Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon (6 page)

BOOK: Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon

4.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

I spoke to the notorious B. P. “Beep” Fallen, Marc’s publicist during this period, and he told me that June was the most important person in Marc’s life. “She instructed Marc in a lot of the ways of the world. When they met he couldn’t drive a car. He never learned really. One time they went for a driving lesson down in Sussex, no one on the road, but Marc just freaked! His mind would wander off into a B-minor instead of into third gear. She was instructive in terms of the machinery of the material world.” With June taking care of the day-to-day activities, Marc was free to wrap himself up in the second Tyrannosaurus Rex album,
Prophets, Seers and Sages, the Angels of the Ages,
which invoked his latest inspiration, Kahlil Gibran, whose mystic work
The Prophet
had become the peacenik bible.

Marc may have seen himself as spokesperson for his love-minded flower-children followers, but despite his unique, uncanny way with words, Marc had to wait in the hall to get into the BBC bar during a “Top of the Pops” taping. “There was nobody to sign us in,” B.P. recalled. “We were all sitting in the corridor with people stepping over us, and Marc says, ‘What do they want us to do? Drink dewdrops out of rose petals?’”

Even though Marc was getting a lot of press with his highly active rosebud mouth, the second album didn’t sell as well as the first, partly due to the winding down of the wide-eyed peace-dream scene. After his fairy-tale book of poetry,
Warlock of Love,
failed to stir up sales, Marc found he could no longer rely on good karma alone. When the third Tyrannosaurus album,
Unicorn
, fared poorly, he was forced to reinvent himself once again.

During an extended tour of the United States, Marc and Steve Took’s relationship began to break down. Marc’s power trip pretty much relegated Steve to a glorified sideman, and the frustrated musician started taking a lot of acid, more than once stripping naked onstage and generally wreaking tortured havoc with the music. After a drug bust in which Marc and June came to his aid, hiring a high-priced lawyer, Took was relieved of his bongo duties.

His replacement was Mickey Finn, a gentle ex-model/artist who slid right into Took’s place without a ripple. The new duo went to Wales to rehearse and Marc was briefly entranced with living the simple life. He chopped wood and sang to the sheep. On a postcard to a friend dated June 1969, Marc enthused about people wearing “deep green peace as a halo here.”

Marc was entranced by the flamboyant American star of
Hair
, Marsha Hunt (who later had a daughter with Mick Jagger), and had a wild fling with her before, full of remorse, suddenly making the decision to marry June Child. The cosmic couple took their vows at Kensington Registry Office on January 30,
1970. Marc was later quoted as saying, “It seemed like a funky thing to do at the time.”

While most of his rock compatriots were flying on various substances, Marc was relatively careful at this point in his career. He admits to taking acid only a few times, and once having a drink spiked with STP, a vicious hallucinogen. At a party for
Rolling Stone
magazine, when June came to fetch her husband, she found him confused and stumbling around, wailing about “eating himself.” When she got him home, a very terrified Marc had to be pried from the car and sedated by a doctor.

Marc plowed back into his fifties records, strapped on a white Stratocaster, changed his band name to the abbreviated T. Rex, and came up with the poppy commercial smash “Ride a White Swan” for the
Beard of Stars
album. Despite press complaints about his bleating, high-pitched tremolo, a successful British tour followed, and after some blazing TV appearances, the “bopping elf” started getting mobbed. It became clear that a bass player was needed to fill out T. Rex’s sound.

Steve Currie answered another
Melody Maker
ad and left his band, the Meteors, to join T. Rex, playing his first gig at London’s Roundhouse ten days after the announcement to the press. Soon after, Marc brought drummer Bill Legend aboard. Some mourned the passing of the cross-legged carpet-and-incense scene, but Marc had waited too long for this chance to shine—he was unstoppable. He made himself very accessible to the rock press, his ego barely contained, and enjoyed shaking up the old guard, who felt he was betraying his mellow hippie ethics with his plugged-in Strat. He reveled in the attention and soon became the most visible, quotable, controversial musician in England. “It’s just cock-rock, man, which is a groove,” he announced. “I mean, if you see a chick and she’s got nice breasts, you’ve got to go up to her and say, ‘You’ve got good tits!’ Right? I do it all the time. It doesn’t have to be a sordid number. Chick’s got good tits. The end.” Oh yes.

T. Rex’s second single, “Hot Love,” was number one on the British charts for six weeks, and Marc was determined to take the group even further. He succeeded with the catchy “Bang a Gong (Get It On),” recorded for the
Electric Warrior
album, which features one of my fave lines of all time: “You’re dirty-sweet and you’re my girl.” Oh yes.

Before a performance on “Top of the Pops,” Marc suddenly decided to throw some glitter on his face, and that three-second act turned into an entire movement! The former Mod “face” fashion plate, Cliff Richard wannabe Marc Bolan taught people how to shimmer and glimmer—wrapping his small frame in velvet and gold lame and brilliant skintight satins, slipping his small feet into women’s tap shoes, painting silver stars under his eyes. It wasn’t just the T. Rex audience that glommed on to the glamour. It wouldn’t be long before acts like Rod Stewart and the Faces, Slade, the Sweet, Gary Glitter, and David Bowie became successful glam rockers, but for a moment in time, Marc
Bolan stood alone in his very own giant pile of glistening glitter—a lustrous blur of spontaneous innovative combustion.

“You had this so-called blues boom in England in the sixties—Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall—and people looked pretty denim-y and uninteresting,” B. P. Fallen told me. “There was too much gray. What was needed after that was something flash and loud and vulgar and, to some people, annoying. Marc was very shiny He brought that in, and it actually opened the door for Bowie. Suddenly men were checking their eye makeup. And the music was much more forthright and jumpin’, much more below the belt.” I asked Beep if shiny Marc enjoyed himself. “Oh, yes, he was a laugh, you see. It’s all theater. He created his own stage. Marc wanted adulation and he didn’t pretend that he didn’t want it. Up until then it wasn’t cool to let on that you wanted people to scream at you. People didn’t scream at Jethro Tull.”

Marc and June moved into a grand flat in upscale Maida Vale, bought a white Rolls-Royce, and spent time with rock’s elite at trendy Tramps and the Speakeasy. With two British number ones under his sequined belt, Marc’s T. Rex got a killer American record deal, and in January 1972, when “Get It On” went to number one in America, the Bolans celebrated by dropping fistfuls of dollar bills from their seventh-floor New York City hotel balcony.

For a short time “T. Rextasy” mania was rampant. Marc’s crown of curls and haughty, wicked grin graced the covers of every teen magazine. But teenage fans are flighty, and Britain’s rock press is notoriously fickle. After such a feverish storm of vainglorious vampy fame, could a Bolan backlash be far behind?

Already imbibing quite a bit of champagne and brandy, Marc started using cocaine, which slowly seemed to erode his acutely astute judgment calls. Mad for his own high-profile image (as usual), believing his own quixotically quotable hot air, he and June took over all the T. Rex business dealings, which turned into a disaster. As Marc climbed higher on his own personal pedestal, people began dropping away, including publicist B. P. Fallon, who paraphrased Dylan in his departing note: ‘It’s all right, Marc, I’m only leaving.’”

While Marc’s increasingly younger androgynous fans ate him up whole, the venemous rock press jeered that “the Jeepster” had totally sold out. When
Slider
came out the end of July, after an initial one hundred thousand copies sold in four days, sales gradually slowed down. During an American tour when T. Rex’s supporting act, the Doobie Brothers, began to headline the bill, Marc hired three black backup singers to fill out the sound. One of the singers was Gloria Jones. “Gloria was this wild rock-and-roll girl,” Beep explained. “She wrote ‘If I Was Your Woman’ for Gladys Knight, but she didn’t have June’s
savoir faire
about the mechanicals.” Though the Bolans had just bought a rural retreat on the Welsh border, Marc was soon flaunting his steamy, head-over-heels relationship with Gloria, and his five-and-a-half-year marriage was over. Without June’s watchful eye and attention to detail, Marc’s carefully constructed shiny universe began to collapse.

Tanx,
the follow-up album to
Slider,
featured a suggestive shot of Marc (the tank between his legs), hiding bloated features behind his mop of hair and a strategically placed feather boa. Two singles, “Twentieth Century Boy” and “The Groover,” reached the British Top Five, but Marc’s number-one days were over. In the spring of 1974, the band’s American label, Warner Bros., dropped T. Rex.

