Roxy Music, "Mother of Pearl" (1973)

(listen)

This wonderful rambling exercise runs nearly seven minutes, splitting into unrelated parts, with a furious rocking overture that devolves into an atmospheric and wheedling showcase for a Bryan Ferry stream of consciousness. It builds to a glorious climax before finally ending on a whimper. The slow-burn churn remains one of the great Roxy Music moments from their early period, following the departure of Brian Eno—it's a fact that Roxy Music has undergone quite a number of convulsive changes. To show what a good sport he is, Eno has identified Stranded, the home of "Mother of Pearl," as the band's best album. "Mother of Pearl" is about as good as it gets, among other things presenting a nice profile of Bryan Ferry's superficial yet penetrating artsy playboy aesthetic abstracted—brooding, comical, ultra-poised all at once. Ferry is so convincing, in fact, that I have to wonder if he was wearing a dinner jacket in the studio when this was recorded. Now I'm not sure I agree with Eno that Stranded is Roxy's best album (I'm still partial to the severe cabaret that makes up Country Life), but it sure as hell is good and this song is too. Let's peer in a moment at what's on Ferry's mind, as the tumbling weird words make this as much as anything: "Then I step back thinking / Of life's inner meaning / And my latest fling … If you're looking for love / In a looking glass world / It's pretty hard to find … Thus: even Zarathustra / Another-time-loser / Could believe in you / With every goddess a letdown / Every idol a bring down / It gets you down … Take refuge in pleasure / Just give me your future / We'll forget your past." Sounds like love!

Let's Stick Together (1976)

This sounds pretty much like what it is, a grab bag of one-offs and B-sides from Bryan Ferry at an uncertain point in his career. It came right on the heels of the first dissolution of Roxy Music—it even seems to have half a foot still stuck back there, with alternate but not that different versions of "2HB," "Sea Breezes," and "Re-Make/Re-Model," all of whose originals appeared on the first Roxy Music album. There are also artifacts of the first phase of Bryan Ferry's solo career (as the crazy covers guy, personally my favorite of his many phases, followed closely by the Big Ripe Sigh of Avalon): "The Price of Love," an Everly Brothers song, "It's Only Love," a Beatles song, the standard "You Go to My Head." What saves this mess is the title song, which is also the first song and grabs hold tight right off the bat, in which Ferry is on the inspired attack with a scorching hot rhythm and blues band that is really something. I think the version here of "Let's Stick Together" stands up just fine to the Wilbert Harrison original or any of the other covers (by Canned Heat, Bob Dylan, Dwight Yoakam, George Thorogood, Nina Simone, etc., a number of big names). There's also a nice treatment of the Jimmy Reed song "Shame, Shame, Shame," full-on horns, harp, chick singers, whomping bottom, and needling guitar. So the essays in this direction do make the album worth checking out. Ferry would take it to some interesting places in at least one other solo, The Bride Stripped Bare, but I think its best expressions are found here. Still, in its totality the album is not that remarkable. The Roxy Music redos made and still make Ferry look a bit exhausted (if not desperate) on the ideas front. And I like the covers fine—as I say, I think especially These Foolish Things is terrific, on some days I'm even pretty sure it's the best thing he ever did in or out of Roxy Music. But these really sound like dregs and barrel scrapings, especially this second attempt at a Rubber Soul cover, which didn't even go that well the first time ("You Won't See Me," one of the few lowlights from that first solo). I wish I knew that next Bryan Ferry solo a little better, In Your Mind, because I know for sure by The Bride Stripped Bare he had some pretty interesting things going for him. Here it's limited to "Let's Stick Together," which is essential but quite possibly the only thing here that is.

75. Bryan Ferry, "Don't Worry Baby" (1973)

(listen)

