Lives Behind The Music

I have enjoyed reading this collection of obituaries from The Times. The linking theme is that they are all popular musical entertainers. There are around 75 names altogether, nearly all of whom I was aware of (Phil May was new to me; I didn't know the name Jet Black; I knew the name Captain Beefheart but noithing about him). Some are legends, as they say, others less so. They die at different ages (with a little glut around 27 as is known - Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, etc). Few of them seem to have lived very easy lives and most of those who weren't abused themselves in some way were immoral or drug abusers. Some of the stories are very sad (Elvis, Michael Jackson, Kurt Cobain, etc). There are very few Christians here (Alvin Stardust and Glenn Campbell?) few religious at all. They are really a bunch of misfits in many ways but redeemed by their musical genius. From David Cassidy to Shane MacGowan I read them all and found them all interesting in one way or another. The obituaries change in style and length over the years (I'd like to have had a longer one on Marc Bolan). Some are missing (such as Johnny Cash).

The Warlock of Love

Desire is a strange thing. In 2 Samuel 13 we read of Amnon that first he fell in love with his half sister Tamar but that after he had raped her he hated her with intense hatred. Having given in to an inordinate desire he then feels an opposite emotion - hatred.

Normally, the desire is not so strong and so the reaction is not so strong either. When I was a student I used to see copies of Tabletalk magazine produced by Ligonier around and it seemed to me to be very desirable but when I investigated costs it was quite expensive having to come from America. As a poor student, I could not afford it. When I became a minister and was as rich as I had ever been I rather forgot about Tabletalk. Now I am sixty and Ligonier are giving us free copies. Somehow I am not that excited.

Some while ago I tracked down a copy of Archie and the Strict Baptists. I had seen a copy again as a student and tried to find one from time to time. When I eventually tracked one down at a price I was happy to pay and I enjoyed reading it again.

Last week another book from my teenage years arrived at my door. This time I had never seen a copy but was aware of it and knew it was one of the best selling poetry books of 1970. It has rarely been reprinted and so when I have looked for a copy the price has been exorbitant. This year it has been printed once again and so I bought a copy, The book is Marc Bolan's Warlock of Love. The new edition comes with a nice CD of four songs and one poem in mono. As for the poems themselves, well I might have got mildly excited years ago but not today really. So there it sits as I try and get something out of it.

The vanquished sun

Is like the withered yolk

Of a weathered egg.

Stacey Grove

Mad Marc at his best

Fist Heart Mighty Dawn Dart

Sunken Rags (Home demo)

Fortieth Anniversary of the death of Marc Bolan

Marc Bolan was an early musical hero of mine. I never saw him life (protective parents). On September 16, 1977, the T. Rex singer was killed instantly when the car, a mini, driven by his girlfriend, Gloria Jones, left the road and hit a tree in Barnes, West London. The couple were on the way to Bolan's home in Richmond after a night out at a Mayfair restaurant. A local man who witnessed the crash said, “When I arrived a girl was lying on the bonnet and a man with long dark curly hair was stretched out in the road; there was a hell of a mess”.

A very good documentary called Cosmic Dancer aired last night on BBC 4 and is worth watching. It appeared to give to me a fair and balanced account of the life. I thought it about right when someone said Bolan was not as good as he sometimes claimed but then not as bad either as others made out. Like most geniuses he was a flawed genius. To die so young was a great tragedy.See here for the next month.

One Inch Rock and Germaine Greer

Mentioning T Rex's One Inch Rock set me thinking about that strange song and what it may mean. Some time ago it crossed my mind that "I asked her name she said Germaine" was a reference to Germaine Greer. That may be the case. Quite what more we can say I know not.

In the book Ride a White Swan: The Lives and Death of Marc Bolan Lesley-Ann Jones writes

Times were a'changing on all fronts. Germaine Greer, outspoken Australian feminist and International Times and Oz magazine contributor, was now a household name, thanks to her best-selling 1970 work The Female Eunuch. Championing the cause of women's liberation beyond 'mere' equality with men, Greer became a high-profile figure on the London scene, and an unlikely friend of Marc (Bolan), (DJ) Jeff (Dexter) and June (Child). Jeff recounts outrageous nights in restaurants, when Germaine could always be relied upon to let down her hair and get up to mischief while Marc would be beside himself with mirth.

