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

was thrown into the backseat of the purple Mini-Cooper and died instantly. (PA NEWS)
    The night of September 16, 1977, Marc went to the Speakeasy and then had dinner with Gloria and her brother Richard at Morton’s, where much imbibing went on. After the meal Marc convinced Gloria to play the piano and sing love songs for him, and they left for home at four A.M.
    Gloria got behind the wheel of
her purple Mini 1275 GT with her brother Richard following behind. Just before five A.M., after crossing Putney Bridge, the Mini disappeared over the bridge along Queens Ride. When Richard neared the bridge, he saw rising steam. The Mini had crashed into a tree, the passenger’s side taking the force of the impact. Gloria was unconscious but still breathing. Marc, who had always had a fear of and fascination with cars, had been thrown into the back of the Mini, lifeless in his orange glittery trousers and neon-green shirt. He looked like he had fallen asleep in a tumbled heap—only one small scratch marred his porcelain skin.
    Marc often said in interviews that he wouldn’t live to see his thirtieth birthday. He almost made it. He would have been thirty in two weeks.
    “Eddie Cochran’s death was always interesting to Marc—the car death,” Beep said. “Cars are featured in a lot of his lyrics … .‘Hubcap driving star halo’ … There’s tons of them—‘I got a Rolls-Royce and it’s good for my voice,’ blah, blah, blah … . When Elvis died, we were talking about how Maria Callas died on the same day and she just got a little squirt in the corner of the newspaper. Marc said, ‘I’m glad I didn’t die today,’ and a couple of weeks later he did. It was very sad. He was twenty-nine. He was looking good again. He’d been through his ‘fat Elvis’ period. He had credence with all the punk people. It wasn’t like he died forgotten.” I asked Beep if he thought Marc had made an important contribution to the mercurial world of rock and roll. “Oh yes,” he says with no hesitation. “There are people who are very talented through practice and application, and then there are people who have a gift that goes beyond worldly definition. Marc had a lot of unworldly knowledge that can’t be learned. It isn’t born of study. It’s like trying to explain ‘soul.’ Either you know what it is, or you don’t.”
    Marc wasn’t the only member of his bands to meet an untimely end.
    After Steve “Peregrine” Took was booted out of Tyrannosaurus Rex, his life became a series of stoned-out mishaps and tragedies. Upon receiving a small royalty check, he bought some morphine and a bag of magic mushrooms, and in the middle of the night, October 27, 1980, he woke out of a bombed sleep and grabbed a cherry to eat. But the morphine had numbed his throat and Took choked to death on the cherry pit.
    Bass player Steve Currie faded into obscurity and, disenchanted with the music scene, moved to Portugal in 1980. At midnight on April 28, 1981, on his way back home in the village of Val Da Perra, Currie swerved off the road and was killed.
    The sad truth is, icons were made to be broken, but Beep was right—Marc Bolan didn’t die forgotten.
    The Marc Bolan Tree on Queens Ride is tied with ribbons and covered in flowers and love notes to this day.
    “I don’t think Marc is unhappy,” said Gloria. “The only thing that is happening up there is that Marc is telling Elvis how to sing and Jimi how to play.”

JOHN “BONZO” BONHAM
    In Through the Out Door
    T he Bonzo I remember was a wide-eyed, sweet-faced prankster, a simple, adoring family man caught up in the maniacal rock-and-roll maelstrom. During Zeppelin’s slay-day, when I was a teenage nymphet hanging on the arm of Jimmy Page, Bonzo was actually protective of me, treating me with curious respect, and I saw him as an overgrown teddy bear, unaware of his gargantuan force, plowing through life with the unnatural grace only a rock drummer can summon up. Bonzo thrived in