1971, “but until you get a hit single, you don’t feel successful,” adding for good measure that he “always wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll star” (qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 171). Hit singles would make this happen, but achieving such status also required a major rethink in other areas. Speaking to Beat Instrumental, Bolan declared that
reaching a wider public is what we wanted. If “underground” means being on a show screened at midnight and watched by 15 people—then we’re out of it. If we’re asked to do Top of the Pops we do it, and if we’re asked to do John Peel we do it. (Qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 172)
This newfound commitment to “reaching a wider public”—by which he meant teenagers, of course—did not only extend to enthusiastically accepting all offers to appear on prime-time TV, or even in teen magazines for that matter. When the revamped T. Rex went out on tour in the fall of 1970, ticket prices were set at an affordable ten shillings (fifty pence). As Bolan himself pointed out to Disc, “The low admission at our shows has meant the younger kids can come—the teenybop heads” (qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 167). Such statements suggest that there is (a frankly undeniable) icy cynicism at work here. Yet, they also illustrate the warm pop-intelligence that would lie behind so much of T. Rex and glam’s phenomenal success—both in its evident respect for and genuine desire to speak to “the teenybop heads.” It was, then, with a characteristic mix of sincerity and market consciousness that Bolan declared: “If there’s going to be a revolution in pop, it must come from the young people, and if you ignore them you are cutting yourself off from the life supply of the rock music force” (qtd. in Hoskyns 17).
However, more ammunition would be needed if T. Rex was to lead this pop revolution. In mid-January 1971, the band went in to the studio to record the follow-up to “Ride a White Swan.” David Hepworth deems “Hot Love” (UK no. 1) to be “a title which had previously seemed about as likely to be applied to a Tyrannosaurus Rex song as to a Virginia Woolf novel” (186). This is an amusing line from a fine writer; but perhaps his rock classicism had led him to overlook 1960s tracks like “Hot Rod Mama,” “Beltane Walk,” and “Is It Love?” Nevertheless, as a piece of dessert-only pop replete with both moments of direct address and opportunities for expression and release, “Hot Love” would make the kind of definitive musical statement that could be—and in fact was—taken as proof of a clean break with the past. Yet, in their more graphic illustrations of some of what went into the creation of the A-side, the two tracks on the B-side are worth some brief consideration here. So, the Cochranesque, 12-bar workout “Woodland Rock”—with its exhortation to “Let it all hang out / Everybody shout ‘Do the rock’”—was either derivative and regressive or a bold homage, depending on your position on such matters. Although its deployment of backward guitar and cello did elevate the track above mere (if enjoyable) revivalism. Similarly, reminiscent then of those psych-folk acoustic days, “King of the Mountain Cometh” can best be described as the kind of trippy fare that seemed to (semi-)consciously nod toward “the Heads”—featuring, as it did, elves and a “changeling son from Mars [who] played a Fender guitar.” “Hot Love” would take something from each of these. “I know it’s exactly like a million other songs,” Bolan confessed, “but I hope it’s got a little touch of me in it too. It was done as a happy record” (qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 174). Based on a 12-bar blue(s)print, it made full use of sixteen-track recording to enhance elements found on previous tracks like “Beltane Walk” and “Ride a White Swan”—such as the use of distinctive backing vocals, strings, and on-the-beat handclaps—to deliver a massive dose of “happy.” “Hot Love” was Bolan’s “She Loves You.” No subsequent T. Rex single would so effectively bottle joy. Its embrace was warm and total. It was inclusive and connective. “I don’t need to be bold, but may I hold your hand?” By no stretch of the imagination is it lyrically deep—“most” is rhymed with “coast,” “gold” with “bold” and “old.” But then neither was “She Loves You” nor “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” However, like them, “Hot Love” invites the listener to join the party, and it does so well before the halfway mark. The “la-las” comprise nearly three minutes of this five-minute song. Plenty of time, then, to work its hypnotic magic. (One suspects that David Bowie took note. “Starman” would, of course, make effective use of the lengthy sing-along fade-out a year later.)
