Free Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon by Pamela Des Barres

gray. What was needed after that was something flash and loud and vulgar and, to some people, annoying. Marc was very shiny He brought that in, and it actually opened the door for Bowie. Suddenly men were checking their eye makeup. And the music was much more forthright and jumpin’, much more below the belt.” I asked Beep if shiny Marc enjoyed himself. “Oh, yes, he was a laugh, you see. It’s all theater. He created his own stage. Marc wanted adulation and he didn’t pretend that he didn’t want it. Up until then it wasn’t cool to let on that you wanted people to scream at you. People didn’t scream at Jethro Tull.”
    Marc and June moved into a grand flat in upscale Maida Vale, bought a white Rolls-Royce, and spent time with rock’s elite at trendy Tramps and the Speakeasy. With two British number ones under his sequined belt, Marc’s T. Rex got a killer American record deal, and in January 1972, when “Get It On” went to number one in America, the Bolans celebrated by dropping fistfuls of dollar bills from their seventh-floor New York City hotel balcony.
    For a short time “T. Rextasy” mania was rampant. Marc’s crown of curls and haughty, wicked grin graced the covers of every teen magazine. But teenage fans are flighty, and Britain’s rock press is notoriously fickle. After such a feverish storm of vainglorious vampy fame, could a Bolan backlash be far behind?
    Already imbibing quite a bit of champagne and brandy, Marc started using cocaine, which slowly seemed to erode his acutely astute judgment calls. Mad for his own high-profile image (as usual), believing his own quixotically quotable hot air, he and June took over all the T. Rex business dealings, which turned into a disaster. As Marc climbed higher on his own personal pedestal, people began dropping away, including publicist B. P. Fallon, who paraphrased Dylan in his departing note: ‘It’s all right, Marc, I’m only leaving.’”
    While Marc’s increasingly younger androgynous fans ate him up whole, the venemous rock press jeered that “the Jeepster” had totally sold out. When Slider came out the end of July, after an initial one hundred thousand copies sold in four days, sales gradually slowed down. During an American tour when T. Rex’s supporting act, the Doobie Brothers, began to headline the bill, Marc hired three black backup singers to fill out the sound. One of the singers was Gloria Jones. “Gloria was this wild rock-and-roll girl,” Beep explained. “She wrote ‘If I Was Your Woman’ for Gladys Knight, but she didn’t have June’s savoir faire about the mechanicals.” Though the Bolans had just bought a rural retreat on the Welsh border, Marc was soon flaunting his steamy, head-over-heels relationship with Gloria, and his five-and-a-half-year marriage was over. Without June’s watchful eye and attention to detail, Marc’s carefully constructed shiny universe began to collapse.
    Tanx, the follow-up album to Slider, featured a suggestive shot of Marc (the tank between his legs), hiding bloated features behind his mop of hair and a strategically placed feather boa. Two singles, “Twentieth Century Boy” and “The Groover,” reached the British Top Five, but Marc’s number-one days were over. In the spring of 1974, the band’s American label, Warner Bros., dropped T. Rex.
    T. Rex continued to release records in England, but only hard-core fans were buying. Marc refused to believe he was failing, pretending he was still an adorable superstar even though his regular tequila breakfasts were making him fat. At a January 1974 gig in Glasgow, an out-of-control Marc stepped into one of his star-shaped stage props, fell onto his back, and had to be helped offstage by Mickey Finn and two roadies. Flailing around in his tap shoes and feather boas, Marc was as close to self-parody as it gets.
    Most of 1974 was spent plodding about in the sunshine. “He took time to go to Monte Carlo and that was like la-la-land, so he lost