Read Online Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon by Pamela Des Barres - Free Book Online
Authors: Pamela Des Barres
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levitated, and cast white spells in Mark’s presence. In some of the tellings Mark spent months in the forest with “the wizard” learning his secrets, but his future manager, Simon Napier-Bell, later said the truth was that Mark had met the strange fellow in a gay bar, spent one night with him, and invented the entire scenario, altering reality—and, as usual, creating something fantastic and poetic out of the mundane. Whether it happened in real life or in his head, the encounter with “the wizard” had a potent impact on Mark, because he became even more dreamy—writing stacks of cosmic prose about dragons and young gods, calling it his “art”—eventually changing his name from Mark Feld to Marc Bolan (originally with an umlaut over the “o”).
His immense self-belief, constant hustling, and efforts to make certain he was always in the right places paid off for Marc, and he was finally offered a deal at Decca Records in the summer of 1965. But since Decca was unsure how to market their curious solo wonder, Marc’s first single, “The Wizard,” failed to sell. After a second single bombed, despite TV appearances on “Ready, Steady, Go!” and “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” Marc was cut loose. Entirely undeterred, and drunk with the bittersweet lure of thwarted fame, Marc relentlessly pursued his dream, calling manager Simon Napier-Bell and arranging to drop off a tape of his songs. Arriving only with his guitar, Marc charmed the Yardbirds’ manager, serenading him for close to an hour. “I thought he was a Charles Dickens urchin,” Napier-Bell said, commenting on Marc’s unique assortment of mismatched clothes. “It’s now become very fashionable to wear old clothes—two jackets on top of one another, that sort of thing. Back then it was pretty unique.” As Marc went through his repertoire, Napier-Bell was taken with Marc’s strange, quavering voice and pseudo-enchanted slang-bang lyrics—impressed enough, in fact, to book him into a studio that same evening to cut some demos.
Marc’s new manager took on many roles: counselor, friend, partner, confidant, lover. “How can you manage anybody and not have a relationship with them?” Napier-Bell said. “The sexual borders had completely collapsed by that time. Straight people thought they shouldn’t be straight. In fact, in the sixties
it was pretty difficult to have any sort of relationship with someone without it being sexual.”
Record companies didn’t find Marc’s urchin charm compelling enough to sign him, and only after Napier-Bell threw his weight around did he finally secure a deal for Marc on Parlophone. The Beginning of Doves, which included “Hippy Gumbo” and the whimsical “Perfumed Garden of Gulliver Smith,” failed to dent the charts, but Napier-Bell had faith in his new protege and teamed him up with John’s Children, a loud post-Mod band he was managing at the time. It was a fairly disastrous union, with Marc never really committing to the band due to his high solo hopes. After a debacle German tour with the Who and a failed single, Marc was back on his own in June 1967, placing a classified ad in Melody Maker for lead and bass guitarists and a drummer for his new group, as well as “any other astral flyers like with cars, amplification and that which never grows in window boxes.”
Marc did one gig with a few of the freaky players who responded to the ad, and according to music paper reports, it was a mind-boggling disaster. What would the determined elf conjure up next? A few months earlier he had happened upon a Ravi Shankar concert, and the Indian sitar player—seated on a carpet, floating in incense—left an indelible impression on Marc. Could he incorporate this mellow hippie ethic into his own music to attain his ultimate goal of stardom?
One of the Melody Maker applicants, Steve “Peregrine” Took, seemed to share Marc’s fanciful vision (his name was taken from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) and decided
His immense self-belief, constant hustling, and efforts to make certain he was always in the right places paid off for Marc, and he was finally offered a deal at Decca Records in the summer of 1965. But since Decca was unsure how to market their curious solo wonder, Marc’s first single, “The Wizard,” failed to sell. After a second single bombed, despite TV appearances on “Ready, Steady, Go!” and “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” Marc was cut loose. Entirely undeterred, and drunk with the bittersweet lure of thwarted fame, Marc relentlessly pursued his dream, calling manager Simon Napier-Bell and arranging to drop off a tape of his songs. Arriving only with his guitar, Marc charmed the Yardbirds’ manager, serenading him for close to an hour. “I thought he was a Charles Dickens urchin,” Napier-Bell said, commenting on Marc’s unique assortment of mismatched clothes. “It’s now become very fashionable to wear old clothes—two jackets on top of one another, that sort of thing. Back then it was pretty unique.” As Marc went through his repertoire, Napier-Bell was taken with Marc’s strange, quavering voice and pseudo-enchanted slang-bang lyrics—impressed enough, in fact, to book him into a studio that same evening to cut some demos.
Marc’s new manager took on many roles: counselor, friend, partner, confidant, lover. “How can you manage anybody and not have a relationship with them?” Napier-Bell said. “The sexual borders had completely collapsed by that time. Straight people thought they shouldn’t be straight. In fact, in the sixties
it was pretty difficult to have any sort of relationship with someone without it being sexual.”
Record companies didn’t find Marc’s urchin charm compelling enough to sign him, and only after Napier-Bell threw his weight around did he finally secure a deal for Marc on Parlophone. The Beginning of Doves, which included “Hippy Gumbo” and the whimsical “Perfumed Garden of Gulliver Smith,” failed to dent the charts, but Napier-Bell had faith in his new protege and teamed him up with John’s Children, a loud post-Mod band he was managing at the time. It was a fairly disastrous union, with Marc never really committing to the band due to his high solo hopes. After a debacle German tour with the Who and a failed single, Marc was back on his own in June 1967, placing a classified ad in Melody Maker for lead and bass guitarists and a drummer for his new group, as well as “any other astral flyers like with cars, amplification and that which never grows in window boxes.”
Marc did one gig with a few of the freaky players who responded to the ad, and according to music paper reports, it was a mind-boggling disaster. What would the determined elf conjure up next? A few months earlier he had happened upon a Ravi Shankar concert, and the Indian sitar player—seated on a carpet, floating in incense—left an indelible impression on Marc. Could he incorporate this mellow hippie ethic into his own music to attain his ultimate goal of stardom?
One of the Melody Maker applicants, Steve “Peregrine” Took, seemed to share Marc’s fanciful vision (his name was taken from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) and decided
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