As the new single demonstrated, Bolan was aware that teenage participation was key to any success the now acutely pop-conscious T. Rex might have. As we know, the band was open to invitations to bring its new material to a prime-time audience. A new sound required a new look, and the T. Rex “deal” was well and truly sealed by a momentous appearance on Top of the Pops on March 24, 1971. On this evening, with (in hindsight quite modest) dabs of glitter under his eyes and dressed in a silver lamé top, Bolan presented a vision of androgyny that had never been seen before on British TV and so marked the moment when glam began. Emboldened by the success of “Hot Love,” subsequent performances would see him wearing ostrich boas, satin pants, and embroidered jackets—clothes sourced from her favorite London boutiques by his manager’s wife, Chelita Secunda, who had also dabbed his cheeks with glitter for that very first TV performance. Secunda can take some credit, then, for giving Bolan a makeover, her restyling working in tandem with the fact that by this time most British homes had color TV to maximize glam’s impact. “Hot Love” would spend six weeks at the top of the UK singles chart. By May, the British media—and not just the music press—were talking about a new phenomenon, “Trexstasy.”
That spring, with now-characteristic immodesty, Marc Bolan announced that he had “suddenly tuned into that mental channel which makes a record a hit and [that he felt] at present as though [he] could go on writing number ones forever.” “The secret ingredient,” he then went on to perhaps rather injudiciously identify, was “energy” (qtd. in Stanley 329). However, for the time being at least, any writing of hits—no matter how easy it came—would have to be undertaken while touring. Unsurprisingly, much younger, female-dominated audiences would be in attendance at T. Rex’s spring and summer UK gigs. On live recordings of the tour, Radio One DJ Bob Harris can barely be heard above teen screaming reminiscent of Beatlemania. Tellingly, on the set list are “One-Inch Rock” and “Beltane Walk”—both included presumably because they represent good fits for the glam-pop star and his glam-pop audience. Together with new tracks like “Hot Love,” these were songs that now “sound-tracked the youth club dances of the kids who were born in 1958 every bit as well as ‘Satisfaction’ had done for the people who’d been born in 1950” (Hepworth 190). One year later, and this would also be true for Gary Glitter’s breakthrough single “Rock ’n’ Roll, Part One.” It had initially failed to make the UK chart, but then had become a hit when its near-instrumental B-side was played in dance halls, discos, and even fairgrounds up and down the country.
The songs that were eventually gathered together on Electric Warrior were recorded while T. Rex was on tour in the States. The album was a kind of glam field recording, with producer Tony Visconti working with the band in the limited studio time carved out between live dates. “Monolith” was recorded in New York, “Get It On” in Los Angeles. Wherever the work was done, it was done quickly. According to Visconti, “What I did in America when we cut the album was not rehearse the band, just go in and make everything live and play. . . . We recorded [it] like the early Sun records” (qtd. in Paytr
ess, Bolan, 177). Typically, then, songs would move very swiftly from Bolan’s initial solo demo to full band take. This is a band now well established as a four-piece unit, with Steve Currie on bass and Bill Legend on drums. At the heart of Electric Warrior sits “Get It On” (UK no. 1). Neither hard rock nor soft bubblegum pop, it is quintessential T. Rex, built on one of the century’s most memorable riffs. Like much of the LP, it radiated a genuine affinity for rock ’n’ roll. Here, this reverence is reinforced by Bolan’s direct quoting of a line from Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie” in the song’s fade-out—“And meanwhile, I’m still thinkin’”—which proves that Bolan clearly knew his classic rock ’n’ roll. “There is very little that I don’t know about rock ’n’ roll on any level,” he boasted to Charles Shaar Murray (qtd. in Shots, 31). He was both a fan and a scholar. After all, he was “Born to Boogie” (Tanx). For some reason, though, Bolan’s rock ’n’ roll references and reverence irritated the rock orthodoxy. This was particularly hypocritical, given that a musician like Chuck Berry, for example, was so evidently key to the music of the much-lionized Rolling Stones. How could the Stones get away with their “plagiarising, revivalist tendencies” (Paytress, Bolan, 184), when T. Rex could not? An appearance by the latter at the “Festival of Progressive Music” held over the August bank holiday weekend in the seaside town of Clacton would provide, if not necessarily a clear explanation for, then certainly a clear demonstration of this inconsistency. T. Rex was appearing on a bill featuring the likes of music press favorites Rory Gallagher, Lindisfarne, Colosseum, and the Faces, who had reportedly played a storming set immediately prior to Bolan and his band taking the stage. In his Chuck Berry T-shirt, Bolan was heckled so badly by a crowd of classic rock ideologues that he lost his cool—“Why don’t you fuck off. . . . If you don’t want to listen, then I’ll leave” (qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 185).
