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| It's funny what turns a man around... |
Personal
While I’d heard of them before a decade ago, my own personal T.Rextasy (BP Fallon TM; that was that publicist’s second-bite evocation of “Beatlemania”) didn’t hit until a friend passed off Electric Warrior, The Slider and Futuristic Dragon. Besides ripping, oh, about a dozen favorite tracks (or north thereof) onto a handful of CDs, the only fully-formed thought I could offer on T.Rex was “Marc Bolan.” That phase lasted a couple years – a rarity for me, even before Spotify really messed me up – and it’s ridiculous that I never learned anything more about a band I fell for that hard.
A Little History
“Audiences had screamed at plenty of pop stars before, but Bolan was the first pop star to make it abundantly clear that he knew exactly why they were screaming.”
I didn’t scour the internet for every last detail and oddity about T.Rex – nearly all the notes and details below came from either T.Rex’s Wikipedia page and the BBC documentary I (the wonderful quote above excepted) - but still feel comfortable saying that the band happened because Marc Bolan, the lead singer and the one and only songwriter (by fiat), wanted to be famous very, very badly. It took him a lot of networking (the BBC doc is strong on this), studying, a little worshipping (see: epiphany watching Eric Clapton), and a couple inartful stabs at fame through the wrong vehicles before he found the formula that launched him to “a popularity in the UK comparable to that of the Beatles.” Once he figured out how to get what he wanted out of an electric guitar after years on acoustic, he juiced it with sexuality.
While I’d heard of them before a decade ago, my own personal T.Rextasy (BP Fallon TM; that was that publicist’s second-bite evocation of “Beatlemania”) didn’t hit until a friend passed off Electric Warrior, The Slider and Futuristic Dragon. Besides ripping, oh, about a dozen favorite tracks (or north thereof) onto a handful of CDs, the only fully-formed thought I could offer on T.Rex was “Marc Bolan.” That phase lasted a couple years – a rarity for me, even before Spotify really messed me up – and it’s ridiculous that I never learned anything more about a band I fell for that hard.
A Little History
“Audiences had screamed at plenty of pop stars before, but Bolan was the first pop star to make it abundantly clear that he knew exactly why they were screaming.”
I didn’t scour the internet for every last detail and oddity about T.Rex – nearly all the notes and details below came from either T.Rex’s Wikipedia page and the BBC documentary I (the wonderful quote above excepted) - but still feel comfortable saying that the band happened because Marc Bolan, the lead singer and the one and only songwriter (by fiat), wanted to be famous very, very badly. It took him a lot of networking (the BBC doc is strong on this), studying, a little worshipping (see: epiphany watching Eric Clapton), and a couple inartful stabs at fame through the wrong vehicles before he found the formula that launched him to “a popularity in the UK comparable to that of the Beatles.” Once he figured out how to get what he wanted out of an electric guitar after years on acoustic, he juiced it with sexuality.
Bolan’s ample ego had to wait on the right vehicle and/or persona. He started as a pre-electric Bob Dylan knock-off (and would later get hit with his own version of “Judas”), before getting inserted into a band called John’s Children, an “interesting, if minor, blip on the British mod and psychedelic scene,” because they shared a manager with Bolan, and they needed a guitarist. They blew up big enough for The Who to invite them on a German tour…and it was in the middle of said tour that The Who kicked them off for either trying to upstage them, or causing a(n actual) riot, depending on who was opining. When John’s Children broke up almost immediately after performing at the “14 Hour Technicolor Dream” in April 1967, Bolan carried his notes from that experience with him (with a detour past Ravi Shankar).
