Funky T.Rextasy. If you could take this song and shake it, reams of glitter would fly every which way. Which is exactly what would happen if you took Marc Bolan and shook him. Bolan wrote a lot of nonsense songs, but he put it out there with so much conviction you couldn’t help but take him seriously. This one is pretty typical Bolan, with all the elements in place; irresistible rockabilly groove, loads of attitude and about as much glitter, and zero logic. I’m not suggesting that Marc Bolan was a shallow glamhead, though. He was focused on making music as fun as possible, but he also understood that even the funnest musics need emotional depth. Pleasure is an important matter, and fun can be spiritual. That’s what made T.Rex special, that combination of soulfulness and pop abandon. I guess in this case it’s leaning closer towards the pop abandon side of things.
Did I say that last song was the ultimate rock’n'roll dance down attitude boogie song? Yeah, I did, and it is, but this is too. In a different way. They’re very different songs, obviously, but the attitude is the same. It’s that I don’t give a fuck I’m gonna dance and have fun and be myself thing that is the essence of what rock’n'roll is all about. Or boogie, if you want to put it that way. Anyway, since it’s the beginning of a new year again and we’re all looking for new resolutions and ways to change and make ourselves better somehow… Why not make a resolution to boogie? If you don’t get it, you don’t get it and I can’t help you. If you do, then you do. It may not seem at first glance that Marc Bolan has anything very deep to say. At first glance most of what he says sounds like gibberish. But that’s a mistake. He does have a deep and meaningful message, if you can hear it. So listen to the song, and see if you don’t hear the message. It’s all about the redeeming power of music and fun and dancing. Those things will save your soul, if you let them.
Hot indeed. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spend just jumping up and down to this song. Back when I was younger and didn’t have to work as hard, and I had more energy for just jumping around. It’s a very euphoric song that makes it hard not to do some jumping about. It makes me happy every single time I hear it, which happens to be rather often. A lot of T.Rex music does that. Which is why I’ve always idolized Marc Bolan and always will. In the sixties nobody was better at fusing mind-expanding psychedelic folk rock with the mythological heft of Tolkien-inspired fantasy, until Led Zeppelin came along and did much, much louder. Then Bolan went and invented glam rock, which fused much the same things with mad guitar riffs and shiny pants. He ruled at glam, until David Bowie came along with heavier makeup and better ideas. Sadly, Bolan gets remembered as either yet another curly haired wizard of English folk in the shadows of Donovan and Barrett, or yet another shiny pantsed glam rocker in the shadow of Bowie, when if fact he blazed both of those trails before everyone else.
Typical Marc Bolan songwriting. His lyrics are so nonsensical you have to wonder if English is his first language. But on an emotional level, it makes perfect sense. Sure he’s throwing words together in ways they’re not quite intended to go, but you instantly grasp what he means. And it’s got Bolan’s signature trick of being both sad and uplifting. Of course with Bolan there’s always a little element of sadness that the listener generates herself, on account of him being dead. You have to watch out for your own sentiments overpowering you like that. That’s not to say Bolan didn’t have a powerful talent for combining the uptempo and the emotional. Which is a rare and kingly gift.
Hang-Ups rocking harder live than on record. For those who thought Dandy in the Underworld ran heavy on the keyboards, the live version definitely sounds more classic T.Rex. I thought Dandy was just perfect keyboards and all, personally. It’s full of bouncy, catchy tunes and it’s a little different but still a classic. We saw how well trying to eternally recreate The Slider worked out. It got boring and people stopped buying records. I worship Marc Bolan greatly, but there was a block in the mid seventies when he was in a slump and his records weren’t worth listening to, even for me. He was trying too hard to be the same Bolan he was in 1972, and failing. As soon as he let his hair down and started having fun again, everyone was having fun again. Unfortunately, we’re left to only imagine what road Marc Bolan would have followed from there, but he danced himself into the tomb only months after his big comeback. I like to imagine that if he were alive today, he’d be an extremely batty old man.