T. Rex continued to release records in England, but only hard-core fans were buying. Marc refused to believe he was failing, pretending he was still an adorable superstar even though his regular tequila breakfasts were making him fat. At a January 1974 gig in Glasgow, an out-of-control Marc stepped into one of his star-shaped stage props, fell onto his back, and had to be helped offstage by Mickey Finn and two roadies. Flailing around in his tap shoes and feather boas, Marc was as close to self-parody as it gets.

Most of 1974 was spent plodding about in the sunshine. “He took time to go to Monte Carlo and that was like la-la-land, so he lost touch,” Beep recalled sadly. “Hangin’ out with Ringo, gambling every night, isn’t going to tell you much about the music scene, is it?” The once-glossy idol was idle. He was bored—the sodden and swollen twenty-six-year-old looked forty. Ashamed of reality, he took to making up wild stories to bolster his trampled ego. He told anybody who would listen that he was going to be a great actor—in his first role he would play the part of a menacing drug dealer opposite David Niven.

Temporarily staving off Marc’s decline, producer Mike Mansfield offered him a job on a teen pop show, “Supersonic,” which Marc grabbed like a neon lifesaver, hoping to entice a new batch of teenybop viewers. During the taping of the first show, Marc got a call that he was about to be a daddy. Gloria gave birth to Rolan Bolan on September 26, 1975, which created a houseful of Librans, and Marc was delighted. (Rolan Bolan now attends Loyola Marymount College in Westchester, California, where he’s a film major.) He took his parental responsibility seriously and his life took a gradual upswing. After another appearance on the TV show “Today,” in which a witty Marc upstaged the host, he was offered a slot interviewing guests like the Who’s Keith Moon and bluesman John Mayall. His records continued to bomb, but at least Marc was back in the public eye—a place he desperately needed to be. He was never a has-been in his own mind and he grabbed every opportunity to outrage. Said Keith Altham, his publicist, “He’d say things like ‘What shall I be this week? Bisexual? Trisexual? Shall we say I take a gold bed with me on the road?’”

The punk scene, which shook the music world to its core, seemed to give Marc much-needed inspiration. Early in 1977 he told the
Sun
newspaper, “I’ve been sitting around waiting for the pop climate to change, for something like punk rock to come along. I consider myself to be the elder statesman of rock. The godfather of punk, if you like.” He got excited again, cut out his lethal drinking, started an exercise program, began to eat healthy foods. Marc was slim again, but so were record sales. Regarded as a rock dinosaur (!), Marc
continued to tour and began writing a monthly column for
Record Mirror.
The column featured a shot of Marc wearing a crown and holding a scepter—it seemed he still had a sense of humor about himself.

Marc met with Mike Mansfield, the former producer of “Supersonic,” and they cooked up a six-week series for Marc to showcase new talent and perform his own hits. Initially announcing guests like Presley, Sinatra, and the Rolling Stones, Marc and his 4:15 in the afternoon kiddie time slot had to settle for acts like the Bay City Rollers and Mud. I rented a video of these shows, in which Marc prances, preens, and mimes halfheartedly to his double-tracked former-glory smashes, and felt sad and embarrassed for him. The camera closes in on him at the end of each show, and he purses his slicked lips and says, “Keep a little Marc in your heart. We’ll be back at the same Marc time, the same Marc channel.” For the final show Marc convinced his nemesis, David Bowie, to appear, and together they performed a song hastily written in the dressing room. It was a mess. Bowie missed his cue, and Marc tripped over the microphone and off the stage—a pitiful display for the glitter master’s last televised appearance. In spite of Marc’s refusal to admit failure, it must have hurt. “Marc used to say that success was a lot like riding the monster, riding the big Tyrannosaurus Rex,” Beep said. “There you are, merrily galloping along, and if you’re not careful it can turn around and bite your head off. A lot of people that we both know have been vulnerable-ized and fucked up by that happening. People have gotten hurt beyond redemption. People have gotten hurt beyond fixing.”

A lock of Marc’s hair tangled in the demolished hood of the Mini-Cooper. (
PA NEWS)