Nineteen forty-seven was a year that marked the end of many events which had shaped the early twentieth century, and began a new chapter that would see major changes in the world order and dramatic shifts in the structure of Western civilization.
World War II was over and the leaders of the world met in Paris for the signing of the peace agreements that would bring the war in Europe to a close. In the United States, General George Marshall was appointed as the Secretary of State and proposed a sweeping recovery program for Europe that would come to be known as the Marshall Plan.
In the middle East, archeologists stumbled upon the dead sea scrolls; a discovery which sparked new studies and deliberations concerning the Jewish and Christian faiths that would still be raging on towards the end of the century and will almost certainly never be fully resolved.
Physicist Max Plank, one of the first people to study the quantum nature of matter died in Nineteen forty-seven as did automotive giant Henry Ford who pioneered the American automotive industry and left behind a fortune of nearly half a billion dollars. Another millionaire died that year although his millions were earned in less reputable a manner - Mafia kingpin Al Capone.
Nineteen forty-seven also marked the birth of the semiconductor revolution. Bell Laboratory scientists William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain announced the invention of the Bipolar Junction Transistor. The discovery caused little commotion at the time, but soon everyone would be carrying their own personal transistor radios. Three decades later, semiconductor manufacturers around the world would be spewing out millions of tiny microprocessors, each carrying well over a million transistors and capable of executing over one-hundred-million instructions per second.
In sports, Jackie Robinson became the first black man to sign a contract with a major baseball club and New York beat Brooklyn to win the 1947 World Series.
Britain had just come through its most severe winter since 1894. But the cold of winter was quickly forgotten as the country prepared itself for a royal wedding between the heir to the throne, Princess Elizabeth, and Philip Mountbatten, the Duke of Edinburgh.
And in the East London suburb of Hackney, a working-class Jewish couple, Simeon and Phyllis Feld, were expecting a child. Phyllis worked days at a fruit stand in Soho while Simeon worked at various odd jobs including cosmetic salesman and truck driver. On September 30th, 1947, the couple gave birth at Hackney General Hospital to a son and they named him Mark.
As far as Mark was concerned, he was born a star. "When I was younger", he recalled, "I certainly thought I was a superior kind of being. And I didn't feel related to other human beings." Mark's parents remember him as a very strong willed boy who would kick anyone he didn't like. He had his share of fights during his school years and was a member of a local gang known as the Sharks. On one occasion, Mark claimed to have been knifed during a fight with a rival gang.
Mark had a strong imagination and would often make believe that he was Audie Murphy, Mighty Joe Young, or the Phantom of the Opera. He was also an avid movie fan. He most enjoyed science fiction and horror films and could name every title, actor, producer, and director.
Mark gained an appreciation for music at an early age spending hours listening to his parent's record collection. His favorite was a song about an American frontiersman from Tennessee, a place far away and much different than the London Mark grew up in. The song was "The Ballad of Davey Crockett" by an American songwriter named Bill Hayes. Mark's father, eager to encourage his son's interest in music, went out shopping one day to buy another record by his son's favorite musician, but he made an innocent mistake that would change the course of Mark's life forever. Instead of buying another record by Bill Hayes, Simeon confused the name with another American. The artist was Bill Haley and the song was "Rock Around The Clock". At age eight, Mark Feld had been handed his calling.
It didn't take long for Mark to act on his love for music. He first built himself a makeshift guitar which he used to learn the basics. He then talked his indulgent parents into buying him a drum kit. Later, when he was nine they bought him a guitar for 16 pounds which was nearly a month of Simeon's salary.
His mother would later recall how Mark would go to see someone like Cliff Richard in concert and come home saying "that's how I'll be one day." Among his earliest compatriots were Keith Reid, future lyricist for Procul Harum, Cat Stevens, and a young man whose life would often be intertwined with his own, David Bowie.
