Roxy Music’s Avalon 9781501355349, 9781501355370, 9781501355356

Table of contents :
Cover page
Praise
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
On Modernism
On Avalon
Production
Music and words / words and music
Remixes, actual and potential
The High Road
The After-Party
The end of the pinup
Nile Rodgers
Nostalgia once more
Running around
Notes
Bibliography
Also available in the series

Citation preview

ROXY MUSIC’S AVALON Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

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Forthcoming in the series: Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal Timeless by Martyn Deykers Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 by Colin Fleming Once Upon a Time by Alex Jeffery Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik The Archandroid by Alyssa Favreau Rio by Annie Zaleski xx by Jane Morgan and many more . . .

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Roxy Music’s Avalon

Simon Morrison BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC

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Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Simon Morrison, 2021 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Morrison, Simon Alexander, 1964– author. Title: Roxy Music’s Avalon / Simon Morrison. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: 33 1/3 ; 172 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Having designed Roxy Music as an haute couture suit hand-stitched of punk and progressive music, Bryan Ferry redesigned it. He made Roxy Music ever dreamier and mellower-reaching back to sadly beautiful chivalric romances. Dadaist (punk) noise exited; a kind of ambient soft soul entered. Ferry parted ways with Eno, electric violinist Eddie Jobson, and drummer Paul Thompson, foreswearing the broken-sounding synthesizers played by kitchen utensils, the chance-based elements, and the maquillage of previous albums. The production and engineering imposed on Avalon confiscates emotion and replaces it with an acoustic simulacrum of courtliness, polished manners, and codes of etiquette. The seducer sings seductive music about seduction, but decorum is retained, as amour courtois insists. The backbeat cannot beat back nostalgia; it remains part of the architecture of Avalon, an album that creates an allusive sheen. Be nostalgic, by all means, but embrace that feeling’s falseness, because nostalgia-whether inspired by medieval Arthuriana or 1940s film noir repartee or a 1980s drug-induced high-deceives. Nostalgia defines our fantasies and our (not Ferry’s) essential artifice”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021000592 (print) | LCCN 2021000593 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501355349 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501355363 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501355356 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Roxy Music (Musical group). Avalon. | Popular music–1981–1990–History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML421.R68 M67 2021 (print) | LCC ML421.R68 (ebook) | DDC 782.42166092/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000592 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000593 ISBN:

PB: 978-1-5013-5534-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5535-6 eBook: 978-1-5013-5536-3 Series: 33 1/3

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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For Paul Dingle

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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On Modernism On Avalon The High Road The After-Party

1 17 73 81

Notes Bibliography

105 129

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Acknowledgments

For assistance and advice I am grateful to Nate Radley, Violet Prete, Samantha Grayson, Dan Trueman, Timothy Ruzsala, and Bora Yoon. For editorial suggestions and corrections, I am grateful to Samantha Bennett and Susan Silver. My thanks as well to Millie Thompson of Studio One, Bob Clearmountain, and the artists of Roxy Music: Bryan Ferry, Phil Manzanera, and Andy Newmark. As always, I am grateful to Elizabeth Bergman.

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On Modernism

Studio One, an unassuming brown-brick building tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac somewhere in England, is marked (only on the inside) by a bright-pink neon sign. Its glowing tubes curl up and around to form the name of an iconic British rock band of the 1970s and early 1980s: Roxy Music. On the wall opposite the pink neon sign, Bryan Ferry’s one-time girlfriend Jerry Hall slithers beckoningly forward in mermaid attire in a photograph taken on a stony shore in Wales. The image draws wryly from myths that deal with fateful, fantastic seduction and the loss of purpose or direction, the erasure of intent. Hall’s body is of cool blue in the published photograph and the archived outtakes, her hair green, her facial expression enticing and intimidating. It became the sleeve of the 1975 Roxy Music album with the hit “Love Is the Drug,” about the sirens of disco driving men mad (or, given the hedonism of the protagonist, calling them to their senses). The album is a musical mixture of madness and fantasy, the border between life and death made trivial. Ferry’s solo pursuits of the 1970s push forward the notion that what is conceived in true love, not the discotheque, will last forever. 1

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The building is also an archive, the tapestried memory vault of the entire Roxy Music experience. Stashed in a corner, among other souvenirs of the glam rock era, is the synthesizer played by Brian Eno, in leopard-skin jacket and excessive eyeliner, on the debut Roxy Music album. Back in 1972, when the EMS Synthesizer was a glam rock must-have, Ferry and his newly formed band experimented with the phase-shifting procedures associated with minimalism, chance-based operations, dissonant pitch clusters, and suggestive noises that modernists of earlier times called flaques sonores—sound puddles. Studio One also includes images of Ferry with Andy Warhol, Warhol’s representation of Marilyn Monroe, and the Marilyn Monroe lookalike Anna Nicole Smith. The real meets its simulacrum. Posters of supermodel Kate Moss, who adorns the 2010 Ferry album Olympia in an image derived from Ėdouard Manet, lend icy chic to the racks containing costumes from Ferry’s recent tours. Women are everywhere to be seen and admired—certain types of women, beautiful in a specific sense. Roxy Music seems exploitative, fixating on the feminine and privileging the male gaze. The women, it might be countered, have agency insofar as Ferry is undone by the power of their beauty. There is also storage space for tour brochures, CDs, and deluxe vinyl editions of Roxy Music recordings. Ferry remains the guiding hand behind the band and its legacy; he is the minder of the brand. The implicit assumption is that, on Avalon, Ferry reached his mature vision, becoming the ultimate auteur, each sound on the album reflecting his tastes, idiosyncrasies, and obsessions. This is not quite the 2

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case, given the lesser and greater influences of the group’s other musicians, engineers, and producers—but close to it. Ferry is still, to quote from his recent cover of a Robert Palmer song recorded with Todd Terje, “running around.” That song is a “slow, thick slab of longing,” to quote another of its appreciators, and has been attached to a film noir-ish video of Ferry in West Hollywood.1 The cinematic element has been all-important to his modernism. Likewise recalling the modernist charge to make it new, Ferry has demonstrated a special interest in do-overs of existing songs, from folk fare to Elvis Presley to Stephen Sondheim. He succeeds with remakes and remodels because he himself is a refined tuneand wordsmith. “When She Walks in the Room” is, in my modest opinion, one of the best songs ever written, as filigreed in its word painting as a Francis Poulenc song.2 The music dissolves, as if unable to bear its own stricken affect, ahead of the line, “’til her laughter has drifted away.” Ferry performs with mild detachment, and the instrumentalists sound tired. This is the after-party, when excitement cedes to a contented buzz, desire fades to longing. I have seen Ferry perform several times, marvelously in New York in 2019 at the United Palace theater, a former vaudeville house built in 1930. I also heard him perform before an orchestra in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Bowl and then with his more familiar retinue of backup singers and dancers at the Greek Theatre. I attended an after-party in Los Angeles at the Chateau Marmont hotel, a “Gothic fort” filled with celebrity lore.3 The cocktails were served “with compliments”; a turntable played Otis Redding. Ferry turned up for a few minutes to shake hands and kiss cheeks, having 3

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changed out of the floral tuxedo he wore at the gig and into a chic blue suit. The first half of a 2013 concert in Manchester I attended offered a medley of jazz standards performed by a cluster of musicians who seemed to have been transported from the era of Fletcher Henderson or Count Basie. The songs, however, turned out to be Jazz Age reimaginings of Roxy Music’s and Ferry’s own material. Following this new-old medley of teasers, Ferry took the stage in front of a loud, precise rock band and images of urban skylines, faux African dancers, flamingos, and models from the pages of Vogue. Ferry’s strenuous casualness became an element in a transmedia collage. Then the jazz ensemble departed, and Ferry reemerged with his rock band to sing the favorites from his and his former group’s catalog. On his first solo tours, Ferry sometimes played the part of a 1950s US doo-wop singer on the oldies circuit, imposing his idiosyncratic vocal style on cover songs that long predated his time as a performer.4 Indeed, Roxy Music’s first album concludes with a doo-wop song, “Bitter’s End.” But the crowd in Manchester came most of all to hear the classics from Avalon. Now Avalon itself is something of an oldie, and the nostalgia with which it is associated is complex, experienced by boomers and millennials alike. It evokes youth and naive harmoniousness of being, but it also makes a drifting imprint that might otherwise be called emotion— something often hard to hear in the empowered but corporatized voices at present. Yes, Avalon is a product of a commercial music corporation, but Ferry, not his label, has fiercely controlled his image, lending the music a curious 4

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authenticity. The person onstage is not the modestly reserved real person—hence the pointlessness, for explaining his art, of the biographies—but at least the simulacrum is his own invention, not BMG’s. His performances aren’t nostalgic; they are nostalgia itself. I met Ferry in 2013, when we discussed a shared interest in Cole Porter and the possibility of Ferry directing a revival of Porter’s ballet-pantomime Within the Quota. I had a casual dinner with him, his manager, and his son Isaac in London, admiring the elegance of his tailored smoking jacket and perfectly mussed coiffure. Besides Porter, I asked him about song-title choices and the experience performing in 1985 at Live Aid. He is a pleasant conversationalist of old-school reserve and manners, willing to indulge the tabloids with a soft-spoken quotation or two, but enigmatic, preferring misinterpretation to soul-baring. That’s fine with me: as a scholar, I’m less interested in the musician than the music. Art and artists are different things, and art is by definition artificial and sometimes made outside the artist’s conscious intending. To point out Roxy Music’s ironic stance, its posing as a glam rock band in the 1970s as the equivalent of Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effects, is to state the obvious. Rock and roll has always had a vaudevillian side, at least until it began taking itself seriously and sacrificed the sense of fun. Roxy Music didn’t, at least not at first. The group took the PhD in performance studies approach: it played at role-playing and dialogued with twentieth-century music history. English kids of middle-class background (Ferry hails from Newcastle upon Tyne, but he was hardly a Geordie outlander) put on 5

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sparkly things and imagined themselves in Motown, then in its glory days. By the end of their run, they were indulging the excesses of the Margaret Thatcher era. Ferry has sung a lot of covers in his career: “Don’t Worry Baby,” “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” and the Louisiana state song, “You Are My Sunshine.” He recorded eclectic arrangements of these standards on such solo albums as These Foolish Things (1973), imposing style and persona on the repertoire of his idols. These days cultural appropriation is considered a bad thing, associated with colonization, but borrowings and influences have long been a part of culture, modernist and otherwise, and Ferry never shied from lovingly acknowledging them. His perspective on the oldies—all the way back to the Pine Ridge Boys and New Orleans jazz funerals—makes the music interestingly unfamiliar, convincing some musicians to cover his version of the originals, not the originals themselves.5 The pink neon sign inside the entrance of Studio One was made by a now-defunct business called God’s Own Junkyard— as suitable a name as could be imagined for the modernist movement in the arts, a scrapheap of “isms” that defined European artistic trends between the two world wars: surrealism, dadaism, futurism, cubism, and imagism among them. In the United States, modernism also encompassed ragtime, blues, and jazz, the music married to the clean lines of art deco, heady glamour of early cinema, feminist possibilities of ready-to-wear fashions, and rise of mass-produced consumer goods from the Model T to Cheerios. It found an outlet in popular culture, in the Ziegfeld Follies, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and swing. At its core, transatlantic modernism aspired to test the limits of traditional aesthetic 6

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construction. “Make it new,” poet Ezra Pound famously declared.6 He meant invention, renewal, and repetition all at once, but modernism also demanded destruction, inspiring philosopher Walter Benjamin, in response to a stick-figure fairy aloft in a painting by Paul Klee, to define the movement as a storm blowing in from Paradise, leaving a pile of debris at the feet of the Angel of History. After World War II, modernism itself became tinder to fuel subsequent “isms” such as abstract expressionism, postmodernism, and minimalism as well as pop art, which stamped rubbish and embellished sleaze with the imprimatur of fine art. The social underworld of the cabaret and bordello, sublimated in the 1920s, was now celebrated and even elevated. Kitsch was cool. Collage shed the aesthetic pretentions of Picasso to revel instead in bric-a-brac. To the most common question asked of modern art—“Is it art?”— postmodernism resoundingly replied, “Yes, anything can be art.” But in an age of mechanical and digital reproduction, with the aesthetic everywhere and nowhere all at once, can art still enchant? The British artist Richard Hamilton tore collage off the canvas when, as the cultural critic Michael Bracewell has argued, he watched one of his projects become the band Roxy Music. Fronted by singer Bryan Ferry, Roxy Music was an assemblage of musicians brought together through mutual art-school connections; they were motivated, according to Ferry, less by Hamilton than by an “eclectic,” “emotional” concept, the music a “completely open book.”7 The group’s wildly inventive and tightly played music harkened back to some of the iconoclastic energies of an earlier age. The 7

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unclassifiable modernist artist Marcel Duchamp had used ordinary house paint to create elaborate and occasionally puerile semiotic jokes; composers Henry Cowell, George Antheil, and others of their restless ilk had searched for new sounds—so too Roxy Music at its start played familiar and invented instruments (the Mellotron, the Electronic Music Studio VCS3 synthesizer) while exploring wholly original, even irrational, forms of songwriting entwined with recherché meanings and references. Pound’s injunction has become, over the course of Ferry’s career, an impulse to make it beautiful, sensual. Yet a cerebral modernist detachment is preserved. Ferry offers up to the critics a sense that it might not be so serious after all. His creative impulse appears to involve stripping away the intellectual dressings of modernism and exposing its beating heart, knowing the body holds its own mysteries—hence the title of his 1978 solo album, The Bride Stripped Bare, taken from an artwork by the surrealist Marcel Duchamp called The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.8 The artwork is intentionally baffling; Duchamp delighted in the confusion by describing it in stream-of-consciousness fashion. Its contents consist of glass, foil, wire, and dust—the materials from which objects are assembled and the residue from the dissolution of those objects. Most critics assess it as a meditation on desire, female and male, whereas the engagement with science and technology arguably proves more meaningful.9 Ferry’s album is often explained as a response of sorts to the end of his relationship with Jerry Hall, but it is terribly reductive to equate the artist and his art. Aesthetics always transcend biography. Some of the 8

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songs are covers or, in Duchamp’s formulation, “readymades.” An Irish ballad “Carrickfergus” (aka “There Was a Noblewoman”) precedes the original song “This Island Earth,” basically a distress signal from outer space that opens with the words “So I send an S.O.S. / Semaphore myself / Catch me falling finally.” Melodic flower patterns betray cracks in the psyche. Listening anew to Avalon, Roxy Music’s 1982 apotheosis, I conducted a counterintuitive experiment, imagining Ferry not as a latter-day Romantic—“Bryan Ferry Portrays Darkness of Romance,” Stephen Holden opined of him at the end of the 1980s—but as a latter-day modernist.10 The sense of looking backward, of seeing the past pile up, resonates with my own experience of coming to know Roxy Music’s output, which I learned growing up in reverse order, beginning with Avalon and moving back in time. The quandaries of modernism that inspired artists in the first half of the twentieth century prove paradoxically enduring in the elusive art of Roxy Music. *

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Roxy Music’s history has been chronicled over and over again, with stress on the competing personalities and agendas that resulted in changes of personnel. (Eno’s departure is front and center in the histories, followed by violinist Eddie Jobson’s and the original drummer’s, “the dues-paying, Britrock journeyman Paul Thompson.”)11 One book is titled Roxy Music, another The Thrill of It All, still another Unknown Pleasures.12 The tale has thrice been told; I see no point in telling it again. Instead, contextualizing Avalon requires 9

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looking culturally backward and forward, so I dip into reviews, interviews, and fan forums. Although trained in the visual arts, Ferry was always drawn to music.13 His childhood was filled with jazz and early rock—including, at age eleven, a trip to see Bill Haley and the Comets at the Empire Theatre in Sunderland. The “luxurious jazz lounge” of the Newcastle Club a’Gogo was a draw, but the crowd tough. The first album Ferry ever owned was a Charlie Parker EP; his first band, formed before he enrolled at Newcastle University to study fine arts under Richard Hamilton, redid songs by Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. Later he formed the Gas Board, a rhythm-and-blues ensemble. He painted and acted, drove a van, restored antiques, and taught ceramics at a London school for girls, though not for long, since music got in the way. With the help of Antony Price, the brilliant couture designer, he endeavored to turn himself and his new band into a work of art. Ferry participated in glam rock but soon abandoned the lamé fabrics then in vogue, thanks to David Bowie, and settled into the persona of a debonair decadent, the 1920s sophisticate reborn in the late 1970s. Disappearing into this image, he dedicated his career to the expression of mild disenchantment about the rest of the world being unable or unwilling to participate in the mystical, mythical, and erotic fantasy perfected in sound on Avalon. The commercial packaging of the music remained consistently fashion-centered, featuring, on the second Roxy Music album of 1973, the French disco queen and artist Amanda Lear, with whom Salvador Dalí was smitten, wearing a skintight black-leather dress and holding a puma on a leash. 10

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(The original sketches for the album sleeve had her in bustling black taffeta, but that was discarded once the backdrop for the image became the Las Vegas Strip.)14 Hit singles like “Angel Eyes” had, as videos, the gloss and sheen of Hollywood spectaculars from the 1930s, like the Goldwyn Follies. The color scheme was pinker, whiter, and brighter than the follies—a vision of heaven with the prettiness of Yuko Shimizu’s roughly contemporaneous Hello Kitty and Angel Cat Sugar brands. The lower depths fascinate Ferry, as it did (to offer an appropriately surrealist comparison) Erik Satie, who rose from a job as mediocre pianist in the sad underworld of Parisian nightclubs to become the standard-bearer of low art made high. Like the modernists, Ferry and his music have their paradoxes. There are the obvious class issues: the embrace of street life alongside the aristocratic. Ferry loves ballet but frames himself onstage with latter-day flappers; he holds his modest piano skill in reserve, playing the occasional melodic line but generally maintaining the chordal underpinning of his songs, nodding his head to cue or cut off his agile ensemble; he performs café society standards from the “lush/louche social world” of the Porter era, clinging to styles supposedly transient.15 He speaks cautiously but sings like a person of coruscating passions. Ferry’s Bob Dylan, rhythm and blues, and Wilbert Harrison covers have earned plaudits from harmonica enthusiasts.16 Whereas scholars have sought to critique the high–low divide, Ferry preserves the tension between different modes—high and low, elite and popular, art and product. The postmodernists gleefully collapsed the categories necessary to sustain a paradox, but 11

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Ferry embraces the space between. The distance measures the depth of nostalgia. During a conversation with a journalist for the New Yorker in 2013, Ferry assessed the tired red décor of the Hotel Edison near Times Square and reflected on the dance room’s lost aura. He has at times sought to revive the era of social dancing and refined manners.17 The quest unquestionably defines his recent aesthetic, from the syntax of his songs to the movements of the backup singers who, on his 2013 tour, worked out the steps of the Charleston in the wings, then made it part of a set break. Art deco projections, roaring 1920s stylizations of dancers and musicians, moved in and out of alignment with the songs like distracted spectators sometimes enticed to stay and listen for a while. Listeners have long loved Avalon, and its popularity has perhaps guaranteed its derision by online agents provocateur. Critic Jeremy Allen compiled a top-ten list of Roxy Music songs and excluded “Avalon,” deciding that “Ferry had only really reformed the band [after a 1977 hiatus] because his patrician image was at such odds with punk and his career needed galvanising with the brand that had once so exemplified cool.” But how does he know? Allen makes light of the “Thomas Cromwell” aspect of Ferry’s biography, arguing that he lost his edge after shaking off his Newcastle background and joining Europe’s poshest cultural circles. The result was dust of another sort: Avalon, an album of “cocaine avarice.”18 Andrew Gaerig likewise targeted the album’s affectation: Ostensibly the last great Roxy Music album, Avalon receives high marks for sophisticated synth-pop

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mannishness, cementing Bryan Ferry’s sensitive machismo minutes before he would vanish into the hearts of collectors and cultists. Ferry’s voice was always too wide and deep to properly navigate Roxy Music’s fidgety pop moments—however valiantly he coped—so it seems natural that Ferry ended up in Avalon’s panoramic scan. Approaching his late thirties, oversexed, and iconic, Ferry’s watch was ticking. Inasmuch as he finally played to his strengths, Avalon was a natural progression. Bullshit. Avalon stinks of varnish. It is obscured by lubricant and cologne. Prophet-5s and oily hair. Set aside for a moment its reputation as an album that makes lovers rock; Avalon is Roxy Music as atmosphere, a sly betrayal of a decade’s worth of work as a frontrunning avant-pop act. Judge an album by its cover: compare the art work of the first four Roxy Music albums—Vargas poses, bunnies, leather—to Avalon’s second-rate Piers Anthony blush. His licentiousness gone brassy blue, his jawline softened, Avalon saw Ferry shelf his hound-dog posturing and formally accept a bench role.19 Haters gonna hate, and realists have always derided impressionists. Self-indulgently prolix lines like these have been written before. (It’s easy and lazy to write in the negative, and the critique of Ferry’s posturing masculinity ignores its fragility.) Roxy Music 1 broke rules and offended gentler ears, but the band still wanted to be successful, hence its constant dialogue with tradition and changes in the lineup. Was Roxy Music in fact a band? Still, even as Ferry looked back to the golden oldies of Motown and reveled in the

