Marc Bolan Original UK DECCA 45 - The Wizard..

	£		310
	$		411

Rare & original UK Decca 45 - Marc Bolan  "The Wizard" / "Beyond the risin' sun"....Note that this has the two spots above the O in "Bolan" apparently indicating that this is one of the earliest runs during the manufacturing of the records in November 1965...The spots were later removed after the "error" was noticed....

The condition of this legendary record is Near Ex with only light, non sounding surface marks....Please note that any markings on the labels are'nt as bad on the actual record, digital camera's seem to exaggerate them..

In the East London suburb of Hackney, a working-class Jewish couple, Simeon and Phyllis Feld, were expecting a child. Phyllis worked days at a fruit stand in Soho while Simeon worked at various odd jobs including cosmetic salesman and truck driver. On September 30th, 1947, the couple gave birth at Hackney General Hospital to a son and they named him Mark.

As far as Mark was concerned, he was born a star. "When I was younger", he recalled, "I certainly thought I was a superior kind of being. And I didn't feel related to other human beings." Mark's parents remember him as a very strong willed boy who would kick anyone he didn't like. He had his share of fights during his school years and was a member of a local gang known as the Sharks. On one occasion, Mark claimed to have been knifed during a fight with a rival gang.

Mark had a strong imagination and would often make believe that he was Audie Murphy, Mighty Joe Young, or the Phantom of the Opera. He was also an avid movie fan. He most enjoyed science fiction and horror films and could name every title, actor, producer, and director.

Mark gained an appreciation for music at an early age spending hours listening to his parent's record collection. His favorite was a song about an American frontiersman from Tennessee, a place far away and much different than the London Mark grew up in. The song was "The Ballad of Davey Crockett" by an American songwriter named Bill Hayes. Mark's father, eager to encourage his son's interest in music, went out shopping one day to buy another record by his son's favorite musician, but he made an innocent mistake that would change the course of Mark's life forever. Instead of buying another record by Bill Hayes, Simeon confused the name with another American. The artist was Bill Haley and the song was "Rock Around The Clock". At age eight, Mark Feld had been handed his calling.

It didn't take long for Mark to act on his love for music. He first built himself a makeshift guitar which he used to learn the basics. He then talked his indulgent parents into buying him a drum kit. Later, when he was nine they bought him a guitar for 16 pounds which was nearly a month of Simeon's salary.

His mother would later recall how Mark would go to see someone like Cliff Richard in concert and come home saying "that's how I'll be one day." Among his earliest compatriots were Keith Reid, future lyricist for Procul Harum, Cat Stevens, and a young man whose life would often be intertwined with his own, David Bowie.

Mark began to build a record collection with money he made doing odd jobs which included serving espresso behind the counter at the legendary 2 I's on Old Compton Street. The 2 I's served as a launching pad for many famous British acts including a young man named Harry Webb who would later change his name to Cliff Richard. Mark himself auditioned there, supposedly on the same day as did Harry Webb, but was turned down.

At age 12 Mark joined a 3 piece band called Susie and The Hula Hoops as a tea-chest bass player. The band's lead vocalist was named Helen Shapiro. Helen would eventually leave the band and within months record a string of pop-hit singles including two number 1 hits in Britain. Although Mark would deny that it had any impact on him, many believed that her success spurred him on to pursue his own path to stardom. He dropped out of school, having already been expelled, and went in search of an opportunity in acting.

During this time Mark befriended the girls from a British TV show called "Oh Boy". The girls would take Mark to all of their performances at the Hackney Empire. It was there that Mark had one of his first face-to-face meetings with a contemporary rock star.

Rock and Roll had been born in the USA and was being exported to Europe by a handful of early American rock stars who's popularity overseas nearly dwarfed their popularity back home in the States. One of these stars was Eddie Cochran and it was he who happened to be at the Hackney Empire on this night for his first Brittish tour.

