You can see Marc Bolan almost anywhere and walk away with the same impression. You’ll think he looks cherubic, not a little elfin, and that he is decidedly beautiful — though not a twinge at the realization that he knows, capitalizes on this, has made it his career.

So it goes: you may be initially amazed by the fact that he is perceptive and intelligent; or cosmic, even, if you will, a mystic; or just a strange sort of rock and roll dude. One of the big advantages Marc Bolan has over almost any other rock and roll star is that he looks and acts the part constantly. It all comes naturally to him, you’re thinking, and in the next minute you realize that that is precisely what you’re supposed to think.

If this doesn’t make you shun Bolan altogether, you acquire a certain kind of respect, a funny kind of liking. Bolan goes Alice Cooper one better: he does it without mirrors. He doesn’t have to rely on props, because his guitar is as big as he is in the first place, his amps towering above his head momolithically, Bolan doesn’t have to appear in drag because he’s ultra-androgynous in the first place.

I’m not sure Marc Bolan is the smartest rock and roll star in the world, but he must be the most calculated. I’d stake money on it. “Well, I couldn’t be sure of success,” he said. “Yes,” I asked, “but didn’t it always seem like it had to work?”

I met Marc Bolan for the first time in 1969, when he was still in a group called Tyrannosaurus Rex — a two man, basically acoustic duo. They did three albums in Britain, put out one of them (Unicorn) in the States, then did a brief tour of America (with the Turtles), and broke up at the end of it. Steve Took, the drummer, went into a group with Twink, of the Pretty Things, and Mick Farren, of the Deviants, called the Pink Fairies. They were “political.” They didn’t last long.

Marc had other plans. He had been in rock and roll bands before, had even had a minor (British) hit in 1966 with a group called Johns Children. (“My god,” he said the other night, “it’s been five years, hasn’t it?”)

And so Marc Bolan decided to go back to rock and roll. Tyrannosaurus had been seen, by some anyway, as a sort of Arthurian-electric Incredible String Band; this due mostly to their dual membership and propensity for lyric abstraction. They sounded a lot different. “The difference is that they’re folk musicians. I come from rock and roll,” Bolan told me three years ago. Believe it.

He does it without mirrors.

Johns Children’s one hit was written by Bolan, a wonderfully whimsical little tune called “Desdemona.” There’s another version by a young black singer named Marsha Hunt, which is much more American (ie. R&B) than Johns Children’s, which is Who-like to the point of parody.

Lyrically, the song possessed a metre that bopped and a grandiloquent sense imagery that revealed certain pretensions to come:

Just because Toulouse Lautrec

Painted some chick in the Rue

Does not give you the right

To steal my night and leave me in the nude*

Perhaps this had been inspired by the then-Marc Bolanfeld’s sojourn in France with a magician when he was fourteen. Supposedly, they had lived in a tree. Of such stuff is legend made.

Johns Children were shortlived, and Marc’s tenure with the group was shorter. He had revealed an interesting warbling vocal on “Desdemona,” which was put to more extreme use in Tyrannosaurus Rex in ’67. Bolan often came on like a demented vacuum cleaner or a chimney sweep gargling charcoal and this added much to the sense of excitement in the group’s records.

The songs were post-acid fairy tales, neo-Arthurian legends, the old ghoulsand-goblins routine. H.P. Lovecraft cum Tolkien. The best song on Unicorn, for example, is called “Cat Black, the Witches Hat.” It needs more electricity.

Steve Took didn’t really figure very much in Tyrannosaurus. He banged the gong, he got it on, but Marc Bolan was the Decisive Dinosaur, the only one who really mattered. When it was time to split, Marc kept the name and picked up another drummer named Mickey Finn. (Wanna bet?)

Mickey and Marc did one mildly electric album, Beard of Stars, together and then gave up the idea of being a duo. For the next one, T. Rex, they added string arrangements by Tony Visconti, who used to produce the Moody Blues, and backing vocals by exTurtles, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan. They released a single, “Ride A White Swan,” and suddenly T. Rex were teen idols.