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dialectic of the A and B sides of 45s, he provided inspiration for English and European new-wave groups like Duran Duran, Deep House, early Radiohead, and other groups invested in what Roxy Music had been at the start: “a forward look back, a fanciful futuristic nostalgia act for 1950s rock and kitsch whose sound Eno hashed into Digital Age squiggles.”20 I decided to write this book in response to the opprobrium. Avalon is loved for the reason listeners break up with it: the music’s stylishness. I am attracted to the style, of course, while convinced of the substance behind it, the calculus that made the album iconic. I am also interested in the music and lyrics. To argue that it is the first album of its kind is easy; to argue that it is the last is harder, yet I try to do that as well. In what follows I discuss the progressive aspects of Avalon, the form and content of the album at the pitch and track-sheet level, and its nostalgic modernism—that is, its nostalgia for nostalgia. I take as my cue the following question, posed to Ferry by Taylor Parkes, and his learned answer: Q. You’ve spoken before about being naturally quite conservative. And yet you began by doing such radical work. A. Yeah but you look through the history of art and you’ll see that people who did even revolutionary work were often quite bourgeois in their life and their tastes. They needed that anchor to get the work done. People like Manet, Degas, smartly dressed guys who might look like bankers. It doesn’t seem odd to me.21 Thus Thomas Cromwell responds to his critics. 14

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Surprisingly, Roxy Music became less retro over time. Unlike the last album, the earlier ones reached back to the blues and music halls and social dancing. A tween novel referencing “Love Is the Drug” describes a “girl in a soiled purple silk gown  . . . showing an older boy how to jive.”22 David Bowie took up a retro role at the same early career stage as Ferry and then became Ziggy Stardust, a role he struggled mightily to shed.23 Ferry also frequently changed his look. The leopard prints and wide flares of the first album were replaced by an aviator’s uniform (with an eye patch), brown fatigues, and, most recently, black, white, and flowerpatterned evening wear.24 Offstage too, Ferry invests in men’s fashion. Again the appearance is not the thing itself, and to get at that requires a concentrated consideration of the sounds on Avalon. These are not retro; rather, they represent a pivot to modernism’s after-party, one that Bowie himself acknowledged in a Ferry homage of sorts, called “Without You.” There’s no doo-wop but plenty of ooh ooh. Just when I’m ready to throw in my hand Just when the best things in life are gone I look into your eyes, ooh, ooh There’s no smoke without fire, ooh, ooh.25

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Production Having designed Roxy Music as a bespoke suit hand-stitched of punk and progressive music, Bryan Ferry redesigned it. He made Roxy Music ever dreamier and mellower—reaching back to the sceptered isle Avalon of Arthurian and non-Arthurian chivalric romances and all their wistful wonders. Dadaist (punk) noise exited; a kind of ambient soft soul entered. Ferry parted ways with Eno, electric violinist Eddie Jobson, and drummer Paul Thompson, foreswearing the broken-sounding synthesizers played by kitchen utensils, the chance-based elements, and the maquillage of previous albums. He changed the mechanics of songwriting, his own and those of his imitators. He shifted from working out verses and choruses with the entire band in the studio to a one-performer-at-a-time, layer-on-layer method, which became increasingly common after the mid-1970s. Tracks evolved from studio grooves with the sketch of a tune and accompaniment created by Ferry on the piano at home, then recorded on a beloved, battered cassette player. Tempo and 17

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feel came first, followed by pitches and words. The eight songs and the two instrumentals on Avalon “started with a blank sheet,” according to producer Rhett Davies, in Phil Manzanera’s home studio in the town of Chertsey, Surrey.1 Phil might have had some chord sequences or musical ideas, and Andy would have some tunes that he’d written, which he’d present to Bryan, and Bryan would play around with them to see if there was any work he could do [on them]. I would then spend time with Bryan alone, writing. It didn’t take that long—we’d go in in the morning and I’d get a groove going to get something happening that Bryan could walk into, and hopefully he’d be inspired by it.2 The auteur had his muses, in short. Davies also claimed that the “chord sequences and ideas” were Ferry’s doing, and he receives full credit for seven of the ten tracks on the album.3 Ian Little, the office help turned recording assistant for Avalon, enriches the account of the period in Chertsey: Ferry would often come up with a chord sequence and record 15 or 20 seconds of that sequence, put it on a cassette and number it. After a few weeks, he’d give a cassette to their producer Rhett Davies containing, say, 75 20-second sequences of just two or three chords, and Rhett would then say “Well, we could merge number 32 with number 74 and make a song.” That taught me a way of optimizing your output—whatever you come up with, keep it, look at it again and use it. And if you’re able to combine some of those elements to make a song, all well and good. As soon as you’ve got a structure, you’ll then

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write parts that blend those sections together and there will be a homogeneity to the entire song. The other method that both Phil Manzanera and Bryan Ferry employed in terms of their writing was to have me program a Linn Drum, put some delays on it and create a groove. Bryan would then vamp on the keyboard and produce what he called a “moody synth” sound, which was like a pad sound with plenty of movement and character. That would enable him to get a lot of feeling out of a couple of chords, and Duran Duran [for whom Smith subsequently worked as producer] did the same thing.4 Little describes something akin to aesthetic collage. It’s a shame, for music history’s sake, that he doesn’t recall how numbers 32 and 74 sounded and what they became in the final mix. The first Roxy Music album to benefit from this method was Manifesto (1979) and its beatbox hit “Dance Away.” The sound was enriched and the reverb humidified on the next album, Flesh + Blood (1980), which contrasts a cover of Wilson Pickett (“In the Midnight Hour”) and the Byrds (“Eight Miles High”) in a “strange delight.” Avalon brought the expensive process of full-time studio immersion as far as it could go without eliminating altogether the need for fleshand-blood musicians. Just as the orchestra became the instrument for nineteenth-century composer-conductors, for Ferry the studio became the band—up to “90 percent of it.” The group benefited from the “first sequential synths” and the meticulous innovations of mixing engineer Bob Clearmountain, who enhanced the alternately bright and

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brooding personality of the album.5 His interventions at the mix and mastering stage cannot be underestimated, though the auteur had the final say. Refining Ferry’s (and Company’s) “sighing, luminous” whole meant that a third side’s worth of material was consigned to oblivion.6 Or so the members of the band thought: the 1981–2 demo tapes recently appeared online as an illegal soundboard bootleg.7 The tapes are a third as long as Avalon at 56:46. After some ideas were developed in Chertsey, the band relocated for a luxurious month to Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, a once-tranquil seaside space across from a cluster of rainbow-colored cottages. Budgets at the time accommodated all sorts of self-indulgences; Roxy Music’s demands were modest compared to those of late 1970s Southern Californian artists like the Eagles, but still excessive. Studio A (the first of two at the site) was opened in 1977 by Chris Blackwell of Island Records, who moved as a producer between Dantean realms, from Bob Marley’s reggae paradiso to AC/DC’s inferno to Grace Jones’s purgatorio. (Jones recorded a disco-punk cover of Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug” at Compass Point close to the time Avalon was fashioned.) Studio A housed a state-of-the-art MCI-500 console, which, thanks to the invention of voltage-controlled amplifiers, made the mixing process simpler and much more flexible. The operative term is “mix automation”: recording the position of the faders to tape and then “replaying” them so that the faders move automatically. The MCI had a greater upper dynamic range than its predecessors, with equalization circuits calibrated to actual musical scales, not arithmetic formulae—another plus.8 Compass Point changed ownership 20

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and fell into disrepair; crime in the area forced the studios to close in 2010, but the paint-box huts remain—so too the ocean waves heard on Andy Mackay’s instrumental “Tara” as tracks 19 and 20 in the mix. Polishing the sound, filtering out the slightest tuning or technical imperfections, meant fewer solo breaks for the guitar, as a comparison between the bootlegged Avalon demos and the actual album makes clear. Davies’s track-sheet cards are layered over with yellow gaffer tape, evidence of his and the band’s rethinking and a disinterest in preserving earlier versions: “If there’s stuff we don’t want, erase it, get rid of it. Don’t have it sitting around creating confusion later on.”9 Making a record is a process of trial and error but also of chance happenings in the room. The first track opens with Manzanera’s Fernandes Stratocaster.10 His “guitar of choice” on Avalon, however, was a Gibson Firebird VII. He “also used a 1957 Gibson Les Paul” and, for the beginning of “More than This,” a 51 Telecaster.11 That beginning is a syncopated chime-like effect that moves down a fourth and fifth, then up an octave using chorus pedal with slight delay on the pitches. Somewhere during the development of the song, the guitar sound changed from something much more pitch modulated (using a pedal) to the out-of-phase chorus effect.12 The Telecaster is the brightest part of the mix and, with Ferry’s voice, about as blissful as pop gets. Manzanera has said that “More than This” was not the pop song it might have been but “simplified” into a “more adult type of lyric,” becoming, as it were, “less than this.” As Manzanera recalls, “halfway through, Bryan rebelled, and it 21

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was all scrapped and simplified incredibly. I must say, I was concerned that we weren’t going to have a hit single from that album.”13 Still, the album is hardly simple: twenty-four tracks expanded to forty-eight tracks on “The Space Between,” “True to Life,” and “Avalon,” when, in New York, the group decided to add new elements to the existing tracks for those three songs. The final mix creates the illusion of everything being in the right place after careful, obsessive preplanning and thinking-through. I am reminded of what Frederic Raphael said of Stanley Kubrick’s overdetermined films: “The wish to eliminate chance leads to madness of which method is the symptom.”14 Here too Manzanera demurs: “We constructed a lot of tracks out of improvisations. In the studio, you can head off into very strange territories by artificial means. By accident, you can plug something into the wrong place on the desk and something amazing happens that you could never have dreamed of.” The sophistication of the album was thus not the product of process focused on creation but involved a kind of effacement. The elements that once made up popular music are purposefully obscured. Manzanera was pleased to awake from the amazing dream, informing Rolling Stone that his “fondest memory” of Avalon was “the day it was finished.”15 Ferry has written a lot of songs about dancing (ballroom, vaudeville, disco, and club) over the course of his storied career, but on Avalon he suppresses the pulses that would guide the steps in favor of sonic immersion—an exploration of possibilities that has one or two jolts. Consider the break into the first verse after the long intro of “Take a Chance with 22

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Me,” which reminds us that what makes a song successful (or used to) is its unpredictability. There is a fine line between smoothness and blandness—a charge leveled against Roxy Music post-Siren—and an even finer one between escapism and the creation of a more real experience.16 The music remains harmonically and rhythmically eccentric. Roxy Music included dancers in their live shows, but Ferry hasn’t had backup dancers in his band since 2012. The backing vocalists sometimes dance, but he doesn’t employ the kind of dancers that Sasha Frere-Jones imagined seeing in New York in 2011.17 The audience is instead invited to dance, to move in or out of sync with the rhythm section with happy abandon. As Ferry said in reference to one of his session musicians, guitarist Nile Rodgers, “He’s made such great records, not only with Chic but with Sister Sledge, all those records you’d dance to at a party in a rather embarrassing way.”18 He said this in a quirkily wistful manner that made it seem like he finds embarrassment aesthetically interesting. One thing is certain. Pounding feet on the beat does not work for Avalon, which relies on rubato and syncopation. It introduced trance music avant la lettre. Because of this quality, rather than despite it, the album generated a hit single—three of them, in fact. The compact disc version of Avalon closely followed the May 28, 1982, release of the vinyl on EG/Polydor Records. (CDs began to be marketed, first in Japan, in the fall of that year; the original pressing of Avalon appeared in 1983 on EG and was rereleased by Virgin in 1987.) Audiophiles were predictably disappointed by the quality of the digital recording versus the original analog. In 1999, Bob C. Ludwig 23

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remastered the original album with the entire Roxy Music catalog. Two years later, and in advance of Avalon’s twentieth anniversary, a 5.1 (home theater) surround-sound version was realized (upmixed) by Davies and Clearmountain, the original producer and engineer. Audiophile devotees of Avalon have speculated—and Clearmountain has confirmed—that the “original multitrack tape” of the “India” instrumental was lost, and so the surround version had to be created from the stereo mix.19 It “is panned clockwise a few times as the track plays, which ends in the rear right channel, from which the saxophone begins the next piece, ‘While My Heart Is Still Beating,’ making up for ‘India’ not being a fully-fledged surround recording.”20 The stereo file was not, however, turned into a mono file that ended up in the rear-right channel, as Clearmountain’s comment implies. Both files of the stereo mix were moved “clockwise” through the five distributed speakers of the 5.1 system, as viewed from above. Lacking the original stems for “India,” this was a simple, but also “rather silly,” low-tech means for Davies and Clearmountain to create a sense of space equivalent to the quasi-cinematic attributes of the other tracks.21 (Upmixing digital sound–production techniques can now solve this problem with ease.) The demos include two versions of an unreleased, truly cinematic track called “Movie, Move Me,” whose beat and guitar line are varied on Manzanera’s Primitive Guitars record, likewise the fourth of the five “unrecorded” tracks. Three other “unrecorded” tracks point, I think, to “Avalon,” the hardest song to complete. It was rethought and recut in New York. The synthesized percussion on the demos bears 24

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the faintest influence of Latin American cabasa and clave patterns—in accord, perhaps, with the references in the lyrics to samba and bossa nova. The most original element, the limpid high soprano solo that brings the song to a close, is nowhere implied. Indeed, it became part of the song essentially by chance. “With ‘Avalon,’ ” Davies recounts, we had to recut the entire song right at the end of the album. We were actually mixing the album, and the version of the song that we’d done just wasn’t working out, so as we were mixing we recut [it] with a completely different groove. We finished it off the last weekend we were mixing. We put some percussion on and some drums on, and then on the Sunday, in the quiet studio time they used to let local bands come in to do demos, Bryan and I popped out for a coffee, and we heard a girl singing in the studio next door. It was a Haitian band that had come in to [record], and Bryan and I just looked at each other and went “What a fantastic voice!” That turned out to be Yanick Étienne, who sang all the high stuff on “Avalon.”22 Étienne came to the United States from Haiti in 1970. As a musique créole specialist, she knew nothing of Roxy Music before meeting Davies and Ferry. Étienne and her boyfriend/ future husband Dernst Emile had booked time at the Power Station to record “backing vocals for Haitian crooner José Tavernier on the French-language song ‘Toi.’ ” Struck by the sound (Étienne sings in a stratospherically high register at the beginning of “Toi”), Ferry recruited her for “Avalon,” first asking her to record background vocals and then encouraging 25

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her to “sing totally free” over a playback. Everything else had been recorded, drummer Andy Newmark had come and gone, but she transformed the song, necessitating some remixing. (Ferry did not, however, change his part after hearing Étienne, as has been claimed.)23 The forty-eighttrack title song was the last finished for the album. The two instrumentals, “India” and “Tara,” are nowhere to be found on the demos. Those instead include a rough draft of the big-voiced anthem “Is Your Love Strong Enough?” Different in spirit than the rest of Avalon, it instead became the end-credits music for the dark fantasy film Legend (1985). The film suffered from second- and third-guessing (several different endings were made), and it was judged derivative in the New York Times, but the song, released in 1986 as a single, rose to number 22 on the UK charts.24 The demos feature the Linn LM-1 drum machine, which came to market in 1982. Actual drums were added last on most of the tracks, which sometimes meant discarding the Linn patterns or supplementing them. Andy Newmark, no fan of the click track, explains that he and session bassist Neil Jason “recorded the drums and bass together” in New York, “simultaneously on all the songs.” He recounts, “We did it all in five days, Monday to Friday, 12 Noon to 6 PM each day. Roughly two songs a day. Those are Bryan’s working days and hours.” As to the kit, “Back then, all studios in New York had their own drum kit set up and mic’ed and ready to play 24/7. Drummers showed up with drum sticks only. Fantastic! I don’t remember what kind of drums they were and in truth it doesn’t matter what brand they were. Secret: They’re all the same.”25 26

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Davies adds, and Newmark confirms, that the drums were recorded to a full-sounding track . . . so it freed [Newmark] up to a large extent. In some cases . . . he’d replace that groove and add a feel to it. In other cases we would keep the more percussive components of the Linn pattern in the final mix, and just take out the kick and snare and hi-hat, which would be replaced by the real drumming. You could never say what combination was going to work. Sometimes Andy would go out and just do tom and cymbal overdubs against what we had. By and large, if we recorded a [drum] kit, we used it. We’d generally get a full kit pass, and then we’d do additional tom fills and overdubs. We got a great drum sound at the Power Station—it was a totally wooden room to mic up in, and that’s part of the sound of that record. We did use a room sound, it wasn’t all closemic’ed. We weren’t really worried about the separation; if it felt right and sounded right, that was good enough.26 The percussion, then, was recorded after the guitars, saxophone, keyboards, drums, and even cello (as in the marvelous transition into the guitar solo on “To Turn You On”). Last came the actual vocals, as opposed to the half-formed words and lalalas heard on the demos. There is eeriness in the humming, an almost pained aspect to the half-formed syllables that the completed album altogether avoids. The demo of “True to Life” has Ferry plaintively lalala-ing from E down to C, then from D up to E down to B before singing the words of the title. In the final cut the last three notes were removed from the vocal part and buried deep in the guitar 27

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mix. Some of the demos did not even get to the lalala-ing stage. Ferry, Manzanera, and Mackay found the material either uninspiring or impossible to shape into a whole. (“India” is an exception: it’s a groove in search of a song.) Even the music the three of them agreed belonged on the album was remade and remodeled, the lyrics formed and poured into the melodic molds at the last minute. Ferry does not have an especially large singing range, which meant slowing down and speeding up the demos to push them into a comfortable tonal space. The opening of “True to Life” involves, according to Clearmountain, a gated synthesizer delay effect produced by AMS 15-80 microprocessors with some equalization on the return. A low-pass filter, used to attenuate frequencies below a set cut-off frequency, was added to the feedback loop, enriching the color of the sound on each repeat. The delay sounds like a basic digital hall reverb, as created by a Jupiter-8 synthesizer, though Davies’s track-sheet cards also list an Oberheim OB-X. Another option for Clearmountain would have been a Lexicon 224 synthesizer, but the Power Station did not own one; moreover, Clearmountain “hated the digital-aliased, 12-bit sound of it.” When I probed him for more details about the mixing of “True to Life” and the other songs on Avalon, he recalled, thirty-eight years after the fact, that the Power Station “had a magnificent chamber, a treated 75-foot staircase driven by a pair of Altec 604E speakers with a pair of AKS 451 microphones at the top, which is the reverb you are hearing on the entire Avalon album.” The album also benefited from the acoustics of “another small chamber” at the Power Station, an “unused bathroom,” and “some 28

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excellent EMT [Elektomesstechnik] plates,” employed to generate artificial reverb, when the natural acoustics of the repurposed staircase and bathroom did not suffice. Besides the gated synthesizer effect, the opening of “True to Life” includes a conga drum on the right channel followed by a tom-tom fill, Manzanera’s electric guitar power chord (rootfifth-root, played with a harmonizer generating the phased sound), clave, a bass on the downbeat with a stereo chorus effect, a couple of lead guitar licks, pronounced high hat, a Yamaha CP-70 keyboard, and Ferry’s voice.27 Manzanera’s guitar fills on the left channel are clean, but the heavily processed, distorted sound of the opening is folded back into the texture of the chorus, Ferry miming the reverb. The texture is a dance of veils, instrument imitating voice imitating instrument through layers and layers of production.

