GERTIE: “ … grace and great consideration of others.” That’s a nice one, Jan.
PAMELA: It’s great that you got right back in a car after the accident.
GERTIE: He’s smacked a lot of cars up. Jan’s not afraid of anything. Sometimes he stands at the edge of the stage. New Year’s Eve three years ago he fell offstage and this man caught him! You’re lucky somebody caught you, Jan! You’re a big man. You’re not easy to catch!
PAMELA: Why didn’t Dean come see you in the hospital?
JAN: Somebody said that when I was still unconscious that he was there, but I think that was it.
PAMELA: A handsome and talented man like you must have had a lot of girlfriends.
GERTIE: [Smiling.] Too much for one man. One time he went to the beach and came back with two girls and I guess the alarm went off and woke up his girlfriend.
JAN: It was a big room, the dining room, and I figured, “Well, gee, we can make out and all this stuff.”
GERTIE: Are you sure it wasn’t the living room, Jan? He gets the couch and table mixed up.
JAN: It was a large house and I figured Jill was sleeping. I said, “See ya later!” and I figured, “That’s it!” No dice. [Sighs.] You know, it’s kinda getting me down, but do you want to continue with this interview?
Jan is weary and goes to bed. I stay for a little while with Gertie and look through Jan’s bright and shining memorabilia. She gives me a photo of the demolished Corvette. She’s a devoted wife, but it’s a difficult situation.
A few days later I take some pictures with Jan in his front yard. Gracious and agreeable, he poses with a surfboard before getting into his car and driving down the street to pick up his dry cleaning. It makes me nervous. I invite Jan and Gertie to my birthday party, but Jan’s going to be back East, doing another gig with Dean.
I call Dean to tell him Jan feels hurt that he didn’t come to see him in the hospital so long ago, and he heaves a sigh. “I think that’s what he was told. I was there a couple of times with his parents, but he doesn’t remember, so what good does it do? I went once when he was awake—he was in the wheelchair; we did show Laurel and Hardy. He started falling in with some drug people, people I didn’t relate to. There was a period of time when we didn’t have anything in common. There was probably a period of time when I didn’t talk to him that much,” he finally admits. “He was so stubborn, it didn’t help to talk to him. He probably never understood why I couldn’t sit with him for ten or twelve hours a day. I tried to get him to understand. I would invite him to my graphics office, but I have to schedule taking a leak and there isn’t much for him to do. He just didn’t understand.”
Over time Jan found that his precious music was still locked in his brain cells. He started writing songs and did some recording, eventually booking himself into Holiday Inns, but after ABC aired Dead Man’s Curve, yesterday’s sun ‘n’ fun duo was back in demand, playing to huge, appreciative audiences at state fairs and theme parks. Everybody was amazed that Jan Berry was back onstage. He was a downright inspiration, as the review of the Butte County Fairgrounds gig proves: “If your trip is to focus on Jan Berry’s half-beat-late and tortured vocals during the haunting ‘Dead Man’s Curve,”’ states the Chico Record, “rather than embrace the miracle that this incredible man is able to even perform, well, I guess that’s too bad.”
Jan and me in his front yard, posing with one of his surfboards. (ADAM W.WOLF)
I ask Dean how long the duo will continue to play. “Jan has said to me that it would be okay for him to go out onstage in a wheelchair,” he tells me, “but I don’t want to do that. On the other hand I don’t want him to panic that it’s almost over.” I mention that Jan is still feisty and determined—and still getting behind the wheel to pick up his dry cleaning! “He shouldn’t be. He could be out the driveway right now—one more bang in the head—and I’d have to really, for the first time, go out and look for a job!” Dean laughs in a sad and tragic way. “You know,” he says finally, “Jan and Dean haven’t been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s not so much for me, but for Jan. Who else could have done what he did? He wrote and arranged and produced all those hit records—what a sound! He got together the most incredible musicians. He pretty much discovered Lou Adler and Herb Alpert. Lesser people have been inducted—I’m not going to name names. Jan Berry should be honored —before it’s too late.”
