Roxy Music – Oh Yeah
Early Roxy Music was the battle of the Br(y/i)ans, and much of the late ‘70s glam rock and the early ‘80s new wave owes a debt of gratitude to this creative tension. Fronted by hyper-suave vocalist Bryan Ferry (trying, methinks, to overcome a hardscrabble life as the son of a coal miner in Newcastle), Roxy Music made aggressively experimental art rock while dressed to the nines. While Bryan Ferry loved soul and smooth pop and had the velvety pipes to pull it off, the other Brian, Brian Eno, was more interested in deconstructing pop and rock and turning it into something more rarified and cerebral. This creative tension worked wonders for the band’s early music and their elaborate, outrageous costumes (Eno often wore dresses and feather boas to off-set Ferry’s sharp tuxedos) inspired a generation of poseurs to shed the rough and tumble look of rock and roll and play dress-up with it. In fact, the entire new romantic subgenre, which blossomed shortly after (and as a reaction to) punk, with its cocktail-ready clothes and cool, polished, posh presentation and unabashed fondness for synthesizers, can be traced back to Roxy Music. While Bryan shaped the wardrobe, and inspired Ultravox, Gary Numan, Duran Duran, and, especially, Japan, to upgrade their outfits, Brian brought the synthesizer into the forefront, and proved that it wasn’t just for making smooth washes of color or kitschy novelty sound effects, but showed that it could be just as edgy and nervy as any electric guitar, inspiring Ultravox, Gary Numan, Duran Duran, and, especially, Japan to upgrade their equipment. Ferry’s smooth baritone was also a welcome relief to the vocal-chord shredding shrieks of punk, and inspired Ultravox, Gary Numan, Duran Duran, and, especially, Japan, to reach for a more polished and sophisticated vocal sound. Roxy Music is a seed from which a giant, variegated tree grew.
For all that, and for the earliest musical appearance of the almost holy Brian Eno, I really don’t like early Roxy Music all that much. And, apparently, neither did Bryan Ferry. He kept trying to smooth out the sound while Eno kept trying to rough it up – plus Eno was starting to upstage him with his outrageous finery. For his part, Eno was irritated at Ferry for not singing any of the songs he was bringing to the group and so, after a couple of well-received albums (in England, anyway), Eno left the group to start his solo career and to become the musical lightning-rod of his generation. And Bryan Ferry was left the sole center of Roxy Music and free to remake it to his own specifications which, over the course of the next few albums, he did.
When Brian left, he took a lot of early Roxy Music fans with him. The smooth, silky, sophisticated cocktail pop that Roxy Music ended up making alienated a lot of their early fans, but the accessibility of their new sound brought in more than enough new fans to compensate. And with their disco-friendly, soul-lite sound, they finally made inroads into the US and became more than a cult act – although one with more cred than they would’ve had if they started off sounding the way they finished (try diagramming that sentence).
By the time their last two albums came out, Roxy Music was essentially a three-piece band, with Bryan singing, Phil Manzanera on guitars, and Andy Mackay playing saxophone. All other instrumental duties were handled by hired guns. By the time their penultimate album came out, 1980’s Flesh + Blood, most of their artistic credibility had been lost. And this is just about the time I got into them.
On a whim, I once bought the soundtrack to the film Times Square. Put out by Robert Stigwood, who made a mint with Grease, Times Square tried to capitalize on the burgeoning new wave/punk movement. The film itself is terrible – or at least what I’ve seen of it – but the soundtrack rocks. I found it used when I was just starting to get into an edgier sound, and it was manna from heaven – a cheap sampler of all sorts of important and interesting bands that I wouldn’t otherwise have had the chance to hear. It has completely disappeared as a film and soundtrack, but it was enormously influential to me at the time, giving me my first taste of such musicians as The Ramones, XTC, Pretenders, Joe Jackson, and Gary Numan, and introducing me to some smaller, less well known but equally rocking bands such as The Ruts and their killer, pedal-to-the-metal, balls-to-the-wall scorcher, Babylon’s Burning. It also introduced me to Roxy Music, by way of the track Same Old Scene. It was a good sound, and odd to hear the saxophone again, which had lost ground in rock since, well, since Blueberry Hill, really. It didn’t exactly rock the house, but it was polished and propulsive and musically interesting, so when I found a copy of Roxy Music’s Flesh + Blood as a cut out, and discovered that it was the album that Same Old Scene was pulled from, I plunked down my $4 and took it home to make it mine.
Initially, I was not that impressed. It had a good sound, was sophisticated and all that, but it just didn’t move me. All those dripping vocals and slinky sax lines and polite, late night grooves really didn’t thrill me, it was just too gentle a sound, so I didn’t play it that often. Then, a year later, I understood.