Music and words / words and music The opening track, “More than This,” became the first single, reaching number 6 on the UK charts and 102 on the US Hot 100. The 1982 statistics, particularly the US ones, are almost meaningless, however, when we take into account the album’s enduring crossover appeal. The classic make-out album was a sleeper hit, achieving gold and then platinum over a decade in the United States. There is the obvious appeal of sound production and engineering, but “More than This” succeeds, to this ear, also thanks to its syntax. The song is in C-sharp major but, characteristic of rock and popular music, suppresses the 29

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leading tone.28 The I-♮vii shift defines the song’s hook. Ferry’s three-part mantra about transience—“more than this / there is nothing / more than this / tell me one thing / more than this / oooh, there is nothing”—oscillates between C# and B, after which the B sinks to A# (no-) and G# (thing) atop a Bsus2 chord (F#, B, C#, and F#). Ferry is nothing if not economical: this bittersweet suspension of C# over B is at once the most affecting moment of the song and a gathering of the shared pitches of the harmonies governing the verses (F#, B, g#, and C#). The structure is conventional: intro verse, chorus, bridge, repeated and extended, but Ferry’s vocal line ends at 2:45, with a protracted coda still to go. The synthesized string coda and several of the fills belong to the Jupiter-8 pad but also, for a few seconds, to solo guitar. Ferry, his producer, or his engineer broke up the solo into tunelets of three and four notes that lead the ear, like fairy-tale crumbs, into a forest of feeling. Had the solo been pushed forward in the texture and drawn out, it might have lost its magic. Reduced on the final cut to the detached barest of minimums, it is the this that is also nothing. The eminent music critic Greil Marcus has written elaborately about the karaoke version of “More than This” as sung by Bill Murray (Bob) to Scarlett Johansson (Charlotte) in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film, Lost in Translation.29 The line “fallen leaves in the night,” recited almost in tune by Murray in a Tokyo club, perfectly captures his jet-lagged, fall-spring infatuation with a girl he knows he can’t get and really shouldn’t try to. The two go through the motions of an affair, performing the karaoke cover version of a faraway holiday 30

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romance. An actor in the role of an actor, Bob is too old, burned out, and, frankly, famous to court a twentysomething. Experiencing loss is life’s main thing, a permanent jet lag. Marcus marvels that a karaoke version of “More than This” was even possible, because he had never thought that the words mattered or that fans of the song would bother to learn them. The break in Ferry’s voice between the syncopated C#, D#, and A# over the bar line in the opening phrase is the attraction, and the words “I could feel” are hard to decipher, perhaps intentionally so. Song lyrics are often hard to hear, and Marcus settles on the idea (obvious after he explains it) that “More than This” concerns, like nineteenth-century Lieder, what music can do but words cannot. The lyrics of the verses are a “golden smear” in a “whirlpool.” The elegant guitar work of the drawn-out ending moves in and out of the ear: You hear “More than this—nothing” and then Phil Manzanera, who has simply been counting off the rhythm behind Ferry, play his solo [to be precise, Neil Hubbard is also heard on guitar at the end of this track]. It’s maybe eleven bent blues notes—there and gone in under three seconds. It is the most elegant and ephemeral distillation of the guitar solo, any guitar solo, imaginable, and it brings up a question. What is a guitar solo? What happens when the singer steps back and gives the song—its themes, its argument, its imagery, its story—to a musician? There are more than eleven notes in the solo, and these are produced by finger vibrato rather than being bent (blues 31

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notes are typically referred to as the minor third added to a major pentatonic phrase, or the tritone added to a minor pentatonic phrase). And keeping time, maintaining precise rhythmic patterns in the background, is no simple matter in this type of music. Marcus’s questions about the solo are rhetorical: “What happens is the admission that certain things can’t be said in words, but they can be said. Almost always, when this happens in a song, there’s a sudden thrill, a catch in the heart—even if what follows is bland, blank time and no more than time.”30 But what if the actual issue is the lapsing of time, the ephemeral? When “More than This” was released as a single, the sleeve, designed by Peter Saville, was graced by a thickly detailed and richly colored image taken from a painting by the pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82). The painting, called Veronica Veronese, includes a French inscription on the frame that seems to tell us what we are seeing as opposed to allowing us to see it, unmediated, for ourselves. The inscription is inaccurate and misrepresents the painting’s melancholic passivity. In Lorraine Wood’s translation of the French inscription: Leaning sharply forward, Lady Veronica quickly jotted the first notes onto the virgin page. Then she picked up the bow of her violin to realize her dream; but before taking down the suspended instrument, she remained still for a few minutes listening to the inspiring bird, while her left hand wandered over the strings searching for the supreme, still elusive melody. It was the marriage of the voices of nature and the soul—the dawn of a mystic creation.

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Rossetti knew little about music, but he often represented it on canvases, showing “inaccurate instruments and impossible performances,” from violins held or strung incorrectly to hands resting on the black keys to play music devoid of either sharps or flats.31 He fixated on the “presumed autonomous ‘thingness’” of music—scores and instruments and performance manuals— and thus on the transient nature of the art.32 The composition exists, and then does not, in performance. Rossetti’s painting depicts Veronica, her bow and violin hung on the wall, and a singing canary perched on a birdcage’s open door (the canary is not visible on the record sleeve). Her expression, the tilt of her head away from her instrument, and the incorrect placement of her right hand on (or near) the bow suggest her thoughts are elsewhere. The quill stands in the ink pot after a few notes have been etched on a single stave—an arpeggiated and scalar figure that no bird could sing. The daffodils (also not visible on the sleeve) and herb sprigs Rossetti painted around her are inscrutable in terms of symbolism. Narcosis, “frensie,” and “sleepinesse” all emerge as possibilities from the 1636 history of plants he consulted.33 Much about the painting suggests Rossetti resisting his own object of study, or his object of study resisting Rossetti. The model for the painting, Alexa Wilding (1847–84), differed from his other muses in that she was not his lover. Veronica Veronese is a typical Roxy Music/Bryan Ferry heroine, ancient and modern, femme fatale and bella donna, objectified by the male gaze but also resisting exploitation by staring right back. In his 1987 “Bête Noire,” the title track, Ferry sings meekly about the price of obsession (so often focus falls on the hurt male ego rather than the suffering of 33

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Figure 1: Veronica Veronese. Source: Studio One Archive.

his female target) in a texture that recalls tango and involves the most complex percussion, chiefly Caribbean, of his career. Images of beautiful women, like beautiful sounds, can be preserved and curated, but such acts are grounded in psychic weakness and cultural power. Rossetti paints “desire and fear,” and “More than This” is about the loss of both (see Figure 1).34 34

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The quasi-instrumental, funk-inspired song “The Space Between,” whose lyrics dissolve into a whispered iteration of the phrase “listen here, listen,” depends on Neil Jason’s fuzzy, oozy bass line. He provides a syncopated eighth-andsixteenth-note riff that grinds out the lower end of the Bb minor scale. The Ebs (as part of Bbsus4) and Cs (Ab6) in the competing vocal and saxophone riffs “close” the “space” (to quote from the lyrics) left open by the bass and exhaust the track’s syntax. Jason attributes his distinctive contribution to Avalon to an “all-analog envelope filter with a sub harmonic,” aka the “seamoon funk machine” that he has long preferred. His passion for the device motivated him to rebuild it for commercial sale. All sorts of instruments, he explains, can be “dialed into” the Seamoon FX.35 Jason’s love of extra sustain on the low end of his specific instrument is palpable in another song on the album: “The Main Thing,” the first track on the B side. The characteristic features of funk bass playing—gooey glissandi, wah effects, ghost notes (emphasizing rhythmic value over audible pitch), and ostinato—lend the track the raunchiness of bourbon breath and stale cologne. The drums complement it; the session musicians on the track do the heavy lifting on Ferry’s, the auteur’s, behalf. Manzanera’s entrance on the track involves distortion, not overdrive or fuzz, and a little reverb.36 The groove deepens as the song unfolds, with a second guitar track adding distorted fills. The music of “The Space Between” is meant to be erotic, but lazily so. Neither the notes nor the words matters as much as they do on “More than This.” How else are we to explain the lines “No where, nor why / No care, nor cry” as anything but rhyme and echo? The lurking desire beneath the words is the 35

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thing, and Jason’s playing grounded an album that otherwise floats, preventing it from disappearing in atmosphere and ambience. Two guitars dialogue on the track (at 1:12 they play in stereo panned hard left and right) with a third, highly chorused guitar enhancing the amorphousness. The first part involves palm-muted notes, the second some overdrive and an envelope filter, whereby the sweeping of the pedal is triggered by the striking of the note, not the foot, resulting in a subtle sound. At a certain point the flirtation ends and the bedroom beckons. This carnal inevitability makes Avalon something more than a troubadour’s self-indulgent fantasies of unrequited love. This brings us to the title track, the troubadour’s ode, which bears the most delicate texture of the album.37 The song, the album’s immaculate anthem, is in an orderly, invariant F major most of the time, suggesting something of the recluse’s resistance to surprises but desire to experience one. Harmonies cycle through a four-chord pattern for the verses (F, C, Bb, and F again), after an introduction built on G major. (The opening D–E–G–E eighth-note bass lick is presented in variation throughout the album, subtly integrating the tracks.) Fortune arrives in G and rhythmand-blues singer Fonzi (Alfonso) Thornton’s “dan-cing, dan-cing” bridge. The song references bossa nova, the “new sound” of Brazil, but “Avalon” is more about the coolness of this genre than its actual sound: bossa nova is chill-out music, with soft-spoken vocals and, at most, a four-person band performing syncopated patterns with clean precision. Compared to samba, the old Brazilian sound that Ferry also references, bossa nova is simpler, with held-back, neutralized 36

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singing. As Antonio Carlos Jobim, one of the founders of the genre, writes in the liner notes of his famous album Chega de Saudade, “Bossa nova is serene; it has love and romance, but it is restless.”38 Manzanera’s Firebird is buried in the mix but present “on the soloing bits.”39 He opens the track with two palmmuted notes on the Fernandes, a sound that returns as the vocals commence. The chorus features the other guitarist on the album, Neil Hubbard, playing (again according to Manzanera) a Gibson ES-335. The mix also features swelling synth sounds—the one on the left channel perhaps produced by guitar but processed into non-recognition. “Avalon” is set deep in the night in a salon or manor house somewhere, but the space opens up, thanks to Thornton and Yanick Étienne’s inimitable ooh-ah concluding vocalization, into a fantasyland governed by two perfectly tuned major triads a perfect fourth apart. There is mystery here too, and starkness, for the pronunciation of the word “Avalon” (sung by Ferry on two pitches a minor third apart, D and F, and then, in the coda, a major second apart, on the dominant and subdominant of F) is prefaced by open-sesame harmonies. There’s a shift to Eb, then C#/Db and a semitone below that to C—that is, from bvii to bvi to the dominant of F (taking us to the second verse), which is also the subdominant of G that takes us “danc-ing.” The song tells the tale of two keys, one (F) sunk in reverie, the other (G) associated with the “veiled promise” of the chance meeting.40 The effects are a mixed bag: swaying Caribbean (or South American), rhythm and blues, and synthesized last-night-inIbiza lament with lipstick on the collar all in standard pop 37

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Figure 2: Shooting the Avalon cover. Source: Studio One Archive.

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song structure. The title is the cipher. For all the effort Neil Kirk and Antony Price put into the Irish sleeve design— showing a “Celtic warrior queen” (Ferry’s betrothed Lucy Helmore) in the chiaroscuro of dawn, horns decorating her helmet and a merlin “bird of prey” in her right hand, setting sail to the isle where King Arthur convalesced from injuries and forged his blade Excalibur—there is nothing archaic or medieval in the music, excluding, perhaps, the hollow fifths in the accompaniment.41 Listen closely to the opening synthesized string sound, and you might hear the water setting the boat on its course to the isle (see Figure 2). I like what journalist Oscar Rickett has to say about the “literal-minded” title of the song: “Now the party’s over,” Bryan Ferry sings over a sparse, spacious musical background, “I’m so tired.” You’re feeling like this, flopped back into whatever you’re sitting on, thoughts and substances buzzing through your synapses— thoughts like, Can a thought buzz through a synapse? But the party isn’t over. The night promises more. The promise lies between the lines of conversation, in moments and movements. There’s Bryan Ferry, in his white dinner jacket, crooning of possibilities: Then I see you coming, out of nowhere / Much communication, in a motion / Without conversation, or a notion.42 Actor, Vogue model, and ballet dancer Sophie Anna Ward starred in the promotional video, which was cast by Susie Figgis and directed by Howard Guard, who chiefly did beauty commercials at the time (he made one other music video, for Peter Murphy of Bauhaus).43 Guard wrote and drew the 39

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storyboard and decided to do the film in the Grand Hall of Mentmore Towers, a mansion built by the fabulously well-to-do Rothschild family in 1854 in Mentmore, Buckinghamshire.44 Ward was only seventeen at the time but looks considerably older in “Avalon,” thanks to Guard’s hair and makeup team and Adrian Biddle’s camerawork. “I spent the entire budget on the production—all of which reflected Bryan Ferry’s high standing with us,” Guard recalled, assuming the singer wanted an aristocratic look for the song. Guard added that he conceived the video as a blend of images of mystical-mythical Avalon and brooding, gothic Venice. He specifically had in mind the film version of Thomas

Figure 3: Official “Avalon” music video. Source: Courtesy Howard Gourd.

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Mann’s 1912 novella Death in Venice and its distantly aestheticized representation of paiderastia, here sexually inverted. “Sophie was the Lady of the Lake after she has surrendered the sword, the Falcon is Death, which brings us neatly back to Dirk Bogarde in the film Death in Venice and Ferry at the end of the ball”45 (see Figure 3). The detached heroine (Ward) dances in a silk bustle gown (created by Antony Price) that must have been hard to make flow. Everything proceeds at first according to the rigid rules of courtship. The suitor (Ferry) breaks decorum by reaching for her at sunrise after the ball with the music still throbbing in the background. She lends him a frosty stare; he pulls his hand back. Her coldness, which cuts through the camera’s soft focus, marks the moment of truth in a moment of blunt moralizing about self-involved men and their fantasies facing reality. The falcon flies away; the maiden is unattainable. Guard decided that “Avalon” represented Ferry’s court. The other knights of the round table—Manzanera, Mackay, bassist Michael Dempsey, and drummer Steve Goulding (a last-minute substitute for the unavailable Andy Newmark)— are given the briefest of cameos. Étienne continues her piercing vocalization, reminding us that it was, unexpectedly, quite a night. Her singing is the closest we get in this land of polish to the buzzing synapse. Guard gave Ferry a “faded edge,” thinking that “his liminal presence suited the track,” if not the singer himself.46 The video, like others from the early 1980s, has not aged particularly well and, perhaps unsurprisingly, “the entire band disliked it.”47 The decision to make it came from recordcompany management, not from the musicians themselves. 41

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Apart from the video, the song has never lost its magic. It is a dream tucked inside a dream, a lavish treatment of syntax so simple as to become lavishness itself. Étienne is from Port-au-Prince, Thornton from East Harlem, and Ferry from Newcastle. The song they created traffics in gender as well as culture, but at a remove. “Avalon” has been aligned in an academic context with Ovidian “machinations of Love” and so too the track after it, the instrumental, “India.”48 Clocking in at just 1:45, the track teases the ear with references to Eastern horn, kanjira (drum with jingle), and sitar. Toward the right channel in the mix is the main guitar riff, played with chorus and reverb (though the reverb here is not so noticeable). The guitar that answers this pattern on the left is heavily chorused for an outré, almost out-of-tune sound. Supplementing the slight out-of-tuneness is a pentatonic scale, accompanied by a D-major tonic triad of the diatonic system. The form relies on a straightforward repetition of two-measure units with ornamental riffs and chordal harmonies, as if improvising in classic blues or jazz style. No sooner than it starts, “India” begins to end, but the descants could last forever. The wet reverb, relaxed pace, and diffuse timbres create a meditative calm. “While My Heart Is Still Beating” relies on Mackay’s alto saxophone to outline the chords of the chorus, and poignantly so: the drop into the chorus involves B passing down to A and E over D minor and then C major, followed by an outline of Bb and E in second inversion. The strangeness of the leap from Bb (=bii) to E major is greatly enhanced by Mackay’s syncopated sultriness. These harmonies are the most elusive 42

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of the album and an apt underpinning for Ferry’s searching “Where’s it all leading?” question about the meaning of it all. (That he poses the question in the music video while pacing rooms filled with statues and mannequins from eighteenthcentury paintings suggests no answer is forthcoming.) The decadence of the question is on display as well: Ferry wears velvet smoking slippers embroidered in gold with his initials, which fans of the video either loved or described as a “fashion faux pas.” (The regal connotations hardly impress.)49 “While My Heart” is anchored in A minor in common time in the verses with running sixteenths in the tom-tom. There are two keyboard parts, one decorative, jangling brittlely in the background after the opening distorted saxophone flare-up from the tonic A to the ninth above. The other, heard forward in the mix, provides the underpinning A minor, Gmajor6, Fmajor7, and E major chords on the downbeat at the start of each line of text. The chorus dissolves into compound meter (12/8) in the chorus, which makes beautiful use of the Neapolitan chord, Bb, after D minor (“I’d better”), and Cmaj7 (“have pity”) before the Bb (=bii) to E major dominant leap. The heart beats throughout in the drum, but the beat is irregular and the static A minor interlude threatens to still it. Ferry’s vocal line is scalar, running down from E to A, but reaches to the F above and the G# below. This song harkens back to Roxy Music’s experimental early years, specifically in the Eno-esque, “it’s-leadingnowhere” processing of Manzanera’s Les Paul guitar playing. The opening has an overdriven sound that is either put through a reverse delay or perhaps recorded on tape and then played backward with reverb: the makers of the album 43

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cannot remember. The sound returns after the first chorus and toward the end of the song. At 0:38 a clean (no-distortion) guitar with delay, the Fernandes, adds fills on the left channel. There is a single overdriven guitar note after the first chorus and then the backward guitar again. “Take a Chance with Me” is the third single from the album after the first and third tracks. The 4:41 original was cut down to just 2:46 in length for the US single. The opening is a congeries that gropes around a pulse: percussionist Jimmy Maelen’s conga and bongo slaps and thuds echo down the Power Station stairwell; so too Andy Newmark’s brush strokes on the snare and bass-drum bombs. Manzanera sets things in motion with a six-note phrase using a short delay called, in guitar parlance, a slapback. Each of the notes is accented with “pinch harmonic,” heard most clearly on the highest note of the phrase, a G#.50 As the music becomes more exotically baroque a half a minute in, Manzanera outlines the tonic F minor triad via the leading tone E. His sound includes chorus, distortion, and volume pedal, adding swells to each note. The phrase has a slightly Phrygian quality, the exotica emphasized by Mackay’s snake-charmer-like oboe line. Following this alignment of seductiveness and an imagined, clichéd Middle East, Manzanera provides more pinch harmonics and more fills with guitar with slapback. The flickering, groping foreplay of the introduction unexpectedly ends. It cadences into two and a half minutes of old-time club-floor fun. (I can only imagine the beaming faces of the band the first time they heard the studio playback of the rightly/wrongly timed drop into the song’s first verse.) Manzanera changed guitars at this point, replacing the Les 44

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Paul of the introduction with the Fernandes.51 Manzanera’s pinging semitonal earworm (the E and the F again, above C) aligns with Jason’s bouncing F-minor bass line, Newmark’s bass drum and snare, and Ferry’s Wurlitzer organ effects and parodic love-song lyrics (“I was blind, can’t you see?”). Art song masquerades as pop; it is only at the end that the hand of the maker is revealed. The autonomous echo-chamber introduction is not so autonomous: it has provided the main material, hook and all. “Take a Chance” is also a kind of deconstruction of a song: here are the effects tracks; here are the song tracks; and here, in the last minute, is everything together. The cover of the 45 and dance mix is a picture of diamonds against a background of kimberlite. “Take a Chance” is the musical equivalent of a diamantaire’s craft. Ferry truly sings this song, whereas “While My Heart” is more an example of poésie mélique, emphasizing the grain of the voice.52 His singing is but an instrument in the texture, equivalent to the cello line added to “To Turn You On” by the eminent cellist and composer Kermit Moore (an amazing “get” for the album). Ferry sings of “words to spare” on “While My Heart,” but the vocal lines are assemblages of syllables whose precise content eludes us. We are “lost in their meaning.” Hand-shaped chords and “scat vocals” inspired each of the songs, and a spare, skeletal structure was fleshed out, in different times and places, by a combination of session artists and actual band members.53 Manzanera plays guitar on the album along with Hubbard, and Bryan Ferry isn’t the only keyboardist, nor Andy Newmark the only drummer.54 Individual tracks can have more than one player on the same part, the same line even. The drawn-out amorphousness of 45

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the creative process—from Ireland, the Bahamas, to the United States, and back again to Ireland—is more audible on “While My Heart” than any other track, but the opening of “Take a Chance,” a throwback to Roxy Music’s experimental early years, must also have a lot of time to mix. The producer, Davies, thought the process a kind of creative cul-de-sac: it “ultimately burnt itself out, and the process became too long winded . . . You start spending two years or longer making a record.”55 Much of Avalon concerns sand running out of the hourglass, but Ferry seems not to have shared Davies’s rush to finish the record. “To Turn You On” has a diverse lineup, partly because it dates back to 1978 and Ferry’s solo effort, The Bride Stripped Bare. The song does not appear on that album but was drafted for it and left incomplete. Three years later the musical architect returned to work on his blueprint, and the song became the B side of Roxy Music’s John Lennon tribute “Jealous Guy” (a number 1 hit in the United Kingdom) and subsequently part of Avalon. Once abandoned, “To Turn You On” has been rerecorded by five different blues, soul, and rock artists: Wendy Slaton in 1990, John Shanks in 1997, Amelia Ray in 2009, J. Scott Bergman in 2011, and Robyn Hitchcock in 2014.56 Once it gets going, “To Turn You On” glitters and shimmers, with a text that finds Ferry in storytelling mode— another indication of its earlier genesis, along with the drum machine and thin synthesized keyboard sound at the start that extends the Bb major triad at the upper end of the register before a sudden crash on the downbeat on that same chord in the lower end. The lyrics include the line 46

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“I’d do anything to turn you on,” and that is the sound at the start: switches flipped on, knobs turned. The first verse has the bass guitar throbbing in eighths on the first beat, a half note on the third and fourth, and a sixteenth–eighth– sixteenth combo on the second. This syncopated groove is shot through with rubato that moves through Bb major to Ab major to G minor to Gb major. The chromatic slide from G to Gb and the fifths of these two chords, D and Db, add weirdness to the song. Juicy discords emerge from the suspended seconds in several of the harmonies and the fabulous crashing together of Bb with F and Eb with Gb chords in the chorus. The guitar solo two-thirds through— the golden section—sounds inside a built-up synthesized choir effect that must have taken ages to sample before the drop from Gb to the tonic Bb. Never has a song in the major wanted so much to be minor, bitonal, chromatic, or anything to titillate the ears. The song has an amorphous start and strange chords, but only when transcribed onto the two staves of the piano. Twenty-four tracks later, the music sounds smoother and much more consonant than it looks. Ferry’s, Davies’s, and Clearmountain’s production is so refined, so burnished, so devoid of the sweatiness of human bodies as to become an artificial paradise onto itself. The utopian fakeness is natural to the album, to Ferry, and to the early 1980s, when the idea of rain on Fifth Avenue was indeed romantic, as opposed to the reality of high heels stuck in potholes in a globally warmed deluge. Ferry is famed as much for the seductive allure of his music as for his talent at turning “hifalutin sleaze” into 47