I agree with Dean. But who brought the Laurel and Hardy movie to the hospital? Lou Adler or Dean Torrence? One of rock and roll’s mysteries, I suppose. At least it made Jan Berry happy.
MARC BOLAN
Twentieth-Century Boy
The usually loudmouthed, raging young crowd at Thee Experience Club was hushed and expectant. I had already taken my place on the grimy floor, folding my ostrich feathers around me, waiting breathlessly for Tyrannosaurus Rex to turn me into a “Child Star.” When Steve “Peregrine” Took and the ringleted boy/girl beauty Marc Bolan joined us, cross-legged on the club floor, the audience and the musicians became one big beating hippie heart for almost an hour. It was 1969, and along with the marijuana and musk in the air, there was a smidge of leftover peace-and-love hope that briefly united the wilting flower children. We floated along, enraptured by the gentle acoustic unicorn-speak of these mystical poets. Two years later Marc Bolan would explode onto the pop scene, strewing it with sequins and sparkling flash. How did this androgynous Tolkien elf with the rosebud mouth become the Lurex-clad, glitter-god pioneer of glam rock?
Even as a young child growing up in the borough of Hackney brash and cheeky Mark Feld demanded constant attention from his parents and older brother, Harry. Quite a bit smaller than his brother, Mark invented heroic fantasy personas to build up his short stature, hoping to stir up an air of importance and originality. It seemed he was never satisfied with the status quo, always wanting to create something more in his life. While his peers slogged over their homework, Mark was up in his room rocking out to Bill Haley records.
The week that Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” hit the British charts, nine-year-old birthday boy Mark Feld got his first guitar. But instead of actually playing the coveted instrument, Mark was much more interested in how it looked on him, perfecting his Elvis and Bill Haley moves in front of the mirror—already outrageously image-conscious. He put a band together of neighborhood kids who couldn’t really play music, called it Susie and the Hula Hoops, and did a few gigs at local schools.
Britain’s first pop television show, “Oh Boy,” was filmed in Hackney, and Mark often took the bus to see acts like Billy Fury and Adam Faith. He proudly claimed to have met one of his absolute heroes, American rocker Eddie Cochran, at one of these shows, insisting that he carried Eddie’s guitar into the studio for him. Nobody has been able to verify this fantastic report, but if young Mark actually got his hands on the legendary axe, it would have been in the spring of 1960, right before Cochran’s death in a British taxicab accident.
Besides rock and roll, the only thing eleven-year-old Mark Feld seemed to care about was his image. He begged his mother to take him to the local tailor to have an Italian-style suit made to his unusual specifications, eventually branching out farther and farther on the bus, desperately seeking affordable fashion. Years later he confessed to stealing motorbikes to pay for his early clothes habit. Looking sharp was all that mattered, staying sharp, the ultimate goal. His brother, Harry, said that Mark wasn’t able to pass a mirror without stopping for a quick (or lengthy) preen.
By the summer of 1962 the snappily dressed fourteen-year-old had become a Mod “face” and, along with two of his natty gang, was featured in the British men’s lifestyle magazine Town. In the article, entitled “The Young Take the Wheel,” Mark said, “You got to be different from the other kids. I mean, you got to be two steps ahead. The stuff that half the haddocks you see around are wearing, I was wearing two years ago … . I brought a jacket back from Paris—I was in Paris with my parents but I didn’t like it much—a
nd this jacket was just rubbish over there but it’s great here. Great shoulders.” Harry says the family never even went to Paris.
It was obvious that young Mark Feld wanted to be noticed. He wanted to be important. He wanted to be famous for something.
The teenage fashion plate started frequenting the Soho clubs and boutiques, “making the scene” with his friend Jeff Dexter. After seeing the Cliff Richard movie Summer Holiday in 1963, Mark excitedly told Jeff he was going to sing and become a big star like Cliff Richard. Would Jeff be interested in managing him? The fact that Mark couldn’t really play or sing didn’t seem to matter. When he started tuning in to the “Pop Goes the Beatles” shows on BBC radio, Mark’s determination to succeed in the pop world started taking precedence over his appearance.
