BORN TO BOOGIE (1972)
In 1971 Marc Bolan was enjoying the height of fan
worship of his music, dubbed ‘T-Rexstacy’, the early ‘70s version of
Beatlemania. At that time, T-Rex was selling 60,000 singles a day. Even the
Beatles themselves acknowledged Bolan was more popular then than they ever were
in the UK at his high-point.
So it was a fitting kind of of anointment or passing of
the mantle by Ringo Starr that he made a documentary celebrating his friend,
composed of live film from T-Rex’s first British concert in six months at the
Wembley Empire Pool and intercut with studio sessions and playful home-movie
style footage.
Beginning with ‘Jeepster’, the live set is excellent
quality, the sound reproduction mixed prominently to overshadow the crazed
teenage rampage of the fans, although you can hear the occasional girly squeals
of delight. There is a great, infectiously loose studio version of ‘Tutti
Frutti’ with Ringo on drums and Elton John’s ferocious boogie-woogie keyboards.
Fans of Bolan’s acoustic guitar-playing will love his sit-down rendition of
‘Spaceball Ricochet’. I’d never heard this song before, not being familiar with
‘the Slider’ album and found it very touching, preferring it to the slower
original album recording I compared it to later.
The supplementary scenes for the most part are a
mish-mash. The first one is a surreal nonsense at an airfield beginning with an
interminable long-shot of Bolan eventually arriving in a convertible in Mad
Hatter guise, accompanied by someone dressed as a giant rat. He recites some of
his poetry, conversing it into the ‘phone as if in a conversation, then
magically produces a dwarf who scoffs his wing-wirror. Your guess is as good as
mine. Later, there is a series of indulgent out-takes in the same location where
he and Ringo keep corpsing while trying to deliver lines to camera starting
with : “Some people like to rock/Some
people like to roll…” before abandoning it in laughter.
The one extra scene that may be of interest to fans is
a sort of country Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, where Bolan does a nice acoustic
medley backed by a string quartet -
including ‘Jeepster’, ‘Hot Love’ and ‘Get It On’, while nuns devour the
sandwiches and Geoffrey ‘CATWEAZLE’ Bayldon performs.
The other highlight from the concert is the final
eleven-minute ‘Get It On’ which goes from electric into an extended free-form
jam session with Mickey Finn on bongos and Bolan imitating Jimi Hendrix by
playing his guitar with a tambourine.
Despite Ringo’s unnecessary padding-out of the running
time, BORN TO BOOGIE is a valuable time capsule of T-Rex’s stage performance
and the fan hysteria of the time before Bolan entered his ‘Fat Elvis’ temporary
spell of implosion - as well as showing
that Bolan had entered the Rock world establishment of impressive musical
friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment