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T.Rex - Left Hand Luke: The Alternate Tanx (1973)

Track listing:
  1. Tenement Lady-Darling 2:49
  2. Rapids 1:59
  3. Mister Mister 2:48
  4. Broken Hearted Blues 2:08
  5. Country Honey 1:50
  6. Mad Donna 2:18
  7. Born To Boogie 2:09
  8. Life Is Strange 1:47
  9. The Street And Babe Shadow 2:20
  10. Highway Knees 2:32
  11. Left Hand Luke 5:17
  12. Children Of The Revolution 1:04
  13. Solid Gold Easy Action 2:13
  14. Free Angel 2:14
  15. Mister Mister (acoustic & bass demo) 3:31
  16. Broken Hearted Blues (acoustic & bass demo) 2:08
  17. The Street And Babe shadow (acoustic & bass demo) 2:14
  18. Tenement Lady (acoustic & bass demo) 1:35
  19. Tenement Lady (acoustic demo) 1:53
  20. Broken Hearted Blues (acoustic demo) 1:50
  21. Mad Donna (acoustic demo) 1:45
  22. The Street And Babe Shadow (acoustic demo) 2:35
  23. Left Hand Luke (acoustic demo) 1:58

Notes

By the time the original Tanx album appeared in early 1973, the critical consensus was that Marc Bolan had shot his commercial bolt — and history has not broken its back to prove otherwise. The album's restoration to its full sonic and contextual glory on Edsel's 1995 reissue was the first step towards its rehabilitation; this CD, compiled from the alternate versions and demos behind the original LP, completes the process. As with other albums in the alternate series, it is an occasionally scrappy, scratchy listen. Drawn from the studio rough mixes, both "Rapids" and, among the bonus tracks, "Children of the Revolution" exist only in incomplete form, although the former is a delight regardless, a brittle guitar fuzz which utterly upstages the lyric and melody. But "Mister Mister," hitherto viewed as a somewhat inconsequential little ditty, takes on unimagined power, while the grinding self-fulfillment of "Born to Boogie" may miss some of the spark and sparkle of the finished version, but it grooves along, regardless. Further enlightenment is drawn from the generous stack of bonus tracks which round out the set, four demos played on acoustic guitar and bass, five more on the guitar alone, including a take on "Mad Donna" with a slew of alternate lyrics. In truth, little about Left Hand Luke can be considered superior or even the equal of the original album, but it probably wasn't meant to be. Rough mixes are scarcely the optimum source for variation, after all. But as a window into the last stages of the album's completion, allowing us to see which bits were twiddled, which were twitched, and which were omitted altogether, we also see what Bolan was trying to do with an album which, at the time, was dismissed as the abandonment of almost all his glam rock principles. And we know now that the impression wasn't wholly undesired.