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impressionist art. The phrase comes from the iconoclastic music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, who proposes that Ferry plays the eternally under-challenged roué, a man who can’t free himself from the grip of models long enough to find out whether love is really just a drug. So why were he and Roxy Music easy to like? Because they played so fiendishly well. Because we suspected Ferry never took any of it particularly seriously. Because the style we showed up for was such an efficient combination of fine stitching and coarse needs.57 Ferry creates textures that manage to disregard all the rules in songwriting school about cadences and voice leading and transitions but still seem right. The lyrics of “To Turn You On” are Romantic in the film noir sense, as are the lyrics of “True to Life,” referencing a mysterious “diamond lady with a thousand faces, I’ll never know.” He emphasizes that he’d “do anything to turn you on,” but desires have consequences, and no dream is just a dream. Roxy Music’s other records are more carnal. Ferry sings about inflatable doll love (“disposable darling . . . my breath is inside you”) over four chords of a movie palace organ on For Your Pleasure, seeking to score at the disco on Siren, and trashy “teenage fever” on Manifesto. The 37:31 minutes of Avalon instead indulge the platonic ideal of Eros and the cult of the most beautiful lady, the eternal feminine.58 What does the artifice atop artifice of “To Turn You On” communicate? Perhaps it means that, even knowing a dream is just a dream, you just don’t want to wake up. That’s the allure of the song that follows, “True to Life,” where layer on layer of Phil 48

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Manzanera’s guitar playing is subordinated to the vocal lines. His lines can still be heard in the interstices as the fragmented beginnings and endings of phrases, grace notes, random sounds, and paratactic leaps. Manzanera’s playing, at least as it represented on this track, is a sublation of the power of the lead guitarist—its simultaneous negation and preservation. In an encomium both to Avalon and Siren, music blogger Jeff Vaca highlights “the lightest of guitar notes . . . near the end of the second chorus” of “True to Life.” He points out that “it’s a small note, but the kind of note that makes you wonder whether it was intended, or just an accident of recording.”59 “Tara” is the swansong track of the swansong album, and it is fascinating to consider the relationship between “India,” which is but a groove, and “Tara,” which is but an improvisation played by Andy Mackay on soprano saxophone. The two tracks are the poles of an integrated musical experience. “Tara” is, on the surface, a cluster of sixteenth, eighth, dotted eighth, and thirty-second notes, with octave-length glissandi that look daunting in notation. A seasoned professional like Mackay can, however, perform them almost without thinking. His rubato, a form of bending time that also eludes notation, is intuitive—likewise his bending of the pitches above and below the mediants of the underpinning chords, a progression that falls from G major to F major and D minor before rising to A minor. The first G major chord excludes the third, opening a hollow in the texture to be filled by the saxophone. The piano twinkles deep in the texture behind the soloist’s pirouettes. “Tara” begins and ends with the sound of waves and synthesized chords that evoke natural paradise and its 49

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electronic representation. In Roxy Music fandom, “Tara” is a “kissing cousin” to the electrified, film noir-like saxophone solo heard in Vangelis’s soundtrack to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, released the same year as Avalon, but Mackay’s solo came into existence quite unprepossessingly.60 As Ferry recalls, [T]he solo was an improvisation luckily captured on tape by Rhett [Davies]. Andy M. was trying to get a sax part on one of the songs, and it wasn’t going too well. So I went into the live room and started to play the piano to try and change the mood with a chord sequence I’d been working on. Andy joined in with a lovely solo and “Tara” was made. I added strings later and sea sounds we recorded on the beach next to the house I was renting, which was called “Tara.”61 The word “Tara” has other associations, none lost on Ferry. “It is of course a name from Irish history and culture, and Ireland is where I initially conceived some of the pieces on the album.”62 In different languages at different times, the word has meant “star,” “light,” “diamond,” “sea goddess,” and more. “Avalon” is “apple island” in Celtic, and “Tara” is farewell (tarah) in Welsh.63 The Hill of Tara, moreover, is a hallowed battle and burial site in County Meath, Ireland. Archaeologists date it to 4000 bce and trace the rule of over one hundred kings, including the historical King of Munster, also known as the King of Anguish in the tales of King Arthur.64 The King of Munster is the father of La Belle Isolde, who falls for her one-time foe, the knight Tristan. Richard Wagner based the supreme Romantic music drama of the nineteenth century 50

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on the tale (Tristan und Isolde, 1859), and the final act opens with a cor anglais solo called the alte Weise, the “ancient tune” in the libretto. Mackay might or might not have known it, but such are the labyrinths the entire album leads us into. Just as the song “Avalon” might refer to a long ago and faraway person or place, or both, so does “Tara.”65 Consider, though, the 1875 ballad composed by Thomas Moore, called “The Harp That Once through Tara’s Halls,” and its correspondences with the last track on the album as well as the other track co-written by Mackay and Ferry, “While My Heart Is Still Beating.” Moore’s song complements Avalon as one of those lovely fossilizations of the Celtic past that most in Britain have forgotten, although Ireland has never ceased being exoticized and oppressed as England’s Other. There are of course other Others on the album—India is named, but there’s also Haiti, rock’s usual African American aspects, and indigenous South American intonations in the mix—but this Other is the closest to the band’s home. There once stood a castle on the hill; lords and ladies walked the halls; it was demolished before the English came to Ireland; the harp fell silent, and with it the land’s true spirit.66 Moore’s text preserves the eight/six syllable count that is a mainstay of that tradition: The harp that once through Tara’s halls The soul of music shed, Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls As if that soul were fled. So sleeps the pride of former days, So glory’s thrill is o’er,

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And hearts that once beat high for praise, Now feel that pulse no more! No more to chiefs and ladies bright The harp of Tara swells; The chord alone that breaks at night, Its tale of ruin tells. Thus Freedom now so seldom wakes, The only throb she gives Is when some heart indignant breaks, To show that still she lives.67

Remixes, actual and potential Ferry, Mackay, and Manzanera parted after an exhausting tour, but they returned to the stage in 2001 and remained in one another’s orbits. Numerous artists have covered their songs—to date there have been thirty-nine versions of “More than This” and fourteen of “Avalon”—but the group itself covered the repertoire better.68 Roxy Music became its own tribute band, turning the irony of the tribute band phenomenon on its head.69 Having engineered the group’s greatest success, Ferry kept control of its legacy; Mackay and Manzanera turned away but then sought a reclamation. In the same year as Avalon, Manzanera released his third solo album, Primitive Guitars, which has an autobiographical element in referencing the countries where he lived as a child, starting out on Spanish guitar, cuatro, and tiple before 52

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electric guitar. Manzanera’s mother was Colombian; they moved through Havana (before Castro), Caracas, Bogotá, Honolulu, and Los Angeles—not the Los Angeles of the silver screen but Ferry’s Los Angeles.70 The track on Primitive Guitars called “Ritmo de Los Angeles” might refer to the city’s barrio or the Chilean city called Los Ángeles or all the “cities of angels” in the world (there’s even a Los Angeles in Thailand). This Los Angeles, everywhere and nowhere, is what Black Francis cryptically sings about: I met a man He was a good man Sailing and shoring Dancing the beta cancan71 Manzanera’s drum machine dances the cancan on the track— more precisely, the subdivision of the four/four rhythm mimics a Venezuelan maraca pattern—and his red Firebird guitar (the closest he could get to the red Hofner Galaxie he played as a kid72) generates an entrancing tune, stressing the augmented second, a generic marker of the exotic. The album’s first track, titled “Criollo” (a person of Spanish descent born in Central or South America), references a joropo, a style of music comparable to the fandango accompanied with metal-stringed harp and maracas.73 Manzanera’s track shares the rhythm and sonic markers of “Alma Llanera” (Soul of the plains), among other famed joropos. He plays a tiple and twelve-string guitar on the track, with the rhythmic pattern doubled and panned hard left– right to give it a broad stereo image. Manzanera also claimed knowledge of cumbia, a type of popular music and courtship 53

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dance that emerged from a collision of cultures, an ethnicerotic jam that means something different in every Latin American country.74 Bolero, tango, and salsa all have complicated chronologies, as does an album that draws from these genres together with “folk” songs named after Bogotá and Medellín. Besides the “primitive” drum machine and a bit of bass guitar played by John Wetton, everything on the album comes from Manzanera’s guitar-encyclopedic imagination. The grooves range from disco to techno to funk, with unguessable Latinx intonations, Frippertronics, psychedelia—sounds that seem to have a life of their own filling the space. The album includes Spanish-language exhortations and (I think) palmas, the rhythmic clapping of hands. “Caracas” has a funkiness that would not be out of place on the Talking Heads album Remain in Light. Most of the nine tracks on the original release frame a solo; in each, Manzanera carves out beautifully abstract lines through the registers. “Europe 70-1” offers high-pitched swelling notes above synth chords. It’s difficult to recognize the sound as guitar, owing to the incredibly thick processing. The track has delay and reverb and fuzz pedal and pitch modulation via tremolo arm, with a slow gear pedal giving repeated notes repeated swells—a minimalist musical dream. “Europe 70-1” is paired on the album with “Europe 80-1,” a track of comparable atmosphere but with acoustic guitar in the strange spoken section at the end. Opposite is “La Nueva Ola,” referring to the “new wave” of musicians who brought European rock to Central and South America. The disco beat underpins a

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palm-muted melodic hook that sounds like the kind of B-movie action music Quentin Tarantino fetishizes. Manzanera might be saying something about stereotypes, but it’s unclear. The soundtrack ends at 1:49 with overdriven guitar with harmonizer, and then another overdriven guitar with reverb doubles the tune at 2:13. There is no track called “Primitive Guitars” on Primitive Guitars. Instead, Manzanera provides the opposite throughout, proving how sophisticated the musics of the Americas are, plus adds the utopian “Impossible Guitar,” a piece he performed with Roxy Music on the 1982–3 Avalon/High Road tour. Novelties include glissandi played with chorus and distortion at the start, a countermelody, double-stops, harmonics, out-oftune modulating sounds, and vintage 1980s reverb that exuberantly pushes the guitars (it can’t be played alone—that’s the impossible part) through the stereo field. Manzanera represents his past with agreeable lightness, adding bits and pieces of oddly witty dialogue captured on a studio mike and inserted between the tracks, all from the 1973 Roxy Music recording sessions at Air Studios and all from Manzanera’s cassette recorder.75 On For Your Pleasure, Ferry can be heard singing “Oh yeah” after a snippet of the fat snare drum from “The Bogus Man,” and Manzanera complains of “dreadful” piano playing in one snatch of studio banter. Elsewhere the words “we will be teenagers casing the teenager scene” are sung in harmony to echoing laughter. Talking about Primitive Guitars at the time of its release, Manzanera references his mother’s guitar lessons together with his frustrations with Roxy Music:

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What I got from her was the groove—the rhythms she loved, which was cumbia and stuff like that. That influenced me to always try, through the use of echo, to play doubletime in Roxy Music. I would say, “Come on guys, let’s groove it up a bit.” It was not easy, because there wasn’t a lot of space. But over my whole period of playing with Roxy, there were various times where I managed to get it in, just by using eighth and/or sixteenth notes with an echo repeat. But apart from that, nothing really. Throughout the entire Seventies, nobody was interested in my background from South America. But in my solo work, I started referencing some of those things.76 Rolling Stone took up this idea. In a combined four-star review of Avalon and Primitive Guitars, Kurt Loder complained that “Guitarist Phil Manzanera is poorly utilized on Avalon—at times he sounds like he’s walking through his parts.”77 The guitarist blamed the pressure the band was under “to break in America” on the reduction of his presence on the album. He also noted the dominance of “Bryan’s fantasy.”78 Primitive Guitars is a lot of things, including experimental passages retrieved from Avalon outtakes and grooved up. In the aggregate, Primitive Guitars is an exercise in transcendence, both in guitar playing that reaches beyond the guitar itself (such as Prince would later strive to do) and in the knitting together of disparate musical materials.79 Another remix is unlikely but has been mooted by Ferry. It is a prodigal son fantasy, with Brian Eno returning from the wilderness of his long and groundbreaking career in sound

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sculpture. A new Avalon would not, however, recapture the iconoclasm of Roxy Music as a band that had displaced the divisions between high and low art, taking on, consciously or not, what aestheticians call “the paradox of the ineffable.”80 Roxy Music’s first album, as a provocative fashion statement and surrealist manifesto, relied on Eno’s experiments, which wafted through the texture like “sea breezes.”81 Eno applied his experiments as a painter and sculptor at the Winchester School of Art to his work at the synthesizer so that the relationship between music and text is carefully randomized, like a “chance meeting.” As Rob Tannenbaum wrote in 1985, “Eno’s solos on [the 1972 and 1973 Roxy Music songs] ‘Remake/Remodel’ and ‘Do The Strand’ have an aleatoric abandon that’s still startling.”82 The lyrics of the band’s debut single (released in advance of the first album) ends with a rhyme, “What’s her name Virginia Plain.” There’s neither a question mark in this sentence nor a referent for her: the name comes from the tobacco brand and a painting of a packet of cigarettes by Ferry.83 Avalon is a very different album. Most listeners are attracted to its sensuousness, but the album is a careful assemblage of strict forms, harmonic patterns, and production techniques that would seem to undercut the sensual experience. How can such careful planning result in an experience so immediate? One of the draft tracks, “Movie, Move Me,” intertwines phonemes on an album of intertwined emotions and rhythms of desire. Some of the instrumentals approach the aesthetic and technique of “ambience,” the style and genre most associated with Eno. His inspiration came from US composer John Cage and Cage’s “we’re getting nowhere” ruminations on 57

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absence—the whiteness around and between the lines of a poem, the rests and fermatas of music. Cage’s 1937 Credo sets out two basic principles, both embraced by Eno: first, that music is an “organization of sound,” with sound defined in the broadest possible terms, embracing life and death; and, second, the usual methods for composing, performing, and recording music are inadequate for the composer invested in the entire field of sound. Cage rejected conventional, collegetaught compositional methods, and Eno, who has spent his career defining himself as a non-techno non-musician, shared Cage’s ultramodernist disdain for all that “blots out” natural “spontaneous” sound.84 Cage allowed noises from the outside world to enter his works. Most infamously, he generated a piano piece that requires the pianist to do nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, simply to illustrate that pure silence is impossible to achieve. Eno moves from the noise of the cityscape to the silence of the cosmos, proving the same point. In a spacesuit you hear your heartbeat. The idea is to get manufactured music out of the ear and tune into the big M (Music) of the cosmos, recognizing that the composer might get in the way of the music. Eno, again perhaps following Cage’s example, manipulated a tape player and synthesizer as the band’s official “aural collagist” to remove himself as author from his compositions, allowing the machines to take over.85 Cage manipulated the piano. He asked that all kinds of objects be inserted into the strings and soundboard so that the instrument would sound purely percussive. Press a key; hear a thump. His magnum opus for “prepared” piano, 58

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Perilous Night, was misunderstood, indeed lampooned. Humiliated, Cage tacked to an extreme, leaving compositional procedures, expression, and interpretation up to chance. His withdrawal of the ego in music, always cast as a profound aesthetic and spiritual statement, is also just wounded pride. Eno embraced noise while withdrawing himself in the mid-1970s on “The Big Ship” from the electronic pastoral Another Green World. He added noise to the first two Roxy Music albums, then departed for that halcyon realm, recognizing that the Roxy Music ship could have only one captain, and he had other plans. Eno was provocative, full of ideas, and a fun interview, but the band was Ferry’s, who was less interested in “drifting abstract cognition” than creating a higher beauty on twenty-four-track recorders.86 These “Gothic pieces of music,” in Eno’s description, were meant to fill “up every space and every corner of the canvas.”87 Eno pivoted away from such ornateness after immersing in music by Cage and minimalist composers like Steve Reich. Eno was especially attracted to Reich’s work for two tape recorders, It’s Gonna Rain: It’s a loop of tape of a preacher saying, “It’s gonna rain, it’s gonna rain, it’s gonna rain, it’s gonna rain.” And at the same time, on another recording, the same loop is being played at a slightly different speed. So that gradually, the two tapes are sliding out of sync. And a very interesting thing happens to your brain, which is that any information which is common, after several repetitions, you cease to hear. You reject the common information, rather like if

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you gaze at something for a long time, you’ll cease to really see it. You’ll see any aspect of it that’s changing, but the static elements you won’t see. And what fascinated me with that piece was that it generated a kind of audible difference and patterns. The amount of material there is extremely limited, but the amount of activity it triggers in you is very rich and complex.88 Reich was interested in making audible his production and creative methods, whereas Cage preferred the mysteriousness of I Ching and other inaudible determinants of musical organization. Reich imagined the listener fixating on the transparent structure of his music, grasping the shifts in its phases, and experiencing nirvana through submission to the process. Performing and listening to the breath-length phrases becomes a form of meditation. Eno occupies the middle ground between his two influences but pushes more toward the mystical on his ambient recordings. There is no beat, no ictus, and how he determined proportion and length is not perceptible; the experience of his music contrasts Reich’s follow-the-method approach. Discreet Music (1975) introduced the term “ambient,” but Eno’s 1979 public space album for fearful flyers, Ambient 1: Music for Airports, is his best-known exercise in ambient music—music “meant to be heard but not necessarily listened to,” as British producer Norrie Paramor said of mood or meditation music.89 Silence of a minute or so ends three of the four tracks on Ambient 1, the last fading into silence over ten seconds, following the repetition, in variation, of discrete sounds, the limbo of waiting in the terminal, the constant

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change and sameness of the flow of passengers. The album is conducive to meditation in its soothingly transporting aspects and rejects everything associated with the 1970s popular music sound, the safe place called “The Crystal Palace of Soft Rock.”90 This is music that, in its predictable repetitions, does the listening on behalf of the listener. Eno in response became interested in “listening to listening.”91 Eno defined “ambience” in vaguely impressionistic terms as an “atmosphere or a surrounding influence, a tint.”92 He remembered half listening (or hearing) an LP of harp music at low volume, with one wonky speaker, in a room with rain falling outside. He had been in an automobile accident and couldn’t get out of bed. The plucking of the harp and pinging of the rain flowed in and out of his head.93 The sound inspired music that, according to philosopher John Lysaker, was “too interesting to be ignored and too diffuse to be followed.” Ambience is liberating and affirming; since it has no diktat, it frees the listener to personalize the experience. “There just isn’t any compositional structure into which we might be forced,” Lysaker writes. “And if we submit to what does unfold, if we surrender, we submit to a kind of general easement in a site of relative safety. Our attention is drawn away from the habits and orders of the day, and we find ourselves before the horizon of that suspension but amid relatively pleasant, even calming musical successions.”94 Eno sought a “sonic, ethereal, peaceful, relaxing, chilled-out, becalming, good-vibe-inducing sort of heaven,” which filmmakers have appropriated after the fact.95 In 1983 he was commissioned to provide sound for a real, pre-existing film and composed a 4:20 track that has since had an 61

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immense emotional (thus un-Cageian) impact on listeners, from teenagers tripping under the stars to the infirm imagining their funerals. I refer to the ambience of the fifth track of Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, written and performed by Eno with the help of his brother Roger and Daniel Lanois. It was conceived as the background for the film For All Mankind (1989), about eighty minutes of 35 mm footage from the Apollo moon missions. Mediocre reviews resulted in new narrations, interviews, some excisions, and a reordering. The sound on the album references, slowed down and psychedelicized, waltzes and the country-and-western music the three astronauts on the mission took into space. The weightlessness of the new frontier is represented along with the hypothetical sounds of aliens. The Eno brothers and Lanois used steel guitar, voltage-controlled oscillators, and a Suzuki omnichord operated by touch and buttons to create a reverberant, hollowed-out texture that translates the astronauts’ gazes into nothingness through the window of their small spacecraft. The fifth track, “An Ending (Ascent),” is meant to suggest a hymn or chorale. It runs together three major chords (Ab, Db, and Eb) and one seventh chord in the minor (Bb) gleaming high register. (The glorious positivity of the effect stems from Eno’s apparent decision to run the processed chordal sequence backward.) As testament to his innovations, his music has entered music-history textbooks, despite his once painting his hair silver and pounding the keyboard with kitchen utensils. He has since become, as Chris Martin of Coldplay will attest, one of the most successful music producers in history. 62

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For environmental reasons Eno did not fly to the United States for Roxy Music’s 2019 inauguration into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The band’s first drummer, Paul Thompson, cited “other commitments” through the group’s publicist, so the long-hoped-for reunion of the original Roxy Music lineup did not happen.96 Still, Eno and Ferry have stayed in contact over the years.97 They co-wrote the fetching final track on Ferry’s 2002 solo album Frantic, “I Thought,” which recalls some of the background keyboard and percussion effects on Eno’s famed third studio album, Another Green World, from 1975. To hear the two of them singing together on the track is a poignant souvenir of iconic early Roxy. Eno and Ferry also co-wrote “Wildcat Days,” which appears on the 1994 Mamouna, and Eno is credited with the electronic “treatments” on this record.98 Ferry is a fan of both Eno’s ambient records and his more transgressive side, the Blade Runner/We Are the World futurism evident in his collaboration with David Byrne called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. That 1981 album offers up a musique concrète mash-up of Lebanese, Algerian, and African American radio voices with tip-top studio drumming, words from the Koran, and metal banging against plastic thumping. Eno became an artist by surrendering creative control in the studio, working quickly, capturing whatever came in the wind. The Nonesuch label released the multitracks of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts to the remixers of the world in 2006, giving the idea of authorship a belated heave-ho.99 Ferry’s songs, too, have been remixed, but he is much more committed to authorial control. Any and all indeterminate elements are made to seem like 63