Mark began to build a record collection with money he made doing odd jobs which included serving espresso behind the counter at the legendary 2 I's on Old Compton Street. The 2 I's served as a launching pad for many famous British acts including a young man named Harry Webb who would later change his name to Cliff Richard. Mark himself auditioned there, supposedly on the same day as did Harry Webb, but was turned down.
At age 12 Mark joined a 3 piece band called Susie and The Hula Hoops as a tea-chest bass player. The band's lead vocalist was named Helen Shapiro. Helen would eventually leave the band and within months record a string of pop-hit singles including two number 1 hits in Britain. Although Mark would deny that it had any impact on him, many believed that her success spurred him on to pursue his own path to stardom. He dropped out of school, having already been expelled, and went in search of an opportunity in acting.
During this time Mark befriended the girls from a British TV show called "Oh Boy". The girls would take Mark to all of their performances at the Hackney Empire. It was there that Mark had one of his first face-to-face meetings with a contemporary rock star.
Rock and Roll had been born in the USA and was being exported to
Europe by a handful of early American rock stars who's popularity
overseas nearly dwarfed their popularity back home in the States. One
of these stars was Eddie Cochran and it was he who happened to be at the Hackney Empire on this night for his first Brittish tour.
As the story goes, following Eddie Cochran's performance at the Hackney Empire, Cochran handed his guitar to the then 13 year old starry eyed Mark Feld who proceeded to carry the guitar to Cochran's waiting limousine. It was a moment that Mark was always proud to relate and one that would often be singled out as an important event in Mark's life, as if that event - the act of having touched Eddie Cochran's guitar, had some greater, almost mystical, significance.
This story, unfortunately, has a tragic and perhaps eerily ironic ending. At the end of Cochran's tour of England, the taxi carrying Cochran, his girlfriend Sharon Sheely, and fellow American Rock Star Gene Vincent, blew a tire while on its way to the London Airport. The car swerved off the road and slammed into a lamp post. Several hours later, on April 17th, 1960, Eddie Cochran joined his good friend Buddy Holly on the list of early rockers who gained instant immortality through a tragic death.
At age 13 Mark spotted a man walking down the street in front of his house wearing clothes which would become typical of the Mod movement in Britain. The sight so impressed Mark that he began spending all of his money on similar clothes. Later, commenting on this period of his life, Mark would say that he had an obsession with clothes, owning forty suits and often changing them 4 or 5 times a day. "I used to go home and literally pray to become a Mod," he would remember.
Bumping into Angus McGill one day, a writer for the Evening Standard, Mark bragged about all of the clothes he owned. McGill followed Mark home to see his collection of clothes. Impressed with what he saw, McGill recruited Mark for a feature article about the Mod scene in Town magazine, a forerunner of modern men's magazines such as GQ. The article was entitled 'Faces Without Shadows' and was written by a fellow named Peter Barnsley. It included some of the earliest photographs of Mark to ever appear in print. They were taken by Don McCullin - Later to become a famous war photographer.
Beneath one of the pictures Barnsley included the following paragraph which included a rather ominous prediction:
"Feld is fifteen years old, and still at school. His family has just moved from Stamford Hill to a pre-fab out in Wimbledon. Of this he does not approve. The queues of Teds outside the cinemas in Wimbledon look just like a contest for the worst haircut, he says. At least the boys of Stamford hill dress sharply, and who would want a new, clean house if it is in unsympathetic surroundings? Nonetheless cleanliness is of vital importance to him. Shining with soap and health, he is apparently tireless and often goes for days on end without any sleep; there is never a trace of fatigue or boredom in his face.
"What is the point of all this energy and all the soap and water? Where is the goal towards which he is obviously running as fast as his impeccably shod feet can carry him? It is nowhere. He is running to stay in the same place and he knows by the time he has reached his mid-twenties the exhausting race will be over and he will have lost."
