To be or not to be, That is The Slider
Such was the advertising blurb. Expectation was huge. Existentialism? Ontological exploration?
Or just bullshit?
Electric Warrior would be a tough act to follow. A new label. A new album. Then the boast - there would be TWO number one singles on it! Promising. Until you find out one was the latest single, Metal Guru (which wasn't my favourite, despite its huge production), and the other was Telegram Sam, the hit from January!
Remember this is now July, six months on. So, I'm two tracks down before I hear the disc. It must have been tempting to proclaim your album has two number one hits on it, but it doesn't bode well for artistic integrity.
Anyhow my friend & I get his precious copy and we set up my dad's trusty PYE Black Box ready to be enthralled. The cover is excellent with a close-up of the face on the front and the rear doing a similar job, but showing the back of the head. Nice touch. Nice big red font, too. The inner sleeve is red with all the lyrics printed black on red. The titles appear to be glorious. Couldn't fail to be impressed. The cover photo is by Ringo Starr, a Beatle. Serious stuff. The first mistake! Turns out years later that Tony Visconti took the photo and Marc, unwittingly, forgot. Cheap.
On to the record. Side one: It's all in two keys, G & E ! My mate knows I can play a bit, so he'll accept my views. I prefer the acoustic version of Metal Guru which turns up in the 90s, sounding like Itchycoo Park in tone. We ignore the first track. Mystic Lady is ok. Sounds like a slowed-down 'Marie's the Name' by Elvis but tends to yawn along. There's no lead guitar. I like the chorus but feel underwhelmed. Things then pick up. Rock On is more like it with a neat guitar line dragging a B flat along and a catchy chorus to boot. The title track is next. Chugging along in trademark 'Get it On' mode it oozes style, but it doesn't feel composed, just like something you'd play in the bath! And there's that run in the chorus which would haunt many of the choruses of future Bolan productions (C - B - Bflat - A), which emanated from Jeepster. The worst offender of this is Dawn Storm (1976) which has a fantastic verse, but repeats its chorus ad nauseam - pity. (Bet the French Horns loved that!) My mate liked it but agreed it was a tad lazy. Baby Boomerang swings in on another unremarkable well-known bit of Bolanic boogie-guitar stuff (again in E, like the previous track). I thought it was pedestrian then. But nowadays I like it a lot - it has great lyrics. It should have had explosive guitarring in the middle, though. My friend, Fred, gave it the thumbs up. I don't know what to say about Spaceball Ricochet. It was personal to Marc. But it's a shambles. Must have written it on a stamp. The downward run, like that of the Slider is now in G, but it's the same run on a lower string. The repetition is becoming irritating. Roxy Music use this run in Pyjamarama, but it sounds like a different animal and Manzanera adds flair to the simple ideas. To me Spaceball Ricochet evolves into a drone. (I find the live versions unbearable.)
Then a brainwave! Buick Mackane shines like a beacon in the torpor. However, this track would have benefited from being left on the back burner till it had become the polished gem it became in 1973. (Have a listen to the version played live on German TV - it pisses all over this one. I also have a Japanese concert where this track is unrecognisable from the rather tame offering here). When Marc wanted to he could be astonishing on guitar. The solo here on the album is weedy as hell. Very odd. Still it's a bit of Zep Rex! Guns 'n Roses even did a cover version on 'The Spaghetti Incident' in the 90s. Much respected is Marc's work and playing.
So a real curate's egg. Quite a lot of egg, on face!
Side Two & what's this? Baby Strange! That was one of the tracks on the flip of Telegram Sam in January! That's 3 old tracks before you start. Well Telegram Sam kicks off side two with a number one and, though it's a classic, it should not be there. Rabbit Fighter is next and is excellent. It's got a blues shell but has lovely overlapping lead guitar throughout and does its Rex chorus with aplomb. It's classy. Baby Strange became an anthem in 1972 and is excellent, structurally and rhythmically. But it shouldn't be there. Ballrooms of Mars is a great song, but lacks dynamics: Visconti said he cut the tape after it ended and bolted a copy (exact) of the first part to make it longer. It should have been played! Silly. Spoils it a fair bit. Heavy lyrics. You can feel the presence of Bowie's Spiders hiding behind the curtains!
The best creative track is next and this kind of attack should have been the springboard for singles. Chariot Choogle is a slice of magic. It's related to Baby Strange but is a demented sister. Great backward guitars and nonsense everywhere. Another six like this please! It all ends with a whimper. Mainman at least gives Defries a name for his Bowie empire. If only Dave knew he wasn't to be the emperor, though, but just an employee. Stinks to high heaven. Mainman is pleasant but doesn't even have a chorus or guitars of note. It does have the chordal structure though for Sound & Vision. Wonder if any magpies were about. Ironic, considering how much Marc would nick.