Bolan began writing more songs, turning his imagery more toward a sort of nascent sexuality and away from the mythic heroes of the past. “Two years ago,” he said in December, “I was more concerned in an elitist sense. I was more concerned with finding the characters in my head and giving them life. Now, I’m much more concerned with finding characters which are already created and learning from them. I couldn’t learn anymore from the dudes in my head. I know ’em all. There are a million I don’t, there’s a million parts of one’s brain that are gonna be opened up. But I was finding for me, as a man, to express the power I knew (here he was adamant) was in me, the only way I could do that was through rock and roll.”

“For me, as a man, to express the power I knew was in me.”

The group followed “Ride A White Swan” with “Hot Love,” then “Bang A Gong.” All three were screaming teenage smashes in Great Britain. Suddenly, seeming hordes of Tyrannosaurus Rex fans surfaced, bellowing “Sell out! BUBBLE GUM! Bring back Marc Bolan!” British music papers, never noted for their subtlety, cashed in. “About ten people may have written in, but the sad thing is that I know for a fact that at least 40 or 50 good letters were sent in and didn’t get printed. It’s nobody’s fault — it’s just the 20th century, and I have to accept it whether I like it or not,” Marc told Zig Zag’s Pete Frane.

T. Rex sold 12 million records in Britain and Europe last year. No one had ever done that before . . . including the Beatles. They have their own record label in England now; Electric Warrior’s British release is on it, with Marc’s face gracing the center of the disc. (This’ll happen here with the release of their next album.)

With the success of Electric Warrior, T. Rex became a full-fledged band. Mickey Finn switched to congas, and a “kit” drummer named Bill Legend (he’d been in a group called Legend, his real name being Fyfield) added. Steve Currie, a tall gangly Townshend-esque bassist who is Marc’s perfect foil on stage, was added on bass.

Pity the Poor Immigrant

There’s only one arena left for the Electric Warriors now: America, the Roman Colosseum of the rock and roll wars. Marc Bolan assaulted it like the biggest promoter in the National Gladiator League, with a conscious program designed to succeed. By now, he knew what it took to make it big and it seemed as though the same principles he’d used in England could be applied in the U.S.

We talked twice: once, in December, at the very beginning of Phase One of the Master Plan and once after their show in Detroit, in the midst of their February tour. In December, Marc was not a little defensive; he had, after all, just entered the States where he was not yet a star. In Europe, wherever he goes, now, he is recognized (“I give them a kiss, too,” he told Zig Zag about autograph seekers.)

By February, the group was riding high on “Bang A Gong (Get It On).” They sold out their entire tour, which means a lot, even though it was a relatively brief one. And they did it as headliners, which means a lot, at least to Bolan. “I’m just not going to slog around playing third on the bill for a year,” he said in December.

We only talked briefly after a somewhat disappointing show in Detroit. The sound wasn’t right: too loud upfront, too soft in the back. But the stage act was obviously great: Steve Currie looks very much like Pete Townshend, only taller, and Bolan, with his shadowtapping and bopping off a wall of amplifiers that literally loomed over his head, dwarfed by his guitar, was great.

The December talk was more fruitful. It raised more questions, solidified more feelings. By February, things looked very much different. For one thing, Warners had actually begun to promote T. Rex as the new Beatles. That’s a lot to live up to, and reveals the essential inconsistency of record companies.

Bolan summed it up: “Lennon and McCartney have both stated positively in print that we’re the new Beatles. They’re only sayin’ it, man, because they know I’m not a fool, they know it’s not like Herman’s Hermits. It’s not like that sort of level. They know where we’re at, artistically.

“It’s taken me seven years, man, to do it. But they know that I’m not a bullshit merchant, and if I blow it, I’ve blown it. Everyone’s blown it in different ways; Lennon with his Christ shit, you know, Jagger with his drug number, Pete always talking about Tommy. Everyone’s done it, so we’ll do it too.

“This year has been a double phenomenon. And next year (1972) will be more, because the material we have, the new things, are so much better.”

On the other hand . .' . “I don’t believe that we’re the new Beatles. It’s seven years on. The people we play to, though, 95% of our audience, are twelve year old girls. The screamers. The Beatles were exactly the same.”

Nonetheless, this means little if T. Rex do not rally some sort of community around themselves. This is the real importance of the Beatles, that they discovered their audience, or let their audience discover themselves. T. Rex, to become the new Beatles, would have to be able to cause the entire rock audience to cohere around their sound. This is unlikely.