As far as I'm concerned the best solo album Bryan Ferry ever made was his first, 1973's These Foolish Things, a collection of oldies covers that was at once arch, bold, surprising, perverse, eccentric, sincere, and just plain entertaining nearly every step of the way. Even the duds were redeemed simply by the fact that he tried them, and the winners make you laugh for exactly the same reason. The ones that most typically excite comment are Lesley Gore's "It's My Party" (which I find a bit overly cute) and Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," which probably gets the prize for most unexpected, not to mention how well Ferry makes it work in the sultry atmosphere in which the set lives and breathes. My own favorites include the title song—it glides in and out on a '70s production magic flying carpet, but retains all the romance of the Depression-era original. But the Beach Boys cover is the one that reliably blows me down. Ferry takes Brian Wilson's already nearly perfect gem about drag-racing and the quaking fear of the singer who is doing it anyway, because the girl loves him, and amps it all up even further. For the 4:15 that this goes on, the drums boom harder, the strings are sweeter and more deliberate, the chick singers mean it more, the singer is more certain than ever of his imminent death, and the heaven that beckons from the beyond is even more ... heavenly. As if to emphasize the point, it spends most of its last minute fading imperceptibly. Flashing guitar hero Phil Manzanera's all too brief licks and solos just leave you wanting more. Which is approximately how, among other foolish things, that it becomes one to play over and over.

Dylanesque (2007)

A welcome surprise—for me, emphatically, both a surprise and welcome. It was Bryan Ferry's first album in five years, and I had sort of lost track of him, can't even remember the last time he released a full-on covers project—the '70s? Oh, OK, I see he took a Linda Ronstadt/Rod Stewart-like flier at pop standards in '99, which obviously didn't make much impression on me. But putting the focus so squarely on Bob Dylan is the real surprise here. Arguably chutzpah, but what a choice selection it is, from all phases of the storied songwriter's fabled career, including one ("Make You Feel My Love") from 1997's Time Out of Mind, all of which works I think to justify my decades-long sense that Ferry "really meant it" when he covered "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." A lot of pre-punk glammers were Dylan fans, secretly and otherwise (David Bowie, for example, pays his backhanded tribute on Hunky Dory), and a good number of usual suspects show up here such as Brian Eno, Chris Spedding, Paul Carrack, and Robin Trower, to name four (keeping in mind that "one of these things is not like the others"). Reviews of this that I've seen are largely lukewarm, and it's true that the sound here hews closely to the Avalon style that Ferry has rarely abandoned since the early '80s. Nevertheless, it reminds me all over again what a gifted and coverable songwriter Dylan is, a fact established on the top 40 charts in the mid-'60s, with the Byrds, Turtles, Cher, and others stampeding in to get in on this action. For that alone it's worth the price of admission. But, still, it's hard to find a whole lot of clear lines and definition in this sticky bun of an album, whose songs tend to shuffle along and blur into one another—not one particularly steps forth to distinguish itself, though if I had to choose I guess I would point to the more obscure Dylan songs here such as "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" or "If Not for You." But if nothing is an outright hit, neither is anything an outright miss, and in many ways it's a pleasure simply to hear this quasi-collaboration cum tribute go down, and appreciate the fact that it exists at all.

These Foolish Things (1973)

Sounding as fresh today as it did practically 40 years ago, but is it a miraculous accident? I always thought there was something special about this, a kind of first-ever "tribute" album even if it is all done nominally by one artist about several others but basically the same proto-new wave idea—wackee coverz. It's the redoubtable Bryan Ferry in his first solo outing after what? A couple of Roxy Music albums? The cheek! And then to roam so wantonly and yet obviously deliberately from Bob Dylan (start with Bob Dylan) to Ketty Lester to the Crickets to Janis Joplin to Elvis Presley to Lesley Gore, and I'm still on the first side of the vinyl LP, which packs 13 songs in to a set that constantly surprises. The big showboat version here of "Don't Worry Baby" gets within shouting distance of the Beach Boys original—I would even say it's the better of the two, quite impressive. "It's My Party" is obvious camp, then and now, and yet the band and performance are extra hot somehow. And the Dylan cover I think is no send-up; whatever Bryan Ferry the singer is concerned about in this song, however he is interpreting "hard rain," he does sound like it's something he cares about. The second side arguably loses its way some, with off choices of songs if not artists: "Sympathy for the Devil" by the Rolling Stones, "The Tracks of My Tears" by Smokey/Miracles, and "You Won't See Me" by the Beatles. But it redeems itself and any outstanding doubts about the album as a whole with a gorgeous take on the title song, a Depression-era standard written by Eric Maschiwitz and Jack Strachey and recorded by Dorothy Dickson rife with lovely images: "A tinklin' piano in the next apartment / Those stumblin' words that told you what my heart meant / A fairground's painted swings" and "The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations / Silk stockings thrown aside, dance invitations / Oh, how the ghost of you clings." Look, I know I'm giving Bryan Ferry big, big props here on taste alone. But there are also a good many fine performances and much comical nuance surfacing along the way in this charming mess. That it sounds better than ever is only more cause to celebrate. Somebody open a bottle of champagne.