Tyrannosaurus Rex makes me take leave of reality like none other. It’s not music that can hold its own in a shuffle marathon, even against latter-day T.Rex. It’s too fragile and fey to make itself known amid hustle and clamor, too refined an appeal. It’s amid peaceful and quiet times, with mind opened to rare pleasures, that it whisks me into another world. Marc Bolan was a happening cat by all accounts, a dresser and an egoist. It was soon enough his music developed an element of look-at-me-go calculation. But in the early days, on the winsome early records, he seemed to pour out his imaginings as unguardedly as a child. The Tyrannosaurus Rex albums were entirely new and original, though their roots showed plainly what Marc had been reading and fantasizing about. To call it fantasy music, akin to fantasy writing would be diminishing, but not inaccurate. Bolan was writing about his own fantasy world with heroes and wizards, magic and lore, and talking animals of course.
If there was a Bolan philosophy to be found, it would be found here. It’s romantic, spiritual, mournful, yearning, and not dedicated to making very much sense. He’s addressing his god, his girl, maybe himself, looking for something high in the fields above earth…
So much Marc Bolan goodness, and Elton John is there too! Bolan is shiny! This song was renamed for single release from the straightforward Get It On to Bang A Gong (Get It On), which is nominally less suggestive and blunts the core message not at all. Like they knew getting it on was bad, but they didn’t know what banging was. The title matters not a whit, for it remains one of the most propulsively sexy tunes ever written. Bolan added a note at the end – “Meanwhile, I’m still thinking” – in tribute to Chuck Berry. Whatever his inspiration that chugging boogie is all his own. Those opening notes took Marc Bolan away from any hippie, bedsitter, folkie past and straight into superstardom. The fey early songs about unicorns and elves were great, Slider was great, the later soul-inflected stuff was great, but nothing approached the 39 minutes of Electric Warrior in greatness. That album and this song are just the ultimate in T-rextasy. What’s he singing? Though he’s expressing himself in his usual corkscrewey way, for once there’s no shimmer of a doubt. We know what he’s on about, and we are with him. ”You’re built like a car” is my favorite line of all time. I like to apply it as the highest possible compliment.
This song is remarkable for lots of reasons. Simply because it’s Marc Bolan at his most wistful and fey. Then there’s the lyric, a simple and beautiful elegy for lost love and fallen empires. It’s also a fine example of Bolan’s habit of stirring into the pot all the things that interest him. Atahuallpa isn’t someone he made up, he was the last sovereign Inca emperor before the Spaniards came ruined everything. I’m not sure how the title is meant to be read. Either it’s just a general title vaguely relating to the words, or if in the interest of poetic license Atahuallpa has been transposed into an empress to serve as love interest. There’s that. Then there’s the chanting, one of the first uses of Hare Krishna on a pop record, right when Eastern mysticism was coming into vogue. That Hare Krishna is continents away from Atahuallpa is immaterial. And then there’s one of Bolan’s charming Kingsley Mole stories, read by John Peel. Kingsley Mole and his friend Lionel Lark appeared sproadically on Tyrannosaurus Rex records and were plainly inspired by English talking-animal pastorals like The Wind in the Willows and the Pooh books with their whimsy and surprising thoughtfulness. All of which is a rich brew of the cultural tides of 1968. All about the creative set were looking beyond their back doors; exploring exotica both spiritual and chemical; adding bongos and sitars to their sets; adoring books about talking animals, quests and elves; and perming their hair. Bolan was a man of his age, and he pulled it off better than anyone.
Another day, another rhapsodic ode to Marc Bolan. Boy, that boy could play. That boy could strut. And when he went electric he did so with a vengeance. You can practically see T.Rex mutate from faerie beastie to electric monster. T.Rex made the transformation from sixties twee to seventies decadent seem not only natural but inevitable, though it was as radical an about-face as could be done. Imagine Donovan trying to launch a second act with glitter on his face and platforms on his feet. Generally, the barefoot-in-the-dirt types stuck to what they did best, strumming away in the face of looming irrelevance. Fair enough though, neither Bolan nor Bowie – the only two who managed to skip from cross-legged hippie to beglamored space being – neither was exactly selling gazillions of records singing about laughing gnomes and questing moles. If Bolan had sold millions of records as Tyrannosaurus Rex, bongos and all, well… I’d like to think he’d still have smelled which way the wind blew and realized that the seventies needed a new breed of rock star, one who doesn’t have dirt between his toes.
Recent Comments