True, Marc’s poetic nature is almost enough to garner T. Rex the Surf’s Up crowd, but the music, which someone dubbed “closet heavy” the other night, forces a dichotomy. There are lots and lots of people who just don’t like this kind of stuff. Even some hard-rock fans tend to find T. Rex contrived and the idea of Bolan’s super-conscious assault on the teenage rock and roll sensibility a little offensive.

Bolan is confident: “We’re it man, we’re fuckin’ it. England, man, we fucked England up. We came along and pssssshheeewwww . . .”

Still, it is a bit difficult to see how T. Rex will untie their audience. The music is there, all right, and so is the show, but somehow there is room to doubt. To do what Marc (and Warner Bros.) say this group can do, there just can’t be any room for question. Perhaps it is only that T. Rex are going to be the vehicle by which a whole new generation of rock and roll kids are brought into the fold; this is closer to Marc’s vision, I think, if it isn’t closer to his record company’s.

“I want ’em to scream. We’re the best visual band in the world. I’ve watched Pete and I’ve seen Hendrix; I’ve seen ’em all for years. I’ve copped everything they did. One TV show with T. Rex in America, it would be all over.

“I know that’s true. How long it would last is not relevant. I know it can happen.”

The. crucial question is not only whether Marc and T. Rex can conquer America, but the means by which this is to be accomplished. Marc Bolan knows that this means rock, and he knows that the rock has to have something substantial behind it. His idea of what is substantial is at variance with the sound of the music, I think. It is, undoubtedly, very British. Ever since he changed the kinds of things he’s writing about, there is still the sense of elfin imagery, the sense of fairy-tale. Older audiences are not going to trust these images, I don’t think, simply because they sound too naive. (I think it is probably the opposite: Marc knows too much about what he’s doing, and maybe tries a little too hard to disguise that fact.)

T. Rex revolves around Bolan and his personality, of course. Marc is not at all bashful about telling you that this is so. On the other hand, as crude as all this planning and plotting sometimes seems to be, he has never lost sight of his real aim: recognition as an “artist.”

Maybe I’ve been around this sort of thing too long, or maybe it’s just that I think that the idea of “art” and “artist” is bullshit, or maybe it’s just that Bolan seems naive in print. I don’t really know all the reasons why but a certain cynicism enters at this point.

Most of all, Bolan’s veneer of innocence bothers me. He is not, or course, at all an innocent. His plan to turn on twelve year old girls with rock and roll amounts to a campaign to seduce them. Not that he wants to fuck them — but to the budding ms.es it must seem so.

This is fine, in one way, because it is the way we all learned to-love rock and roll. Certainly, Bolan’s super-androgynous character, which is not the same as Alice Cooper’s bogus and deceitful drag-queen studding, couples well with the physical beauty he does possess.

There is something crude about teenagers coming in their seats for a rock and roll singer, whether it’s Bolan or Mark Farner or Rod Stewart of Mick Jagger. We’ve all done it, for someone, and this is probably going to continue for some time.

There is a clear-cut difference, though, between Marc Bolan’s innocent front and the true naivete of someone like Mark Farner. Farner has never exactly understood, I don’t think, just how much he turns people on, sexually. (This is the lost explanation for the popularity of Grand Funk.)

Marc Bolan is different. He knows all about his sexuality and it is exploited to the hilt. Yet, unljke Rod Stewart, who knows it and writes about sex maturely (“Maggie May,” “Every Picture”), Bolan just takes his sexuality and uses it. This is great, in a way, even though the idea of calling a girl a “Jag-u-ar, that’s what you are,” is about as misguidedly sexist as it is possible to be. Nonetheless, you can’t approach twelve year olds with Rod Stewart’s sexual sophistication.

What bothers me about Marc’s fiddling with sex is, I suppose, a sense that it is just coy. There is a .veneer, an “Aw-shucks! Did I say that?” that is almost repellant. Maybe this is the only way to approach the very young rock audience Bolan wants to get at; I don’t know. It’s been a long time since I was twelve and I know how I felt about the Shangri-Las.

“There are no cigar smoking dudes behind Marc Bolan,” perhaps, but this is partially because there needn’t be. Marc is not ill-intentioned, I don’t think, but there is a certain point beyond which he doesn’t see his effect.

It is great and important that Bolan literally took pains to both keep prices down and make sure that the concerts on the current tour were general admission events. This is important if only because there aren’t any other successful rock and roll bands doing these things. This has been a consistent T. Rex policy in Britain and that’s one reason why they are so beloved over there.