Following these events Mark was introduced to a modeling agency and became a "John Temple Boy". As such he was used as a model for their suits in their catalogues as well as a model for cardboard cutouts to be displayed in their shop windows. Whether because they were unimpressed or because they wanted to keep their catalogue fresh with new faces is uncertain, but he was never used again.
Mark then shifted his focus back towards music and, at age 17, made another attempt to kick-start a career in the business. Sporting a denim cap and playing an acoustic guitar, he decided to try his hand at the British folk circuit. The sound resembled a Dylan/Donovan mix and, indeed, his songs consisted of some Dylan covers and a few other folksy tunes. To complete the new look and sound, Mark even came up with a new name for himself. Thus it was that the short music career of Toby Tyler began.
It didn't take long until Toby met up with an actor named Allan Warren
who offered to become his manager. Allan helped arrange recording time
for Toby and they proceeded to record several tunes including Dylan's
"Blowin' in the wind". A version of Betty Everett's "You're No Good"
was submitted to EMI for a test screening but they turned Toby
down. Deciding that the future for Toby Tyler looked bleak, Warren and
Toby parted company after which Toby Tyler once again became simply
Mark Feld. (There was one small change however, but it's not clear to
me when exactly it occurred. And that is that somewhere around this
time period, Mark chose to drop the "k" from his name and replace it with a
"c". Therefore, many poems and diaries from this period were signed as
Marc Feld rather than as Mark Feld.)
The tapes produced during the Toby Tyler recording session vanished from thought and mind for over twenty-five years before resurfacing in 1991 and selling for nearly eight-thousand dollars. Their eventual release on CD in 1993 made available the earliest of Marc's known recordings.
With yet another attempt to get into the music business at a dead end, Marc found himself hanging around the National Theatre looking for work. He was able to land several character parts in some TV shows including a delinquent on the Sam Kydd TV series and a show called 'Orlando'. But TV acting bored Marc so he decided to take an extended trip to France.
The accounts of what happened in France differ and not even Marc ever seemed to tell the same story twice. He was known to occasionally stretch the truth or fabricate pieces of it and seemed to often forget which parts were real and which were fantasies. He once admitted to an interviewer that he felt that his credibility as a poet allowed him to stretch the truth or make things up.
In any case, according to Marc's accounts he met a magician who lived in a 40 room mansion with libraries of books on mythology and black magic. Marc claimed to have witnessed levitations, seances, and crucifixions of live cats. He even claimed to have at one point witnessed a ceremony at which the attendees resorted to consumption of human flesh. All of this, recall, was from Marc's own accounts. According to one of Marc's early producers, Simon Napier-Bell, however, Marc had merely met a guy who did magic tricks and spent a weekend with him.
Whatever the real truth, the experience had a profound effect on Marc. He left France with a much more highly developed imagination and a near obsession with Greek mythology, British romantic poetry, and the Tolkien books "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of The Rings". The Tolkien books had reached nearly Biblical status with the sixties generation of hippies and they would have a tremendous influence on Marc's early song writing; manifesting themselves in the form of enchanted poems and lyrics.
Marc returned to Britain more determined than ever to become a star. He locked himself away for months writing songs in a manic frenzy of inspiration. His future wife would later describe his writing style in terms of "a force flowing out of him". He himself contributed it to the work of his Guardian Angel whom, he was sure, really did all of the writing. During this period of time, Marc would churn out a reservoir of songs which he would still be tapping into five albums later. Among them was a song which he entitled "The wizard" in honor of his wizardly friend in France. With the help of producer Jim Economedies, he recorded the song and landed a record contract with Decca.
When Marc received the initial samples of "The Wizard" from Decca he received a mild shock. His name had been changed again; but this time without his approval. Decca had decided that the name Marc Feld would NOT do and had changed his last name to "Bowland". The name change didn't bother Marc as much as did the fact that he had not been consulted about the matter. As would become typical of other events in his future, Marc refused to allow Decca to have it their way without his stamp of approval. After negotiations, he convinced them to drop the W and the D from Bowland to shorten the name to BOLAN. Thus, Marc Feld became Marc Bolan and in November of 1965 "The Wizard" was released and the voice and music of Marc Bolan was broadcast for the first time over British airwaves.
