Posted on
December 05, 2010 by
Jennib And Friends
Biography
Early life and career
The son of a lorry driver, Bolan grew up in post-war Hackney, East London, amongst a Jewish family, and later lived in Wimbledon, southwest London. He fell in love with the rock and roll of Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Arthur Crudup and Chuck Berry[citation needed] at an early age and became a Mod, hanging around coffee bars such as the 2 I’s in Soho. He appeared in an episode of the television show Orlando as a Mod extra.
At the age of nine, Bolan was given his first guitar and began a skiffle band shortly after, and at fifteen, he left school “by mutual consent.”
Plaque marking Marc Bolan’s childhood home, 25 Stoke Newington Common, Hackney. (November 2005)
He briefly joined a modelling agency and became a “John Temple Boy,” appearing in a clothing catalogue for the menswear store. He was used as a model for their suits in their catalogues as well as a model for cardboard cut-outs to be displayed in shop windows. “TOWN” Magazine featured him as an early example of the Mod movement in a photo spread with a couple of other “faces”.
Marc Feld had changed his name to Toby Tyler when he met and moved in with child actor Allan Warren, who was to become his first manager. Warren saw Toby Tyler’s potential whilst Toby spent hours sitting cross-legged on Warren’s floor playing his acoustic guitar. Warren then took him to the photographer Michael McGrath and commissioned a series of photographs. Warren then hired a recording studio and had Bolan’s first acetates cut. One track being the Bob Dylan song ‘ Blowing in the wind’. Also a version of Betty Everett’s “You’re No Good” which was later submitted to EMI for a test screening but they turned down the then Toby Tyler. Warren later sold Marc’s contract and recordings for 200.00 to his landlord, property mogul David Kirch, in lieu of three months back rent. Kirch was far too busy with his property empire to do anything for him. A year or so later,
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Song
Posted on
December 04, 2010 by
Jennib And Friends
References and allusions
“Subterranean Homesick Blues” was, in fact, an extraordinary three-way amalgam of Jack Kerouac, the Guthrie/Pete Seeger song “Taking It Easy” (‘mom was in the kitchen preparing to eat/sis was in the pantry looking for some yeast’) and the riffed-up rock’n'roll poetry of Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business”.
While Dylan was not a member of the original Beat circles of the 1950s, Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, a novel published in 1958 about the Beats, has been cited as a possible inspiration for the song’s title. Stretching further back, the title alludes to Notes from Underground, a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose works were popular with Beat writers such as Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.[citation needed]
The song’s first line is a reference to codeine distillation and politics of the time: “Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine / I’m on the pavement thinkin’ about the Government”. The song also depicts some of the growing conflicts between “straight” or “square” (40-hour workers) and the emerging 1960s counterculture. The widespread use of recreational drugs, and turmoil surrounding the Vietnam War were both starting to take hold of the nation, and Dylan’s hyperkinetic lyrics were dense with up-to-the-minute allusions to important emerging elements in the 1960s youth culture. According to rock journalist Andy Gill, “an entire generation recognized the zeitgeist in the verbal whirlwind of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.”
The song also references the struggles surrounding the American civil rights movement (“Better stay away from those / That carry around a fire hose”). (During the civil rights movement, peaceful protestors were beaten and sprayed with high pressure fire hoses ). In spite of the political nature of the lyrics, the song went on to become the first Top 40 hit for Dylan in the United States.
Influence
Listed by Rolling Stone magazine as the 332nd “Greatest Song of All
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