My mate looked at me. "Well. What do you think?"
"Electric Warrior," I replied. He knew what I meant.
If all that seems rather harsh on what many assume (hegemony, again) to be the most iconic T. Rex album, I tracked down my mate to get his views on the album. I thought it would be enlightening to see what he thinks of it now, compared with what he thought about it when it was released. My mate (Fred) is a bit of an expert on all things Bolanic (going back to Tyrannosaurus days) and we were rather amused and bemused when superstardom intervened.
Here goes a track-by-track of the above album. I recorded everything he said on a macbook and this is the result.
So, Fred, what do you think of ............Metal Guru?
”When I first heard it, it was to me 'middle of the road.' There was nothing memorable about it. There was nothing that stood out. OK, the chorus is a hook and people get into that, but the sound was very bland, whereas the song before it, Telegram Sam, had a bit more 'oomph' to it. Metal Guru was dropping into 'middle of the road' sound, just floating on, floating on. You've got the hook, which he was good at doing - he had a hook - and he could play it, but it seemed to me that things were beginning to get a bit, I don't know, easy. 'I'll just stick this track out, it's just...' It's a big production thing, but I think that is just Visconti, because I'm convinced that, particularly with this album, he rushed it and even if you listen to people like Bill Legend & Steve Currie, they'd say, 'We'd go in the studio and we'd have half a song, he'd go ' woop woop woop wop bang it out' and the next thing you know it comes out as this big production. And I think that was Visconti making the sound, you know, because I think Bolan was feeling under pressure to churn stuff out. I think he must have known that Fame was a fleeting thing and he wanted to grab it while he could. And so as a result he was just going in.........he was in a very creative time. He had a lot of ideas, but I don't think he developed them and I think Visconti was the person who developed them. Thoughts on it now? I don't like it very much now. When I play stuff, sometimes I skip it, because it is too bland. There is nothing to get excited about. There's nothing that really grips you or hooks you. It was OK for the public, but I do believe that the public listened to it and bought it because that's Bolan. Then they all bought it, but when it actually began to play, they must have been thinking, 'That's a bit ordinary, really.' I quite like the other side, I've got to be honest. I don't hate it. I will listen to it if I've got something playing and it comes on. I will listen to it, but I wouldn't turn round and say, 'That's one of my favourite tracks.' I've heard a lot of alternative versions. But at the time it's not gonna be commercial (non-electric version). This was the problem with him. He lost sight of his musical credibility in order to be famous. I don't think it was a complete artistic collapse (The Slider, according to Charles Sharr Murray), I don't agree with that, no. I don't agree with that at all and I think it has become the kind of ultimate T. Rex sound. That is the one, you know. It had a kind of iconic cover because the photograph made you look at it. It was fascinating and you would go back to it time and again. The music was the most accepted and recognised T.Rex sound and they were the same in as much as they both came together in this ultimate image or representation of T.Rex.
Tanx was probably better, production-wise. and I often think if they'd brought Tanx out first, musically he would have been more accepted. The way that Tanx was produced was far more sophisticated. The sound was better, the songs were more varied. I thought, if that had come out before The Slider, Charles Sharr Murray wouldn't have been saying, 'This is an artistic collapse,' because he couldn't have. And I think he would have had a lot more musical credibility......."
The next track.......Mystic Lady?
"A disappointment. Massive disappointment. I think it's lazy. I think there are two tracks on there that are lazy. The second one is Mainman, which I think is really lazy. They are just fillers. He couldn't be bothered to work them up. Mystic Lady was a big disappointment. Lyrically it's ok. I've always liked his lyrics. There's always something to pick up. I often wonder who's choosing the tracks to go on the album. When you think of the stuff he had 'in the can' that he could have worked up into reasonable stuff - I think the b-sides are stronger than the stuff on here. Even Lady is stronger than Mainman and Lady's not great. I like Thunderwing and that is stronger. The stuff on the b-side of Children of the Revolution, Jitterbug Love & Sunken Rags, is stronger. Way better. Why couldn't they have slotted those in, instead?
Rock On"
I like it........but the next track (The Slider) is much better. It seems to need something more - I don't know what - but I do listen to it and like it. There are tracks which disappoint simply because they haven't been worked up into something more. He obviously liked a fairly-sparse guitar sound which he wanted to be prominent. He'd have a bit of a riff and it would stand out. He liked doing that coz he thought that was the catch. But it didn't always work.
