Fucking Marc Bolan

Archive: Listening

I got out of high school and Victor and John moved to Savannah. They happened so closely that I can?t separate them.

My listening to LPs had been sporadic, scanty: Messiah, Chopin?s Death March (led there by a reprint of a golden age Captain America story in which the Red Skull played the march before he killed an American military officer), Gregorian chants (no idea how I discovered those in 1970-71 - maybe idlest curiosity) and spoken word records of English poetry.

With Victor and John I got stoned, took psychedelics and listened to the music of the time: The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix (lots and lots of Hendrix: I think after they got their cat high once she would always go sit under a speaker when a Hendrix album was on) and groups and bands whose names are familiar to collegial* rock fans in their teens today.

And Marc Bolan and T. Rex, T. Rex was John?s special enthusiasm. I?m sure he thought Bolan gay. Particularly when looking at the album with the photo of Bolan standing with a longhaired mustached looking guy that with the sort of hip good looks John liked. A nice way to see the two men.

Diminutive, skinny Marc Bolan with makeup, frizzy hair, and cute costumes looked the image of sassy hippy queen. Colored perhaps by my own wishes his voice has always suggested British fem boy.

But I think Bolan was straight. On the cutting edge of glam-rock when straight rockers invested themselves with feminine decoration for the first time.

When I moved on to Atlanta I never thought to buy a T. Rex LP. I liked the music well enough: cheerful, bouncy meaningless but not unsympathetic lyrics (a blend of science fiction and fantasy trash that I?d probably reject if I were discovering it for the first time today). Probably I?d really have rather fucked Marc Bolan than listen to him.

So long ago that I was living with a woman Gordon bought a T. Rex LP much to my surprise (this was before I decided he was eventually own every more or less canonical rock recording from the 60s into the early 70s). After a shiver of nostalgia I softly recoiled. Stupidly, fuzzily the music seemed something I?d outgrown. Maybe living with a woman I tended to skirt away from something that revived my homoerotic side. (Maybe not: I should think about those possibilities one day.)

In rediscovering the music of my youth I have two main hopes: to rediscover neglected pleasure and to revisit younger Richard. Not that the two goals are readily distinguished. Almost Cut My Hair, Four Dead in Ohio, Southern Man, The End (Nico, not whatshisname), Pilgrims Progress: are equally rich in forgotten beauty and moods.

In listening to T. Rex?s Slider (Gordon doesn?t have Electric Warrior I?m back with old friends, one dead, the other maybe damned. And with a na?ve young man in Savannah, GA who would laughably but inevitably made his way to typing away now.

* Meaning camaraderie of sensibility, not college age.

Addendum: Queerbychoice supplies this quote:

Interviewer: ?Are you heterosexual??

Marc Bolan: ?No, bisexual, but I believe I?m more heterosexual ?cos I definitely like boobs. I always wished that I was 100 per cent gay, it?s much easier??

Source.