Marc Bolan said that from an early age he felt he was different from everyone else (don’t we all, dearie…). He believed, like say Churchill, he was born to do something momentous with his life. Something that would have a lasting importance, where his name would be known a hundred years after his death. He claimed when he was a child he didn’t feel like any of the other kids. But how he knew what these kids felt is a moot point. However different Bolan felt from everybody else, he sincerely believed it was in his fate to succeed.
Strange superstitions and odd beliefs the supernatural have caused some mythologizing around Bolan’s life and young, tragic death. This, in large part, has been inspired by the singer’s own words and writing. We all know the story of how Bolan idolized James Dean. This hero-worship led the Bolan’s first manager, Simon Napier-Bell to jokingly suggest he could imagine Bolan dying in a car crash just like Dean, but in a Rolls-Royce rather than a sports car. To which Bolan replied a Rolls-Royce wasn’t his style, a Mini was more in keeping with his image. Two weeks before his thirtieth birthday, Bolan was killed when the Mini his partner Gloria Jones was driving hit a metal fence. A bolt from this fence smashed thru the windscreen, hit Bolan in the head and killed him. The car then crashed into a tree where it came to a halt. The car’s number plate was FOX 661L, which led some fans to suggest this tragic event had been predicted by Bolan in the lyrics to his song “Solid Gold Easy Action” when he sang about “picking foxes from a tree” and sang about a “Woman from the east with her headlights shining.”
Then there was Bolan’s long-held and frequently mentioned belief that he would die young like some poet-artist. Or, the time during the recording in Germany of the (much under appreciated) album Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow when Bolan claimed he saw the ghosts of a dead Jewish family who had perished during the Holocaust. This deeply troubled the singer and gave him an overwhelming sense of death. Not long after, he quit Germany never to return.
Of course, Bolan often embellished the events of his own life. He once claimed he had a met a wizard in Paris during the 1960s who had shown him how to use the power of occult magic to achieve his ambitions. This meeting became the basis for one of Bolan’s early singles “The Wizard.” Napier-Bell later suggested this “wizard” or “magician” was nothing more than a stage conjuror who showed Bolan how to do a few card tricks. Whichever version was true, it’s fair to say there was always something otherworldly about Bolan.
He was born Mark Feld on September 30th, 1947, in Stoke Newington, east London. His Jewish father was a truck driver and his mother worked at a local street market stall. Bolan was named after his uncle Mark, who had been brutally murdered during the war by an army sergeant called Patrick Francis Lyons. Surprisingly, at a time when murder meant the death penalty in England, Lyons received a ten-year jail sentence for the lesser charge of manslaughter. Bolan was well-aware who he had been named after. In part it inspired him to do something with his life. At the same time, it gave him a sense of great sense foreboding that maybe for all his possible future success he might in some way be cursed—as he later claimed “all rock stars are cursed.”
Bolan was the younger of two brothers. He was by all accounts spoiled by his mother and was given anything he wanted. One day, on a trip with his Mother to the cinema, to see Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It, the young Bolan discovered his future destiny. He was to be a rock ‘n’ roll star.
The Girl Can’t Help It starred Jayne Mansfield (who also died in a bizarre, occult-tinged, road accident) and Tom Ewell. The movie featured a whole roster of rock ‘n’ roll stars like Little Richard, Gene Vincent, The Platters, Fats Domino, and Eddie Cochran. It was Cochran who caught Bolan’s attention. The eleven-year-old Bolan quickly formed a band, well a duet, and managed to blag his way into playing at the 2i’s Coffee Bar—“birthplace of British Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
At fifteen, Bolan was expelled from school for “bad behavior.” But he knew academic qualifications weren’t a requirement to graduate as a rock ‘n’ roll star. He was clocked by photographer Don McCullin who photographed Bolan and his Mod mates for Town magazine. This gave Bolan a brief career as a model for fashion catalogs looking tough in sharp suits for the flash Mod-about-town. But he still chased his dream of a successful career in music. He signed up as a folk singer, changed his name, and became half-Bob Dylan, half-bohemian pixie poet. He was spotted by manager Napier-Bell who suggested he join up-and-coming band John’s Children as “their Pete Townshend.” It was a brief but revelatory experience. Throughout his life, Bolan adapted elements to his personality from characters out of movies or comic books to shape his own persona. From the battling Mighty Joe Young to Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. From John’s Children Bolan learned how to perform on stage. He then learnt a different approach to stage craft from watching Ravi Shankar perform cross-legged sitting on a rug next to a tabla player. It led him to form Tyrannosaurus Rex. Bolan played his guitar cross-legged on a rug next to a bongo-playing Steve Pergerin Took.
Bolan wrote ethereal songs about nothing much in particular where words were used for their sound rather than their meaning. Tyrannosaurus Rex was championed by DJ John Peel, who considered the band “revolutionary.” It was short-lived infatuation. Peel later denounced Bolan’s naked ambition for fame describing the singer as “a hippie with a knife up his sleeve.” Ain’t no pleasin’ some folks… However, producer Tony Visconti recognized Bolan’s immense talent from the beginning stating in an interview with the Guardian in 2015 that what he saw in Bolan:
...had nothing to do with strings, or very high standards of artistry; what I saw in him was raw talent. I saw genius. I saw a potential rock star in Marc—right from the minute, the hour I met him.
Tyrannosaurus Rex arrived at a time when students were rioting on the streets of Paris and an anti-Vietnam demonstration almost became a pitch-battle between protestors and police outside the American embassy in London. Peregrin Took was more far radical than Bolan. He wanted to take the band in a more political direction…
More Marc and Gloria, after the jump…