"The Slider"
I liked this. That catches you straight away. I wouldn't say it's subdued but the chugging beat gets you and I really like that. I like the lyrics and it sounds like he's worked on it in terms of the production. It's not so harsh with its chugging little beat and I really like The Slider. It's fairly simple and repetitive but it works. You mentioned 'Walk on the Wild Side' (I had been referring to the string-arrangement on 'Cosmic Dancer' - editor) and it has that kind of beat as a hook. So I think The Slider really works.
"Baby Boomerang"
I've always liked Baby Boomerang. I like the lyrics and it's catchy. You can tap your foot to it and I still like it now." [about Patti Smith, possibly]
Spaceball RicochetI
I got a little bit fed up with his megalomania. I'm putting myself in the song. I'm writing about myself. The 'produced by Bolan' logo and those songs where he was almost trying to 'justify' himself. I. I. And 'The Groover' was just all about him. I thought, 'Can't he just shut up about himself?' The kids like this. I'm this. This is the one song that makes me think 'I'm getting a bit tired of this.' It's a bit cocky. The thing about the British public is that they love an underdog who's making a success, but once you start to get a bit cocky, they don't want this anymore. I think he blew it, big time. This song is almost the first one which made me think 'You need to shut up a bit now.' I don't know whether they could have done anything with this, whether it was purely designed as an acoustic sit-down piece. I'm not sure if he wanted to do anything more with it. The odd thing is I've slated these tracks but I like the album."
Buick Mackane [Guns 'n Roses recorded a version for 'The Spaghetti Incident.']
"I've heard a couple of versions by other people. The thing about this track that puts me off this track is the fact that Bolan said it's Zep Rex. This track cannot compete with Led Zeppelin. It is nowhere near. I don't know why he would even say it. Whether it's because it's loud and noisy or whether it's the same riff being repeated. Zeppelin used a lot of repetitive riffs in their songs. However, lyrically it's crap. So perhaps he's thinking...I'm in a studio having a lot of fun letting rip. Let's stick it on an album.[reputed to be about an American artist he met in New York] The end shows that. The end is a shambles. It just dies out in the studio. I don't really like it at all. Instead of building a riff into a decent track, he'd splinter it and put it into other songs. That's probably where the accusations came of lacking originality. He's bringing out stuff that sounds the same, because he used bits and pieces he'd already used. Most people do that, but for some reason he got a lot more criticism for it than other artists. But that's because he irritated music writers and the public. He shouted his mouth off.
[On 3rd December, 1972, T. Rex should have commenced a three-week American tour supporting Alice Cooper, but it was shelved, possibly because Marc wouldn't like being second-fiddle. Reprise Records had been surprised by the sudden unexpected success in Britain by T. Rex.]
But he thought he was bigger than that. He'd have wanted Alice Cooper supporting him! And that's this inflated-ego nonsense. He thought he was bigger than he was. What happened to the stuff he did with Steve Harley? It never appeared."
So, that's side one accounted for and it's not too good. Liked 2 tracks. Panned the rest. Haha!
On to Side Two.......
Telegram Sam
My favourite T. Rex track. It is the best single they've ever done. It is a stand-out track despite the fact that music journalists said it sounded the same as the last one. It doesn't sound the same at all. It's brilliant. I cannot listen to it without tapping my foot. It's my feel good song. That's to do with the period and the time, no doubt, but if I want to feel good, I will put this on. That's the best thing he's ever done. No matter what his faults may be, I think it's brilliant.
What do you think about putting two number 1s on there which had already been released?
I've been thinking about this. These days artists release albums and then start releasing tracks off the albums as singles. We've bought the album. Why are they churning them out as singles? Whereas back then you released singles and stuck them on albums. Once again there's an element of laziness, because these have already been produced so we don't have to do anything to them, so we can stick the album out really quickly. It was a number 1. Marketed with these number 1 singles. When they recorded this album it was a kind of rush. As I said earlier the band would say it was rushed. Again there's this fame thing. He's riding a wave of popularity. He wants to cash in on it. Whether he was truly aware it was a fleeting thing and he wanted to make the most of it at the time, what did happen was that by adopting those tactics he sacrificed his musical credibility. It's his own label and EMI wants something that will sell. The idea was that he would put other bands on his label, but he never did. The record company aren't going to invest all that money and not want something that doesn't sell. But having said all that, there's no single on Tanx. So, the very next album has no single!
