There's a Shadow in the Basement

T. Rex — "Cadillac" (1972)

Before we get into today’s post, I just wanted to say thanks to all of you Jagged Time Lapse subscribers for bearing with me over the last two weeks or so. Not only did I not get to write as often as I would have liked over that period, I didn’t get to write at all. So it goes when you’re tying up loose ends and racking up nearly 2,000 back-and-forth road miles on your way to a new life in a new town, I guess… but I promise that I’ll do my damnedest to make sure that any future breaks in the action are significantly less drawn-out!

Last Friday would have been the 75th birthday of the late, great Marc Bolan, and I had hoped to have something up here in his honor by then; alas, I was still too wiped from my move to put fingers to keyboard in any meaningful way. I did, however, spend much of last Friday listening to T. Rex records, which is never not time well-spent. And while I did so it occurred to me that, as great as albums like Electric Warrior and The Slider are, if you were to put a zip gun to my head and force me to choose a favorite T. Rex (or Tyrannosaurus Rex) track, I would have to go with this non-LP B-side.

“Cadillac” (or “Cadilac,” as it was misspelled outside of the US) is pretty close to the platonic ideal of a T. Rex song — almost every single element that defined Bolan’s music at the peak of his commercial and creative powers is contained within. There’s the sexy stack-heeled strut, the 50s rock and roll roots warped as if reflected in a shiny hubcap, the airy Flo & Eddie backing vocals (or perhaps Flo & Eddie-esque, since by 1972 Marc and producer/collaborator Tony Visconti had become quite proficient at imitating the duo), and the inimitable locking-in of drummer Bill Legend, bassist Steve Currie and percussionist Mickey Finn around Marc’s Les Paul grind. One key element missing, however: the colorful, J.R.R. Tolkien-meets-Chuck Berry whimsy that marked so many of Marc’s lyrics is nowhere to be found.

In fact, “Cadillac” is a rather unusual specimen, at least as far as hubcap diamond-star Bolan boogies go. After holding steadfast to a single chord for the song’s intro and the first line of the verse, classic blues form (which Bolan often followed) would dictate a move from the root chord (D) to the fourth (G) for the second line. Instead, there’s a two-bar movement from D to E minor — an unexpected chord progression which sounds both a little creepy and vaguely reminiscent of something off of Abbey Road.

And for all the swaggering braggadocio that Marc typically spouted in song and in interviews — sometimes with a wink, sometimes not — his lyrics here come across as vulnerable and even quite literally haunted. The sly opening invitation of “Baby, I wanna walk you home” meshes perfectly with the track’s slinky groove; but just when you think Marc’s about to double down with a more roguish seduction line (a la “Raw Ramp”’s “Baby, I’m crazy ‘bout your breasts”), he instead follows up with the jarring revelation that “There’s a shadow in the basement/And I’m scared to sleep alone”.

I vividly remember the first time I heard him sing those words. It was Thanksgiving 1994, and I was visiting my dad and stepmother in NYC for the long weekend. Our family gathering had been somewhat hastily convened due to a health scare, and so the joy of seeing everyone was somewhat tempered by an underlying sense of tension, worry and upset. As always, I took solace (or maybe cover) in music, and so “Black Friday” found me at NYCD, a now-defunct music store on the Upper West Side, which had a pretty impressive selection of new and used imports.

One of the CDs I bought that day was a new Edsel Records compilation called Great Hits 1972-1977, which featured all the T. Rex A-sides on one disc and all the B-sides on another. I was well familiar by then with most of the hits, but the flips were still largely unknown territory for me. I was completely unfamiliar with “Cadillac,” the flip side of “Telegram Sam” — and when it led off the second disc, I was completely transfixed.

The jubilant groove made me want to get up off the couch and do the chicken-necked “Keep on Truckin’” strut around my dad’s living room, but the song’s unexpected melodic twists and its spooked lyrics (“Baby, doesn’t everybody weep?/I’d slide up there beside you but my nightmare’s oh too steep”) took me somewhere else entirely. I felt like I’d been simultaneously dragged onto the dance floor and chilled to the depths of my soul…

Like most American rock fans my age, I’d grown up hearing “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” on the FM dial — and maybe even “Jeepster” and “Telegram Sam” from time to time — without knowing or thinking much about the artist behind it. In England and Europe, Marc Bolan had been the biggest thing since The Beatles; on these shores, outside of a small-but-rabid cult of anglophile fans who really “got” Marc’s unique brand of glam-rock wizardry, T. Rex was largely seen as an early-70s one-hit wonder along the lines of, say, Norman “Spirit in the Sky” Greenbaum or David “Rock On” Essex.