There is nothing to any of this, for me anyway, which destroys what he has done. I dig the sound of the music too much for that. I’m just ambivalent, really. I don’t trust T. Rex, but then I don’t really trust any rock and roll band, and I don’t think I ever will. That seems reasonable, given experience.

The Dwarf-Prince of Bop

Bolan knows, I’ve been saying, but just what does he know? Well, he’s known enough to realize that the way you write rock and roll songs is to take the oldest ideas you can find and rework them.

“ ‘Jeepster’ is basically ‘Mystery Train’ . . . the end is the same. It’s not, in fact, but in my head it was a Howlin’ Wolf song.

“But I’m not content to just do a twelve bar blues. It’s the difference between what is rock and roll . . . I mean, Lennon got well into that, what is rock and roll. And Lennon quoted me as being the only one who was doing anything near as good as he does.”

The idea I like best is not that Bolan may be able to push young audiences far out in any of the directions people like Alice Cooper are (supposedly) trying to push them, but that he can really give us a sense of our own history.

“ ‘Monolith’ (from Electric Warrior) is ‘Duke of Earl’, you know . . .”

“What?”

“Sure, man, it’s ‘Duke of Earl’ . . . of course, it’s also ‘Runaround Sue,’ and ‘Instant Karma.’ It’s every rock song. It’s American history every three years.”

Even more impressive was Bolan’s total lack of respect for “musical” technique. “The fuel, the energy (of the music) has never gone away. I’ve become by my own estimation a pretty funky guitar player. How good I am is not necessarily even important to me, as long as I can get the pleasure and emotion and use that as a vehicle. That makes me a good guitar player. But how technically good is to me totally unimportant.”

In a larger sense, however, the most important question is still what it is like to make the big switch from an artist with a hard-core cult following, to a star who has to deal with mass adulation. “All of this' has changed my life,” Marc says.

“It really did. I wanted excitement. I wanted to spend my life using the energy that I have at hand. And allowing myself not to fall into the trap of mocksecurity, which I don’t believe exists. And doing things EXACTLY when I Want to do them. Disregarding the consequences, whether it’ll mean success or failure. I’m now a total man. Or worse, it might be my total downfall. But if it is, I might be a fallen angel.”

Well, there my problem is again. Aw, c’mon, or rather, don’t fuckin’ come on . . . Yet, you almost have to let this slide, the way you let John Lennon drift from one cult to another, the way you put up with Jagger’s boring and boastful decadence,. the way you let Pete Townshend talk about Tommy all the time.

You let it go because Marc Bolan is somehow a standard bearer of rock. He is not taking pop music to his audience, he is taking them rock and roll. This may make him something, of a Pied Piper, in certain circles; I prefer to think of him as the Dwarf Prince of Bop.

There is something of the Beatles in this, something that is really innocent, the way that Ringo could take a woman to the Bahamas with him and not make any bones about it, then turn around and sing “Yellow Submarine” and make us believe both parts of it at once. Marc Bolan possesses such duality I think, if not for all of us, at least for those of us who are not too cynical and basically old to believe in . . . the magic.

I might be one of the latter. I don’t know. I don’t necessarily believe what Marc Bolan tells me, I don’t necessarily trust his judgement in wanting — as a friend put it — to be on the cover of 16, CREEM, and Time in the same month.

Still, there was a moment or two, in the interview, when I wanted to believe not only that Marc Bolan is everything he pretends to be but that by being that he can really do what, he says he can do.

I asked him about inspiring a sense of community and about having a sense of responsibility towards that community.

“We’re very aware of fucking up the community,” he said, “because it’s the key . . . the key to humanity. That’s why we keep prices down.

“In England, you have the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Jimi Hendrix. And since then it’s a four year gap and then T. Rex. And we are only the second generation.

“When Hendrix happened in England it was all over. And when we happened, it was the same thing . . . It got much bigger than I expected.

“Why? Right time, right music, my credibility. People knowing I’m not a fool, that I’m basically a writer, and a lot of other things. And that I wasn’t loosing my cool by going on stage and hanging it out.”

“And because we rock, man. EVERYONE wants to ROCK, man everyone.”

I believe.

*© Tro/Essex Music (ASCAP)