- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- T. Rex released their second album, the fully glam-rock Electric Warrior that topped the British album charts and became the best-selling album in 1971.
T. Rex – Electric Warrior (1971): Bandleader Marc Bolan of T. Rex – he was born Mark Feld, and his stage surname is a contraction of “Bob Dylan” – was a major force in British rock music in the late 1960’s and the 1970’s. In July 1967, Marc Bolan founded Tyrannosaurus Rex as a psychedelic band that plays mostly acoustic music. This creates an alphabetizing dilemma, since their original name and their shortened and more successful incarnation as T. Rex are at opposite ends of the T’s; but I went with the names as spelled. Marc Bolan is the songwriter and lead vocalist on all of the songs by T. Rex, to the point that T. Rex is as much an alter ego for Marc Bolan as the name of his band.
In October 1970, a standalone single called “Ride a White Swan” b/w “Is it Love?” and “Summertime Blues” (the Eddie Cochran classic) is the first release to come out under the name T. Rex. “Ride a White Swan” entered the Top 40 by the end of October, climbing slowly to a position of #2 in the U.K. charts in January 1971. The song is generally regarded as heralding the glam rock movement in Britain; the “glam” label being less about the music itself and more about the bands’ images and public performances, with shiny and satiny suits, top hats, feather boas, glitter, and such replacing the traditional jeans-and-tees that most male rock musicians sport in concert. Two performances on the long-running British music program Top of the Pops enhanced the popularity of “Ride a White Swan”. In the U.S., the song attained #60 in the Cashbox singles chart and #76 in the Billboard Hot 100. The follow-up single by T. Rex, “Hot Love” was a #1 hit in the U.K. for six weeks; T. Rex would create another three #1 singles – “Get It On”, “Telegram Sam”, and “Metal Guru” (with the emphasis on the second syllable in each word in the latter song title) – and a total of four #2 singles and 11 Top Ten hits between 1970 and 1973. Less than a year after the release of “Ride a White Swan”, T. Rex released their second album, the fully glam-rock Electric Warrior that topped the British album charts and became the best-selling album in 1971. In the U.S., Electric Warrior peaked at #32 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. Marc Bolan is a first-rate songwriter and has a highly individual vocal style; while the lyrics are still fantastical as in the old Tyrannosaurus Rex days, on Electric Warrior they are paired with an array of throbbing and droning rhythms and background singing having a sensuous undercurrent. Its lead single, retitled “Bang a Gong (Get it On)”, made the Top Ten in the U.S.; the song would be the only North American hit by T. Rex and is played regularly on rock radio stations to this day. In 1985, a supergroup called the Power Station – composed of singer Robert Palmer, John Taylor and Andy Taylor of Duran Duran, and Tony Thompson of Chic – released a cover of “Get it On” that was called “Get it On (Bang a Gong)” in the U.S. This version of the song did slightly better than the original by T. Rex, attaining #9 on the Billboard Hot 100, although it just missed the Top 20 in the U.K. The other single on Electric Warrior, “Jeepster” is also a treat; other favorites on the album are “Mambo Sun”, “Lean Woman Blues”, “Planet Queen”, “The Motivator”, and “Life’s a Gas” – but I love all of the songs. Perhaps because the very public break-up of the Beatles was happening concurrently with the arrival of Marc Bolan and T. Rex on the English music scene, the unbridled popularity of the band was compared to Beatlemania; and the band’s publicist BP Fallon coined the term “T. Rextasy” as a descriptive. Marc Bolan was killed in an automobile accident in September 1977 following the release earlier that year of a comeback album for T. Rex called Dandy in the Underground. Also, six episodes of a low-budget weekly music program called Marc were shot, and another six episodes were planned until the host’s premature death not even a month after the program started airing. T. Rex was way ahead of their time, and I am at a loss to explain why the band had such limited success in the U.S. Remarkably, besides being influential on punk and new wave music as well as post-punk and alternative rock, T. Rex is also an important influence on earlier proto–punk-rock bands like New York Dolls and the Stooges – and the entire music scene in Great Britain for that matter. T. Rex was belatedly inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020.