T. Rex "Electric Warrior" [1971]

It's extremely hard to understand how these itchy guitars, burbling hand drums and breathing-on-your-neck reading-the-paper-over-your-shoulder vocals could have amounted to a glam-rock sensation in the Western world during the early 70s, but somehow the Hobbit-obsessed UK weirdo named Marc Bolan (itself a pseudonym) traded in his acoustic for a Gibson with a Marshall stack and made the impossible happen -- to all the rest of us' detriment. Rock this opaque and bleak could scarcely be produced by Hendrix's corpse. Add in a bunch of inane string arrangements and Theremin-inspired backup vocals, as well as the most infantile fantasy-schlock lyric sheet ever printed, and it's crystal clear that the "sensation" of glam was more biding-time/treading-water while rock fans waited around for the Beatles to rejoin, the Stones to kick drugs, or to get pounded in the face by the jack-boot of punk rock. But Bolan had cashed in all his chips by then, and never had to suffer the agony of MTV's 80s version of glam-rock that he was in part responsible for -- clearly there are some rewards for being thrown through the windshield of a car to your death. For these brief moments early on in the decade, however, T. Rex had Rolling Stone critics, David Bowie and chicks who thought Gary Glitter wasn't creepy enough gushing with excitement. Impossible to see in retrospect; luckily we're no longer so myopic or emaciated.