I remember that once I saw Marc Bolan for the very first time, I was in absolute shock that he was so much more beautiful than the magazine photos. I turned around and grabbed Shelly and started screaming, "Oh, my God, I didn’t know he was so gorgeous!" I was absolutely transfixed by the sight of his flowing corkscrew curls, his white satin suit, and the T-shirt underneath which was entirely the image of his own face. When he began hurling tambourines into the audience on the ground level, I became consumed with envy that I was too high up to catch one, especially as Marc reached out and shook hands with the people in the front rows. That night, I made two solemn vows to myself: the first that I was going to someday meet this man and become his friend, and the second that the next time T. Rex played New York City, I would get a seat close enough to the stage that I could either catch a tambourine or shake Marc’s hand myself. I wish I could tell you more about the concert, but I can’t. I didn’t know any of the songs back then other than "Bang A Gong," so it’s not like I have a set list ready to recount here; I vaguely recall an acoustic interlude which would have included songs like "Spaceball Ricochet". All I can honestly remember about that night is that it changed the entire direction of my life forever!

Once I laid eyes on Marc Bolan, nothing else mattered to me, and I became an entirely new person. It didn’t matter any more to me if I was getting along at school or not, because I was consumed by my new interest. One day, one of my classmates named Rita Bono approached me. Rita corrected my pronunciation of the name Bolan, and suggested I start reading a British weekly music paper that was delivered to a store near her house called "Melody Maker" to learn more about him; she’d just seen Marc on the cover the other day. From that day on, I got my hands on this and every other music trade paper I could find to learn as much as possible about my new idol.

One incident that sticks out in my mind was the day that a sadistic school bully asked to borrow one of these papers in a study hall class. She procrastinated about giving it back to me at the end of the period, and when she did, she tore a full-page advertisement for the current T. Rex tour in England. Now, everyone was terrified of this girl because she brazenly carried a knife around school and had been frequently institutionalized. However, I absolutely erupted and confronted her in front of a large group of students, screaming "I don’t care if the whole town is scared of you, because *I’m* not! You can’t do that to Marc!," making people wonder more about my sanity than hers! Another incident soon followed which had racial overtones. An African-American girl about half my size challenged me to a fight in the hallway, when all I wanted to do was write some poetry influenced by my newly-acquired Tyrannosaurus Rex albums. I walked away from the girl so I could go into a classroom and start scribbling things about "cosmic dancing elven lord lieges of the Beltane" or whatever, in direct defiance of the students’ unwritten code of ethics governing these matters at my school. When I refused to stop writing and accept the girl’s challenge, a tough female leather-jacketed gang leader went out to send her away and break up the potential fight, only to get her own face slapped. This created such havoc throughout the school that eventually I was taken privately aside later in the day by a group of black classmates, led by a large, imposing girl who said "Look, we’re gonna get us some niggers together and straighten this thing out ourselves, y’hear?" I stepped back in shock, pointing and stammering, "Y-y-y-you, you-you said, you said THAT WORD!!" Maybe that doesn’t seem so shocking to anyone reading this story in 1999, but it certainly was back in 1972! I have often wondered what would have happened that day if I hadn’t been so insistent on writing those Tyrannosaurus Rex-style lyrics!