Detail of a cover illustration from Hanatsubaki magazine, February 1940
If you stop and think about it, it's pretty weird that T. Rex, the band that basically invented glam rock in the UK in the early '70s, started out as a "bedroom bard" act that sang folk songs full of Tolkien-esque mythos. Back then, they were Tyrannosaurus Rex, a duo of composed of singer Marc Bolan and bongo player Steve Took, and they produced three albums of odd lo-fi folk-rock before Took was fired and replaced with another bongo player, Mickey Finn, for Tyrannosaurus Rex's fourth album, 1970's A Beard of Stars. This album prominently featured Bolan's electric guitar for the first time, and touches of blues and overt pop leanings foreshadowed the name and direction change that would come when the band became T. Rex later that year.
The songs on A Beard of Stars are mostly minimalist sketches - at 2:39, "Pavilions of Sun" is one of the album's longest tracks. It stumbles out of the gate without an intro of any kind in a rush of bongos and acoustic strumming. Like most of Bolan's songs from this period, "Pavilions of Sun" has a very abbreviated and repetition-heavy verse-chorus structure. Right there in the middle, though, a chugging electric guitar riff appears and then disappears just as abruptly - it comes back for a little vamping at the end in an outro that ends with a nice exultant shout from Bolan. This transition-period sound, combining bedroom folk and blues rock, makes A Beard of Stars a unique record in the T. Rex canon - a year from its release, Bolan was fronting a full four-piece band and releasing the landmark Electric Warrior.
"Pavilions of Sun" by Tyrannosaurus Rex
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