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part of the plan, a feature of the musical latticework, not a flaw. The music of Avalon is “gothic” (to refer back to Eno’s oblique critique) in its delicate and intricate acoustic architecture, but its ribs and buttresses are hidden so that the illusion is preserved. This description of Eno’s techniques exposes the architecture, at least in part, and explains the technical processes that make the music: The original setup for the production of ambient music was the delay-line system: an assemblage of tape recorders, filters, and tone generators arranged in a variety of orderings and pairings, each rendering slight variations in tempo, texture, timbre, and harmonic variability. From a tone generator such as a synthesizer playing a complex sound, to an oscillator producing a single pure sine wave, nearly all of the inputs into this assemblage emerge largely unrecognizable compared to their original derivation. The sound from the original input device passes through a variety of filtration units, generally either a graphic equalizer that modulates the amplitude of certain band frequencies in the tone, or an echo or reverb unit that widens the psychoacoustic space of the sound and increases the depth in which we appear to hear it. Finally, the modified signal(s) reaches a series of tape recorders, and as the signal passes over the tape heads, often looping many times, the instances of sound repeat with diminishing volume levels. Thus, Eno and others are able to generate sounds that appear to emerge from nothingness, slowly twist and bend in their resonance, and decay into oblivion.100

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The means might be different, but are not the words in the final sentence the perfect description of the reverberations on the twenty-four/forty-eight tracks of Avalon? The B side to the “Avalon” single in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan (and to “More than This” in the United States) is a track called “Always Unknowing.” It suggests something of Eno’s atmospherics, although he was not involved in making the track. Neil Hubbard plays guitar, with exquisite touch and choice of pitches and a distant hat tip to B. B. King. (Hubbard performed on King’s Deuces Wild album of 1997, so obviously deeply admired him.) At the four-minute mark, the guitar line uses prominent King-style pinch harmonics. The reference reveals the truth and lie of the song in the blues universals of loss and melancholia. Ferry sings of Venus, the morning and evening star, as understanding yet unknowing, weaving his way through the minor mode: Follow the morning star But there’s no sense In always running Take what you want and go Just give me time Always unknowing The world pass you by That’s how it looks Always unknowing

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Don’t you leave my side There’s no sense In always running Just one more time Is all I need Always unknowing Hold back the night With your sighs Always unknowing Ferry’s studied disinterest suggests a suspicion of the senses, the knowing that how something looks isn’t what it is. The guitar responds to the call of the main vocal part, and the two background voices interact along with meandering ahs from Ferry as recorded on different tracks. Excluding the Linn pattern, the music (vocals, guitar, and saxophone) acts like the words, repeating similar sounds at different times. Newmark, the live drummer on Avalon, explains that the tom fills sound like me doing an overdub. Those fills are exactly the way I play, but they might have copied my fills using a drum machine. I must say, it sounds and feels like me playing all those tom fills. But the bass drum and cross stick on 2 and 4 and the snare backbeat on 2 and 4 sound like the LinnDrum. It might be my snare drum sampled and inserted on the backbeats.101

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Whatever the precise origins of the sounds, “Always Unknowing” is a gem yet did not make it onto Avalon, leaving “Tara” as the close. Perhaps Hubbard dropped too much heaviness into a texture, or perhaps “Always Unknowing” seemed too much akin to the last song of Flesh + Blood, “Running Wild,” and its self-reflexive cant: “there’s that melody again / where it’s coming from I must have been.” The phased and flanged effects of “Always Unknowing” belong to an astral plane; Ferry instead opted to end Avalon in another of Eno’s creative locations: “On some faraway beach.” This location is the title of one of Eno’s songs as well as the title of a biography by David Sheppard exploring Eno’s postRoxy career.102 If Eno had an ally in the band it was neither Ferry nor Manzanera but the reed player, Andy Mackay. He brought Eno into Roxy Music, and the two shared an escapist interest in underground, electronic, and bebop musicians of New York during the late 1950s. They were particularly attracted to the dreamscapes composed by Morton Feldman, to whom Eno is indebted (through Cage) and to whom Mackay might also have been—had he decided to complete the journey with Eno. He turned back. Mackay played oboe in school, then took up the saxophone as an English major at the University of Reading. He did not finish the degree—rock and roll took him away—but developed a significant interest in Eno’s playlist: music by Feldman and Cage, free-form improvisation, German electronic music architect Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Russian inventor Léon Theremin. Mackay wrote a short book about these figures and the general history of electronic

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music in 1981, as Avalon was being made.103 It includes potted histories of the microphone and speaker, plus references to famous modernist composers. He begins by discussing Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori instruments and L’arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noises) manifesto of 1910 and ends in 1979 with the Fairlight synthesizer. It’s quite a journey for just 124 pages of text, including pictures. He’s a great performer, a good songwriter, and a fair orchestrator of the Hollywood Romantic type. During a Roxy Music hiatus, Mackay wrote the songs for Rock Follies, a short-lived 1976–7 UK television series about a fictional group of aspiring female singers. (They adopted the English persona of the Andrews Sisters but go on the road as a cabaret act and get duped into soft porn. The second abbreviated season becomes extremely strange, taking them into the world of Alice Cooper and on to a record label called SM, as in sadomasochism.) A pretend tearjerker for Royal Air Force vets, Mackay’s song “Glenn Miller Is Missing” is simple and gentle but didn’t sell when released as a single. The complete soundtrack, which ranges wildly from ballads to roller-skate disco, did well. Like Manzanera and Ferry, Mackay has released albums of his own material. The first, In Search of Eddie Riff, is a technical showcase of 1960s songs like “Wild Weekend” but also contains an intentionally ridiculous honking sax version of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”104 (Fun fact: Morrissey, who hate-loves Roxy Music, occasionally used “Eddie Riff ” as a pseudonym.)105 Mackay also made a maudlin record inspired by a trip to China, composed spa music for an actual spa at the Park Hotel Kenmare, and in 2009 released a 68

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collection of rock-and-roll bric-a-brac under the title Andy Mackay and the Metaphors. To call the album uncategorizable in terms of genre, as Mackay does on his website, is no less self-defensive a gesture than Eno’s “I’m not a musician.”106 Some of it is easy listening (Julie Thornton adds concert harp); some is 1972 Roxy Music redux with Paul Thompson back on drums; the rest suggests a shortage of ideas. Nine years after Avalon, Mackay completed a bachelor’s degree in divinity at King’s College and took to the idea of setting Latin and Hebrew to musical material that he had recorded on tape in grabbed moments. The result is the 2018 solo album, 3 Psalms. It’s a musical morass: prog rock confronts Frank Ocean slow jams, Stockhausen-lite electronica, guileless singing meant to recall Mackay’s choirboy days, a Czech string orchestra often used for commercials, and Manzanera on guitar. The scoring isn’t bad, as software-aided scoring goes. The strings sound like strings, rather than a piano, but as a statement of faith it proves paradoxically dispiriting, despite reflecting the composer’s confrontation with mortality during a cancer scare. Mackay told an interviewer that “at first the psalms piece was going to be electronic and experimental, a bit Stockhausen,” but he couldn’t realize it with his setup at the time.107 Listening to it, I missed Eddie Riff. I also missed those girls missing Glenn Miller, about whom Mackay wrote such a pretty song. His 2019 collaboration with Manzanera on reimagined hybrid rock, orchestral, and choral versions of eight Roxy Music songs is partial redemption, the lemon with some juice left. It seems also to be an exercise in reclamation, reminding listeners of their songwriting contributions to 69

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Avalon and the other albums. It wasn’t all Ferry, the album insists. Roxymphony is inventive but seems calibrated for prog rock veterans who thought they could get into orchestral music but never did. And wasn’t the rejection of orchestral schmaltz the point of rock and roll? Still, “More than This” is fascinatingly unrecognizable, the piano and chirping strings revealing what the song might have been like had Manzanera exerted more influence on the original and had Ferry not drawn ever “closer to the session musicians” who indulged his obsessions with polish and precision.108 One of Roxy Music’s habits is discordant amorphousness, parts sliding around one another like vapors, with a groove, lyrics, and hook occasionally visible. Here the tics recur, but the traditional tonal foundation is rethought for the sake of the orchestra. It works and it doesn’t, the microtonal glissandi recalling Jean Sibelius, the chromatic passages trolling Phantom of the Opera trolling Psycho. “More than This” benefits the greatest from reharmonization, “Sentimental Fool” from increased chromatic eeriness and disjunct melodic slithering. The album suffers from the stately but kitschy recitation of lyrics by the London community choir enlisted for the gig. The “Tara” do-over modestly succeeds. Mackay sounds better than the original. Ferry provided orchestral texture on synthesizer the first time around; now the track gets the real thing with the added bonus of Manzanera on steel-string acoustic guitar in counterpoint with the soprano sax until an extremely quick switch to electric at 3:50. The entire touchsensitive spectrum of his overdrive is presented on Roxymphony, in graceful dialogue with his long-time 70

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collaborator on saxophone. “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” opens with clean guitar ostinato, sul ponticello strings and pizzicato strings, plus a whispered text with reverb reminiscent of the 1973 horror film, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. The violins slither, a cello moans, and then the orchestra mimes a heavy metal freak-out, with Manzanera bending strings to the breaking point. I wonder what Cage would have thought of it, given his description of rock amplification as time-blurringly transcendent.109 Everything is amplified on the album, including the shrill tremolo across notes a half step apart in the upper strings. “Bitter-Sweet,” a cabaret send-up from the Country Life album, is half-good, especially in the power-chord-backed, Rammstein-like German-language declamation: Nein, das ist nicht Das Ende der Welt Gestrandet an Leben und Kunst No, this is not The end of the world Stranded in love and art If Avalon were summed up in five words, it might be this last line.

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The High Road

Roxy Music toured from the start, mostly in the United Kingdom, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia. For complicated cultural, demographic, and commercial reasons, the group did not pierce the US market until “Love Is the Drug” in the mid-1970s. Roxy Music opened for Jethro Tull in 1972 for twenty-four shows, performing in massive arenas and small clubs and medium-sized venues like Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga.1 There followed six US shows as the main act in 1974, ten in 1975, nineteen in 1976 (one canceled because of low ticket sales), and nineteen in 1979. Flesh + Blood did not bring the group to the United States, but Avalon, conceived with the commercial (no longer free-form) FM dial in mind, broke sufficiently into the record-buying market to justify a twentyfour-show North American tour.2 Between August 12, 1982, and May 28, 1983, the group played in fifty-four venues around the globe, beginning modestly at the Savoy Theatre in Limerick and ending at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia. Roxy Music toured west to east in the United States and Canada, with half a dozen shows in California, followed by gigs in Vancouver and Edmonton, the US Rust Belt, Toronto 73

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and Montreal, and New York’s Radio City.3 The cognoscenti handed out four- and five-star reviews. The old-school critics, still in tune with their punk rock salad days, lamented the absence of Eno-era edginess, but most extolled the note-for-note perfection of the ninety-minute set. This was not just another loud rock band; the quality of the live sound awed.4 The stage was backed by ten rows of venetian blinds in constant motion, smoke and light seeping through large panes, casting sullen shadows on the band members, the audience, and the floor.5 The core trio—Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay, and Phil Manzanera—dressed in perfect accord with the minimalist, cool background. Ferry kept it simple in

Figure 4: The High Road. Source: Getty Images.

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a plain black suit and white shirt, black hair carefully disheveled.6 The words “lounge lizard” recur boringly in the reviews, but Ferry was also described as a classier (or simply classy) version of Frank Sinatra.7 Aside from the three musicians fronting the band, an elaborate rhythm section of seven (sometimes eight) players, as well as three (sometimes two) backup singers—who were said to have brought a soulinspired bluesy sound to the work—came along with the right costumes for the occasion, including silver reflective capes (see Figure 4).8 Roxy Music contracted Fonzi Thornton as a backup singer for the tour. Yanick Étienne was unavailable, and in her place the group recruited Tawatha Agee, a gospel singer and rising solo artist from Pittsburgh. She has recorded one solo album, Welcome to My Dream (1987), but her recognition in 1983 came from her performance with James Mtume on “Juicy Fruit,” a slow “thigh ride” of a song whose lyrics flirt with a content warning.9 Titillation was less Agee’s calling card at the time than her perfect pitch and the heaven-directed upper range of soul/funk/gospel fare like “You, Me, and He” and “Tie Me Up,” as well as the live “Avalon.” Michelle Cobbs also joined the tour. She was close to Thornton and, having performed with him on his song “Pumpin’ ” (1984), was an obvious replacement for Étienne. Besides Ferry, she has sung with Laurie Anderson, the B-52’s, Paul Simon, and Luther Vandross. She also sang with Chic and from Chic ended up being recruited by Duran Duran. The band’s producer, Ian Little, recalls the band getting “some Black session vocalists in from New York for ‘The Reflex’— BJ Nelson and Michelle Cobbs—and I told them to sing like 75

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little girls: ‘La-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la.’ ”10 Compared to this tawdriness, Ferry’s treatment of his Black session vocalists was more respectful, if still artistically unequal. Agee had nothing but positive memories of Roxy Music. The Avalon tour in 1983 with King Crimson and Adrian Belew was my first world tour. In the middle of it, Roxy Music allowed me to return to the U.S. to complete my lead vocals with my group Mtume on our album Juicy Fruit, which became the # 1 R&B record in 1983. Roxy Music was so gracious that they played my song during the intermissions at their shows. I also had the pleasure of performing “Avalon” with Roxy Music when they were inducted into the 2019 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.11 Blackness often appeals to whiteness as a fantasy of difference. Ferry recalls Motown as an escape from the despair of “life in a northern town” (to quote Dream Academy’s hit single). “From the age of about 10,” Ferry recounts, “every week you’d discover somebody new. I was very much into jazz. I loved Little Richard and Fats Domino, but when I heard Charlie Parker for the first time, this was something I really loved, and nobody else who I knew knew anything about him.”12 Besides Parker, Ferry has always loved Billie Holiday “because she was so inventive, and soulful, and just so cool.”13 He cites the soul music of the Stax label too and all of the jazz greats referenced on his recent solo album, Bitter-Sweet, as influences.14 Roxy Music thus numbers one among many British bands drawing their inspiration from Black Americans generally and Black American women specifically.15 76

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Reviewers fond of the Roxy Music back catalog note the jazz/blues/Motown expansion of the original sextet and comment on the loss of spaciousness in the music as well as a disconnectedness. Ferry acknowledged the price of “refinement, in terms of it being too soft” and pledged a harder, rawer sound in the future.16 The result can be heard on Ferry’s solo song “Limbo” (1988), among other post-Roxy tracks. For diehard fans of the harder, rawer sound, the Roxy Music of Avalon was a watered-down version of the faster but more brooding band of the Stranded, Country Life, and Siren albums—the band that grooved along with P-Funk and against the Bee Gees.17 The fact that neither of the concerts on May 2 and 3, 1983, sold out at the Los Angeles Universal Amphitheatre perhaps speaks to this point.18 Audiences there wanted the old Roxy Music. In other venues around North America, however, tickets disappeared quickly, and reviewers rhapsodized the pivot to satin-textured mellowness. US East Coast audiences loved it; Canadian audiences too. According to the Washington Post review of the May 23 performance in Baltimore, the crowd erupted with “a kind of welcome usually reserved for military heroes or religious leaders.” The “Main Thing” was followed by “stunner” after “stunner.”19 In Edmonton twelve days earlier, the crowd burst through the security barricade and rushed the stage.20 In the reviews the highlights of the concert were the band’s covers (recorded separately from Avalon) of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” and Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane.” The Young cover, Jim Sullivan wrote of the May 27 Boston show, was “superb” with “soulful, ethereal backup vocals, a 77

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simmering sax break from Mackay, a burning guitar break from Manzanera.”21 John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” was the resonant encore. Ferry whistled the break, and, according to Ethlie Ann Vare from Billboard, left the audience breathless.22 No wonder: Ferry performs this song a lot on his solo tours, and the whistling can last over two and a half minutes. Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” is frail song with a touch of malice; Ferry’s cover is laden with ennui until the whistling, when, in Andrew Rostan’s impassioned assessment, Ferry “leaves the song behind” and channels something new, an expression of heartbreak and wistfulness and, ultimately, love. It’s as if Verdi had written a whistle into one of his arias and John Coltrane was improvising off of it. As if the last human alive had only one final moment to express something real and true, had lost the use of his vocal chords, and was channeling every emotion into this controlled breath.23 I confess, while I don’t hear anything of Coltrane’s style in the whistling, much less the end-times of humanity, it’s enchanting. The lushness of Roxy Music’s studio and live sound is emphasized over and over again in the reviews. Mackay’s fiendishly great saxophone and (on “Out of the Blue”) oboe playing garners much praise, as does the hustle of “Love Is the Drug,” bolstered on tour by bassist Alan Spenning. Audiences reveled in the selections from Avalon (five in all, with a tape of “India” used as pre-show mood music). Keener listeners wondered if Ferry was caught in a style-versussubstance (or friction-versus-polish) conflict within himself. 78

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Don Waller, a historian of Motown and rocker in his own right, described the seventeen-song set as “smoldering to sweetly sad, from continentally cool to razor-fight raucous.” Quite the canniest comment came from this same writer, who dubbed Avalon “Roxy’s most lush, most languid disc to date. A record of extraordinary beauty, it was laced with irony just the same.”24 Bad faith? Hardly. Ill will? No, not that either. Ferry’s irony is that of modernism: the irony of pretension. The experience of love’s labor’s lost is buried in style and affect but remains a painful matter.25 Roxy Music broke up at the end of the tour, exhausted with one another and the music they had made over a decade. Having lived the high life, Ferry, Manzanera, and Mackay shook hands in a hotel elevator, separately boarded the Concorde, and brought the curtain down on their collaboration. Just as Avalon took its place on the radio dial alongside the edgier Fleetwood Mac songs, Roxy Music was effectively finished as a creative entity. There would be a 2001 reunion tour, but no new songs, and smaller reunion tours up to the fifteen shows of the For Your Pleasure tour of 2011: seven appearances in the United Kingdom, one in New Zealand, and seven in Australia. Since then Bryan Ferry has been an exclusively solo act, excluding the set the core trio played together for the 2019 Hall of Fame inauguration.

