Joe Harland, currently resident in Barnes, West London, blogs about his experience hanging with the Marc Bolan fan(atic)s on the anniversary of his death last week.

‘I climbed up it once,’ said John Peel, pointing west towards the sunset silhouette of Glastonbury Tor. We were at Glastonbury Festival, the longest-running and best-loved in the UK. ‘It was the year of the first festival,’ John went on. ‘Marc Bolan and I decided to climb the Tor. When we got to the top we sat down, and Marc said: “When do you reckon it was built, John?” I had no idea, but I wanted to sound smart, so I said “Er, 1359 I think.” Marc walked around the tower, came back and sat down again. “There’s a plaque around the other side. You were a year out. It was 1360.”’John smiled to himself as he remembered, staring into the middle-distance a little longer. Then he glanced toward the Brothers Cider Bus at the bottom of the Pyramid Stage field. ‘Time for a drink.’

I’d like to say we raised a glass to Marc’s memory whilst I eloquently interrogated John about T. Rex and their shared role in shaping a 1970’s pop music landscape that was the artistic opposite of the bleak British social backdrop it accompanied. But I can’t say I did. We probably talked about the merits of pear cider, or the perfect time to play Status Quo in a DJ set.

That pretty much starts and ends my second-hand experience of Marc Bolan, except to say that on the night he died the sirens of emergency vehicles attending the car accident on Barnes Common awoke – amongst others – an old man sleeping in a dusty back room of a nearby Victorian flat. For ten minutes he watched the strobing of electric blue police light through the trees before heading back to bed.

My Grandfather was not what you’d call a music man. Living as he did so close to the ‘Bolan Tree’ it was not uncommon for him to encounter a lost fan looking to pay their respects. By the early eighties however his age and shaky grasp of popular culture was baffling pilgrims who came looking for the memorial, only to be told in no uncertain terms by this kindly local expert that ‘Just down the road is the exact spot where Jimi Hendrix died.’ When my Mother finally corrected him he was genuinely surprised. ‘Well you can understand the confusion can’t you?’ he reasoned by way of explaining away the mistake. ‘They both had curly hair.’

On September 16^th this year, Marc Bolan’s deathaversary, I got up at six, strode past bleary-eyed businessmen and commuting cars to what is now listed by English Heritage as the ‘Marc Bolan Shrine’. I thought I would be the first of the visitors. Not so. Due to my trademark lack of proper research it turned out I was pretty much the last.

Purple Pied Pete from Preston has been coming to the Bolan Tree every year for the last thirty four. ‘I still live in the Seventies y’see.’ I could see. The fifty year-old man sitting in front of me was a ringer for nineties Pete Postlethwaite facially, but the glittering purple glam rock jacket and Bolan t-shirt belonged to a pre-Thatcher Britain I was too young to remember. ‘Cost me my marriage did Marc. It really did. And when we divorced she said she were going to smash all my Bolan records unless I agreed to sell the house.’ He took a gentlemanly sip of his champagne and went on: ‘They’re worth about eight grand the records are. But I wouldn’t sell ’em for a million pound.’ Which seems reasonable. If your entire life has been devoted to a single cause in the way Pete’s has, selling your records would be like selling your faith. And, as televangelists like to say, faith is a hole that no amount of money can fill.

Sunflower is a comparative newcomer. She started coming in 1996 to watch the sun go down, to have a drink, to chat about Bolan, and to mark in a quiet and kind way another lap of the sun without him. ‘Sometimes something magical happens. He died at five am, and last year at that exact time the tree lit up and – okay there’s probably a lot of them around here – but a fox peered around it to say hello to all of us.’ This is considered evidence not of sunrise and a burgeoning vermin issue, but of Marc’s presence, as FOX was the number plate of the ill-fated car he died in.

But why do they come to where he died anyway? Tradition holds that you more usually pay your respects at gravesides rather than the place of passing. Not least because otherwise hospital wards would be knee deep in wreaths and mourners all year round. ‘It’s because.’ Pied Pete pitched in, “this is where his soul left his body. And we think it’s still here don’t we?’

