Zolar X landed in Los Angeles just in time for the birth of glam rock in 1973. Fronted by Ygarr Ygarrist, originally a man named Stephen Della Bosca from the San Francisco bay area, the band invented their own language (spoken in Zolaria City on the planet of Plutonia) and performed in equally out-there costumes.
For a few years, Zolar X were rock gods on the Sunset Strip. They played with the Stooges and the New York Dolls, they ruled Rodney’s English Disco, and they had a regional following, but it was never enough to get signed. Perhaps it also had to do with the fact that Yggarist describes their sound as a mix of ”Mozart, Zeppelin, Hendrix, the Ramones, Star Trek, the Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still — the original version.” To say the least, it wasn’t a winning combination.
Through the years they had some line-up changes, recorded five times and hit many a brick wall. They saw the death of glam/glitter, experienced the pains of disco, and were virtually extinct by the rise of punk. Zolar X officially called it quits in 1981, but they had enough of a following to reunite and play a few gigs in the new millenium (including SXSW in 2010), and serve as the subject of a documentary, Timeless – Starmen On Sunset.