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The After-Party

The end of the pinup For a decade, Roxy Music was an aspirational, innovative lifestyle brand—long before such marketing clichés emerged. Bryan Ferry established himself in his twenties as a musical iconoclast clad in translucent fashion, and he took that shimmer to a knowing extreme in the group’s promotional videos. His pink suit in the video of “Angel Eyes,” with angels in gold and silver surrounding him, tires this writer’s eyes but bedazzled Stuart Lenig in his book about glam rock.1 In the disavowed video for “Avalon,” Sophie Ward’s dress, makeup, and movement evoke the ideal of the “Gibson Girl,” who emerged in the 1890s as a symbol of the “new woman” of the Progressive Era—the era of US modernism and of the suffrage movement. Artist Charles Dana Gibson created the ideal US girl in a series of iconic illustrations that blatantly objectify women in a bid to define beauty. Yet, in seeking to fix the ideal in such representations, Gibson admitted the elusiveness of female power. His most famous image is his 1901 The Eternal Question, with the coiffure of the model in profile outlining a question mark. Evelyn Nesbit was Gibson’s 81

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muse, but so too were his wife, Irene Langhorne, and her sisters as well as the romantic comedy actor Ethyl Barrymore, who starred on the New York stage but came from a distinguished theatrical family dating all the way back to the Elizabethan era.2 In the “Avalon” video, Ward looks like Barrymore: the gown is similar, as well as the pileup of hair and chiseled features carved out by makeup. The video recalls another iconic Gibson image, The Crush (1901), which shows a stately young woman, facing forward, and a diminutive man to her side. He is paying court to her, but she is completely indifferent. Her parents spy on the scene, her mother shocked that her daughter could be so unobliging. Gibson created a similar pen-and-ink illustration called The Weaker Sex (1903) that depicts four young women peering through a magnifying glass at an insect-sized man on his knees. One of the women is about to jab him with a hatpin. The Gibson girl in “Avalon” isn’t having it. She rejects the boy, sticking her pin into his desire. He’s deflated and acutely feels the sting of her allure. The Roxy Music album covers are no less iconic than Gibson’s images. Roxy Music 1 features model Kari-Ann Muller as the embodiment of a pink neon sign. An old friend of mine, lover of camp and self-declared ambassador of nerditude, assumed the cover showed a male in drag; the truth disappointed him. One of the songs, “Ladytron,” welcomes robot love with Stepford-wives connotations. It finds its disturbing parallel in the second album’s “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” best known for featuring Playboy model Amanda Lear. An online tribute to the Roxy Music album covers notes that rumors of Lear’s having been born in 82

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France as Alain Tapp have persisted throughout the decades.3 The convolutions of desire continue on the third album, Stranded, which also features an English “Playmate” on the cover, Marilyn Cole, the first model to appear full-frontal nude in the magazine. The cover of Roxy Music 4 features two German groupies in see-through underwear posing in front of shrubbery, a kitschy representation of (to quote lyrics from the first album) “country life and all of its joys.” The image would have been censored in the United States, so the US edition excluded the women, leaving everything, as opposed to nothing, to the imagination. Just the foliage is left—bushes of another sort. Roxy Music 5, Siren, stars Jerry Hall in mermaid blue on a rock. Compared to the previous cover, it’s discreet. The next album cover is confessional: assorted mannequins dance under multicolored streamers. Women have literally become objects. Linder Sterling, an artist a decade younger than Ferry, has devoted her career to the antipinup, tearing a hole in the haute couture images of women. She has cited Roxy Music as a source of inspiration—one has to assume negatively— noting that “most musicians have very little interest in the art world, but I think very interesting things can happen when the two worlds collide. Early Roxy Music is one example. You could dance to it or hang it on the wall.”4 Sex and housework are often combined in her work to form a feminist riposte to misogyny. Linder (Sterling’s professional name) is best known for using photomontage, cutting up images from pornography, catalogs, and mom magazines to create humorous, nightmarish, surrealistic montages. One shows a man and woman embracing while the woman stabs 83

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a serving fork in her eyes.5 A fellow traveler of the punk movement, she designed one of the most provocative record covers of all time: the image disgracing the cover of the 1977 Buzzcocks’s song “Orgasm Addict.” It shows a Roxy girl with her head as an iron and red lips atop her breasts. Yet Linder recognizes the built-in obsolescence of genres like punk. Revolutions can’t last forever. Her art thus draws on banal, static, obsessive-compulsive repetitions to find the continuities in change over time. She takes a scalpel to the patriarchy to expose the pain and tedium of real women’s lives as opposed to their consumable simulacrum. Her artworks have the attributes of little girls’ scrapbooks grotesquely transformed. The woman looks back on the girl now knowing, as she didn’t before, that men would watch her grow and blossom as something to be plucked even while she tried to remain hairless, ever the ingenue. There remains the cover of Roxy Music 7, Flesh + Blood, a controlling stylization of three female athletes, two on the front side and one on the back. They look like javelin throwers from the Vogue Olympics. The designer, Peter Saville, mentioned to me that he “sidestepped” a constructivist approach to the cover in favor of a neoclassical look, something like the Hellenic, Dionysian tunics worn by the Irish American dancer Isadora Duncan, attire also once seen on the tennis court. Saville wanted the image to be bordered, not full-bleed, but lost the argument to the ultimate art director, Ferry.6 The look of the models also points forward in time, inspiring the “Roxy girls” of the early 1990s California surf scene. The apparel manufacturer Quiksilver launched a 84

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women’s clothing line meant for surfing both fashionably and comfortably. In place of the risky bikini, no match for riptides, Quiksilver sold board shorts under the label Roxy. The success of the brand was such that girls in the surf-free Midwest bought them. Quiksilver’s CEO called the look “sexy” but “real,” and it informed, on the SoCal and Hawaiian coasts, “a new ideal of female athletic strength folded into and set atop that most classic figure of sexist discipline: the female beauty.”7 The word “classic” could well be capitalized, given the ancient Greek ideal stitched into the look. The Roxy girl turns her back on the viewer on the cover of Avalon, which hides the feminine sublime behind a scrim. As a thirtysomething artist of means, Ferry had settled into Ivan Turgenev’s nest of the gentle folk while working on Avalon.8 He was thinking of marriage and children and an actual country life. On the cover of the last Roxy Music record, Lucy Helmore is an Arthurian Romantic. Casper David Friedrich might have painted her; the image recalls his circa 1818 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Helmore’s torso is armored and reversed, her gender disguised. Knowledge is partial, and the landscape is mysterious and shrouded in fog. Morgan le Fay, witch-healer and shape shifter, is more powerful and more interesting than King Arthur. Or maybe King Arthur is actually a woman.

Nile Rodgers “I came for the pose, stayed for the camp, and best remember the raw,” fashion writer Réginald-Jérôme de Mans concludes 85

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of his years observing Bryan Ferry’s look.9 His connoisseurship excludes the word “cool,” but Ferry was and remains cool, at least judging from the affection shown to him by one of the most important, and coolest, session musicians in the business, Nile Rodgers, who heard Roxy Music in the mid-1970s and took it from there. Rodgers’s musical upbringing was beyond unorthodox. His parents struggled with heroin addiction, even selling the stuff, while jazz musicians frequented the East Village (Alphabet City) apartment where he grew up. Rodgers’s grandmother provided a safe space for him in Los Angeles, and his upbringing became bicoastal. He liked old movies and Frank Sinatra, played in school orchestras, and then began to learn guitar, hoping to join a band led by a girl he had a crush on. Love failed, but he stuck with the guitar, taking his first job with the Sesame Street touring band. From there, Rodgers rolled into the Apollo Theater and collaborated with bassist Bernard Edwards, the genius with whom, in 1972, he formed the Big Apple Band, later named Chic. Their vision of integrated performance came from Roxy Music. Rodgers is fuzzy on dates and details but recalls encountering Ferry’s pirate look circa 1975: I was going out with this girl and she took me to see a band called Roxy Music and I had never seen anything like this. To me in all the different rock and roll bands I had played in whatever you got up and put on in the morning, that’s what you wore on stage at night. These guys were wearing couture clothing and it was beautiful. The music was hip and furious and layered and I called

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Bernard up and I said, “Man, we got to do the black version of this.” If you look at Chic and you look at Roxy Music, you can see we were basically trying to do a black version of Roxy Music. The show that I saw, [Ferry] had two girls onstage with him dancing and he had an eye patch on like a pirate. That was it, that’s when we started to think of albums as conceptualizations. We created the concept of Chic and at that time we also ran into this group called KISS that was good friends of the second person that we hired to join Chic. Our keyboard player was good friends with a guy named Ace Frehley and they didn’t have a record deal either. We went to see them play and we were like going, “Oh my God.” They were completely anonymous when they didn’t have on their makeup but when they were in their makeup, the crowd was going bananas and we were like, “That’s it, we want to have the anonymity of KISS and the stylization of Roxy Music and then we’ve got to figure out how to do the songs to go along with that.”10 Ferry took glam to the door of the discotheque; Chic blew the door open, complicating the genre until the inevitable white-lash. Chic assumed a polymorphous, keep ’em guessing attitude and a glamorous Euro look. Rodgers made the Black elements of glam Black again, infectiously and irresistibly so. Atlantic Records pushed Chic’s first single, “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah! Yowsah! Yowsah!),” into rotation, strategically distributing it to DJs at a New York convention. Thanks to Bob Clearmountain’s engineering, the bass line

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sounded phenomenal on everything, mono and stereo alike, and the song peaked at number six on the Top Ten. Rodgers conceived the song, but Edwards rethought the chorus to make it catchier, jamming the simplest of hooks into the ear. Atlantic urged the recording of an album, which appeared in 1977. “Everybody Dance,” “Le Freak,” “I Want Your Love,” backed by an all-White, all-female string orchestra—Glenn Miller is definitely missing—and the mesmerizing, endlessly paraphrased and plagiarized groove of “Good Times” (written during bad economic times) followed. A song, Rodgers claimed, is just an excuse to go to a chorus, and a chorus is just an excuse to go to a breakdown: a discombobulation of the groove and its reformulation at a higher level. Disco was an alchemist’s art before becoming minimalist, as the similarities between Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” and Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians attest.11 The Chic sound was tight, clean, unlocked at the break, and driven at the close. Rodgers crammed ever more notes onto and around the beat on his Hardtail Fender Strat, compressing triads and their inversions in rapid-fire syncopation, and pushed hit after hit up the charts. The duo thereafter moved into production for Sister Sledge. The question raised on the group’s iconic hit “He’s the Greatest Dancer”—“I wonder why?”—is answered by the snare-drum riff that launches Rodgers’s chicka-chik, chickachika-chik syncopation contra the high-hat and bass-drum pattern and the no-less complicated syncopation in the bass. Still, Rodgers insisted that the number 1 Sister Sledge album, We Are Family, was less music- than concept-driven. His playing found its groove in the service of community 88

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solidarity. The “disco sucks” movement of 1979 deterred Chic from more recording, putting an end to a “multiracial, diva-exalting, omnisexual movement” that Rodgers had started.12 In the wake of the “Disco apocalypse,” as folk/ country rocker Jackson Browne called it in a song stuffed with schadenfreude, Rodgers retreated from the stage to become a “junkie workaholic” in the studio.13 Rodgers and Edwards began composing and producing for others, helping Diana Ross in 1980 to reimagine her shopworn Motown sound. “I’m Coming Out,” which they tailored for her, restored her regal status. From here Rodgers went on to produce David Bowie’s Let’s Dance record, with the hits “Let’s Dance,” “Modern Love,” and “China Girl.” Then the commissions piled up. Rap benefited from Rodgers and Chic, with Notorious BIG sampling “I’m Coming Out” on “Mo Money Mo Problems” and Sugar Hill Gang sampling “Good Times” on “Rapper’s Delight.” Rodgers and Edwards reformed Chic, but Edwards died suddenly of pneumonia in 1996, leaving Rodgers rudderless. Two years later he founded the record label Sumthing Else Music Works, as well as Sumthing Distribution, which concentrated on video game soundtracks. He created the We Are Family Foundation in 2002, with the goal of nurturing the ideas and talents of youth, diversely and inclusively defined. Returning to his original source of inspiration and longtime hero, he agreed to perform on four of Ferry’s solo albums, playing with the same irrepressible stylishness that brought the globe “Get Lucky.” He receives a generic credit on the first post-Roxy Music album, Boys and Girls; provides rhythm guitar on three tracks on Mamouna; plays 89

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on Olympia; and does loop de loops on the leadoff track of Avonmore, “Loop de Li.” The title is from a nursery rhyme and a 1962 song by Johnny Rocket, a Black singer backed by White bobby-soxers. The promotional video for Ferry’s song shows those socks.14 Rodgers took inspiration from Roxy Music, then enlisted Fonzi Thornton for Chic (he sings on “Good Times”). Ferry subsequently recruited Thornton for “Avalon” and Rodgers for four of his post-Roxy Music solo efforts. Clearmountain is in the middle of it all. Another loop has Black musicians reclaiming music appropriated from them by “white boys.” In an episode of Hip-Hop Evolution, Grandmaster Caz discusses how he and other “grandfathers of hip-hop” pickpocketed the Beatles and Rolling Stones, who all but looted Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Muddy Waters.15 The White groups had the privilege of airplay and commercial recording contracts, the Black musicians less so. Detroit’s Motown and Memphis’s Stax labels morphed into smoothedged “soft soul” operations representing the very best of African American culture with “expensive tastes and luxurious habits: complex habits of harmony, classicizing orchestration, and a characteristic focus on fervid eroticism.”16 US soft soul did not last, nor did the indulgent habits that resulted in Avalon. Tawatha Agee, Michelle Cobbs, and Fonzi Thornton are hostages in a performance full of attitude but stripped of sentiment, which, for all its dominance in the 1970s, is what music has forfeited.17 Certainly the B-52s abandoned it, despite rummaging through the Roxy Music backlist on better tracks like “Planet Claire.” Avalon immerses in 90

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sentiment while also anticipating its loss. That’s the real romantic breakup, and Ferry is still seeking a reconciliation, a closing of the loop, if not the space between.

Nostalgia once more The production and engineering imposed on the album’s music confiscated emotion and replaced it with an acoustic simulacrum of courtliness, polished manners, and codes of etiquette. The seducer sings seductive music about seduction, but decorum is retained, as amour courtois, the soft soul of a much older time, insists. Avalon was meant for the grown-ups of 1982—for listeners with a past, or at least past the point of teenage caprice. It aspires to fin’amor, fine love. As Ferry commented in a 2019 question-and-answer session with fans in Detroit, the album bid farewell to his and his band’s early 1970s grittiness. “We had in the earlier records done plenty of cruder up-beat stuff, and I suppose my tastes had become more sophisticated,” he explained. “This seemed to strike a chord with the Roxy audience, who after all had also grown up a bit and maybe wanted some music that reflected this.”18 He also said goodbye to a modernist aesthetic defined in 1975 as a “precise intersection of nothing.” He mused that “there is indeed nothing called ‘real life,’ nothing to which we can attach ourselves when the fuses blow and the parents die and all the standards props like ‘love’ and ‘success’ prove hollow.”19 This was the ironic element of the pinups, inflatables, mannequins, and SoCal poolside parties. 91

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Nostalgia is bound up with loss, but aestheticians and psychologists also give us phrases like “nostalgia for nostalgia” and “the loss of the loss.” Such are the paradoxes of aging. We miss our youth as a plethora of possibilities. There are ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends we might remember with wistful delusion, because they cheated on you the entire time. Infidelity, breakups, divorces, death: such are the windswept realities of real life. And such is what commercial commodities of fantasy like Avalon knowingly engage. Perhaps Ferry imagines living in the Jazz Age, in the speakeasies of the 1920s. His listeners, however, think back to the late 1970s and early 1980s again, remembering the loves and lives they naively fancied but couldn’t attain.20 The album was extolled for its seductiveness as a kind of musical fine wine. There was no mention of female exploitation or empowerment, nor were there “notes on camp,” to quote the title of Susan Sontag’s famed essay on the subject.21 People (mostly middle-aged men, I’m guessing?) recount where they were and what they were doing the first time they heard Avalon, attaching the sounds to their memories. The urbane, sultry, mysterious, and cloudy mise-en-scène of Otto Preminger’s film noir Laura captures the popular sentiment: “not exactly classical,” the detective hero comments, “but sweet.”22 For those evaluating the 5.1 reissue, Bob Clearmountain’s contribution was celebrated. The comments posted beneath YouTube videos of the complete album and individual tracks suggest that the album has lost none of its appeal with its original listeners. It proves evergreen; the sounds are what we still expect to see in the mirror long after our self-image has diverged from our real reflection. That 92

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which is heard in youth remains lodged in—invested in— youth as an emblem of innocence. As of the end of 2018, when this survey was undertaken, the link for the complete Avalon album had been clicked 1,300,000 times, with most viewers offering lavish praise (from the hyperbolic extreme of “one of the greatest masterpieces this civilization has ever produced” to the enigmatic apposite of “this album must come from somewhere else”). “More than This” garnered 11,300,000 looks, nostalgia for the 1980s mixed in with howls of protest about the corporate degradation of popular music since then. Yet Roxy Music’s official video for the song no longer appeals. One twentysomething commentator thought it “so aesthetically atrocious as to illegitimatize any claim of Roxy Music being an art-rock group.” The lesser-viewed (75,000 times) “The Space Between” was, for its fans, “hypnotic” reverie, and “India” (52,000 times) exoticized as a musical Taj Mahal, “the sound of sex.” (The comment is neither especially accurate nor a compliment.) “Tara” (80,000) earned a general thumbs-up from boomer and Gen X viewers. The title track, unsurprisingly the album’s greatest YouTube attraction at 11,700,000 views, “flowed” like a “fine” pinot noir, Yanick Étienne’s performance the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti of backup singing. “While My Heart Is Still Beating” (55,000 views) “haunted” its fans. Reactions to “The Main Thing” (50,000 views) ranged from “elegant” to “smooth” and “timeless.” In the opinion of one listener (or perhaps non-listener), the song was fodder for pagan persecution: “These fake leaders and teachers . . . the last thing they want is that your soul should be on fire for Jesus . . . That is the main thing.?” Those of the 500,000 viewers of “Take a 93

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Chance with Me” who posted comments focused on its sexiness (and in a few instances the sore—a makeup mess-up— on Ferry’s lip in the official video). Classiness, elegance, and the mojo of the song’s introduction often came up. “To Turn You On” (65,000 views) is “ultra-sensual”; what Roxy Music diehards consider the album’s masterpiece, “True to Life” (108,000 views), is “perfect,” “sublime,” and “from the land of the gods.” Classical and Romantic music receives this sort of description more often than pop and rock. Some commentators first heard “More than This” as sung by Bill Murray in Lost in Translation; others learned of the song from the popular video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, where it is played on Emotion 98.3, a radio station hosted by “Fernando Martinez” (voiced by Frank Chavez), a devotee of power ballads. The “Avalon” 45 is also spun on this fictional station, which players can tune in to while driving their cars through 1980s SoCal locations or other gameworlds.23 Numerous such stations exist in Grand Theft Auto, and game-music scholars have studied the demographics of the players through their musical choices and chatroom postings. DJ Fernando is a caricature of a “Latin Lover” of exaggerated stamina and prowess, telling his listeners how to pick up ladies and offering consolation for those who have followed their hearts into ruin, the lonesome losers of epic rock. The station self-identifies on a jingle as the place “for laughter, and sorrow, heartbreak, and tears, and those posttherapy session blues.” Grand Theft Auto goes further into its foiled lovers vibe: “In early 1980s Vice City, if you got caught in an extramarital affair with your wife’s aerobics instructor, there was only one man to turn to: Fernando Martinez. 94

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Fernando brought make-up and make-out music to all of Vice City’s lovers.”24 The game industry is lucrative, and prominent composers and orchestras have long sought a piece of the action. “More than This” and “Avalon” were merely licensed. Experienced gamers morph into programmers, making each version of the most popular games ever more sophisticated as worlds unto themselves. Grand Theft Auto was one of the first to allow players to invent avatars, to reboot themselves. The music on this game and its successors runs the gamut from 1950s radio music in the postapocalyptic landscape of Fallout 3 to the nostalgic opera sequence in Final Fantasy IV and brooding melancholia of the Silent Hill series. There are performances within performances, and diegetic, player-controlled musical dialogues with background (non-diegetic) music. Interactive gaming has dark sides: “griefing” (interfering with or harming another player’s activity), trolling, sexual harassment, and threats of violence.25 The Grand Theft Auto series has sold in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I spent some time combing through the advertisements. DJ Fernando and Bill Murray confirm what I found: this space is almost completely devoid of women and often bleakly lonely. Everything is virtual, or, put another way, everything is musical. Grand Theft Auto runs the original versions of these songs, and so nostalgia is reinforced by authenticity. For active gamers the imagined is more than real, not fake at all. Both “More than This” and “Avalon” have been variously covered, but listeners young and old prefer the originals. Some of the covers are like Ferry’s reimaginings of golden oldies, reflecting the artist’s mid-career “lounge leanings as 95

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chanteurs.”26 10,000 Maniacs lovingly covered “More than This” after Natalie Merchant’s departure: it’s an up-tempo but languid variant, with shaker percussion added to the richly harmonized chorus. Blondie took a stab at it in 2006, to a collective “meh.” New York folk artist Lucy Kaplansky chose the oenophile’s approach to her 2007 acoustic rewriting, enriching the flavor and texture of the original in tender homage. She made the song seem new, exceeding Ferry’s ennui. Her version came into existence almost by chance. “Bryan heard me on BBC London (an interview with songs on Radio 4), liked my voice and hired me to sing on Frantic. So I decided to try ‘More than This’ the next night at my gig in Scotland, for fun. I’ve always loved the song. Never consciously thought about how to sing it, it just came out that way!”27 Unlike Kaplansky’s “More than This” cover, the non-Roxy Music “Avalons” are regrettable. The most distinctive is also the most innocuous: Australian singer Kate Seberano’s 2008 soul-jazz, hotel-lobby (or Lithium Café) confection. Her version reduces the original to Muzak. It cannot have been intended for attentive listening; it’s the background music to a bad date, the kind that ends with an urgent text from a friend seeking to rescue you from both the date and the background music. The least distinctive cover comes from British techno group M People, which ceased active operation in 1997 with an album called Fresco. The operatically powerful lead singer, Heather Small, filled arenas with her kinetic anthems for a few years, after which M People lost momentum. The backbeat cannot beat back nostalgia; it remains part of the architecture of Avalon, an album that creates an allusive 96

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sheen. Be nostalgic, by all means, but embrace the feeling’s artifice, because nostalgia—whether inspired by medieval Arthuriana or 1940s film noir repartee or a 1980s druginduced high—is a lie. It concerns that thing that never happened. Nostalgia defines our fantasies and our (not Ferry’s) essential artifice. Roxy Music 8 was rejected by the hardcore devotees of Roxy Music 1 because the switch was flipped on crassness and clunkiness. Ugly things became beautiful, and the music subtler in aiming at, but not being, what the words describe. Avalon is ambience’s commercial destination, where the music of the spheres turns into lover’s rock. Even DJ Fernando knows that, and he’s not even real.