A website here refers to One Inch Rock as "a thinly veiled attack on Germaine Greer".

The lyrics are

Met a woman she's spouting prose She's got luggage eyes and a roman nose

Her body is slung from side to side Need a lift she said much obliged

I'm riding piggy-back Then I came to her shack

We go inside the place it's a mess She said my name's the liquid poetess

She unties her mouth And her buckskin dress

She drinks from a bottle labelled tenderness I'm in one hand in the other's a can

She puts me in the can And smiles through the wall

I got the horrors 'cause I'm one inch tall Next thing I know's a girl by my side

Dressed in a bayleaf she's trying to hide I asked her name she said Germaine

Do the rock do the one inch rock.

This is a song

I was thinking about his song the other day. I found this acoustic demo. Nice.

Tasteless?

I'm not sure how these malgorithms work but if you know anything of the story of Marc Bolan (he died in a car crash) then you will recognise how tasteless this ad on Youtube is.

Recent Purchase

As a sort of pre-Christmas present to myself I recently bought an album I only discovered a few years ago. Tales from the Book of Time, like its predecessor Beltane, is a reworking of some of the music of Marc Bolan by the French Canadien singer Catherine Lambert. The treatment is a baroque one with lots of harpsichord, recorders and strings. The main CD contains 15 songs from the period from Unicorn to the T Rex album, a golden era for Bolan and beautifully presented on this excellently produced album. I was familiar with most of the tracks through Youtube (see above for example). (I've not explored the second CD yet, an audiobook).
I had almost despaired of getting hold of the 2004 album. I saw one advertised somewhere for over a thousand pounds. I got this one from discogs and it was very reasonably priced although I had to pay the same price again more or less to get it from Switzerland. It really is worth having, however.

10 Winter Songs

These are not really Christmas songs but winter ones.
To hear them go here.
1. River Joni Mitchell 
2. Winter time Kayak
3. Winterborn lyric Jan Akkerman
4. Drive the cold winter away Horslips/Kate Rusby
5. The throat of winter Tyrannosaurus Rex
6. Midwinter night Tangerine Dream
7. Trains and winter rains Enya 
8. Flight of the snow goose Camel
9. Winter time love The Doors/Bojoura
10. Hazy shade of winter Simon and Garfunkel/Bangles

The Slider

This is one of my favourite Marc Bolan tracks, the title track of the second T Rex album.

Incongruously

I just blogged this over on one of my other blogs:
Because I love words so much I can sometimes remember where I first came across a word. As a teenager I was a big fan of T Rex. In May 1972, aged 13 or 14, I bought a music magazine called Cream because it contained a long article about my favourite group (and a free poster I now recall having found the cover on the Internet). It was by someone called Charles Shaar Murray, a name that would have meant nothing to me at the time. The one thing that struck me about the article's style was that he was trying to be objective, something I was not really used to. You can find the article here I believe, including the bit where he says that Cosmic Dancer is "a fine song, spoilt by incongruously heavy-handed drumming by Legend". He has a point but I still find it hard to accept. (The comment about "Visconti's saccharine string writing" was lost on me then and now).

Retro album "of the week" 38 A Beard of Stars

A Beard of Stars by Tyrannosaurus Rex came out in 1970 but I didn't discover it until three or four years later after Marc Bolan had found commercial success with T Rex (beginning with Ride a white Swan that same year). I really discovered all four Tyrannosaurus albums at more or less the same time. Beard of Stars the fourth of them is different to the other three in that it was the first to feature Bolan with Mickey Finn as percussionist rather than Steve Peregrine Took and is the transition album in that electric guitars and drum kit feature for the first time. (On the this front, there was an electric guitar first featured on the 1969 single King of the Rumbling Spires/Do You Remember)

One writer (Mark Deming of AllMusic) says that A Beard of Stars "was the turning point where Marc Bolan began evolving from an unrepentant hippie into the full-on swaggering rock star he would be within a couple of years, though for those not familiar with his previous work, it still sounds like the work of a man with his mind plugged into the age of lysergic enchantment." The truth about Marc Bolan I think is that he was willing to do whatever it took to get musical fame. It was the times that were achangin' (and Bob Dylan especially) rather than Bolan himself. 

