So You Want To Be A Rock N Roll Star

The Song That Mocked Fame While Selling Millions

Marc Bolan wrote "So You Want To Be A Rock N Roll Star" in late 1974. It came out as a single in December that year, backed by "I Kill Littleponies", and pulled from the album Bolan's Zip Gun. The song sits at about 3:24 in its original mono mix. Bolan was already a massive star in the UK by that point — T. Rex had dominated the charts from 1970 through 1973 with glam rock mania — and this song reads like someone looking at his own situation with a certain amount of dark irony. The track is built around a riff borrowed directly from The Move's "Mr. Wizard" (1970). Bolan essentially took the rhythmic skeleton of that song and rebuilt it with different chords and attitude. The lyrics describe the whole fantasy — buying flashy clothes, getting the fame, the groupies — then undercut it by revealing the singer knows he's already living it. That gap between the narrator's dream and his actual life is what makes the song work. It's not a celebration. It's a slightly bitter observation. Instrumentation is fairly straightforward for a T. Rex record: electric guitar (played by Bolan himself), bass from Mickey Finn, drums from Clive Bunker of Foghat, and Bolan on vocals. The production by Bolan and Tony Visconti is clean but not overwrought. There's a raw edge to the guitar tone that you don't get on the more polished stuff from The Slider era. Visconti was pushing him toward something grittier at that point, and you can hear it.

One thing beginners always get wrong about this song is the timing. The verse rhythm sits somewhere between 4/4 and a swung feel. If you're trying to learn it by ear, don't count it as straight quarter notes. It drags a bit behind the beat, which is very much in the glam rock tradition. Trying to play it too tight will make it sound stiff and kill the groove.

How To Play It

The main riff uses a standard E-shaped power chord pattern. Bolan's tuning is standard E A D G B E. The iconic opening riff is essentially E5 moving to C5, then G5, then D5 — a descending chord progression that's pretty common in rock music but works here because of the muted picking and the staccato attack. Each chord gets hit once per beat with a downstroke, and the muting gives it that choppy character. The verse chord progression is E5 — C5 — G5 — D5, repeated. For the chorus, it shifts to something more open — A5, F#m7, D5, E5 — giving it that lift before it crashes back into the riff. The solo section circles back to the same progression but lets the guitar sing more. Bolan's solo style on this track is surprisingly bluesy compared to his usual glam approach, probably influenced by Visconti's direction at the time. If you're learning this on guitar and struggling with the transitions between those lower-position chords while maintaining the palm muting, here's what I found works: practice the chord changes with a metronome at about 60 BPM, then gradually push it up. Don't add the muting until your fretting hand can land cleanly without looking. The muting comes from the picking hand — rest the edge of your palm lightly on the strings near the bridge. Too much pressure and you choke the tone. Too little and you get unwanted feedback and noise. It took me about three weeks of daily practice to get it sounding anywhere near the record, and honestly, I never quite nailed the exact attack Bolan used. His right hand had a particular snap that's hard to replicate.

Common Problems People Hit

The biggest issue I see when people try to perform this song live is tempo drift. The original sits around 108 to 110 BPM if you're counting the quarter note as the beat, but because of that laid-back feel, it's easy to drag during the verses and then rush the chorus. When I was playing this in a covers band back in the mid-2010s, our drummer kept speeding up every time we hit the chorus. We tried using a click track, but that felt wrong for the song — it's got too much swing for a rigid metronome to work. What eventually fixed it was having the bass player call out count-offs and locking in on the kick drum pattern rather than the snare. The kick carries the tempo better in this arrangement. Another problem is the vocal range. Bolan sang this in a fairly high register, and if you're not comfortable up there, you have options. You can transpose it down a half step or whole step, which most singers do. The key signature is essentially E major, so moving it to D or C makes the chorus less straining while still keeping the riff playable with the same fingerings.

Why This Song Matters

The irony of "So You Want To Be A Rock N Roll Star" is that it came out when T. Rex was already past their commercial peak. Bolan's Zip Gun was an attempt to shed the glam image and be taken more seriously as a rock artist. The album didn't sell as well as his earlier work, and the single barely cracked the UK top 30. So the song's central joke — the gap between wanting fame and already having it — was running both directions at once. Bolan was tired of the whole machine even as he was still operating inside it. The song has been covered several times. The most notable version is by Spinal Tap, who included it on their 2009 album Break Like the Wind, which felt like a deliberate nod to the song's themes about the music industry. There's also a cover by The Darkness that keeps the riff intact but adds more modern production polish. Neither quite captures the lo-fi swagger of the original, but they're functional if you're looking for reference recordings. If you want the original, it's available on streaming platforms under the Bolan's Zip Gun album. The mono version is generally preferred by listeners who care about fidelity to the original mix. The stereo version exists but spreads the instruments wider than Visconti and Bolan intended, and the guitar loses some of its midrange punch in the process. Not a dealbreaker, but worth knowing if you're studying the arrangement closely.

The song also appears on several T. Rex greatest hits compilations if you don't want to buy the full album. The Singles and Live at the Talk of the Town are reasonable sources. Avoid the cheap reissues that compress the dynamic range — you'll lose the quiet parts of the performance, and the song's dynamics are part of what makes it work.