Running around In 2014, Ferry covered the Robert Palmer song “Johnny and Mary” on Norwegian DJ and producer Todd Terje’s debut album, wryly titled It’s Album Time. It was released on CD and vinyl; the sounds on the record are called nu-disco, electro disco, and space disco. Modernism makes everything old new again, and the 1970s have been the archive of choice for electronic dance music artists of the past two decades, with a postmodern twist: everything, past and present, is whatever—as Daft Punk demonstrates on Random Access Memories, a hyperproduced junkyard of 1970s and 1980s sounds that is perhaps the worst great record ever made. The joyless joy of the album is an inevitable result of its protracted gestation and the long list of guest artists or “collaborators” invited to the party. 97

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Terje, in contrast, is a guy who just wants to have fun. In 2012 he mixed a single called “Inspector Norse” (as in Nordic), reveling in its rejection by a radio station because it sounded like “background music at a beach bar.” Terje took no offence, affirming that he’d created “good, danceable elevator music. Elevate your body!”28 The challenge Terje assigned himself on “Inspector Norse” and the rest of It’s Album Time was to rely almost exclusively on a disco-era synthesizer, the ARP 2600, which was built and sold throughout the Roxy Music era. Terje is not dogmatic, of course, so he used other analog machines along with digital filtering. The “synergistic oscillations” between the analog-digital realms gives the music its spark, and there’s no mistaking Terje’s tongue-incheek references, at a classic four-on-the-floor disco beat of 120 rpm, to music like Lipps Inc.’s “Funky Town,” Bob James’s “Spunky,” and the eternal earworm of “Popcorn.”29 Video game sounds from the 1980s, the descending falloffs from animated warship guns, meet sparkling 1990s production. As to how “Inspector Norse” was made, according to a recent Point Blank Music School “deconstruction,” or reverse engineering of the track, first the beat was developed, then a quartet of chords in F (I and bVII for the A block, and II and v7 for B) added on top, then a tune with unbridled affection for the pitches of the tonic chord.30 This kind of analysis hardly accounts for what makes the track work; the overall slow burn over time, the long form, and the upbeat groove at a simmer— all are essential ingredients. Terje likes white-noise effects and googly, swirly sounds in bright, twinkling registers of the Star Wars era. Another hit, “Dolorean Dynamite,” is named after the time machine in Back to the Future, but also a dance band 98

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from the Basque region of Spain. Its nostalgic elements include “Balearic” guitar licks, an “Italo-style driven bassline,” and the coda, where the groove is silenced, electronica qua electronica takes over, and the outer-space metaphors return.31 Disco emerged from the creativity of communities of color, economic hardship, the despair of bankrupt New York City, LGBTQ+ oppression, and the quaalude subculture. Terje’s return to disco—the analog synthesizer jams and (judging by his cover art and promotional apparatus) the branding, marketing, and even biz of the later 1970s—is friskier, giddier, less sexual but no less spaced-out. The minimalist techno sounds add a “back to the 1980s” and even “back to the 1990s” feel. Everything is “back to.” The past is a plaything, grown-ups can still be immature, and Terje is a mischievous merchant of happiness who nonetheless honors the subcultural dark side of his borrowings honestly, idiotically, and sardonically all at once. In the video for “Inspector Norse” he (or his character) is shown cooking up drugs as an escape from gray skies, his father’s illness, and the bowling alley of the boring Scandinavian town where he still lives and works. He is relatable and affable, makes music in his bathrobe in the bedroom, dances to it on headphones in a field, wraps his torso in lightbulbs (this happens just after the fabulous drop into the B section), and transports himself, through his Ibiza beats, to a sunny beach.32 The music gets at the big feelings of rebellious teenagers or nostalgic ennui of thirtysomethings, while the analog sounds suggest resistance to being told what music to like by corporations. Terje’s shows have this ultrapositive feel. His mixes respond to the dancers on the floor, creating moments 99

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of “blissful release.”33 The breakdowns serve as cadences for the dance floor: “Inspector Norse” is kinetic and became popular not because of the video but because DJs played it in clubs. Mike Powell of Pitchfork admires It’s Album Time but puzzles over the Ferry/Palmer track, proposing that “Johnny and Mary” exists on the album to remind you that life is sad. He mulls over Ferry’s aesthetic: “Ferry has spent his entire career crying crocodile tears, exploring the ways a seemingly insincere performance can ring with more feeling and pathos than something we recognize as ‘real.’ His voice—once a dazzling, cartoonish instrument, like Elvis with his finger in a wall socket—sounds hollowed-out and whispery, an old man whose wisdom brings him no comfort.”34 But Ferry’s voice does not sound that much different than on Avalon and would not be out of place on a playlist with the Shins and Ben Howard. It has maintained the low hum of Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” and still conveys the sense of a whispered secret. Palmer recorded the original song in 1980 at Compass Point, just ahead of Roxy Music’s time there; Ferry knew it before Terje did and proposed collaborating on a remake when Terje visited Studio One. There would be no off-kilter kitschiness in the edit, but the swirling crescendos would remain, representing the reason the relationship between the girl and the boy ended—his “running around.” The music video for the song was shot by Brantley Gutierrez at the Chateau Marmont hotel and another notorious Los Angeles landmark, Wolf ’s Lair, a fake (which in Los Angeles means real) Norman Castle whose crenellated towers overlook the Hollywood sign. The video is a 100

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black-and-white slow pulse, with a dog on the prowl standing in for Johnny, and English model Eliza Cummings his liberated antipode. No longer trapped in a gendered doublestandard, she gets to have desires too. Gutierrez’s camera reveals the skyline from inside a room: the ARP 2600 version of a whoosh of a jet taking off at the end suggests Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports. As the camera reaches the windowsill, the reflection of the room from behind supersedes the view from outside. Confined to her thoughts, Mary counts the walls, an absurd non-action, succeeded by the strange inside/outside of the shot of a bathtub spliced into an image of Cummings diving into a pool.35 Ferry gazes across the Los Angeles skyline and deep into the past from his familiar contemplative after-party distance. The little scale segment is echoed in layers, so too the synthesized finger snaps. The song is the paused, interrupted, and resumed translation of an em-dash, yet the expected explanation or illumination never comes. Ferry types something on a typewriter and pulls a tune from a Wurlitzer, singing slower than Palmer ever did about Johnny’s skirt chasing and Mary’s insouciance. The song and the video of the song traffic in contradictions: analog bests digital; Los Angeles is shown wild (the fronds are B-roll) and sleek urban; Ferry (as Johnny) ruminates about and in the past, while Mary escapes the four walls and enjoys the wind in her hair in the mountains and along the boulevards (see Figure 5). “Johnny and Mary” brings us back to “now the party’s over / I’m so tired,” to T. S. Eliot and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and to the contradiction at the heart of Avalon: 101

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Figure 5: Official “Johnny and Mary” music video. Source: Courtesy Brantley Guttieriez.

Johnny’s always running around Trying to find certainty He needs all the world to confirm That he ain’t lonely Mary counts the walls Knows he tires easily Johnny thinks the world would be right If it would buy truth from him Mary says he changes his mind More than a woman But she made her bed Even when the chance was slim Johnny says he’s willing to learn When he decides he’s a fool Johnny says he’ll live anywhere When he earns time to Mary combs her hair Says she should be used to it 102

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Mary always hedges her bets She never knows what to think She says that he still acts like he’s Being discovered Scared that he’ll get caught Without a second thought The collage of sounds here, as on Avalon, come “out of nowhere” to form a beautiful, desirous whole.

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On Modernism 1. John Donohue, “Night Life,” New Yorker, June 4, 2015, www. newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cultural-clicks-caitlynjenners-predecessors-bryan-ferrys-new-video. 2. It is instructive to compare Ferry’s songs with the more sensual, somber ones by Poulenc discussed by Alex Ross in “Francis Poulenc’s Drunken Angels,” New Yorker, August 10, 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/17/francispoulencs-drunken-angels. 3. Adrian Glick Kudler, “A Totally Incomplete History of Trouble at the Chateau Marmont,” Curbed, July 30, 2019, https:// la.curbed.com/2013/6/26/10227258/chateau-marmont-hotelhistory-deaths. 4. As defined by Timothy D. Taylor, “Performance and Nostalgia on the Oldies Circuit,” in Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices, ed. Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009). 5. Juline Costa provides an example in her cover of Ferry’s cover of “You Are My Sunshine”: YouTube video, 2:45, November 1, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2fh8vqXip8.

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6. The phrase, ironically, was not coined by Pound. It is from Confucianism and the scholarship of Chu Hsi. See Ezra Pound, Ta Hio: The Great Learning (Seattle: University of Washington Book Store, 1928). 7. Michael Bracewell, Re-make/Re-model: Becoming Roxy Music (Boston: Da Capo, 2008), passim, 330–1. 8. The French title is La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (1923); it’s also called Le Grand Verre or The Large Glass. 9. The literature on Duchamp (and this particular work) is vast, but for an introduction, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “The Large Glass Seen Anew: Reflections of Contemporary Science and Technology in Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Hilarious Picture,’ ” Leonardo 32, no. 2 (1999): 113–26. 10. Stephen Holden, “Bryan Ferry Portrays Darkness of Romance,” Chicago Tribune, August 11, 1988, www.chicagotribune.com/ news/ct-xpm-1988-08-11-8801220148-story.html. 11. Simon Philo, Glam Rock: Music in Sound and Vision (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 63. 12. Jonathan Rigby, Roxy Music: Both Ends Burning (Richmond, UK: Reynolds and Hearn, 2005); David Buckley, The Thrill of It All: The Story of Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music (London: Deutsch, 2004); Paul Stump, Unknown Pleasures: A Cultural Biography of Roxy Music (London: Quartet Books, 1998). 13. The following information is from Michael Hamilton, “Going Back to His Roots: BF Talks to Michael Hamilton on North East Life,” Bryan Ferry’s official website, November 20, 2009, http://bryanferry.com/roots/. 14. Studio One archive. 15. Mitchell Morris, “Lists of Louche Living: Music in Cole Porter’s Social World,” in A Cole Porter Companion, ed. Don

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M. Randel, Matthew Shaftel, and Susan Forshcher Weiss (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 84. 16. “Bryan Ferry,” World of Harmonica (blog), August 14, 2012, http://worldofharmonica.blogspot.com/2012/08/bryan-ferry. html. 17. Sarah Larson, “Instrumental Ferry,” New Yorker, March 4, 2013, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/ instrumental-ferry. 18. Jeremy Allen, “Roxy Music: 10 of the Best,” Guardian, February 25, 2015, www.theguardian.com/music/ musicblog/2015/feb/25/roxy-music-10-of-the-best. “Cocaine avarice” likely refers to the yuppie culture and middle-class excesses of Thatcher-era Britain. 19. Andrew Gaerig, “On Second Thought: Roxy Music; Avalon,” Stylus, September 17, 2007, http://stylusmagazine.com/ articles/on_second_thought/roxy-music-avalon.html. 20. Réginald-Jérôme de Mans, “A Hall of Famer,” No Man Walks Alone, July 1, 2019, https://nomanwalksalone.com/newsroom/ a-hall-of-famer. 21. Taylor Parkes, “An Unsettling Creation: Bryan Ferry Interviewed by Taylor Parkes,” Quietus, November 13, 2014, https://thequietus.com/articles/16665-bryan-ferry-interview. 22. Patrick Gale, Friendly Fire: A Novel (New York: Open Road, 2016), 3. 23. Ian Buruma, “The Invention of David Bowie,” New York Review of Books, May 23, 2013, www.nybooks.com/ articles/2013/05/23/invention-david-bowie/. 24. The aviator’s uniform was for a 1975 video of “Love Is the Drug.” The patch was real; he injured his eye walking into a door.

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25. David Bowie, “Without You (2018 Remaster),” YouTube video, 3:09, August 15, 2019, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=nXoD5Gz-Aak.

On Avalon 1. Ian Little, future producer of Duran Duran, was involved in the design of the studio, which was called “Gallery” at the time and is now called “Songphonic.” 2. Sam Inglis, “Recording and Remixing Roxy Music’s Avalon: Rhett Davies and Bob Clearmountain,” Sound on Sound, August 2003, www.soundonsound.com/people/recordingremixing-roxy-musics-avalon. 3. Bryan Reesman, “Looking for ‘Avalon’: Bryan Ferry Talks about His Past, Present, and Future,” Goldmine 33, no. 20 (2007): 50. 4. Richard Buskin, “Classic Tracks: Duran Duran ‘The Reflex,’ ” Sound on Sound, July 2004, www.soundonsound.com/ techniques/classic-tracks-duran-duran-reflex. 5. Rob Chapman, “Roxy Music: They Came from Planet Bacofoil,” Rob Chapman’s official website, December 1995, www.rob-chapman.com/pages/journalism.html. 6. Parkes, “Unsettling Creation.” 7. “Roxy Music: The Avalon Tapes (1981–1982),” Ace Bootlegs, December 24, 2017, https://ace-bootlegs.com/roxy-music-theavalon-tapes-1981-1982/. Studio One has had this material removed from the internet; for a time the entire world could access it. 8. Chris Juried, “MCI JH-500 Series Console,” History of Recording, April 19, 2012, www.historyofrecording.com/

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MCI_JH-500.html. Automation would later be achieved with onboard computer processors. 9. Quoted in Inglis, “Recording and Remixing.” 10. To be precise, the first track opens with a Fernandes Stratocaster-style guitar. The brand is Japanese, a better-built and better-sounding replica of the American Fender Stratocaster guitar of the 1970s and 1980s. 11. Phil Manzanera, personal communication with the author, June 16 and 22, 2020. 12. For all the technical information in this book on Manzanera’s guitar technique, effects, and style, I am indebted to Nate Radley. 13. “100 Best Albums of the Eighties,” Rolling Stone, November 16, 1989, www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/100-bestalbums-of-the-eighties-150477/roxy-music-avalon-70624/. 14. Frederic Raphael, Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick (New York: Ballantine, 1999), 139. 15. “100 Best Albums.” 16. Taylor Parkes makes this point beautifully in the introduction to his interview with Ferry in Copenhagen in 2014 (or, non-interview, given Ferry’s reticence): “An art band who were not just fundamentally and enthusiastically pop, and who chose not just to play but to perform, they [Roxy Music] were able to wipe reality clean, projecting a newer and more engaging reality of their own which would, as it instantly faded, call into question what ‘reality’ means. (Listen to how Ferry sings the word ‘real’ in ‘Mother of Pearl,’ the most relentless of his early songs.)” “Unsettling Creation.” 17. In Sasha Frere-Jones’s imagining, “We got four backup singers and two go-go dancers, who were fun but seemed to be

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dancing at a different concert. A concert where other people might be dancing, perhaps.” “Set List: Bryan Ferry, the Alpha Male of Highfalutin Sleaze,” New Yorker, October 11, 2011, www.newyorker.com/culture/sasha-frere-jones/set-list-bryanferry-the-alpha-male-of-highfalutin-sleaze. 18. Geoff Lloyd, “Bryan Ferry: Interview,” Hometime Show, Absolute Radio, YouTube video, 16:02, December 17, 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvGHozmdUs8. 19. Bob Clearmountain, personal communication with the author, June 7, 2020. 20. “Avalon (Roxy Music Album),” Wikipedia, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalon_(Roxy_Music_album). 21. Clearmountain, personal communication, June 7, 2020. 22. Inglis, “Recording and Remixing.” 23. Charles Legge, “A Ferry Jaunt to Avalon!,” Daily Mail, June 13, 2019, www.pressreader.com/similar/282119228052184; Bryan Ferry, personal communication with the author, June 19, 2020. 24. Vincent Canby, “The Screen: Ridley Scott’s ‘Legend,’ ” New York Times, April 18, 1986, C15; John O’Brien, “Is Your Love Strong Enough?,” Viva Roxy Music, www.vivaroxymusic.com/ songs_239.php. O’Brien develops and maintains this invaluable “virtual museum” of all things Roxy Music. 25. Andy Newmark, personal communication with the author, July 7, 2020. 26. Inglis, “Recording and Remixing.” 27. Clearmountain, personal communication, June 6, 2020. 28. For this reason, major-mode pop music is sometimes called mixolydian.

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29. Joshua Clover, Ange Mlinko, Greil Marcus, Ann Powers, and Daphne A. Brooks, “Critical Karaoke,” Popular Music 24, no. 3 (2005): 425. 30. Clover et al., “Critical Karaoke,” 425. 31. Lorraine Wood, “Filling in the Blanks: Music and Performance in Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” Victorian Poetry 51, no. 4 (2013): 537, 541–2. 32. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), 4. 33. David D. Nolta, “ ‘Veronica Veronese’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Personalization of Pictorial Symbolism,” Notes in the History of Art 17, no. 1 (1997): 22–3. 34. Nolta, “Veronica Veronese,” 23. 35. Kevin Johnson, “Seamoon FX Resurrects the Seamoon Funk Machine Pedal,” No Treble, February 25, 2020, www.notreble. com/buzz/2020/02/25/seamoon-fx-resurrects-the-seamoonfunk-machine-pedal/. 36. Distortion, overdrive, and fuzz are the trinity of clipped (cutting the top of the sound wave) guitar sounds. Each one has a distinctive flavor. On Avalon, Manzanera relies primarily on distortion, prevalent in the late 1970s through the 1980s. 37. There exists another song called “Avalon,” which Al Jolson recorded in 1920 and Benny Goodman arranged for his quartet in 1937. Jolson and his team (Buddy DeSylva and Vincent Rose) purloined the tune from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca and got sued as a result; the song refers to the town in the California Channel Islands where the singer left behind his heart. Stephen Buckley’s 1984 painting Avalon makes “passing” reference to Ferry’s and Jolson’s songs in an

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effort to connect their different “worlds.” Marco Livingstone, “Stephen Buckley’s Recent Paintings,” Burlington Magazine 127, no. 988 (1985): 456. 38. Quoted in Chris McGown and Ricardo Pessanha, The Brazilian Sound: Samba, Bossa Nova, and the Popular Music of Brazil (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 62. 39. Manzanera, personal communication, June 22, 2020. 40. Oscar Rickett, “Why ‘Avalon’ by Roxy Music Is the Best Afterparty Song Ever,” Vice, June 16, 2016, www.vice.com/ en_us/article/9b8yde/why-avalon-by-roxy-music-is-the-bestafterparty-song-ever-535. 41. Michael Bracewell, “Avalon: History Tab,” Bryan Ferry’s official website, September 3, 2013, http://bryanferry.com/avalonhistory-tab/. 42. Rickett, “Why ‘Avalon.’ ” 43. Ward recalls her three years of training with the Royal Ballet prima ballerina Merle Park, one reason she was cast in the video, as “terrifying and transformative.” Sophie Ward, personal communication with the author, June 11, 2020. 44. Mentmore Towers was also the residence of Archibald Primrose, Lord Rosebery, from 1894 to 1895, when he was British prime minister. 45. Howard Guard, personal communication with the author, June 15, 2020. 46. Guard, personal communication. 47. Millie Thompson, personal communication with the author, July 13, 2020. 48. The quotation comes from R. M. Fransson, who jarringly likens Ferry to Ovid in an article called “Ovid Rox,” Classical

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Journal 86, no. 2 (1990–1): 178. “Ovid is a connoisseur of beautiful women and their luscious anatomy . . . One finds this sentiment too quite clearly in Roxy Music’s predilection for young supine vixens over their album covers; these sirens are ever decked out in slinky costume with the ever-present ruby-red lipstick . . . Whether Bryan Ferry read and assimilated Ovid as a schoolboy may be open to doubt; nonetheless the two are birds of a feather in their cavalier attitude towards women and Love. For Ovid, Love is not a suffering, as it is for Gallus and Catullus, but a game, mere child’s play.” 49. “Roxy Music: While My Heart Is Still Beating (Rare Video),” YouTube video, 3:06, March 8, 2012, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Z5dMx90IsvE. 50. To create a pinch harmonic, the guitarist touches the string with the side of the finger or pick to bring out a high harmonic of the plucked note; Manzanera brings out the effect using a compressor pedal. 51. Or the Les Paul was replaced by a Rickenbacker twelvestring—Manzanera could not precisely recall. Personal communication, June 22, 2020. 52. Poésie mélique (speech singing) is the heightened declamation heard in the operas of Jules Massenet and other French vocal composers. 53. Reesman, “Looking for ‘Avalon,’ ” 50. 54. Paul Carrack provides keyboard, and Rick Marcotta drums, on track 8. 55. Reesman, “Looking for ‘Avalon,’ ” 50. 56. “To Turn You On by Roxy Music,” Second Hand Songs, https:// secondhandsongs.com/performance/57705.

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57. Frere-Jones, “Set List.” 58. References to the “Muse as Eros” are ubiquitous in Romantic and modern literature and art, from Goethe to Kierkegaard to Blok. Stephen Downes goes through the list in The Muse as Eros: Music, Erotic Fantasy and Male Creativity in the Romantic and Modern Imagination (London: Routledge, 2017). 59. Jeff Vaca, “Top 50 Albums, #38: ‘Siren’ and ‘Avalon,’ Roxy Music,” Apropos of Nothing (blog), November 7, 2011, http:// of-nothing.blogspot.com/2011/11/top-50-albums-38-sirenand-avalon-roxy.html. 60. For “kissing cousin,” see “Roxy Music ‘Avalon’ Your Three Favourite Songs,” Steve Hoffman Music Forums, June 16, 2019, https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/roxy-music-avalonyour-three-favourite-songs.851921/. 61. Ferry, personal communication, June 11, 2020. 62. Ferry, personal communication. 63. Ta-rah is also the final word sung on the final track of the 1973 Roxy Music album, For Your Pleasure. 64. Amanda Fiegl, “Ireland’s Endangered Cultural Site,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 2000, www.smithsonianmag. com/travel/irelands-endangered-cultural-site-51845458/. 65. “None of the songs on the album, however, has any unambiguous Arthurian content,” according to A Bibliography of Modern Arthuriana. “The song ‘Avalon’ talks of a party and dancing, and the word ‘Avalon’ in the lyrics could be interpreted as a woman’s name rather than a place.” Ann F. Howey and Stephen R. Reimer, eds., A Bibliography of Modern Arthuriana (1500–2000) (Martlesham, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), 580.