As the story goes, following Eddie Cochran's performance at the Hackney Empire, Cochran handed his guitar to the then 13 year old starry eyed Mark Feld who proceeded to carry the guitar to Cochran's waiting limousine. It was a moment that Mark was always proud to relate and one that would often be singled out as an important event in Mark's life, as if that event - the act of having touched Eddie Cochran's guitar, had some greater, almost mystical, significance.

This story, unfortunately, has a tragic and perhaps eerily ironic ending. At the end of Cochran's tour of England, the taxi carrying Cochran, his girlfriend Sharon Sheely, and fellow American Rock Star Gene Vincent, blew a tire while on its way to the London Airport. The car swerved off the road and slammed into a lamp post. Several hours later, on April 17th, 1960, Eddie Cochran joined his good friend Buddy Holly on the list of early rockers who gained instant immortality through a tragic death.

At age 13 Mark spotted a man walking down the street in front of his house wearing clothes which would become typical of the Mod movement in Britain. The sight so impressed Mark that he began spending all of his money on similar clothes. Later, commenting on this period of his life, Mark would say that he had an obsession with clothes, owning forty suits and often changing them 4 or 5 times a day. "I used to go home and literally pray to become a Mod," he would remember.

Bumping into Angus McGill one day, a writer for the Evening Standard, Mark bragged about all of the clothes he owned. McGill followed Mark home to see his collection of clothes. Impressed with what he saw, McGill recruited Mark for a feature article about the Mod scene in Town magazine, a forerunner of modern men's magazines such as GQ. The article was entitled 'Faces Without Shadows' and was written by a fellow named Peter Barnsley. It included some of the earliest photographs of Mark to ever appear in print. They were taken by Don McCullin - Later to become a famous war photographer.

Beneath one of the pictures Barnsley included the following paragraph which included a rather ominous prediction:

"Feld is fifteen years old, and still at school. His family has just moved from Stamford Hill to a pre-fab out in Wimbledon. Of this he does not approve. The queues of Teds outside the cinemas in Wimbledon look just like a contest for the worst haircut, he says. At least the boys of Stamford hill dress sharply, and who would want a new, clean house if it is in unsympathetic surroundings? Nonetheless cleanliness is of vital importance to him. Shining with soap and health, he is apparently tireless and often goes for days on end without any sleep; there is never a trace of fatigue or boredom in his face. "What is the point of all this energy and all the soap and water? Where is the goal towards which he is obviously running as fast as his impeccably shod feet can carry him? It is nowhere. He is running to stay in the same place and he knows by the time he has reached his mid-twenties the exhausting race will be over and he will have lost."

Following these events Mark was introduced to a modeling agency and became a "John Temple Boy". As such he was used as a model for their suits in their catalogues as well as a model for cardboard cutouts to be displayed in their shop windows. Whether because they were unimpressed or because they wanted to keep their catalogue fresh with new faces is uncertain, but he was never used again.

Mark then shifted his focus back towards music and, at age 17, made another attempt to kick-start a career in the business. Sporting a denim cap and playing an acoustic guitar, he decided to try his hand at the British folk circuit. The sound resembled a Dylan/Donovan mix and, indeed, his songs consisted of some Dylan covers and a few other folksy tunes. To complete the new look and sound, Mark even came up with a new name for himself. Thus it was that the short music career of Toby Tyler began.

It didn't take long until Toby met up with an actor named Allan Warren who offered to become his manager. Allan helped arrange recording time for Toby and they proceeded to record several tunes including Dylan's "Blowin' in the wind". A version of Betty Everett's "You're No Good" was submitted to EMI for a test screening but they turned Toby down. Deciding that the future for Toby Tyler looked bleak, Warren and Toby parted company after which Toby Tyler once again became simply Mark Feld. (There was one small change however, but it's not clear to me when exactly it occurred. And that is that somewhere around this time period, Mark chose to drop the "k" from his name and replace it with a "c". Therefore, many poems and diaries from this period were signed as Marc Feld rather than as Mark Feld.)

The tapes produced during the Toby Tyler recording session vanished from thought and mind for over twenty-five years before resurfacing in 1991 and selling for nearly eight-thousand dollars. Their eventual release on CD in 1993 made available the earliest of Marc's known recordings.

