It is not unusual for bands and musicians to shift in genre or style, but not every audience is fond of that type of change when it comes to their favorites. Thus, in this process, musicians face a lot of criticism and even lose fans while, at the same time, they start to catch new crowds’ fancy.
For example, Machine Gun Kelly has recently had a slight shift in his music from rap to rock, which brought him many views but also caused him to receive heavy criticism from his primary audience. The musician had to stop doing interviews for a while to distance himself from the reactions; however, his songs welcomed a lot of positive feedback from many people, including artists like Mick Jagger as well.
What T. Rex went through in the 70s was a similar experience to Kelly’s. Marc Bolan formed the band to create psychedelic folk music, which attracted London’s hippie community at the time and slowly shifted into glam rock, which would influence the next wave of rock musicians despite the initial opposition from fans.
Bolan’s band had a shaky start with no proper line-up in 1967 and was initially named Tyrannosaurus Rex. When the first show that was held at London’s Electric Garden failed, he turned the four-piece band into an acoustic duo featuring Steve Peregrine Took. They gained their first fans during this period until Marc collaborated with Mickey Finn after Took’s departure in 1969.
The new duo added electric guitar into their sound and followed a more simplistic route by renaming themselves T. Rex with the release of their 1970 single ‘Ride a White Swan.’ Their new sound became more proto-boogie with the addition of the drummer Bill Legend and bassist Steve Currie, which created the original line-up. The rest became history because the band entered a new era with this shift.
They started to spice their stage shows up by dressing up in glamourous and glittery costumes supported by Bolan’s dynamic performances, and their new lyrics took a more playful and sensual tone with a tint of their first style. This change caused displeasure in their first generation of fans but brought great success to T. Rex.
After the initial success of their single, which entered the UK charts of the time, the band kept gaining popularity with their other singles and albums like ‘Electric Warrior,’ encountering fame comparable to that of The Beatles. With this album, glam rock dominated UK rock in the 1970s, inspiring many bands after T. Rex, such as New York Dolls and The Stooges.
According to ‘Too Much, Too Soon: The Makeup & Breakup of the New York Dolls’ by Nina Antonia, the band was influenced by Marc Bolan’s music and style. Sylvain Sylvain explained in the book that all the members would listen to and play his songs to practice at the beginning of their careers.
The singer recalled the times as follows:
“We’d all sit on the bed with these cheap guitars and do Marc Bolan songs, as well as some blues and instrumentals.”
As The Stooges’ James Williamson explained in a 2013 interview with Tone Deaf, their album, ‘Raw Power,’ was inspired by Bolan and his popularity in England, as it also had a shift in tone and style from the band’s initial shape. The Stooges members were affected by T. Rex’s evolution to turn their direction into a hard-rock approach.
Williamson expressed their impression of Bolan by saying:
“We were over in England at the time when Marc Bolan was red hot, and we were looking at his stuff and thinking, ‘hey, we could be like that,’ and writing our stuff and just thinking it would take off.”
After all this popularity and adventure, the band’s legacy froze in time with Marc Bolan’s death in 1977 because he was the band’s only constant member. Following his death, nothing held the band together, which did not cause many problems as their fans did not want T. Rex to stay active without Bolan. So, they prolonged their name by reissuing their old albums and songs in addition to all the bands carrying Bolan’s influence in their music.
