T. Rex’s Rock Hall Induction By Marc Bolan’s Former Manager Simon Napier-Bell

Simon Napier-Bell, who managed T. Rex’s Marc Bolan early in his career after he showed up on his London doorstep in 1966, wrote this first-person homage on the occasion of T. Rex’s induction into this year’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame class of 2020. Napier-Bell, whose clients included The Yardbirds, Japan, Ultravox, Boney M, Wham! And Candi Staton, is also an author.

Marc Bolan would have loved his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It’s where he thought he belonged even before he’d had his first hit.

He turned up at my front door one early evening in 1966 with a guitar slung round his neck and told me, “I’m a singer and I’m going to be the biggest British rock star ever. I need a good manager to make the arrangements.” Five minutes earlier on the phone, he’d told me, “I have a tape and I’d like to drop it off.” Now he said, “To tell the truth, I don’t have a tape but I could sing for you if you like.”
Normally, I’d have just turned him out but I couldn’t. Because he came across with the three things most needed to be a star – creativity, talent and drive.

His creativity was instantly there to see in his image: five foot two, with a mop of black curly hair and dressed in Dickensian street-urchin clothes. Unlike most people who are small, he was delighted with his size; he played down to it and saw himself as a sort of pixie rock star. His drive was obvious, simply from him having managed to find out my home address and inveigle himself into my front room. And his talent was apparent immediately he began to sing.

Peter Sanders / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images –
CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION: Marc Bolan and Steve Peregrin Took circa 1969 of British psychedelic folk group Tyrannosaurus Rex, a precursor to what would become the glam rock juggernaut T. Rex.

He chose my biggest armchair and sat in it, cross-legged, put a capo on the neck of his guitar and said, “I don’t play guitar too well but the songs are fantastic. You’re going to love them.” He wasn’t boasting or being immodest. To him the songs really were amazing and exciting. The fact that he’d found them inside himself rather than in the street was no reason to lessen the praise he gave them. He didn’t think of them as specifically his. He just happened to have come across them and he wanted to share them with everyone. He sang for fifty minutes and after each song he asked if I’d had enough. In the end I stopped him to ring up and book a recording studio.

We went there at once, at eight o’clock in the evening, and started the songs again from the top. He’d invented a unique wavering voice and, coupled with the deft verbal imagery of his lyrics, it created an eerie effect that perfectly matched his elfin image.

Afterwards he told me what his songs were really about, how he’d arrived at the subject matter, and how he’d developed his unique singing voice. It was by playing Billy Eckstine 45s at 78 and copying the result. I could tell it was true; his voice was deliberate, he’d worked on it; he instinctively knew that while having talent was luck, success only came from application.

He then told me his views on management; he seemed to have put a lot of thought into it. He’d rejected the idea of the Beatles manager, Brian Epstein: “Too middle-class…too provincial.” Nor was he impressed with the Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Oldham: “He was all right when he was camping around like a girl, but Mick Jagger’s stolen all his mannerisms and Andrew’s had to take up being butch. Well, you know what the newly converted are like! He’s running round town like a cross between Billy the Kid and Al Capone.”

Marc amazed me. He looked about fifteen yet he’d picked up more knowledge of the music business than seemed logically possible. Anyway, he’d decided I’d be just the right person. I was managing the Yardbirds at the time, complete with Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, and Marc seemed to think that would dovetail nicely with his ambitions. He had a mammoth ego; he thought he could become a superstar simply by announcing himself. “All we’ve got to do is put up posters,” he told me. “As soon as people see my picture they’re going to flip. The public’s crying out for someone like me.”

It didn’t take long to persuade him a record would be necessary too, and we chose a song to work on, “Hippy Gumbo,” a great piece of narcissistic self-recognition. “Met a man. He was nice. Said his name was Paradise. Didn’t realise at the time that his face and mind were mine.” (Though apparently Marc didn’t like what he saw of himself…) “Hippy Gumbo, he’s no good. Chop him up for firewood. Hippy Gumbo, he’s no good. Chop him up and burn the wood.”

Michael Putland / Getty Images –
ELECTRIC WARRIOR: T. Rex at the Sundown, Edmonton, London on Dec. 22 1972. Marc Bolan (kneeling) with drummer Mickey Finn and bassist Steve Currie.

The next thing was to persuade him that the song needed some sort of instrumentation other than his own acoustic guitar. It was
hard work but he finally agreed to my suggestion of a small string section playing staccato chords along with his guitar. Once the idea had lodged in his mind it became very much his own. “It’s going to be real nice, man. Those strings are meant to be trees and I’m like the kid lost in the woods. People are going to hear that when they listen to it. They’re going to thank me for making such a beautiful record.”
There were only five or six record companies in England in those days. When we’d finished it, I went to see them and listened patiently as they gave me their excuses, their usual rubbish

.I like the backing, but I don’t like the song.”
“I like the song, but I don’t like the backing.”
“Hate the voice, but the ideas are great.”
“Love the voice, but he doesn’t seem to have any ideas.”
“It’s a smash, but it’s not what we’re looking for.”

I called Marc into the office to hear the news. To say he was deflated is putting it mildly. His ego had been in such confident high gear he had no defense for a shock like this. Surprisingly, he said, “OK, what do I have to do? I’ll do whatever they want, whatever you tell me.”

I was shocked. Where had the uncompromising artist gone? I told him, “Don’t be silly. These people are full of shit. Just stick to what you’re doing. Don’t listen to them.”

“No, man, we’ve got to do what they say. I don’t want you to blow it with all this art crap. I wanna be a star.”

He was tight-lipped and frighteningly serious and as he said the word “star” he smashed his fist on my desk. Then he ran to the toilet and I heard him vomiting. He hid there for almost twenty minutes. When he came out he’d totally lost his super-cool charm but at least he’d recovered his artistic integrity. “You’re right,” he said, “I won’t change a thing. They’re just a bunch of ignorant ****s.”

Bolan was born Mark Feld in Hackney, North London, in 1947, the son of Jewish lorry driver Simeon Feld and his wife Phyllis, who worked on a fruit stall in the market in Soho. The new name he’d come up with was appropriated from Bob Dylan, half each of the bard’s first and second names.

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SWINGING LONDONER: Simon Napier-Bell who managed Marc Bolan early in his career photographed on May 12, 1966.

Apart from the Yardbirds, I had another group I was managing, John’s Children, three good-looking young guys and a lanky not so good-looking guitarist. I’d signed them to Track Records, the label owned by the Who’s manager Kit Lambert. The biggest weakness in the group was the guitarist, but Kit had a brilliant idea, “Why not replace him with Marc?”

I explained it to him tactfully. It would help him build a following, he’d capture at least a quarter of John’s Children’s fans, he could do some of the singing and let people get used to his Billy Eckstein voice, and he could write all the songs because it was songs more than anything that the group lacked. Finally, he agreed. With his addition to the group, John’s Children became totally new and dynamic. Marc didn’t really play the guitar as well as the guy who was leaving but he stood center stage and plunged his arm up and down across the strings with a force that was positively evil, and the group were set alight.

Kit Lambert suggested we support the Who on a major tour of Germany in venues of around 10,000. Eager not to be just a boring support group, I pondered on how we could steal the show. Arriving in Düsseldorf, John’s Children and I walked around town looking for possible stage accessories. I told Andy, the singer, “Marc and the other two should come on first and start playing a heavy riff, getting the audience excited, then you appear from the wings running like a demon. You run right across the stage towards the audience as if you can’t stop, then you do a great ten-foot leap down into the aisle and keep on going, right to the back of the hall, across to the other aisle and back to the stage. I’ll arrange for two guys to be there to give you a flying legup just in time to grab the mike and plunge into the first number. It’ll be a stunning ‘winder-upper’ but the audience will try to grab you. You’ll have to keep running like crazy all the way.”

Realizing how dangerous it might be. I wanted a way of pinpointing his whereabouts in case he needed instant rescue. In an ironmonger’s shop we came across feathers, so I bought a couple of kilos. Then Marc spotted some marvelous black chains, so I bought them too. My plan was for the singer and bass player to get into a fight during the finale and for Marc to whip them with chains while the drummer smashed his kit, Keith Moon-style.

Peter Sanders / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images –
(Listen To The) Flower People: Marc Bolan in the late-1960s in Denmark performing with Tyrannosaurus Rex sitting cross-legged and playing acoustic guitar after having seen the legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar perform.

It was a complete show stopper. At the start of the show, Andy had leapt off the stage and streaked through the audience creating a Siberian blizzard with fistfuls of feathers while all the Who fans tried to catch him and beat him to a pulp. But before they knew it, he was back down the other aisle and up on the stage with the mic in his hand. In the auditorium there was chaos, and a snowstorm of feathers which wouldn’t stop. When the finale came John and Andy stripped off and fought to the death while Marc attempted to brand them for life with slashes from the black iron chains.

More than any of the others, Marc became totally crazed. He was hypnotized by the power of the feedback, the flashing lights, the audience, the sheer chaos. His eyes were manic. The Who still made a good impact with their performance but the reaction was quieter than usual, more subdued, and Roger Daltry kept coughing on the feathers that were still floating around. As a result, he didn’t sing too well and later Kit Lambert came to my hotel room and said he wasn’t happy with our stage act. “You’ll have to leave out the feathers,” he told me, “otherwise Roger can’t sing.” I said I would but we didn’t. And the next night, with the group only half way through their set, Kit came to me in the wings and said we were fired; off the tour.

At the end, with the group battered and bruised from fighting and chain-whipping, and with auditorium still in a snowstorm of feathers, rather than face the wrath of the Who, we all jumped into my Bentley and headed home to England.

I took the scenic route over the mountains to Luxembourg, where we stayed the night. In the morning we discovered that the theatre next door to the hotel had a concert that night by the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar. So we extended our stay and went to see him. Marc was entranced. He loved the simplicity, the lack of equipment, the lack of having to share the limelight. Shankar sat on a rug with his big sitar while a figure in the shadows tapped on tablas, the whole set-up surrounded by candles and joss sticks.