#24 T. Rex – Chariot Choogle (1972)

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the tragic death, at 29, of Marc Bolan in a car crash. There isn’t anything that I can say about Bolan and his band T. Rex that hasn’t been already written 100,000 times, but I just wanted to pay tribute to him on this significant date, by selecting a lesser-known T.Rex song, (if there is such a thing), and sharing it. It’s a track from their 4th album, The Slider, and demonstrates how far ahead of his time Bolan was as a songwriter, arranger, and musician. It still has a freshness to it, even in 2017. I got into T.Rex relatively late in the day, when my copy of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s heavily Bolan-influenced 1988  single, Sidewalking, sparked an interest in me to get to the DNA of the track. I’ve loved T.Rex ever since, and have often wondered what Bolan might have gone on to do had he lived. T. Rex’s final two albums, Futuristic Dragon (1976) and Dandy in the Underworld (1977), are still not really like any other albums I’ve ever heard, and indicate perhaps that he could have taken rock into wildly new and uncharted territory. Sadly, we shall never know. So much potential. Only 29.

RIP #Forever29trex

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: