Not precisely sure how
this happened, but I completely missed Roxy Music for the last 49 years. The dearest of friends, with impeccable, stem
cell-similar taste that evolved in a waltz with my own, wrote recently to
insist I dig in. Appropriately it was his college-aged son who had
forced the band upon him.
The first few Roxy Music album covers were absolutely
iconic, sexually supercharged, unavoidable flashing lights at the age of
thirteen in every record store at the time.
And times immemorable, a teen flipping through albums, I saw, considered,
and discarded them as something I wasn’t interested in. Why?
Too soft when I was in to punk?
To angular when I was rediscovering everything else from those early
seventies years? It wasn’t just me,
either. No one else among my knowing set,
echo chamber, had anything to say about them for all these years.
I’ve been listening over and over to the first four albums
this week. They feel like missing femur
bone that connects one limb of rock history to another. I pride myself on knowing either side of
that bridge, very well; say British rock of the early seventies to the punk
explosion a few years later. These
songs are punchy, catchy, experimental, blessed with tasteful period guitar
fills and screeching sax. Brian Ferry himself
soars, with a voice that seems to immediately suggest seminal influence for,
Jello Biafra, Devo, David Byrne, Howard Devoto, David Vanian, and how many
other voices I otherwise considered as sui
generis, and utterly unique. I caught a clip of Ferry reminiscing about the
band and he came across and thoughtful, articulate, smart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdnrciMhrvI
I’m still a bit mystified by it all: how cold something so
obvious, remain unexplored for so long?
I’m trying to recall who was ever into them over the years. No one comes to mind. Better still, why wasn’t every one into them? The album covers have a pornographic quality
that made them feel cheap, glammy and trite.
Something that looks like that can’t be what I’m looking for. So glad to discover I was wrong. I’m gonna put on ‘Re Make / Re Model’ right
now.
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