When I first went up to Quincy Mass. in 1983 to work at the shipyard, leaving my wife and 1 year old son behind in Delaware, new employees had to go through a two week orientation class. There were about 20 people in the class including one woman, an Englishman and a Scotsman(who always seemed to be trading barbs with each other) and an Iranian who came dressed in a business suit. We all thought he was a spy either from Iran or the U.S. government because General Dynamics was being investigated for price gouging on the ships being built for the Navy. At this time the union was on strike. We were worried. Would we be scabs since we were not union members yet? Luckly the strike was settled before we were done with our class. Sitting behind me was a young guy just out of high school who had several relatives working at the shipyard, one a shop steward. Anyway we got to talking and the first Saturday there he and his girlfriend took me on a tour of Boston to see some of the attractions. They had a cassette tape playing that was some kind of compilation of early T.Rex songs. I told them I had never heard them before. They kept the tape playing the whole time, heard the songs two or three times and liked all I had heard. Fast forward to 1986 back in an apartment in Claymont Delaware after a short stay in Salisbury, Md. Saw this record in the sore on Penny Hill and seeing that the first two sides had early recordings on it I bought it. This is the first of The Collector Series I bought. After putting it on I remembered most of the songs like “Strange Orchestra”, “Mustang Ford”, “Deborah”, Stacy Grove”, “Salamanda Palaganda”, And “The Traveling Tragition”. The only instrumentation on these early tracks was Marc Bolan’s acoustic guitar and Steve Peregrin Took’s bongos. These songs came from three albums released between 1968 and 1970. On the fourth album Took was replaced by Micky Finn and Bolan started playing electric guitar. These songs are on side three with “Elemental Child” having a long electric guitar solo. Side four has songs from T-Rex and Electric Warrior where they became a four piece band. The songs from Electric Warrior included here are “Mambo Sun”, “Life’s A Gas” and “Jeepster”. Also on Electric Warrior but not on this compilation is “Get It On” which became a big hit and from there Bolan became a pioneer of Glam Rock. In 1977 Bolan was killed in a car crash driven by his girlfriend. He was 29 years old.