"Love Is the Drug" (1976)

99. Roxy Music, "Love Is the Drug" (Feb. 26, 1976, #30)

In the halcyon era of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Bryan Ferry and his fellow travelers get their gigolo on and troll downtown the red light place. It's not entirely believable but the oozy seductiveness remains persuasive enough, for reasons good and bad, and how they managed to pilfer this onto the U.S. charts has to be taken strictly as a matter of historical context. Or, "It's the '70s, Jake." Which doesn't change the fact that it endures to this day for us to marvel at, enjoy, thrill to in its snaky, skanky glory, all enunciated quite clearly. "Late that night I park my car / Stake my place in the singles bar / Face to face, toe to toe / Heart to heart as we hit the floor / Lumber up, limbo down / The locked embrace, the stumble round / I say go, she say yes / Dim the lights, you can guess the rest." Now wait a cotton picking minute, that's sexual addiction you're talking about, isn't it? Well, if it's convincing enough Roxy Music—co-writer Andy Mackay squawks away on his sax, Paul Thompson hits those drums hard, and Ferry of course is unmistakable, in tone and sensibility—it's still so blatant and obvious about itself that it's hard not take as calculated. But who, even in the '70s, would ever imagine that a sleazy workout about pickup sex had broadcast commercial potential? We know the answer to that now. This may not be the best thing Roxy Music ever did by a far sight, but it's the only one that managed to distinguish itself as a U.S. hit. That alone makes it something special, even now. Especially now.

Avalon (1982)

You can't really call this the best Roxy Music album, because in a lot of ways it's hard to make the case that it is a Roxy Music album. Mackay and Manzanera are reduced to sidemen, and after Bryan Ferry they're the only originals left. But, damn, is it sweet and pretty, impossible to resist, even overwhelming—which might only mean that you have just developed a taste for adult-oriented rock. But there's little point denying its effects. At a certain vantage, it feels like the entire world opening up wide. All of the art here is softly compressed into the structures and melodies and layers and nuances of affect. It barely moves, but it saturates every available space. Even in the background, where arguably it belongs, it calls insistently. It's meant to lull, seduce, beguile, draw you over, win you to its side—Ferry perhaps attempting to actualize his never-ending riff as the consummate gigolo. If it has its antecedents in the previous two late-period albums, Manifesto and Flesh + Blood, not even they prepared anyone for this. And if it is essentially the end of the line for Roxy Music as an enterprise—a live EP and an anthology (and not the first) is all the more we got from them—somehow in memory it seems to herald the beginning of a long, slow fade into a vanishing relevance textured by brief and occasional flashes of interest. I guess I must be thinking of Bryan Ferry's solo career from that point forward because all these years later it's as clear as can be. This is an end, not a beginning. And by the way what is that, a Viking on the cover? (Actually, it's Bryan Ferry's girlfriend at the time, Lucy Helmore, wearing a helmet to play King Arthur.)

Manifesto (1979)

"Spin Me Round" In the wake of new wave and all that it seemed to entail and promise, Roxy Music decides to stage a big comeback bid, minus a number of the critical figures who rode the train with Bryan Ferry from the beginning (though both Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay are on hand). To facilitate success, perhaps, it rubs off any number of the edges and burrs we had come to appreciate about this band through so many years of hard work, concentration, and dedication to the craft of what they seemed to be about. Ferry's voice is recorded with more clarity than ever, certainly in the context of Roxy Music, and it's deepening and mellowing and more confident too; much of that had already started on Ferry's solo outings following the breakup of the band. And they've obviously been listening to disco. No objections here. There's not actually much that I can think to carp about on this album—I liked it a lot at the time, and I still think it's one of their best. The intervening four years of their hiatus were not unkind to them. But there's an overweening sadness here too: the vim of youth is suddenly well behind them, replaced by a disquieting veneer of professionalism, and that sans irony (which I suppose, all things considered, is for the best). Where all the earlier albums had risked boredom and made mistakes and laughed and moved on, this is careful, like a person who has learned a lesson and come to embrace caution. It's not as much for our pleasure any more. At the same time, with the effort moving out of the cerebral regions it once ruled, it now appears to be knocking on the doors of our hearts: there's an emotional appeal at work that had previously been detectable only through peeling away the painstaking layers of irony on Ferry's earliest solo work. Growing old is a hell of a price to pay for maturity, but Ferry, more than ever the man in charge at this point, appears to have measured carefully the scope of his choices. (As for the cover, I believe it's a terrible pun: mannequin festival.)

