A Beard Of Stars

                                 

I wrote this for a friend's music site. The site was to be a blog but turned into a tumblr. I guess this was too long for a tumblr. A shorter version may end up there someday. In the meantime, to avoid feeling like I wasted my time, here is the full post.

In high school, my friends and I shared music. The worst thing you could do was buy a record that someone else already owned. Each new record was meant to be passed around, taped and thus added to the collective.

One day I found myself no longer friends, in fact enemies, with these people and also living in another city in what could equally be describe as an emergence form a cocoon as an exile to a cold, harsh wilderness. The first music I bought after this upheaval was T.Rextasy by T.Rex. T.Rex wasn't like any of the music I had been listening to before. It rocked, but with a serene confidence and a coolness that I had never encountered. It was great, it was odd, and it was mine and mine alone.

After the hits compilation T.Rextasy, I quickly followed it up with Slider. My cassette copy of Slider was borrowed, brought to a party, and lost by a roommate. With the 12 dollars he gave me to replace it in hand, I headed to a used record store where I found a vinyl copy of Slider and to my delight had enough left over for the record next to it as well. That bonus record I picked up that day was A Beard of Stars by Tyrannosaurus Rex, a duo who were one album away from shortening the name and filling out the sound with a full band.

I remember sitting in the basement and watching the needle make it's way through one T.Rextasy hit after another and I immediately knew this was meant for me. It was everything I loved about music and even several things I hadn't known I loved about music until the first notes of Raw Ramp reached out and became my new best friends; best friends I felt I had already known forever. However, A Beard of Stars was different.

The sound is not as warm and lush. No steady, reliable groove. While T.Rex moves along somewhere between a strut and a saunter, here it skitters, skips, flutters and floats. The cockiness is not there in Bolan's voice. He is not playing the cosmic rock star of Get It On. His voice is higher, jittery. His pronunciation so odd that he seems to be singing half English words and half words he made up himself or merely a series of guttural vowel sounds, tongue clucks and whimpers.  The lack of drums was a bit off putting at the time, as well. The best way to be sure you are in the process of being rocked is to have a big fat beat up in your face.

Side A and side B both open with instrumentals. On the album's first track, Prelude, small bell is struck and on the ninth strike a lead electric guitar rings in with a slow, convincing melody. Up until this point, Marc Bolan had been insistent on staying strictly acoustic, so it is surprising that this album opens with, basically, a guitar solo. What's more surprising is how he had a unique voice on the guitar from the first note to the end of his career. If there are any boys/girls out there who want to know what a lead electric guitar should sound like, listen to the two instrumentals here (the other being A Beard of Stars).

Prelude fades into the warm and deep acoustic guitar of one of the album's best songs, A Day Laye. Wha-wha-ed leads, bass, a couple of acoustic guitars, bongos, and backing vocals come together but never crowd this perfectly balanced pop song. Now I won't go track by track here, don't worry, because I could write an essay on each one (and who wants to read that shit?). Let me bunch them together into a few groups.

Woodland Bop, First Heart Mighty Dawn Dart, Pavilions Of Sun, and Dragon's Ear have a decided Rock 'n Roll bent to them with a mix of chugga chugga rhythms, hand claps and climactic choruses. Eddie Cochran via Middle Earth. Definitely a hint of the Tolkien tinged, string-of-words-that-just-sound-cool-together lyrics, boogie rhythms, and blazing leads that would define the T.Rex sound. 

By the Light of The Magical Moon, Great Horse, Lofty Skies, and Dove are dreamy, lilting tunes that move along like a flower petal that's fallen on the surface of a pond. All four are truly beautiful songs and sadly they are in a vein that would not be explored as deeply in the more rock focussed T.Rex. Everything from the lyrics to the melody to the instrumentation are so light, delicate and moving. A smile on your face and tears rolling down your cheeks.

Two goofball songs break the flow of the album a little bit. Organ Blues has long, sustained organ notes and a simple repetitive bongo beat that make it seem longer than it actually is. The melody is good  and the fairy tale lyrics about beasties and people living in the sea are charming enough to save it from being a skipper. Wind Cheetah, I have begrudgingly come to like. Again organ is prominent and the guitar line following the vocal melody creates a plodding feel. the guitar leads sound great but overall, it's a bit of a miss. You know what they say; true beauty only exist in contrast to ugliness, so there's that.

The last song is the monstrous five and a half minute long Elemental Child. The acoustic guitar is gone and one of the (still to this day) rawest electric guitars takes the spotlight. The song is pretty much a twelve bar blues song but if anyone could ever make that seem fresh and unexpected, it was Bolan. The song breaks down into some serious chugging in the second half and it's just a guy in a room seeing how much noise he can get out of an amp and a guitar. Again it's amazing to think that when he finally decided to go electric he came out of the gates already one of most original and awesome guitarists in the world. Way to go!

Also, I feel I have to mention how this song features some of the worst, most tentative bass player ever committed to vinyl. It could be that was what they were going for or it was an afterthought. Or maybe no thought at all. I'd like to know what the decision making was behind keeping that odd, muffled, plucked take. It is a part of an amazing whole which cannot be broken apart so I wouldn't change it but what  a strange choice.

Of course, the circumstances under which you first hear an album have a huge effect on how you perceive it at the time, and often forever. Some things I heard at the wrong time but later realized their value. Others lost their appeal once the moment had past. But twenty five years later, A Beard of Stars still has a hold on me. As I listen I can picture myself on a hillside overlooking a dale, glenn, brook, shire or what have you, Bolan's odd quivering voice mixing in with the rustling of leaves above us. But I can also picture two young musicians and a producer, in a room, enthusiastically trying to make something great. It's this rich evocativeness contrasted with the unmistakable, stripped down sound of guys enjoying pounding out music together that makes this one of the albums I have come back to the most in my life. 

That, and the feeling I still have that it is mine and only mine.