Decca's press release on the Wizard single was a masterpiece of sixties hype. It read:
"Marc Bolan was born in September 1947. After 15 years had passed he traveled to Paris and met a black magician called The Wizard, He lived for 18 months in The Wizard's chateau with Achimedies, an owl, and the biggest, whitest Siamese cat you ever saw. He then felt the need to spend some time alone so he made his way to woods, near Rome. For two weeks he strove to find himself and then he returned to London where he began to write. His writings mirror his experiences with mentionings of the magician's pact with the great god Pan. In London, walking down Kings Road, Chelsea in the dead of night, he chanced to meet a girl named Lo-og who gave him a magic cat. This cat, named after the girl, is now his constant companion and is a source of inspiration to him. Now The Wizard's tale is set down for all to hear on Marc's first recording for Decca."
A small poem accompanied two photographs of Bolan. It read:
Keith Altham, Marc's future publicist who at this point in time was just an acquaintance, remembers Marc frequenting a bar called the Brewmaster. He would come in carrying his record and say "Gotta listen to this fellas, I'm going to be the greatest thing since Elvis Presley." "Nice little bloke Marc!", they all thought, "Sit down and have a Coca Cola." No one really expected him to get too far.
Marc performed "The Wizard" on the TV show "Ready, Steady, Go". Unfortunately, the band missed out on the intro, played too fast, and in the wrong key. To make matters worse the show encountered technical problems and the signal went dead for most of Marc's debut. It was a disaster.
In June of 66 Decca released a follow up single called "The Third Degree" backed by what Marc called an unfinished demo titled "San Francisco Poet". It flopped. This single was to have been followed up by a song called "Jasper C. Debussy" but by then Marc's contract with Decca had expired and Marc had moved on to Columbia and producer Simon Napier-Bell.
Following his lack of success with Decca, Marc called producer Simon Napier-Bell and told him "I'm a singer and I'm going to be the biggest rock star ever, so I need a good manager to make all the arrangements." Simon told him to send him his demo tapes but Marc insisted that he was close by and could just drop them in. Ten minutes later he arrived at Simon's office with his guitar around his neck and announced that he had no demo tapes after all but would be happy to sing a few tunes for him. He sat in a chair cross-legged, accentuating his short stature, and played all the songs on acoustic guitar - enough, according to Simon, to fill nearly four albums. By the end of the set, Simon was on the phone booking some time in a local recording studio.
Simon recalled that Marc was ridiculously egotistical at the time, to the point where it was easy to get furious with him. He actually thought that all he needed to do was to make a few posters of himself and things would just sort of happen. Simon disagreed and convinced Mark to add some strings to one of the songs, called "hippy gumbo", and approach some record companies with it.
Unfortunately, none of the record companies liked the tune. When Simon told Marc the news, he was completely shattered - not even expecting to be turned down. Eventually however, Simon was able to convince Columbia records to take Marc on and the single was released in June of '67. This single was another flop and was greeted with bad reviews including one that called the single, quote, "a crazed mixture of an incredibly bad negro blues singer and Larry the Lamb."
Marc made a second appearance on "Ready, Steady, Go" to promote 'Hippy Gumbo'. This appearance went much better than his first but it was overshadowed by the first British TV appearance of Jimi Hendrix. Marc later boasted that Hendrix told him how much he liked his voice but that he would never make it. In some respects this prediction was true in as much as by mid 1967 the short solo career of Marc Bolan had failed to take root.
Simon Napier-Bell happened to be producing two other groups at this point in time. One was The Yardbirds, which included future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. Watching the Yardbirds work was one of the things Marc would later recall as one of the highlights of this period. The other band was a group called John's Children who were signed to the Who's label, Track.