That all thankfully changed for me around 1984, when I grabbed a copy of Nicholas Schaffner’s The British Invasion: From the First Wave to the New Wave off the shelves of Kroch’s and Brentano’s in downtown Chicago. Schaffner’s book would prove absolutely essential to me over the next few years (I still have that original paperback copy), hipping me to records I’d never heard — or even heard of —and providing me with a greater context and understanding of ones I already knew and loved.

But when I first picked up his book, I was completely confused by its cover mention of T. Rex. I was already completely obsessed with the Kinks, Who and Beatles (in that order), and though I had yet to fully immerse myself in the music of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd or David Bowie, I fully understood that they were generally considered to be “among the greats”. But T. Rex? What were they doing on there?

I soon found out. Schaffner’s chapter on T. Rex not only made a rock-solid case for Marc Bolan’s importance as an artist, but also detailed perhaps the most fascinating personal journey in the entire book, one that even out-wowed that of friend and rival David Bowie. Here was a diminutive, poorly-educated son of working class East End Jews who essentially willed himself into a variety of incarnations, including male model, fey folksinger, best-selling poet, and superstar glam-rocker. He believed his own hype and flew too close to the sun, crashing embarrassingly to earth as Bowie rocketed past him, but Bolan’s story didn’t end there; embracing the burgeoning British punk movement (many of whose participants had been big T. Rex fans five years earlier), he was able to once again remake himself, this time in the mold of “punk elder statesman”. Bolan was in the midst of a legitimate (and completely unexpected) comeback when the car he was riding in crashed into a tree in southwest London; there, unfortunately, the story did indeed end.

I was sold, and immediately had to lay my hands on any Tyrannosaurus/T. Rex records I could find. The problem was that, outside of 1971’s iconic Electric Warrior, his best albums were long out of print in the States. I used to see latter-day works like 1975’s Bolan’s Zip Gun and 1976’s Futuristic Dragon all the time in the cut-out bins, but Schaffner had made it clear that these were not the best places to start. Thankfully, the glam gods smiled upon me and I soon found a near-mint copy of 1972’s The Slider at a local thrift shop — and the album’s winning combination of saucy guitar riffs, majestic backing vocals and wonderfully absurd lyrics made me a T. Rex fan for life.

Bolan always believed in giving his fans good value for their money, which is why so many of his B-sides were significantly more than just half-assed throwaways, but which is also why some of his most wonderful tracks eluded me for years. “Cadillac,” recorded during the Slider sessions, could have easily fit on that album, but for whatever reason it was set aside for the back of “Telegram Sam” — and thus, I remained ignorant of its existence for nearly a decade after I discovered The Slider.

What inspired Bolan to write “Cadillac”? As far as I know, he never revealed much about it in any if his interviews — not that he was ever one to let his guard down for long with the press. Certainly, the song is part of one of the great contradictions of his life and career: here was a songwriter who filled his songs with automotive imagery yet was too terrified of cars to learn how to drive, and who ultimately met his untimely demise in the passenger seat. But the song certainly contains contradictions of its own, and not just the clash of brash boogie and lyrical anxiety. I mean, who begins a song named after a car with the line “Baby, I want to walk you home”?

Whatever the source of its deep-seated dread, there’s no question that Marc felt a real affinity with “Cadillac”.There are several great clips of T. Rex performing the song live, my favorite being this one from 1972, which was filmed at the height of “T.Rextacy” by no less than Ringo Starr for his 1973 film Born to Boogie. T. Rex could be diabolically inconsistent live, but the band is totally cooking here, and Marc — resplendent in a crown of black ringlets and a t-shirt emblazoned with his own face — is clearly digging the groove. Groove on, Marc, wherever you are…