Beard of Stars (1970)

T. Rex's The Slider (1972) was among the party records in rotation at our rec room in the mid-1970s, but it was the band's Beard of Stars (1970) that I would put on after everyone left.

Beard of Stars opens with an instrumental track, the appropriately titled "Prelude", followed by "A Daye Laye". The album concludes with an uncharacteristically long song called "Elemental Child".

Listening to T. Rex today (or Tyrannosaurus Rex, as they were known until the album that followed Beard of Stars), I am reminded of the vocal stylings of poet bill bissett, who turned 74 yesterday, but also Rufus Wainwainright, whom I met while my band was performing at the Edmonton Folk Festival in the early 1990s, where he and his sister Martha, both in their teens, sang back up for their mother and aunt.

Here is an outtake from the Beard of Stars album sessions, a song I had not heard before constructing this post. "Poets of the skies look long and hard" indeed.