‘Definitely,’ agreed Sunflower.

Which makes the Bolan Tree rather unusual in the ghoulish realm of rock death sites, in that it marks not folly, but misfortune. It’s not Room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn, it’s not an LA drug-scoring underpass or old graffiti’d old bedsit. It’s a tiny spot cared for by passionate, obsessed, and infatuated fans of possibly the only man who ever made a Gibson Flying V look good. Odder still is the way that some people choose to leave their message for the ‘Cosmic Dancer’; they write on hubcaps and stick them to the tree that put a terminal halt to Marc’s mini, and to him. Hazard warning triangles would seem more appropriate.

Bill Hicks once questioned why Christians wore crosses, reasoning that the last thing the Almighty would want to see on his return to earth is gilded miniature replicas of the means by which his previous visit was rather painfully terminated. ‘That’s like wearing a sniper’s rifle in memory of JFK,’ he concluded. Which is why rock sites tend not to be littered with the specifics of their heroes passing. The Cobain family home is not, to the best of my awareness, knee-deep in heroin needles and shotgun cartridges, nor is the swimming pool where Brian Jones failed to surface surrounded in snorkels and inflatable armbands.

Pete and Sunflower don’t care. The early morning sunlight is warming their tired faces, the champagne is pepping their spirits, and as they pack their wares away their satisfied smiles speak of people who have no doubt they’ve done the right thing by their man. And I wander off realising that contrary to my previous belief, obsession isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes it can in fact be rather wonderful.

Last week the film American: The Bill Hicks Story opened in select theaters in the US and on slightly iffy torrents around the web. As my home town of London was the city that arguably loved him most I’m optimistic that there will be a cinema showing it. Which is more than can be said for Chris, who now lives in his home town of Valdosta, Georgia and where, seemingly, hardly anyone has heard of him. When I find the cinema I will plan my visit with the sort of methodical zeal usually reserved for concerts by my favourite bands. Because even seventeen years since his death, Bill Hicks deserves some fucking respect. 

For two years in the mid-nineties I produced an in-flight radio comedy show for British Airways. (For those under the age of twenty-five, in-flight radio meant ten channels of endlessly looping movie-length audio shows that were immediately rendered redundant the moment Boeing put screens in the back of their headrests.) This meant that every month I crafted a two-hour master class in humour, in which stars from Eddie Izzard to Dudley Moore talked about their favourite comedians. Every time they name-checked someone, I would get hold of the relevant CD or cassette and find a clip to illustrate their point. The result? A pointlessly thorough knowledge of the routines of Al Read and Albert Brooks, and a swearing supersense which allowed me to spot any and all bad language from the soundwave on the screen. Eight hours of comedy, five days a week, for two years. There wasn’t a joke I hadn’t heard or a set up to which I didn’t know the punch line, and following one particularly mirthless trip to a London comedy club in which I sat nodding approval at the gags rather than laughing, I quit. 

I say this not because I think it is particularly remarkable – it isn’t – but because I hope it provides some context and validation for this next statement: Bill Hicks was the greatest comedian ever. The funniest, most exciting, most incendiary, most thought provoking, most moving, most thrilling, most how-ever-the-fuck-you-want-to-measure-it comedian that ever picked up a microphone.  

He wasn’t a seer, or a visionary, a political genius or even a psychotropic warrior as some of the more effusive hagiographies would have it, but in the exacting science and precise art of writing and telling jokes he has never been bettered.  

Often labelled a ‘rock ‘n’ roll comedian’, his influence can be found on the classic triple album Aenima by Tool, and in the dedication on Radiohead’s The Bends. And he died young, shortly after Kurt Cobain and whilst the world’s eyes were still on Seattle. I made a programme about that coincidence a few years back – check out the start of it here: 

Now, many other comedians have been labelled rock ‘n’ roll of course. Lenny Bruce was, and then he stopped being any good. Which isn’t massively rock ‘n’ roll. Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson were too, but then Rik started playing a Tory MP and it became clear that they’d gone MOR. Good lord, even Newman and Baddiel were described as rock ‘n’ roll. Posh kids twatting about in an arena isn’t rock ‘n’ roll. Just ask Pink Floyd.

