You picture Glam Rock, you probably imagine Marc Bolan of T. Rex drowning in glitter, draped in boas, and wailing about electric warriors. He's the undisputed king of the sonic sparkle, practically inventing the art of making a guitar solo look like a sequined hallucination. But prepare yourself for a truth bomb that might just make your platform boots wobble: our glam godfather wasn't always a rhinestone cowboy.

Believe it or not, before T. Rex was busy making teenagers swoon with their cosmic boogie, Marc Bolan was slumming it as a bona fide, acoustic-guitar-strumming folk singer-songwriter. Yes, the man who would later champion electric guitars and shimmering excess actually started out channeling his inner Bob Dylan. His original band, bless its earnest little heart, was called Tyrannosaurus Rex, and it was a psychedelic folk duo armed with nothing but acoustic guitars and, wait for it, bongos. Bongos! The ultimate accessory for a future rock god, clearly.

They played for the "hippie underground," which, let's be real, probably meant a lot of patchouli and mumbled poetry. One can only imagine the sheer existential crisis that must have hit Bolan when he realized strumming a wooden box wasn't going to get him the superstardom he so clearly craved.

So, he did what any self-respecting artist does when their current gig isn't delivering enough fabulousness: he went electric, ditched the bongos, and embraced every single piece of glitter he could find. And thank goodness he did. Otherwise, we might have been stuck with a world where the most flamboyant thing on stage was a particularly vibrant macramé vest. The horror.