Impossibly dated, and glittering still

Pop history is littered with lost islands of hysteria, vanished archipelagoes of freakout where the kids stomped, screamed, swooned, and then moved on, leaving no trace.

Ted Nugent, Culture Club, the Macarena. They flourished wildly and are gone. Is glam rock, the craze that consumed Britain in the early 1970s, one of these? Musically, at least, its legacy is hard to detect -- you can hear the bootboy wallop of Slade somewhere at the back of Oasis, and certain of Gary Glitter's studio effects were reprised by Marilyn Manson for 1998's ''Mechanical Animals." But the strangeness of the glam sound, the paradox of its caveman drums and thin futuristic guitars, has disappeared.

And glam style -- the thickset men with foundation and platform shoes and stick-on gold stars around their eyes -- was doomed from the start. Only those ferocious ironists the Darkness have had the nerve to attempt a revival. (KISS, which has never stopped doing it, doesn't count.)

The DVD release last month of ''Born to Boogie," the 1972 concert film directed by Ringo Starr and starring Marc Bolan, T. Rex, and 10,000 shrilling British teenagers, will stir up these conjectures afresh. (A double CD of the ''Born to Boogie" soundtrack, with additional live material, was released simultaneously.)

Of all the glam rockers, David Bowie included, it was Bolan -- tumbling curls, precious little features, 5 foot 7 inches of compressed charisma -- who sold the biggest. At one point T. Rex was said to be moving 100,000 records a day.

Pre-glam Britain was grim. Flower power was in a hung-over state, and many of the cultural initiatives of the '60s had failed (free love, universal awakening) or been assimilated (flared trousers). But just below the surface of the British psyche lay the chemical sediment of Beatle mania, still potent, less than a decade into its half-life, awaiting reignition. It was Bolan who would touch it off.

Born Marc Feld in East London in 1947, the son of a tailor, Bolan had been apprenticing for stardom since his teens, when he appeared in magazines and in a BBC documentary as a sharp-dressed Mod about town, an ''ace face" in a razor suit. After a brief stint in 1967 with the loony acid-Mod band John's Children -- smashers of instruments, all dressed in white, with shag haircuts -- he took flight into psychedelia and formed Tyrannosaurus Rex. He sang and played acoustic guitar, while Steve Peregrin Took oversaw percussion and murmured harmonies.

This was hippiedom in excelsis: Over a patter of bongo drums and hesitantly stirred tambourines, Bolan would strum and babble like a smitten pixie. He sang of Dworns and mages and the vale of Beltane, of travelers whose ''robes of chintz were melting in the snows." Tyrannosaurus Rex became known as ''the Last Great Underground Band," and flower children sat cross-legged and big-eyed at Bolan's feet.

But he wanted more, of course. Getting in touch with the rock 'n' roll pulse that lay buried beneath his music, Bolan ditched Took, plugged in his guitar, and -- at the turn of the '70s -- started to write hit singles. Producer Tony Visconti gave him a band and a nice fat downbeat. No more songs called ''Like a White Star, Tangled and Far, Tulip That's What You Are." Now it was all ''Hot Love," ''Get It On," and ''Jeepster."

Teeny-boppers shrieked in delighted recognition. A comparable shift in our own pop culture might occur if the underground avant-folkie Devendra Banhart were to suddenly turn into Justin Timberlake. Trailing clouds of hippie waffle, but spicing his spiel with ''groove" and ''funky" and ''electric boogaloo," Bolan seemed to have happened upon a whole new grid of communication. The kids lit up.

''Born to Boogie" was filmed at the height of what was known as ''T. Rextasy," a phenomenon that Starr cheerfully admitted to be noisier and more intense than anything he had experienced as a Beatle. (''We've done in a year what took the Beatles four years!" Bolan crowed in an interview at the time.) It features concert footage from a sold-out show at Wembley in London, plus various surreal sequences supposedly inspired by the films of Federico Fellini: a tea party at which a butler serves burgers to greedy nuns, a scene in which Ringo wears a bear suit and is lightly swatted with a yellow spatula by a top-hatted Bolan.

It is all very much of its time -- that is, impossibly dated -- but some of the live action is formidable. There are four musicians onstage in ''Born to Boogie," but T. Rex is basically a power trio, with Bolan's guitar supported by the unglamorous skilled labor of Steve Currie on bass and Bill Legend on drums -- two pudding-faced Englishmen holding the thing together.

The fourth man, clonking his conga drums and moving vaguely about the stage, a little lost in his freedom, is the beautiful and inessential Mickey Finn, Bolan's percussion partner since the departure of Took. Ever the fiery foil to Finn's pointlessness, Bolan struts, whoops, smirks, pouts, duckwalks, headbangs, and does the patented little sex-bleats that raise a wail of longing from the crowd. ''It's such a groove . . ." he sighs.

Bolan was sui generis, unrepeatable; no one will ever look or sound like him again. But to watch him performing the acoustic number ''Spaceball Ricochet," sitting cross-legged with his out-of-tune Epiphone clanging plangently in his lap, and singing ''I bought a car/ It was old but kind/ I gave it my mind/ And it disappeared" with the solemnity of a choirboy is to realize what we have inherited from glam.

Here is what Bolan's friend Bernie Taupin called the ''super space age put-on": an archness, an ironic self-knowledge, a campy delight in artifice that would be the beginning of punk rock's deconstruction of stardom. It's all a game. Great clothes and euphonious nonsense are what count.

Or, to quote a wizened Wembley usher who flickers across the screen in peaked cap and red epaulets, herding the children toward their spectacle, ''Good fun, innit?"