All pop music is a “synthesis,” noted Charles Shaar Murray in an uncharacteristically sympathetic piece written on T. Rex when the band was at its peak:
In Bolan’s head, Tolkien and Berry are collaborating on songs. . . . Does it work? Make up your own mind. It’s worked in that someone has revived the single as an art form. Any imbecile can furzle around for 17 minutes and come up with some good licks, but to lay it all down in 2:15 or 3:38 or whatever is a dying trade. . . . We’re suffering from a surfeit of amazingly tedious long-players so anyone with a gift for producing listenable music in a concise form is very welcome. . . . T. Rex are the best singles band we’ve got. The art of making singles as opposed to albums is no more odious than that of the short-story writer as opposed to the novelist. (Shots, 26–27)
That said, Shaar Murray judged most of Electric Warrior to be subpar, describing “Lean Woman Blues” as “clumsy,” dismissing “Planet Queen” as “indifferent,” and somewhat grudgingly declaring “Rip Off” to be a “mess but entertaining” (Shots, 27). Even though he recognized T. Rex as masters of the single, presumably the band still had much to learn if it was to master the album. However, released on September 24, 1971, Electric Warrior—the genre’s first extended statement—would demonstrate that glam was not just about the single. It was a “proper” LP, with a unity of purpose and effect that defied its on-the-fly production and which, appropriately enough for a long-form glam work, was reinforced by its packaging. The iconic front cover—from an original concept proposed by Bolan’s wife, June, then realized by photographer Kieron Murphy and Hipgnosis’s Aubrey Powell—featured a guitar-wielding Bolan in heroic silhouette, encircled by a full-body halo that also surrounds his similarly impressive amp and which presumably emanated from within this godlike being. The cover of My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair had featured a fantastical scene illustrated by George Underwood that clearly chimed with the mythic address of songs like “Graceful Fat Sheba” and “Knight.” Prophets, Seers and Sages had featured a photograph of a becaped Peregrin Took and a (perhaps surprisingly) less theatrically attired Bolan staring rather shyly into the camera. Doing away with any sartorial flamboyance—Bolan, for example, is dressed in a simple yellow vest—the next Tyrannosaurus Rex LP Unicorn had merely presented a modest portrait of the duo. For A Beard of Stars, Steve Peregrin Took had evidently been deemed surplus to requirements for cover duty. This time we just have a Pre-Raphaelite Bolan, striking a Romantic pose dressed in what would appear to be a sort of ruff. Perhaps tellingly, a photo of the new duo of Bolan and Mickey Finn takes up two-thirds of the cover of the transitional T. Rex. The remaining third is composed of a pillar of red with the band’s now-shortened name in bold yellow-gold type in the top-right corner. In the photograph, the foregrounded Bolan does have an electric guitar, but he is not handling it with any conviction. Indeed, it is almost as if it is the first time he has picked one up. What a contrast, then, with the cover of Electric Warrior.
At the time of the album’s release, in September 1971, Bolan told Rolling Stone —somewhat unnecessarily, one feels—that he did not “wanna be James Taylor” because he was “feeling a lot more aggressive in my outlook towards the world.” A month earlier, he had explained to Melody Maker’s Chris Welch that “there was a quiet period, flowers and peaceful but I don’t feel that way anymore. It’s not a peaceful world. I want to boogie, but with good words as well” (qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 187). Of all the tracks on Electric Warrior, perhaps only its closer “Rip Off” could be said to have channeled this mood swing. It is certainly more musically abrasive, even angular, than other up-tempo songs on the album. It even features some free jazz–style sax parps toward the end. Yet, if “Rip Off” is—as Mark Paytress has suggested—“vitriol-filled” and found Bolan “rag[ing] . . . against the iniquities of the music business” (Bolan, 189), there is arguably much for the listener to do here to draw this message out of what is a typically opaque, allusive lyric—“Rockin’ in the nude feelin’ such a dude / It’s a rip off” or “Dancin’ in the dark with the tramps in the park / It’s a rip off.” Even the line “If it’s hers then it must be mine” is nonspecific.