With yet another attempt to get into the music business at a dead end, Marc found himself hanging around the National Theatre looking for work. He was able to land several character parts in some TV shows including a delinquent on the Sam Kydd TV series and a show called 'Orlando'. But TV acting bored Marc so he decided to take an extended trip to France.

The accounts of what happened in France differ and not even Marc ever seemed to tell the same story twice. He was known to occasionally stretch the truth or fabricate pieces of it and seemed to often forget which parts were real and which were fantasies. He once admitted to an interviewer that he felt that his credibility as a poet allowed him to stretch the truth or make things up.

In any case, according to Marc's accounts he met a magician who lived in a 40 room mansion with libraries of books on mythology and black magic. Marc claimed to have witnessed levitations, seances, and crucifixions of live cats. He even claimed to have at one point witnessed a ceremony at which the attendees resorted to consumption of human flesh. All of this, recall, was from Marc's own accounts. According to one of Marc's early producers, Simon Napier-Bell, however, Marc had merely met a guy who did magic tricks and spent a weekend with him.

Whatever the real truth, the experience had a profound effect on Marc. He left France with a much more highly developed imagination and a near obsession with Greek mythology, British romantic poetry, and the Tolkien books "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of The Rings". The Tolkien books had reached nearly Biblical status with the sixties generation of hippies and they would have a tremendous influence on Marc's early song writing; manifesting themselves in the form of enchanted poems and lyrics.

Marc returned to Britain more determined than ever to become a star. He locked himself away for months writing songs in a manic frenzy of inspiration. His future wife would later describe his writing style in terms of "a force flowing out of him". He himself contributed it to the work of his Guardian Angel whom, he was sure, really did all of the writing. During this period of time, Marc would churn out a reservoir of songs which he would still be tapping into five albums later. Among them was a song which he entitled "The wizard" in honor of his wizardly friend in France. With the help of producer Jim Economedies, he recorded the song and landed a record contract with Decca.

When Marc received the initial samples of "The Wizard" from Decca he received a mild shock. His name had been changed again; but this time without his approval. Decca had decided that the name Marc Feld would NOT do and had changed his last name to "Bowland". The name change didn't bother Marc as much as did the fact that he had not been consulted about the matter. As would become typical of other events in his future, Marc refused to allow Decca to have it their way without his stamp of approval. After negotiations, he convinced them to drop the W and the D from Bowland to shorten the name to BOLAN. Thus, Marc Feld became Marc Bolan and in November of 1965 "The Wizard" was released and the voice and music of Marc Bolan was broadcast for the first time over British airwaves.

Decca's press release on the Wizard single was a masterpiece of sixties hype. It read:

"Marc Bolan was born in September 1947. After 15 years had passed he traveled to Paris and met a black magician called The Wizard, He lived for 18 months in The Wizard's chateau with Achimedies, an owl, and the biggest, whitest Siamese cat you ever saw. He then felt the need to spend some time alone so he made his way to woods, near Rome. For two weeks he strove to find himself and then he returned to London where he began to write. His writings mirror his experiences with mentionings of the magician's pact with the great god Pan. In London, walking down Kings Road, Chelsea in the dead of night, he chanced to meet a girl named Lo-og who gave him a magic cat. This cat, named after the girl, is now his constant companion and is a source of inspiration to him. Now The Wizard's tale is set down for all to hear on Marc's first recording for Decca."

A small poem accompanied two photographs of Bolan. It read:

"Standing alone in the wood, with the golden palace bleeding scarlet tears into the sunset, I thought of all the treasures in the magic palace. And all the emptiness in my stomach and I smiled secretly, Rememberin' the wizard's words." 

Thus began the legend that was Marc Bolan !                                                                       

This is my 30th year collecting & dealing in vinyl so be assured my grading is as accurate as can be but should you find you're not satisfied with your purchase I offer a full refund.

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Thanks for looking & good luck                :o)