John's Children had previously been known as the Silence which had developed from a number of even earlier bands such as the Clockwork Onions and The Few. The name John's Children came about because bass player John Hewlett was the leader of the band. The other band members were lead singer Andy Ellison, guitarist Geoff McClelland, and drummer Chris Townsen who occasionally deputized for the Who's Keith Moon. The band had already caused quite a stir in England after having done some nude publicity shots and performing some relatively wild stage acts. Today they are remembered as one of the first psychedelic bands of this era.
John's children had already released two singles. One was called "The Love I Thought I'd Found" which was released in America retitled as "Smashed!! Blocked!!". The second single was called "Not The Sort Of Girl You Take To Bed" which flopped. Following these two singles guitarist Geoff McClelland was kicked out of the band, having failed to live up to the expectations of his fellow band members or the owner of the Track record label, Kit Lambert, who was also the Who's manager at the time.
In addition to the Who, Lambert had signed Jimi Hendrix and John's Children to his record label but insisted that Marc Bolan be included in the deal as John's Children's guitarist. The deal was acceptable to Simon-Napier Bell who, having failed to make Marc Bolan a solo success, saw a union between John's Children and Marc as a move that would potentially benefit both parties. John's children would have a better guitarist as well as one that could write music and Marc could broaden his exposure by joining up with a band that had already established a following. Marc found the deal acceptable if for no other reason than he would be recording on the same record label as Jimi Hendrix whom he had immense respect for.
The merger was made and the new line up of John's Children headed for the recording studio to put down some new tracks. After one week they emerged with several demos and releasable songs. The first to be released was a Bolan compilation called Desdemona. Andy Ellison performed the lead vocals on the song but Bolan's unique voice was unmistakably present on the background vocals. The single was released in May of '67 and initially appeared to be headed for the top of the charts. Unfortunately, The BBC dealt the song a fatal blow by banning the song because it considered the line "lift up your skirt and fly" to be offensive. Despite this the song was popular and to this day is considered to be one of the finest British releases of 1967.
Onstage, John's children were as controversial as their music. Andy Ellison was prone to getting excessively wild, jumping around the stage, leaping into the crowd and occasionally attacking other members of the band. Marc would swing between moods sometimes simply sitting cross-legged on the stage and other times running around the stage in circles.
In their private lives, however, Marc was clearly apart from the others. Andy Ellison would later recall that the rest of the band was into drugs and dropping acid while Marc would only occasionally sip a little wine and spent most of his time simply writing songs. This, among other reasons, was why the merger of Bolan with John's children was to be a relatively short-lived union.
Marc also grew increasingly dissatisfied with the fact that John, not he, was choosing the musical direction of the band. Their second single with Marc was to have been "Midsummer Nights Scene" with "Sarah Crazy Child" on the flip side - both Bolan compositions. But, for reasons that are still unclear, the single was shelved at the last minute even though it had already been pressed. In its place was released a Hewlett/Townsen number called "Come And Play With Me In The Garden".
Then, perhaps the straw that broke the camel's back, a concert in Ludswigshaven, Germany while touring Europe with the Who, nearly ended in disaster. Near the end of their set the band jumped into a song entitled "You're a Nothing" which ended with a repeated German chant. Andy Ellison grew quite a bit more wild than usual and jumped off the stage with a large sack of feathers that he had pulled from hotel pillows. While he went about the business of tossing feathers at the crowd, Marc began beating at his amps with chains, and the rest of the band began chanting the German slogan. Eventually, a riot broke out. Fans began to rush the stage and the band just narrowly made an escape to the safety of their limousines. They drove off just as the police began moving in armored cars to quell the riot. The Who had to cancel their act that night and the German government confiscated a good deal of John's Children's equipment.
Marc left the band soon after - less than 6 months after joining it.
But he left John's Children with a mission - to establish his own rock band under his own complete control. Still wielding the electric guitars and amps he had used with John's children, Marc put ads in the International Times looking for other musicians. Not patient enough to wait, he also booked a gig at the Electric Garden in London's Covent Garden, a club that would later change its name to "Middle Earth" after the mythical land in the Tolkien trilogies.
