With "Baby Boomerang," T. Rex hearkens back to the jaunty, infectious pop stylings of Electric Warrior. Bolan slows things down again with "Spaceball Ricochet," an ode to various instruments integral to the speaker’s self-expression: the titular space-themed game (possibly a pinball variation), a Les Paul guitar, and books—many books. The bibliomania broached here is just one among several writing and reading references on The Slider, as these activities are obviously crucial tools for perpetrating creative escapes. These elements have also paid more ethereal cognitive dividends for the song’s speaker. Calling back to "The Slider," Bolan proclaims early on that he now “understand[s] the wind/And all the things/That make the children cry." His interiority is fast progressing.
"Buick Mackane" marks another milestone track on The Slider. Is it about a girl or a car? It may very well be both. Certainly, sexual opportunities and car ownership are closely imbricated, at least in the 20th-century English-speaking world, and Bolan is well aware of this inevitability. Sexualization of automobiles figured into several prior T. Rex tracks, including “Bang a Gong (Get it on)”: “Well you're built like a car/You've got a hubcap diamond star halo.” With “Buick Mackane,” the girl and the car have become virtually indistinguishable, once again dissolving a perceptual boundary and speaking to an underlying monistic substrate. By now, Bolan's mysticism has taken on sexual valences. As conceptually complex as "Buick Mackane" may be, its musical arrangement is one of the finest on the album, with authoritative, clangoring guitar work that gives away to grooves at its close. This vamp involves a multilayered wall of sound, culminating in an orchestral jam session that is itself semi-numinous. Evidently, "Buick Mackane" inspired Guns N Roses, as a cover thereof found its way onto The Spaghetti Incident?, in this case as part of a song suite with "Big Dumb Sex" by Soundgarden. The explicit Soundgarden vamp—"I wanna fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you, fuck you" serves to accentuate the sexual undertones of Bolan's original composition.
"Telegram Sam" served as the initial single from The Slider. It's upbeat, the guitar hook highly reminiscent of "Bang a Gong (Get it On)." The lyrics deal with some curious characters, including not just the titular man but also one "Jungle-Face Jake" and a "Golden Nose Slim." Judging by their names, these individuals don't sound like personages one would want to meet. Despite his relatively upstanding name, Telegram Sam is hardly any better. He is, in actuality, T. Rex's manager, Tony Secunda, and Bolan labels him as his "main man," in that Secunda was their primary drug supplier. Undeniably, there would be no "Slider" without the efforts of "Telegram Sam."
"Rabbit Fighter" aspires toward some amazing scope early on before making an involution into bluesy rock throughout its verses. But in the end, Bolan telescopes back out to re-acquire that grandiose sound. For "Baby Strange," Bolan strips it down all over again, getting sexual and quirky on the strength of a simple, neurotic electric-guitar riff.
The best song on The Slider is "Ballrooms of Mars." Here Bolan gets balladic, tenderly and deliberately delivering beautiful, wistful images of seduction by way of poignant maunderings. Bolan sings of how "Your diamond hands/Will be stacked with roses/And wind and cars/And people of the past." Here again Bolan collapses the permeable boundaries between people and cars and wind, the elemental aspects of the album. Bolan yells "Rock!" to inaugurate each of the masterful, siren-like guitar solos, and his one-word command is fully realized in his fretwork, which serves as an apt synecdoche for all that rock and roll can be. He even references other rockers by name, specifically John Lennon and Bob Dylan, neither of whom could hold Bolan's jock in terms of raw creativity. Of course, Bolan lacked the Dylanesque and Lennonesque attunement for mass appeal. "Ballrooms of Mars" is too capacious to make mainstream waves. Nonetheless, it's not just the highlight of the album, but a high watermark for the rock and roll genre.
With "Chariot Choogle," Bolan offers up another precarious rock anthem, with heavy guitars laid out over yet another non-conventional time signature. This song teeters on the brink of collapse all throughout its verses, but with each chorus it gives way to jubilation and upliftment, at least momentarily. After the nervous verses, the sudden build to orchestral strings gives the listener some release—some temporary deliverance. Perhaps our deliverance comes by way of Bolan’s reassurance: "You know who you are," he murmurs. All told, the trepidations of the verses feel like they've been allayed, and the song has effectively resolved itself.
The original pressing of The Slider finishes with "Main Man." Here, Bolan slows it down with a bass-heavy backing track. Spacey effects give the vocals a dreamy quality as Bolan sets into his refrain: "Are you now? Are you now?" he asks repeatedly. Bolan talks intimately to the listener, asking "Are you frog man?" and, going back to the record’s pervasive preternatural undertones, reports that "Heaven is hot, babe." By this endpoint, the writer has even brought himself into the mix: "Bolan likes to rock now," he says over and over. We've come full circle, for here, it seems, is our metal guru speaking to us from outside the surrealistic prisms that have veiled him throughout the album. Bolan goes on to sing about laughing in childhood and crying as an adult, and then reflects on his sanity. This is not at all out of place on this album. As he approaches the end, Bolan has moved toward casting doubt on the status of "Telegram Sam" as the true "main man." Bolan, it seems, is the only viable main man left, and such a conclusion is not out of character, as Mark Bolan was reputedly a narcissist of the highest order. Of course, some narcissists truly earn the right to be as self-involved as they are, embodying in full the undisputed main man or main woman, and Bolan is one such person.
Future reissues of The Slider provided further additions to the initial thirteen songs, none of which take away from the original arrangement. The track "Cadillac" brings back the car motif, benefitting from another sturdy rock riff that is augmented by the liberal use of maracas. "Thunderwing" also rocks, ornamented by nursery-rhyme lyrics. "Lady" makes for an even better finish to this record than "Main Man," arguably. In offering up a dreamy appreciation of Lady Luck via some country-fried rock and some of Bill Legend's finest drumming, T. Rex takes it home with a smooth groove, delivering us into a space much less manic than that in which we began. "Lady" also makes for a satisfying conceptual capstone, for in this alternative conclusion, Bolan simply gives his pain to Lady Luck—whether or not everything’s all derived from one essence in the end, from day to day she's our main woman.
In sum, The Slider helps the listener toward realization of a psychologically and mystically complex umwelt. Bolan's writing covers a lot of conceptual territory in just 53 minutes, making for a jamboree of strangeness that inevitably complexifies the interiority of the auditor, just as it has for the composer. The Slider embodies a weirdness that transcends era. It's less a rock album than an extended meditation with delightful psychoactive effects. And yet much of The Slider hinges upon building a song around a simple riff and then giving way to an orchestral chorus and/or an orchestral vamp at the end. It's an effective formula, but the album is in no way formulaic. Indeed, it's verily mantraic in its commitment to repetition. This is rock and roll as high-end abstract art, and Bolan is a Warhol whose oeuvre is comparably much easier to take. Yet The Slider's many confounding, oceanic elements are mollified by the fact that it rocks well. If Electric Warrior is stellar, then The Slider is nothing short of cosmic.