When Mark felt that Mod fashion was becoming commonplace, he sought a new way to climb out of the pit of conformity. Wandering through a secondhand bookstore, he stumbled upon the English romantic poets—Keats, Shelley, Byron—before glomming on to French bard Arthur Rimbaud, whose mystical opaqueness seemed to jolt Mark’s vivid imagination. “When I first read him,” Mark said later, “I felt like my feet were on fire”
Mark may have been in the subtle process of mixing up his varied influences, but his parents were concerned about his seeming lack of initiative, so when Mark expressed an interest in modeling, his mother put up her savings so he could attend a fancy West End modeling school. His success was minimal, perhaps because of his height, but years later, at the peak of his fame, Mark claimed to have once been the cardboard cutout in every John Temple menswear store in England. With some of his catalog earnings, Mark bought himself a new acoustic guitar.
The brief modeling career over, Mark took his new guitar and moved to a friend’s flat in London, where he spent hours playing, trancelike, to Bob Dylan records. He considered Dylan a poet with a conscience, a genius with vision—not unlike himself—and in January 1965 recorded his own wispy high-pitched version of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” along with two more songs, for his very first demo. Calling himself “Toby Tyler,” Mark made the record-company rounds, but there were no takers.
Mark’s first sexual encounter had taken place in Hackney with a dark-haired girl named Terry, but he had never gotten entangled romantically—probably because he was so wrapped up in himself! Allan Warren, a friend from his early days in London, claims that Mark was bisexual. “He went to bed with anyone, because everyone did in those days. It was nothing new. Rather than go to bed alone, if someone was pretty—irrespective of whether they were a girl or a boy—you’d go to bed with them … . Mark loved the girls, but I think in the beginning he was very shy with them. He was much more at ease with the boys. Boys took the lead if they fancied him, whereas if he fancied a girl, he’d have to chase her. It was really an ego thing, because he loved himself and he loved to be worshiped.“Many years later Mark would confirm Warren’s theory. “When I was fifteen I wasn’t very sure of myself,” he said. “I wanted to find out, so I went with a bloke. It was so that I’d never have to look back and wonder what I’d missed out on.”
The enchanting Marc Bolan, who reigned briefly as king of glam rock. (PAUL CANTY/ LONDON FEATURES INTERNATIONAL)
On a trip to Paris Mark supposedly met up with an older American man at the Louvre, and this chance encounter took on such epic proportions that he would refer to the incident for years to come. Mark spoke about his host’s many books on magic and marveled as the mysterious American conjured up spirits, read people’s minds, 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 to grab his bongos and go along with Marc for the carpet ride. Took had naturally gravitated to the gentle, nonthreatening hippie scene, having been a high-strung child who was taunted mercilessly because of his asthma and chronic eczema. The pair got into Eastern religion and mysticism—both on a heady romantic quest.
Not wanting to seem meek-mouthed and overly folky like British troubadour Donovan, Marc chose the name Tyrannosaurus Rex, hoping to give the trippy duo a hard-assed edge. They took their gongs, bells and panpipes into the studio to cut some demos, which Marc promptly gave to pacesetter pirate deejay John Peel. The songs became a staple on his radio show, which led to a deal for Tyrannosaurus Rex on EMI.
Producer Tony Visconti caught the duo at the UFO Club and was mesmerized by “the very precious, very powerful, and powerfully charismatic exotic gypsy” and approached Marc
Bolan about working with Tyrannosaurus Rex. The album that came from that fortuitous meeting, My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows, went on that year to outsell albums by Pink Floyd and Hendrix. Marc Bolan’s most fervent wish was about to be granted.
His fleeting bisexual skirmishes behind him, Marc was involved with another girl named Terry and in January 1968 sent her one of many flowery notes describing her “Torquay smile” and “ballerina body” and calling her the “unique Theresa of the childhood dancing nights.” But by spring Marc was writing romantic odes to June Child, a blond and beautiful, intelligent public-relations woman five years his senior. They left their respective partners and moved into an attic flat in Ladbroke Grove.
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?’”
Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Page 5