An 18 year old drummer named Steve Turner responded to the add. Marc hired him but convinced him to change his name to Steve Peregrine Took after the youngest of the four hobbits in the Lord of The Rings trilogy. The name change was fine for Steve apparently as long as Marc didn't mind being referred to as Nalob Cram - Marc Bolan spelled backwards.
In addition to bringing a full drumkit to the band, Steve Took could also acceptably integrate several other strange instruments into the music such as kazoos and pixiephones. He could also handle backing vocals quite well being able to immediately find a harmony for nearly anything Marc sang. According to Marc's soon to be producer Tony Visconti, Steve was perhaps the only person who was ever able to really get inside Marc's head and travel the distance into the Middle Earth landscape where most of his musical themes took place.
In addition to Steve, Marc recruited a 28 year old bearded guitarist named Ben who, according to Steve, kept turning green with stomach ulcers and a bass guitarist who was also a lot older than Marc and Steve and smoked a pipe which clearly labeled him as an undesirable - or at least so thought Steve. There was one other member of the band, but little is documented or remembered about him. In fact, the identities of all three of these original band members remains a mystery today.
Marc needed a name for this new band. Naturally he wanted a name that reflected his belief in mythology but knew that most people didn't adhere to such beliefs. But Marc reasoned that modern science had firmly proven the existence of the dinosaurs; creatures that, far more than anything else known to man, encroached on the boundaries of mythology. And if such creatures had existed millions of years ago, then who could argue against the possibility that even long before they existed there may have been creatures more like fire breathing dragons and other mythological creatures. Following this reasoning, Marc decided to name his band after a dinosaur. But not just any dinosaur would do. It had to be the biggest and baddest of them all - the king of the dinosaurs; the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
With a new band and a new name, Marc headed for the Covent Garden. Time didn't allow for such trivialities as rehearsing so the band practiced together only once before the show. The result was disastrous. The band members were simply incompatible and the total lack of rehearsal understandably didn't help. The band was promptly booed off the stage and disbanded almost immediately afterwards. To make matters worse, Track records, who owned most of what remained of John's Children's equipment following the German fiasco, repossessed Marc's electric guitar and amps. Then, to scrape up enough cash to obtain the bare necessities of life, Steve had to sell his drumkit and replaced it with a simple pair of bongos.
Thus, Tyrannosaurus Rex, which Marc had started with the best of
intentions, had disintegrated into a 2 piece band owning only a set of
bongos and an acoustic guitar. They may well have vanished from the
music histories altogether had it not been for the support of a very
early ally and big fan - radio disk jockey John Peel.
John had operated an illegal offshore radio station which was eventually shut down by the BBC. But being illegal allowed Peel to play lots of music NOT allowed or sanctioned by the BBC including underground bands like Tyrannosaurus Rex. After the offshore radio was shut down, Peel was hired by the Middle Earth club and immediately recruited the fledgling Tyrannosaurus Rex as a house band. Later, after landing a job at Radio One, John would often invite Tyrannosaurus Rex to play live on his show. Some of these recordings along with those from many other bands are currently available on a series of albums and CDs known as the Peel sessions. John also made sure that whenever he was asked to MC at clubs throughout England, Tyrannosaurus Rex was brought along as his warm-up band. Eventually, this exposure began to build a following for the band and they were soon being asked to play at various colleges and open air festivals around England. They even appeared at the first free Hyde Park festival in 1968.
Thus, with John Peel's help, Marc's Tyrannosaurus Rex survived the Winter of 1968. Aside from a few rough cuts released on an album years later called "The Beginning of Doves", little in the form of recordings is available of Tyrannosaurus Rex from those early days and, historically, it's fair to say that Tyrannosaurus Rex was dormant and would remain so until the thaw of spring.