T. Rex – Children Of The Revolution

The aluminum guitar Marc Bolan plays in this film was the first one its maker ever sold, and Bolan bought a second one for Eric Clapton.

The guitar throwing light around the room in this film had been made by hand in St. Petersburg, Florida, by a machinist whose day job was building aluminum housings for electronics that went up on rockets from Cape Canaveral. John Veleno taught guitar in the evenings, and to advertise the lessons past a city ordinance limiting signs to a foot square, he built himself a guitar-shaped mailbox out of aluminum. His supplier saw it and asked why he didn’t make an actual guitar out of the stuff. The first Veleno Original he ever sold went to Marc Bolan, who took one look and bought two. The second was a present for Eric Clapton.

Keep watching: T. Rex – Children of the Revolution (with Elton John, Ringo Starr) · Marc Bolan & T. Rex – Hot Love

T. Rex filmed this promo in London in October 1972, weeks after the single came out, with the guitar still new enough to be a talking point. The band on screen is the lineup that carried the whole glam run: Bolan on guitar and vocals, Mickey Finn on percussion, Steve Currie on bass, Bill Legend on drums.

The song had started as a jam. On March 31, 1972, at Rosenberg Studios in Copenhagen, during the sessions that produced The Slider, the band recorded a studio rehearsal of it that ran past twelve minutes, with Flo & Eddie, formerly of the Turtles, singing behind Bolan. Nothing that long was going anywhere near a seven-inch single, and what EMI released on September 8, 1972, was a two-and-a-half-minute record with Jitterbug Love on the B-side and, in many countries, Sunken Rags added as a third track. Tony Visconti produced it, as he had produced everything since the band mattered. It never appeared on a regular studio album.

Second place, and first place twice

It broke the streak. Hot Love, Get It On, Telegram Sam and Metal Guru had all gone to No.1 on the UK Singles Chart, four in a row across eighteen months of what the British press was calling T. Rextasy. This one stopped at No.2, and the newspapers treated the two places as a verdict on Bolan.

The verdict was not unanimous. Both the NME and Melody Maker ran their own charts in 1972, and on both of them Children of the Revolution reached No.1. No T. Rex single ever topped a British chart again. The record that supposedly marked the beginning of the decline was also the last one to win anything outright, which is the kind of detail a single number on a single chart erases.

There is another film of this song, and it is the more famous one. In 1972 at Apple Studios, Bolan cut a different version with Elton John on piano and Ringo Starr on drums, filmed for Starr’s Born to Boogie, and that footage has its own page here. The London promo is the plainer document: the actual band, the actual single, and a guitar that had traveled from a Florida machine shop to a London soundstage inside a few months.

Veleno made about 143 Originals before two strokes ended the business, selling them for six hundred dollars each, and the ones that survive now change hands for thirty thousand. Bolan died on September 16, 1977, at 29. What this film preserves is not a band at its peak, exactly. It is a band at the precise moment its peak ended, playing the song that everyone agreed was a step down, on an instrument nobody else in Britain owned.