Country Life (1974)

No, neither one of the two women on the cover are Bryan Ferry's girlfriend at the time. But Ann Magnuson was unceremoniously booted from Facebook a few weeks ago for posting a parody photo of this album cover, which testifies to both the enduring potency of the image and the witlessness of the people running Facebook. Getting to the point, I think this may be my favorite of all the Roxy Music from their first period—I'd call it their classic epoch, but that '80s release is probably the one that's better known to the mainstream. So let's call the first handful of albums their European phase—after all, Bryan Ferry previously demonstrated he's happy to go ahead and belt it out in French when so inclined. Here he airs it out auf Deutsch (again, strictly as inclined). And as much as it thuds and crashes about like that legendary bull in that storied china shop, it never loses its ability for the subtle touch: "The Thrill of it All" entertains the possibility of sincerity, with big, wide, open arms. "Out of the Blue," all cascading shimmer, sinuously pulses and phases across its own surfaces like visible waves. "Bitter-Sweet" plays like a demented interpretation of The Blue Angel. "Triptych" even seems to have a notion of going baroque. And it's possible somebody has started to develop a sense of humor. From the cover shot to the straight-up blues of "If it Takes All Night" to the last song here, "Prairie Rose," a kind of Western ballad filtered through certain sectors of Brussels and incidentally one that both Talking Heads and Big Country obviously listened to closely, there's something a little funny about the whole thing.

Stranded (1973)

"Amazona" More of the same, only better, better and better. The sound remains cerebral and weird, but the band is well acquainted with itself by this time, knows when to charge forward in unison, when and how to hold back and open up spaces, and who gets to jump in to fill them. This may work most for guitarist Phil Manzanera—or, frankly, us, with his fully mature and artfully deployed playing—but head songwriter and singer Bryan Ferry, no shrinking violet, naturally takes his share of the spotlight too, and Mackay's reeds continue to lend the sound unsettling tearing and ripping textures. At least one song here is arguably too long ("Psalm," at 8:05) but the good moments are plentiful, coming straight out of the kind of hard-won confidence that only a working band can earn for itself. "Street Life" sets the hard rocking tone, a self-conscious vamp but one that gets the job done. "Amazona" floats in like a butterfly, unfolds like a flower, soars like a blimp. "A Song for Europe" might be the definitive statement of purpose; it sounds like it, all impassioned, but I can't make out the French. The manifold layers of "Mother of Pearl" are ultimately a gift for your head, relentlessly lapping a permanent place there. Say welcome and give in. It only gets better. And, oh yeah, that's Bryan Ferry's girlfriend at the time on the cover, Marilyn Cole.

For Your Pleasure (1973)

"Do the Strand" The second Roxy Music album, and the last that Eno would be associated with (rumors of the time had it that Ferry was jealous of the attention Eno was getting, even coming eventually to relegate him to doing his thing in live performance from back at the soundboard), this tidy set continues apace the development of the art-rock unit's sound, at least as it existed in its first phase, which ran to approximately 1976: a thick blend of lead-footed texture, led by Bryan Ferry's perfectly ridiculous warbling, Andy Mackay's wailing reeds, all manner of odd plank and chizzle from keyboard and guitar (the latter courtesy Phil Manzanera), and Eno's electronic treatments and atmospherics, a strategy the band continued to build on even after he was gone. This is strange music even for its time—not that much to do with new wave or any of its antecedents, no matter what you might have heard, and in terms of style something even bigger and more ambitious than mere glam, something that set out to absorb and internalize and fetishize the artifice itself. As someone who was more a fan of Eno at the time (and incidentally Bryan Ferry's solo turns, which were covers projects), I had always assumed Roxy Music grew out of this bunch of yobs sitting around on hard chairs in studios feeling it out, after having first decided to unilaterally jettison even the vaguest gestures toward the blues or anything particularly rhythmic. It has that feel, and maybe that's the fact of it too, but then there's Bryan Ferry with all the credit for the songwriting, which I never noticed before. Is it an acquired taste? I suppose. And humorless, with no sense of history. But ultimately worth living with, a houseguest that can stay with you the rest of your life if you want. And, oh yeah, that's Bryan Ferry's girlfriend at the time on the cover, Amanda Lear.