Four tracks from this album, including "Great Horse", were apparently salvaged from Spring 1969 sessions for a fourth album with Took in the wake of "King of the Rumbling Spires". These four tracks were overdubbed for release by Finn, Bolan and Visconti. A further four tracks from the Took sessions were rejected for the final album and only surfaced later on compilations, three ("Once Upon the Seas of Abyssinia", "Blessed Wild Apple Girl", "Demon Queen") in Bolan's lifetime, the fourth ("Ill Starred Man") posthumously.

I have always found the two instrumental openers (Prelude and Beard of Stars) particularly pleasing. Elemental Child is pretty much an instrumental and goes on far too long. Bolan is sometimes classed with the progressive music makers and these tracks give part of the reason why. Meanwhile A Daye Laye, By the light of the magical moon, Lofty Skies, Dove, etc, are all great numbers. The simple Organ blues was long a favourite.

Newly released CDs

 

Two of my musical heroes have CDs out this month. First Jan Akkerman has a new CD of live performances in the North Sea Jazz Legendary Concerts series. This must be from 2011. It is nothing too special but gives an idea of Akkerman live as he is these days. I found it in mp3 form on Amazon UK for £5.99. Then here I see all of Marc Bolan's recordings at the BBC have been put together in a six CD set. Interesting.

10 Successful People They say had Dyslexia

1. Hans Christian Anderson
2. Marc Bolan
3. Winston Churchill
4. Leonardo Da Vinci
5. Walt Disney
6. Albert Einstein
7. Michael Faraday
8. Francis Schaeffer
9. Auguste Rodin
10. W B Yeats

Olympics Opening Ceremony

I haven't stayed up so late in ages but I did last night for the opening ceremony of the Olympics which was a total triumph. Highlights for me were Chariots of fire featuring Sir Simon Rattle and Mr Bean (Rowan Atkinson), the appearance of Mike Oldfield (I'd only been playing his album QE2 that afternoon) and the gobsmacking sequence with James Bond (Daniel Craig) and Her maj (I thought it particularly clever that you saw her back first and so you thought - yeah not her but then it was!). Also enjoyed Abide with me from Emeli Sande and The Arctic Monkeys doing Come Together and not forgetting JPR scoring a try for Wales. Paul McCartney at the end was inevitable and okay but poor song choice (Hey Jude - though what else I don't know) and the poor man can't sing any more (well, he is 70). How they missed any reference to Hackney born Marc Bolan I cannot imagine (this I see despite a campaign by some). Why U2 tracks were heard during the entry of the teams is mystifying. The entrance of 204 teams did become boring but it really is quite a thing to see and a reminder to pray for the nations of the world. I think it did make you proud to be British (not a phrase often on my lips) and it was good to see the Christian backbone to it all in Glastonbury Tor and Abide with me. I'm always wishing for more though and I do see the Olympic movement as a potential form of antichrist in that it in so many ways it presents an alternative way of salvation. I think Coubertin's thing about taking part not winning is fine enough but what does it oprofit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul. Ultimatley if you don't win, you've lost.

Aged 27

I notice in my sidebar that my most popular post at present is one I did in 2008 on musicians who died aged 27. See here. No prizes for guessing why people have been looking at it. Tragically, another 27 year old musician died last weekend. There is probably nothing over significant in the number. It allows time for real success but is still tragically young. Others, like Marc Bolan, get beyond 27, but still die tragically young.

Country Honey

This song is in my head for no reason. You might like it ... probably not. At least it's short and to the point (like Bolan himself in stature and life span). I like it when he says "Guitar".

Find a little wood

Another piece of music not to like! This is a demo of a nice song I was listening to recently.