Rabbit Fighter
This is supposed to be the track where he demonstrates his guitar-playing. When the album came out, this was Bolan showing he could actually play his guitar. He was the opposite to what was happening at the time, because rock music was played by long-haired denim-clad guys who just stood on a stage and went into long guitar solos, but that wasn't what the youngsters wanted. He appealed to the youngsters who wanted something instant and quick, so he couldn't put long guitar solos on his albums, otherwise he'd lose his audience. That wasn't what was working for him. Whether he could do it or not wasn't even the question, because he probably could have, but the kids in his audience would have been thinking, 'What the hell is this about?' So they say he was the one who changed things. I like Rabbit Fighter and he could probably have done a version which would have been much more interesting, but it had to be 'sanitised' for the audience at the time.
Baby Strange
It's catchy and I can listen to it without any problem, though it was released as a b-side. It's got some good changes. I liked it as a b-side when it came out. Having said that, I'm surprised that 'Cadilac' isn't on there, because they wanted 'Cadilac' to be the A-side. It's a strong track, yet they don't put it on the album. As much as I like 'Telegram Sam' musically 'Cadilac' would have been an adventurous choice. Whether it would have sold is another matter. But returning to the album, how is it omitted when there are weaker tracks on there? But you could have filled this album with the tracks from the singles. The singles have 3 tracks. That's 6 straightaway.
I'm convinced his perception of what the public wanted, whether there's pressure from his record company, his own megalomania (all of that), compressed what he produced and he didn't think there was the demand for things like that and he wasn't seen as someone who was going to play guitar solos. I think the fame aspect got to his head. I don't think he thought 'I want to be a great musician.' I think it was...'I want to be famous. The most famous person in the world.'
Any views on the cover photo taken by Visconti, but attributed to Ringo ?
That's indicative, because he now can say that Ringo Starr took that photograph. Wow! Ringo Starr, eh? But who the hell is Tony Visconti? It's all to do with that publicity machine.
Ballrooms of Mars
I’d stick this in the category of 'Spaceball Ricochet.' It's something and nothing. It comes and goes. I'm not overly-enamoured with 'Ballrooms of Mars.' It doesn't develop because it's repeated and cloned. Songs normally have some kind of progression and changes by the end. I've got one minute's worth of recording here, but we could make it 4 minutes by copying and pasting. So, it's repetitive then. I always thought there was something not quite right about it.
Chariot Choogle
I like Chariot Choogle - I'd heard it on the radio. They said T. Rex have a new album out and they played this. It sounded a bit wild to me for Bolan. There's more energy whereas many of the acoustic tracks didn't seem to have any 'go' in them. You listen to this and it's as if he's on speed, hyped-up and he's gone for it. But the ending is a complete let-down.
Mainman
What a naff way to end an album. It was so pointless.
Overview: There's a nice flow to the album and I do like it and it was held to be the best example of the T. Rex sound. I don't know why that should be the case. Sure, 'Electric Warrior' was a little more primitive, perhaps not as well-developed. There were many riffs on there (old type) and some of the tracks are quite raw. I wouldn't say it was more polished but it seemed more of a T. Rex sound, in my opinion. That's Visconti's influence, I think.
The next album (Tanx) took a further step as far as production was concerned: the song-writing was better, the variety was better, the styles were better. I love 'Rapids' for instance. My kids love 'Rapids' (the one's favourite track by T. Rex is 'Rapids'). There are some good songs right down the opening side. However, 'Shock Rock' is just another version of 'Buick Mackane.' It's the same kind of idea. If they'd have released Tanx before The Slider, Charles Sharr-Murray would not be considering the notion of 'artistic collapse.' There would not have been any question.
On 'pairing' albums (having maybe something in common), I would put 'T. Rex' & 'Electric Warrior' together, 'Slider' & 'Tanx' together, 'Zinc Alloy' on its tod. I would have released 'Dandy in the Underworld' & 'Futuristic Dragon' closer together. It's possible (obviously) to place them chronologically, but it's more interesting to link them stylistically. Haha! (So much for the legacy-destroying pairings in recent times). I don't agree that 'Zinc Alloy' & 'Zip Gun' are similar enough to be put together, because with 'Zip Gun' I didn't quite know what he was doing (good spot, that - it was a separate new album for Neil Bogart of Casablanca Records, hence the new production values). I don't think he knew what he was doing.
Anyway, we digress. What if? That old sci-fi chestnut.....what if? But what if 'The Slider' had been postponed for just two months. Think of the choice available then to put on a new album. For, by then (August), a whole raft of new material had been assembled. Take a look at these and then try to decide which of these, along with what was released on 'The Slider,' you would pick to fill a 40 minute album. That's just 20 minutes a side. That's quality-control for you. Remember, too, that there's audible distortion on the last track on each side (part of the vagaries of vinyl). The extra tracks recorded by the 4th August:
