‘Marc Bolan: Destined For Fame’ Recounts The Brief Life And Career Of T. Rex’s Perfect Rock Star

Marc Bolan was the perfect rock star. Fey and impish but with a cocksure swagger, equally comfortable gently strumming an acoustic guitar or peeling off licks on his iconic orange Les Paul, he was Ziggy Stardust or Johnny from Bad Company’s “Shooting Star” made flesh, rising like a helium balloon to the top of the charts only to die a couple weeks shy of 30, leaving behind a good looking corpse and several album’s worth of very excellent music. Issuing records under the band name T. Rex, Bolan’s songs have been covered by everyone from Bauhaus to Duran Duran spin-off The Power Station to The Replacements to Guns N’ Roses, speaking to the diverse impact of his influence. 

The 2022 British documentary Marc Bolan: Destined For Fame covers T. Rex’s career and Bolan’s life, and is currently available for rent on various streaming services. “There was a real Marc Bolan but it was unreal,” says fellow glam rock traveler Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel. Born Mark Feld on September 30, 1947, he grew up in East London, believing his fame to be predetermined. Schoolmates recall him dressing like a dandy and bringing a guitar to school at the age of 10. With his pouty good looks and diminutive frame, he became a male model and had a keen eye for fashion and how to present himself.

Bolan first made a name for himself as a member of mod oddballs John’s Children. Though making a big enough splash to get banned by the BBC and kicked off a tour with The Who, their mercurial art pop went nowhere. As Swinging London succumbed to psychedelia, Bolan formed Tyrannosaurus Rex, which saw him playing acoustic guitar sitting cross legged on the floor while percussionist Steve Peregrin Took banged on a set of bongos straddled between his knees. While 1968’s My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair…But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows and 1970’s A Beard of Stars had fabulous album titles and performed respectably on the UK charts, they failed to make him a super star.  

Bolan’s fortunes changed once he shortened his band name to T. Rex and plugged in an electrical guitar. Between late 1970 and 1973, he dominated the British music charts, putting out four top 10 albums and ten top 5 singles in a row. Hits like “Bang A Gong (Get It On)” and “Telegram Sam” pinched musical motifs from the 1950s but addressed the psycho-sexual concerns of the nascent Me Decade. His lyrics blended hippie mysticism, nursery rhyme nonsense, and self-mythologizing turns of phrase with the lingua franca of canonical rock n’ roll. With his mane of raven curls he was pretty enough for the girls and his meaty guitar riffs were tough enough for the boys. It worked the other way, too. His campy preening, back to basics songwriting and affection for the spotlight make him the father of glam rock, in whose image all others followed, including friend and rival David Bowie. 

In the UK, Bolan and T. Rex were seen as the second coming of Beatlemania, friend Bob Harris saying their concerts had “this overpowering smell of urine because so many of the girls had wet themselves in their excitement.” Soon Bolan was gallivanting with rock royalty. Ringo Starr directed the 1972 concert film Born to Boogie and recruited him into the infamous celebrity drinking club, the Hollywood Vampires. Of course it all went to his head. His unwavering belief in himself made him incapable of realizing he was losing the plot and like ‘70s rock itself, Bolan became self-indulgent and bloated.

Punk rock formed in reaction to the rock excess of the 1970s and made its disdain for the previous generation known. Rather than feeling threatened, Bolan championed the new scene, seeing in them an extension of himself. In 1977 he brought pioneering punkers The  Damned on tour as his opening act and featured several young new bands on Marc, his musical variety show on British television. He slimmed down and tried to limit his drinking and drugging. The future looked bright up until the morning of September 16, 1977, when a car driven by his girlfriend, Gloria Jones, plowed into a tree on his way home from a night out. Bolan died instantly at the age of 29, two weeks shy of his 30th birthday.    

Marc Bolan: Destined For Fame tackles the basic plot points of his life and career with a removed authority, like a Wikipedia page set to video. It shares its DNA with similar British music docs which seem churned out to fill programming gaps between episodes of, well whatever shows they like to watch over in the UK. The subject matter is discussed with a minimum of sentimentality but the occasional insight does occur, usually courtesy of someone who knew the subject before stardom froze them in time. Thankfully, the filmmakers splurged to license the original recordings, not always a given in such productions. The film ends with “Life’s a Gas,” a fitting if predictable choice, though perhaps “Cosmic Dancer” would have been better, where Bolan sings, “I danced myself into the tomb / I danced myself into the tomb / Is it strange to dance so soon? / I danced myself into the tomb.”

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter: @BHSmithNYC.