Reflecting on T. Rex’s phenomenal twelve months in a piece in Creem, Charles Shaar Murray concluded:
All that happened was that Bolan added more and more technology, more and more instruments, more and more sounds and presentation, and when the necessary level of electrical energy had been built up, all hell broke loose. Rock and roll madness, verily. (reprinted in Shots, 14)
Of course, to really “Get It On,” in addition to all this “electrical energy” and all that extensive overdubbing made possible via Trident Studio’s sixteen-track “technology,” there needed to be that essential ingredient of joy. And indeed, the record shows that Bolan would reign supreme for as long as this held true. Furthermore, Electric Warrior also possessed what Bob Stanley describes as a “strange magic”—a “magic” attributable to both its sometime “reliance on acoustic guitars and restraint” (as on “Cosmic Dancer” and “Life’s a Gas,” for example) and to the fact that it is one of the “most sexually charged albums ever released in Britain.” So, it “audibly pants, yet also leans on cellos and the eerie banshee backing vocals of ex-Turtles Flo and Eddie for its power” (Stanley 329). The glam ballad “Life’s a Gas” was fragile and reflective, while the similarly meditative, haunting “Cosmic Dancer,” its arresting time-shifting lyric taking us from “womb” to “tomb,” went even deeper into distinctly un-pop existential territory—asking, “Is it wrong to understand the fear that lies inside a man?” and “What’s it like to be alone?” to a musical accompaniment featuring a plangent cello and an eerie effects-treated guitar solo. Although ostensibly more familiar to fans of “Hot Love,” the up-tempo boogie “Jeepster”—which placed Finn’s bongos very high in the mix—was still lyrically unconventional for teen pop. In this respect, much like “Get It On” with its reference to “the teeth of the Hydra,” “Jeepster” seemed to speak of (and possibly to) Bolan’s not-too-distant past. As producer Tony Visconti points out, “Even when we were making the pop al
bums and the Flower Children were no more [Marc] said we had to include some special effects like flanging and phasing for ‘the Heads’” (qtd. in Chapman, “Waiting,” 49). And if “special effects” were to be included for this demographic, why not lyrics too? “Jeepster” rather quaintly addressed a woman with “the universe reclining in [her] hair” as “pleasing to behold” and politely, chivalrously, enquired as to whether she might be called “Jaguar, if I may be so bold.” Then, toward the end, things became rather more “adult” with the close-to-the-knuckle promise to “suck ya,” as “Hot Love’s” “two-penny prince” morphed into a predatory vampire. Even at the peak of Trexstasy, Bolan often appeared to make few, if any, concessions to his growing teen audience. His landmark show at the Empire Pool Wembley in March 1972 featured lengthy, noodling jams complete with cross-legged acoustic strumming and extended workouts of the hits—“Get It On,” for example, ran to fully eleven minutes. At Stoke-on-Trent, on the band’s summer ’71 UK tour, a faithful low-amp version the very first Tyrannosaurus Rex single “Debora” (1968) was followed by a lengthy Bolan monologue stressing how little T. Rex had changed. All that had happened was that “we’ve just grown a little.”
Such apparent defensiveness was understandable. Even generally positive reviews for Electric Warrior had tended to come across as condescending if not downright grudging. “He has developed the knack for writing good, original pop,” wrote Melody Maker’s Chris Welch, “and with the aid of producer Toni Visconti is developing an amazing studio sound with its roots in the Fifties” (qtd. in Paytress, Bolan, 197). Of course, one of the downsides of having a signature sound, no matter how exciting and engaging, was that almost inevitably it opened Bolan to charges that all T. Rex tracks were essentially the same. The 12-bar blues “Lean Woman Blues” did, of course, bear an undeniable family resemblance to other tracks on the album, while even the ballad “Girl” sounded like “Cosmic Dancer,” which sounded like “Life’s a Gas.” In hindsight, perhaps this helps explain T. Rex’s finite shelf life. If the songs were interchangeable, then Bolan’s prospects for longevity were not good, particularly as more inventive challengers would emerge and ultimately outgun him. Yet, while he may well have been, in Visconti’s words, a “limited musician,” Electric Warrior showcased an unusual, idiosyncratic way with the pop couplet. Album opener and—with its riff, strings, and BVs—quintessential T. Rex track “Mambo Sun” includes the lines “I got stars in my beard / And I feel real weird,” while its near twin “Planet Queen” features Bolan exhorting a “flying saucer to take [him] away” and figures the Queen herself using his “head like a revolver.” Sitting somewhere between those up-tempo rockers and the ballads, “Monolith” is arguably one of the strongest album tracks—with its stoner groove and proportionate, wah-wah-infused solo. Too often, though, non-singles can sound like fragments or studio jams with very little of interest. Some, like “The Motivator,” for example, are barely songs at all. Perhaps all this is not surprising, given that Tony Visconti admitted that with Electric Warrior “what we were probably doing was amassing singles” (qtd. in Paytress, “Yeah,” 83).