But Bill Hicks was rock ‘n’ roll. Not because of the material about drink and drugs, the regular references to Hendrix or dying too young. Bill Hicks was rock ‘n’ roll because his recordings are the only ones as constantly exhilarating to listen to as your favourite band’s albums. He was rock ‘n’ roll because people are still doing elements of his act to this very day, just as bands are still covering The Stones when needing to quickly win over a hostile crowd.  

Not that anyone nowadays tries and directly steal Hicks’ material, but if you see a comedian getting morally intense, pausing to let the discomfort cloak the crowd and then puncturing the tension with a gag – that’s Bill right there. If you hear someone confronting an established taboo whilst ensuring that there’s a punch line every thirty seconds, that’s Bill. If you find you’re being entertained and educated – well, chances are that’s Bill too.

If however you see someone stealing his act wholesale, you’re watching Dennis Leary. And nobody will ever, ever, make a film about his life.

I live in Valdosta, Georgia, birthplace of American comic genius Bill Hicks, whom readers of Live Fast, Die Young will know is a hero of both mine and Joe’s. With the new Hicks movie opening in America this weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about him (proper blog to follow); I’ve even tried to find the address of his first house.

Which reminded me this morning of a similar wild goose chase a few years back, in search of Gram Parsons’ childhood home in Winter Haven, Florida. For reasons which are now lost in the fog of red wine and deadlines that was the final edit for the book, this weird episode didn’t make it into the final chapter. Luckily we have this ‘lost’ footage, which we offer to you now by way of free bonus content. Fans or fanatics? You decide.

“If anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself.” Bill Hicks

Much as we agree with Bill on many things, if you do work in advertising or marketing – or you happen to have a brain for creative commercial tie-ups – please don’t blow your brains out just yet. Put them to good use – you might just be able to help us. We’ve been offered the chance of placing a Live Fast, Die Young extract and competition with an in-store magazine for the UK’s largest menswear chain, the venerable and venerated purveyor of low-slung trousers, vigorously patterned cardigans and fluorescent sweatbands that is Topman. Our Wonderful Publisher™ is approaching relevant companies about stumping up a super cool competition prize.

You know the kind of thing: we ask Jack Links, official suppliers of Missing Parsons road food, to offer up a year’s supply of Turkey Jerky to anyone who can name a type of poultry beginning with T, or prove themselves otherwise fit to complete a task so insultingly easy that lots of people will enter and stupid people won’t feel excluded. We need your help brainstorming a list of ‘creative partnerships’.

We think we’ve considered most of the really obvious ones – Chrysler cars because we drove a Sebring, Best Western because we stayed in their fine motels, and so on – but we think the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ might either (a) pick up any that we’ve missed, or (b) dream up something infinitely more creative than our own tiny brains can muster. (Joe suggested Glaxo Smith Kline, official providers of Missing Parsons emergency herpes remedies, which gives you an idea of why we need the help.)

If you’ve read the book or need an excuse to reacquaint yourself with it, we would be very grateful for your suggestions. Likewise if you can’t be bothered to (re)read the book but work for a large, profligate multinational looking to invest goods or services by way of entry into the cash-rich, time-rich and increasingly colourful young male market, we would be very interested in hearing from you. Leave a comment below or, if you arrived here from Facebook or Twitter, feel free to drop us a line there.

Many thanks in advance for your ideas, loot, cash or custom.

Missing Parsons

Some background, for any companies wanting to get involved: Live Fast, Die Young is a book about music and travel. Music companies – record labels, radio or TV stations and so on – might consider offering gig tickets or music. Travel companies could provide flights, holidays etc. A genuine opportunity to place your product or service on the counter of every Topman store in the UK.

There, we did it. Now let’s all watch this so we can feel better about ourselves: