Reminderhere.
I don’t think they were anything startling. I enjoyed their music but I suppose if Bolan hadn’t croaked they would have been consigned in my memory to the likes of Scaffold.
I definitely don’t think Marc Bolan and T.Rex should be remembered for “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.”
I read the OP as being about Mack Bolan:
Big fan here and I think of them as being one of the defining acts of the 1970s. Fantastic riffs, if nothing else. This was my favourite:
Get It On
Bang a gong, of course!
I didn’t realize until now that Bolan had anything to do with “Chirpy, Chirpy, Cheep, Cheep.” I knew him from Tyrannasaurus Rex and later T.Rex.
They should certainly be remembered for Electric Warrior. The cover alone is a masterpiece and Mambo Sun is one of the greatest songs ever written!
Beneath a Bepop Moon…
I’m a huge T. Rex fan - they’re definitely one of my favorite bands, and I’d put both Electric Warrior and especially The Slider up against any other “classic” album of the era. Those records are just completely phenomenal rock records.
Bolan was nothing if not consistent - he basically wrote the same three songs over and over for his entire career, and they honestly got better each time.
-
The swaggering, glammytake on the 50’s rock-n-roll staple.
-
The spacey, melancholic, psychedelic ballad.
-
The sort of proclamatory, over-arranged mid-tempo power-ballad.
By the time you get to later records like Futuristic Dragon, they’re still totally amazing but they’re basically all just refinements of those same three songs.
Yeah, I think Bolan’s songwriting style was very much “pick a riff and write a song around it”, which I like (I tend to approach songwriting the same way). I didn’t care much for T. Rex at the time … I was into art rock and other “serious” music and thought T. Rex was just sort of bubble-gummy teen-pop. I’ve grown to appreciate them more.
I had the maddest biggest crush on Marc Bolan back in the day, I thought he was absolutely darling and was devastated when he died. I have a videotape I bought full of performances by Glam Rockers (including Gary Glitter) and Marc and look at it now and then for nostalgia’s sake. Always loved Bang A Gong, though I thought the remake by Power Station blew it away.
Jeepster rules.
It really does. So does Metal Guru. I always presume Johnny Marr agreed with me, given its similarity to bits of Panic by The Smiths.
Trivia: In Bolan’s fatal crash, Gloria"Tainted Love" Jones was driving.
If you couldn’t guess from my username, I love T Rex. I think Vernon Vernons hit all the important points except for the fact that Elemental Child is missing. They also did a lot of fun Lord of the Rings / druidism inspired folk music as Tyrannosaurus Rex before they went Electric. I think Bolan was one of those people who put his heart and soul into making music. A strange, fascinating, natural rock star of a human being.
I feel I may have pasted the wrong clip after looking at the 1970’s thread 
Ride a White Swan. Bang a Gong was a Bowie song originally, but they completely rewrote it.
On the whole, my attitude is (and was then) “Who needs T. Rex when I’ve got TV?”
But anyone who can have a hit single with a song called “New York City,” whose entire lyric is:
Did you ever see a woman
Coming out of New York City
With a frog in her hand
Did you ever see a woman
Coming out of New York City
With a frog in her hand
I did don’t you know (x3)
And don’t it show
must have had something.
I loved (and love) the early stuff as Tyrannosaurus Rex. So different, so twee, but with some great tunes. He fitted in so well with the Summer of Love times.
But I did go off him when, despite being championed and supported by John Peel in the early days, Bolan just dumped Peel when he went electric and became rich and successful. John Peel was hurt by that.
I haven’t been able to get into anything aside from Electric Warrior and The Slider (which I think is just as solid of an album). I get the feeling that one day I will hit the right mood for the rest of the T. Rex / Marc Bolan discography and just have at it.
Too much of his stuff had long lead outs repeating hte same stuff over and over.
He was apparently something f a tyrant when it came to recording his stuff, puttin ghuge pressure to get things done in very tight deadlines, and to me it sounds it, very rushed, and a lack of care.
Compare him to contemporaries, especially David Bowie who would just hire a chateau somewhere and spend months making an album, those albums have not really dated that much, then compare with T Rex, time has not been kind.
His producer of those days stated in a radio interview that the sound was very formulaic, and he could quite easily knock up a T Rex mix with almost anyone, just a matter of eqs a few overdrives and and double tracks.
He had one or two great numbers, but he had a tendency to wear a riff or groove out completely.