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66. “Harp Analysis,” Irish Studies, https://irishstudies. sunygeneseoenglish.org/sinn-fein-harp-analysis/. 67. “Broadside Ballad Titled ‘The Harp That Once through Tara’s Halls,’ ” Word on the Street, 2004, https://digital.nls.uk/ broadsides/view/?id=16436. My thanks to Paul Muldoon for details on the text. 68. “More than This,” Second Hand Songs, https://secondhandsongs. com/work/16877/versions#nav-entity; “Avalon,” Second Hand Songs, https://secondhandsongs.com/work/48330/versions#naventity. 69. Taylor, “Performance and Nostalgia,” 102. 70. His father was English and met his mother in Barranquilla, where he was teaching English as a second language. Phil Manzanera was born in London as Phillip Targett-Adams, but he spent his first ten years with his parents in Latin America. His adopted surname is his mother’s maiden name. (The composer Armando Manzanero, president of the Sociedad de Autores y Compositores de México, is not a relation.) 71. Subbacultcha, “Frank Black: Los Angeles (Official Video 1993),” YouTube video, 4:13, February 19, 2017, www.youtube. com/watch?v=fuLllNyfiHs. 72. Alan di Perna, “Phil Manzanera Talks Roxy Music History, Gibson Firebirds and His Neighbor and Occasional Bandmate,” Guitar World, April 12, 2018, www.guitarworld. com/artists/phil-manzanera-talks-roxy-music-historygibson-firebirds-and-his-neighbor-and-bandmate-davidgilmour. 73. My thanks to Susan Thomas for the identification. 74. Perna, “Phil Manzanera.” 75. Manzanera, personal communication, June 30, 2020.

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76. Perna, “Phil Manzanera.” 77. Kurt Loder, “Avalon,” Rolling Stone, June 10, 1982, www. rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/avalon-187477/. 78. Rigby, Roxy Music, 244. 79. Manzanera has continued recording and performing songs from his childhood in the Americas, including, in 1990, the most popular song of all, “Guantanamera” (The girl from Guantánamo). It’s been covered hundreds of times, Manzanera’s perhaps the highest octane. John O’Brien calls the tune a “traditional Spanish folksong,” circa 1865. It was arranged for Manzanera by Chucho Merchán, with singer Ana María Vélez, a London-based native of Bogotá. “Guantanamera,” Viva Roxy Music, www.vivaroxymusic.com/ songs_190.php. The song has a knotty history and painful political and personal associations, but it does not come from the Spanish “folk.” As Peter Manuel details, it was written by the Cuban singer-songwriter Joseíto Fernández (1908–79) and rewritten by Julián Orbón (1925–91), using a different verse structure. Orbón left the catchy F–Bb–C harmonic cycle of Fernández’s chorus intact except for the opening note. “The Saga of a Song: Authorship and Ownership in the Case of ‘Guantanamera,’ ” Latin American Music Review 27, no. 2 (2006): 121–47. The most familiar version of “Guantanamera” takes stanzas from four different poems in José Martí’s 1891 Versos Sencillos (Simple Verses). Vélez, however, sings from just two of the poems, one and three, ending with the words: I have seen a man live With his dagger at his side, Without ever saying the name Of her who had killed him.

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José Martí, “Guantanamera,” in The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, and Pamela María Smorkaloff (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 128. Vélez’s low-register singing is feverishly seductive, and Manzanera’s guitar playing frenzied in response. See “Guantanamera Phil Manzanera,” YouTube video, 3:43, June 14, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eKF1RAeJvk. 80. The phrase is developed by Michael Gallope, in Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 81. Roxy Music’s fashion innovations and, for the first two years of its existence, ostentatious role-playing (as a band named after a dance hall that performed in that same dance hall) anticipated David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona and his other “extraordinary stage costumes, from Kabuki-like bodysuits to Weimar-era drag.” Buruma, “Invention of David Bowie.” 82. Rob Tannenbaum, “A Meeting of Sound Minds: John Cage and Brian Eno,” Musician, September 1985. 83. Tom Doyle, “Roxy and Elsewhere,” Mojo Magazine 252 (November 2014): 49; Bracewell, Re-make/Re-model, 131. 84. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 3 (quoting from “The Future of Music: Credo”), 152 (quoting from “45’ for a Speaker”). 85. David Buckley, “Eno, Brian (Peter George St John Le Baptiste de la Salle),” revised by Celia Sun, Grove Music Online, January 31, 2014, www-oxfordmusiconline-com. 86. Daniel Siepmann, “A Slight Delay: Agency and Improvisation in the Ambient Sound World,” Perspectives of New Music 48, no. 1 (2010): 178. 87. Tannenbaum, “Meeting of Sound Minds.”

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88. Tannenbaum, “Meeting of Sound Minds.” 89. Quoted in John Lysaker, “Turning Listening Inside Out: Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31, no. 1 (2017): 170. 90. Sam Anderson, “Letter of Recommendation: Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tusk,’ ” New York Times, February 18, 2015, www.nytimes. com/2015/02/22/magazine/letter-of-recommendationfleetwood-macs-tusk.html. 91. Lysaker, “Turning Listening Inside Out,” 162. 92. Buckley, “Eno, Brian.” 93. Siepmann, “Slight Delay,” 177. 94. Lysaker, “Turning Listening Inside Out,” 170. 95. Blake Goble, “10 Brian Eno Songs That Made Films Better,” Consequence of Sound, November 14, 2018, https:// consequenceofsound.net/2018/11/10-brian-eno-songs-thatmade-films-better/. 96. Devon Ivie, “Snub Is the Drug: Brian Eno Won’t Attend Roxy Music’s Rock Hall Induction,” Vulture, March 27, 2019, www. vulture.com/2019/03/rock-hall-2019-roxy-musics-brian-enowill-not-attend.html. 97. Anthony Decrutis, “Q&A: Bryan Ferry Talks Eno, Dylan’s Modern Ideas, and ‘Hideous’ Rap,” Rolling Stone, July 8, 1993, www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/qa-bryan-ferrytalks-eno-dylans-modern-ideas-and-hideous-rap-119398/. 98. Mark Edwards relates that Mamouna “is far from raw, but it’s not overcooked. And while Ferry is still working the spacy post-Avalon groove, fans of early Roxy will note with pleasure that Brian Eno features heavily on several tracks—variously credited with ‘sonic ambience,’ ‘sonic emphasis,’ ‘sonic swoops,’

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‘sonic awareness’ and ‘sonic distress.’ It’s the first time the two have collaborated in over twenty years.” “The Best of Both Worlds?” More Dark Than Shark, September–October 1994, www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_arena-sep94.html. 99. Chris Dahlen, “David Byrne/Brian Eno: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” Pitchfork, March 23, 2006, https://pitchfork.com/ reviews/albums/1064-my-life-in-the-bush-of-ghosts/. 100. Siepmann, “Slight Delay,” 179. 101. Newmark, personal communication, July 9, 2020. 102. David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009). 103. Andy Mackay, Electronic Music: The Instruments, the Music and the Musicians (London: Phaidon, 1981). 104. There are two versions of the album, 1974 and 1976. “Wild Weekend,” a cover of a 1962 Rockin’ Rebels surf song, appears on the second. 105. D. McKinney, Morrissey FAQ: All That’s Left to Know about This Charming Man (Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2015), 315. The Ferry–Morrissey relationship is interrogated by Nicholas Pell in “We Love Morrissey but C’mon: Dude Totally Ripped Off Bryan Ferry,” LA Weekly, June 5, 2012, www.laweekly. com/we-love-morrissey-but-cmon-dude-totally-ripped-offbryan-ferry/. 106. “The Metaphors,” Andy Mackay’s official website, www. andymackay.co.uk/the-metaphors. 107. Sam Clark, “Andy Mackay: Sax, God and Rock and Roll!,” Riddle Magazine, 2018, https://riddlemagazine.com/andy-mackay/. 108. Bryan Ferry, interview with John Blake of the Daily Mirror, April 3, 1985, in Rigby, Roxy Music, 264.

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109. Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Oakland: University of California Press, 2009), 193–4. Then again, Cage collected actual rocks.

The High Road 1. The band played just twenty-five minutes, according to a reviewer of the Madison Square Garden concert, whose “first impression of Roxy Music suggested a blend of neo-fifties rock and synthesized weirdness, compromised by an uncertain, pretentious stage image.” “The Jethro Tull Sound Fills the Garden,” New York Times, December 10, 1972, 83. 2. In the first summer of its release, the album reached number 1 in the United Kingdom, number 4 in Germany, and number 53 in the United States on the Billboard 200. Music ID, database, Princeton University, updated December 2018, http://musicid.academicrightspress.com.ezproxy.princeton. edu/search/result?albums[]=262693. 3. John O’Brien, “Tour Index,” Viva Roxy Music, www. vivaroxymusic.com/tours.php. 4. For the following compilation and annotation of reviews, I am greatly indebted to Samantha Grayson. 5. Alan Niester, “Roxy Stages Another Battle,” Globe and Mail, May 20, 1983, E5. 6. James Muretich, “Roxy Showed Edmonton What We’ve Been Missing,” Calgary Herald, May 12, 1983, F1; Howard Wuelfing, “Roxy Music’s Rock ’n’ Roar,” Washington Post, May 24, 1983, B2. The attendance at the Edmonton show was 11,000. 7. Ethlie Ann Vare, “Roxy Music Burning Sensations,” Billboard, May 14, 1983, 33; Niester, “Roxy Stages Another Battle.”

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8. Muretich, “Roxy Showed Edmonton”; Niester, “Roxy Stages Another Battle.” 9. “Thigh Ride” is the title of Agee’s 1987 single. 10. Buskin, “Classic Tracks.” The enlisting of black backup singers to support white stars is the subject of two superb articles: David Scott Diffrient, “Backup Singers, Celebrity Culture, and Civil Rights: Racializing Space and Spatializing Race in 20 Feet from Stardom,” Black Camera 8, no. 2 (2017): 25–49; and Susan Fast, “Genre, Subjectivity, and Back-Up Singing in Rock Music,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 171–88. Black background singing evokes deeply racialized notions of black subservience. And in white, racist, and misogynistic imagining, black female background singers can at once be maternal, nurturing, and supportive as well as sexual. 11. Tawatha Agee, personal communication with the author, July 28, 2020. 12. Jon Savage, “Bryan Ferry on How Roxy Music Invented Art Pop: ‘We Were Game for Anything,’ ” Guardian, February 1, 2018, www.theguardian.com/music/2018/feb/01/bryan-ferryroxy-music-invented-new-pop-game-for-anything. 13. Lindsay Zoladz, “Bryan Ferry,” Pitchfork, February 28, 2013, https://pitchfork.com/features/5-10-15-20/9076-bryan-ferry/. Ferry adds, “My first musical memory is from when I was about five—one of my aunts was really into music and she had a lot of records by this beautiful vocal group the Ink Spots. The lead had this lovely high voice and there was a bass who always did this thing in the middle where he kind of spoke. Elvis Presley was a big fan of theirs, and it was quite a big influence on his singing style.”

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14. As I wrote on the liner notes to the album (Bryan Ferry and His Orchestra, Bitter-Sweet, BMG B07JJLXCVB, 2018, MP3, CD, LP), “ ‘Reason or Rhyme’ calls to the ear the dark reed timbres and baleful trumpets of Duke Ellington’s ‘Black and Tan Fantasy,’ with a gesture, perhaps, to the tenor saxophone sound of Coleman Hawkins. (Ellington and Hawkins played together on an essential album from 1962.) ‘Sign of the Times’ includes a swinging trumpet solo and a veiled allusion, in the concluding section, to Eddie Lockjaw Davis. ‘Heart Still Beating’ throws a bridge between the clarinet and alto sax duo of Sidney Bechet and Johnny Hodges to the edgier sound, on the sax, of Benny Carter or Phil Woods. An even more haunting transposition of the 1920s is ‘Boys & Girls,’ which again recalls Bechet and Hodges, now processed through a modernist sensibility. The vibrato in the saxophone line is crisper and more classical, less sensual than cerebral, more like the imitations of jazz that became fashionable among modernist composers.” 15. Roxy Music did not always rely on black backup singers. The 1975 “Love Is the Drug” video, for example, has two blond singers dressed in powder-blue flight attendant uniforms and high heels. 16. Jim Sullivan, “Roxy Steers toward Middle of the Road,” Boston Globe, May 30, 1983, 25. 17. Kirk, “Roxy Music (11) Burning Sensations (6),” Variety, May 11, 1983, 94. 18. The theater’s capacity was 6,251; Roxy Music sold approximately 90 percent of the seats for the first of the two Los Angeles Amphitheatre shows, 75 percent for the second. 19. Wuelfing, “Roxy Music’s Rock.” 20. Muretich, “Roxy Showed Edmonton.”

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21. Sullivan, “Roxy Steers.” 22. Vare, “Roxy Music Burning Sensations.” 23. Andrew Rostan, “Bryan Ferry’s Whistle: An Observation on an Aspect of Millennial Culture,” Addison Recorder, May 16, 2013, www.addisonrecorder.com/bryan-ferrys-whistle-anobservation-on-an-aspect-of-millennial-culture/. 24. Don Waller, “Roxy Music’s Back and Still on Track,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1983, H5. 25. As another reviewer offered, “[Ferry] recognized that a certain ambiguity is inherent in most emotional states. In passion there is always a hint of reserve, he seemed to be saying; in cool there is heat.” Robert Palmer, “The Pop Life; Ferry at Tour’s End,” New York Times, June 1, 1983, C17.

The After-Party 1. Stuart Lenig, The Twisted Tale of Glam Rock (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 83. 2. Maria Elena Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 118. 3. Jason Draper, “Beauty Queens: The Stories behind Roxy Music’s Album Covers,” U Discover Music, September 27, 2019, www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/beauty-queensbehind-roxy-musics-artwork/. 4. Neil Cooper, “Interview: Linder,” MAP Magazine, November 2007, https://mapmagazine.co.uk/interview-linder. Perhaps David Bowie had this idea in mind when he called his 1973 album of cover songs Pin-Ups.

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5. I draw from Brian Dillon, “Linderism,” London Review of Books 42, no. 9 (2020), www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/ brian-dillon/at-kettle-s-yard; and Louisa Buck, “Linder: Scalpel-Sharp Dissections of Society,” Art Newspaper, February 1, 2019, www.theartnewspaper.com/interview/culturalbiopsies. 6. Peter Saville, personal communication with the author, July 8, 2020. 7. I refer to Ivan Turgenev’s novel Dvoryanskoye gnezdo (Moscow: Glazunov, 1859). 8. Krista Comer, Surfer Girls in the New World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 81, 87. 9. Mans, “Hall of Famer.” 10. Steve Baltin, “Who I Am Part 2: Nile Rodgers on David Bowie, Daft Punk, and ‘Sesame Street,’ ” Forbes, August 4, 2019, www. forbes.com/sites/stevebaltin/2019/08/04/who-i-am-part-2nile-rodgers-on-david-bowie-daft-punk-and-sesamestreet/#17d5ed132aba. 11. Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 56. 12. Chris Randle, “Nile Rodgers Is Not a Machine,” Hazlitt, June 18, 2013, https://hazlitt.net/feature/nile-rodgers-not-machine. The Billboard Hot 100 list of May 5, 1979, the beginning of the antidisco reaction, includes twenty-seven black artists and bands. “The Hot 100,” www.billboard.com/charts/ hot-100/1979-05-05. KISS, a makeup-drenched band Rodgers also claimed as a source for the Chic look (perhaps he had in mind the glam rock boots), marketed themselves as antidisco, even though their best-known song, “Detroit Rock City”

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(1976), has a lot of disco in it. Fatigued from Saturday night fever, the drummer falls behind the beat in the bridge. 13. Randle, “Nile Rodgers.” 14. Bryan Ferry, “Loop De Li,” YouTube video, 4:25, November 5, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a0_ko3Vr68, 4:02 of the fadeout. 15. Hip-Hop Evolution, season 1, episode 2, “The Underground to the Mainstream,” directed by Darby Wheeler, featuring Grandmaster Caz, Melle Mel, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, et al., developed by Banger Films, aired September 11, 2016 on HBO Canada and Netflix. My thanks to Violet Prete for this reference. 16. Mitchell Morris, The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 31. 17. This issue is explored throughout Morris, Persistence of Sentiment. 18. Jerilyn Jordan, “Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry Answers Our—and Your—Emails via Email,” Metro Times, July 31, 2019, www. metrotimes.com/detroit/roxy-musics-bryan-ferry-answersour-and-your-emails-via-email/Content?oid=22274054. 19. David Tipmore, “Roxy Music: ‘Making Fun’ of Fun,” Village Voice, March 3, 1975, 117. 20. Anderson, “Letter of Recommendation,” celebrates Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk for precisely the opposite reason: “What makes [it] a great album—not just a pop relic of the late ’70s but an artwork that continues to speak to contemporary, sentient humans—is how quickly and ruthlessly it exposes [the] lie.” 21. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 2001), 275–92.

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22. The style of the film, and this line from it, is discussed in Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 159–83. 23. Kiri Miller, “The Accidental Carjack: Ethnography, Gameworld Tourism, and Grand Theft Auto,” Game Studies 8, no. 1 (2008), http://gamestudies.org/0801/articles/miller. 24. Quotations from “Emotion 98.3,” GTA Wiki, https://gta. fandom.com/wiki/Emotion_98.3. 25. William Cheng, Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 131. 26. George Plasketes, “Further Re-flections on ‘The Cover Age’: A Collage and Chronicle,” in Play It Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music, ed. George Plasketes (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 19. 27. Lucy Kaplansky, personal communication with the author, July 10, 2020. Her version of the song had received almost 12 million streams on Spotify as of this date. 28. Mike Powell, “Todd Terje: It’s Album Time,” Pitchfork, April 7, 2014, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19148-todd-terjeits-album-time/. 29. Tony Ware, “Todd Terje: It’s Album Time,” Electronic Musician 30, no. 5 (2014): 44. 30. Ski Oakenfull, “Todd Terje: ‘Inspector Norse’ Deconstruction at LMC,” Point Blank Music School, YouTube video, 22:37, April 1, 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v–RNas1RHUgM. 31. Frederico van der Post, “Throwback Track: Todd Terje; Dolorean Dynamite,” Bad Kingdom Music, December 5, 2019, www.badkingdommusic.com/home/throwback-track-toddterje-dolorean-dynamite.

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32. “Todd Terje: Inspector Norse (Official Music Video),” Pitchfork, YouTube video, 4:20, June 19, 2012, www.youtube. com/watch?v=gHiqPG0526U. 33. Carter F. Hanson, “Pop Goes Utopia: An Examination of Utopianism in Recent Electronic Dance Pop,” Utopian Studies 25, no. 2 (2014): 384. 34. Powell, “Todd Terje.” 35. My thanks to Violet Prete for the observations in this paragraph and the reference to Dylan’s (and Ferry’s) low hum and whispered secret.

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140

Also available in the series

1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes

Ladyland by John Perry

2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans

9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis

10. Prince’s Sign “
” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller

11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard

5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice

12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo

6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh

13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore

7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli

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141

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17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy

18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz

31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario

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32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis

20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green

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34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar

22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks

35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti

24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Wilder

36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal

25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese

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61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl

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A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

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77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks

65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton

78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr

66. Madness’ One Step Beyond. . . by Terry Edwards

79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer

67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal

80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost

68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson

81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell

69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol

82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield

70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois

83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman

71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten

84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton

72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles

86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem

73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo

87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson

74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent

88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Elizabeth Sandifer

76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin

89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall

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90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum

102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford

91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar

104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor

105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley

93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson

106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann

94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven

107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker

96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold

108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra

97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves

109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr.

98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod

99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden

112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole

100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast

113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork

101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner

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114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts

125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton

115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic

126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly

116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas

127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay

117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi

128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin

118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia

129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross

119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney

130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony

120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli

131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman 132. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow by Samantha Bennett

121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero

133. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel

122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker

134. dc Talk’s Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson

123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein

135. Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry

124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch

136. Odetta’s One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson

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146. Elton John’s Blue Moves by Matthew Restall

137. Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible by David Evans

147. Various Artists’ I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen by Ray Padgett

138. The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin

148. Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope by Ayanna Dozier

139. Tom Petty’s Southern Accents by Michael Washburn

149. Suicide’s Suicide by Andi Coulter

140. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines by Ian Bourland

150. Elvis Presley’s From Elvis in Memphis by Eric Wolfson

141. Wendy Carlos’s SwitchedOn Bach by Roshanak Kheshti

151. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads by Santi Elijah Holley

142. The Wild Tchoupitoulas’ The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner

152. 24 Carat Black’s Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth by Zach Schonfeld

143. David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler

153. Carole King’s Tapestry by Loren Glass

144. D’Angelo’s Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick

154. Pearl Jam’s Vs. by Clint Brownlee

145. Judy Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall by Manuel Betancourt

155. Roxy Music’s Avalon by Simon Morrison

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