Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Musician NOVEMBER 1980 - by David Fricke

ROXY MUSIC

Underneath the veneer of art deco flash, devious sexual elegance and off-centered camp, Roxy Music developed a self-generated genre of music that paved the way for new wavers like Talking Heads, The Cars and Television. The latest Roxy album finds them still evolving as they stand on the precipice of mid-life crisis.

"In 1977," confessed Bryan Ferry, shifting uncomfortably in a New York hotel room armchair much too small to accomodate his six-and-a-half-foot frame, "I remember being really depressed by commercial failure, feeling I didn't have enough artistic acclaim to compensate for my work. I was feeling really sorry for myself, like a lost soul, and wrote a couple of songs about it."

Two years later, the long Romanesque lines of his severely handsome face were cracking into a thin smile. The album on which those songs appeared, Ferry's fifth solo album away from his group Roxy Music and called The Bride Stripped Bare, had been dismissed as a breast- beating bore by critics and ignored wholesale by the same public that used to lap up the pop- art perversities of Roxy Music. But this was the spring of '79 and the Top 40 success of the revitalized Roxy's first album in four years, Manifesto, had neutralized most if not all of the sting.

"It's a case," Ferry said triumphantly, "of being convinced that you're doing what you like, that you're being yourself through your medium."

Now more than ever, Roxy Music is a concept by which we measure Bryan Ferry's pain. At 35, Ferry - the singing, songwriting, and conceptual captain of the only commercially successful team to rack up lasting artistic points in the losing streak of mid-'70s British rock - is standing on the precipice of mid-life crisis and the latest Roxy record Flesh + Blood is his calm, collected admission that his "danceable solution / to teenage revolution" of eight years ago was only a rain check against growing old.

Even more so than Roxy's cautiously commercial return last year on Manifesto, Flesh + Blood signals the end of a pivotal rock & roll era. For starters, the fine line between Roxy albums and Ferry's solo ventures is further blurred by the inclusion of two ill-fitting covers. The Byrds' Eight Miles High was actually shortlisted from The The Bride Stripped Bare and the listless version of In The Midnight Hour (Ferry sounds more like a cool ghoul than the wicked Pickett) was first done for a Roxy video commissioned by a British television show for a New Year's Eve special.

The Roxy personnel merry-go-round, which once carried bass players like Graham Simpson, Rik Kenton, John Wetton, and John Gustafson at the rate of nearly one per album, seems deserted now. Charter drummer Paul Thompson is nowhere to be heard on record or seen on the current tour (Andy Newmark is sitting in his chair), and no fewer than eight sessioneers handle the bass, drums, and keyboard duties between them on Flesh + Blood. Only Ferry, reedman Andy Mackay, and guitarist Phil Manzanera (technically not even an original member) remain and even that's not a fixed line-up. On the title track of Flesh + Blood Ferry is the only Roxy player listed in the credits.

"We've done things like that before," Ferry argues now, the congenial ring of his booming basso voice tempered by his obvious fear of being misunderstood. "Even when there were six people in the band, certain people didn't play on certain tracks. We always had the different bass players and on Dance Away [from Manifesto] there were five different drummers and percussionists on that song alone. Phil didn't play on Sunsets from the Stranded album - that's just piano and string bass. And 2 H.B. on the first album was really just sax and piano. This time on Flesh And Blood, I even played guitar on that because the others were away on holiday."

He still makes the distinction between Roxy Music and his solo work, despite the implications of Roxy's recent attrition rate. But ironically, Bryan Ferry does not seem at the same time interested in maintaining the illusion that Roxy Music is a band or. for that matter, ever was. "To me, it's always been sort of a repertory company with some members more fixed than others. It's very nice to have certain people there all the time because you build up a rapport where speech becomes unnecessary."

Where Ferry and the boys made speech unnecessary among themselves, Roxy Music as both idea and reality made speech nigh on impossible among the populace in their freshman year of 1972. Conceived by Ferry in late 1970 and corn in an explosion of kitsch-y futurama and psychomutant art-rock, Roxy Music burst supernova-style onto British charts, radio, television and concert stages in the summer of '72 with a smash single and a startlingly eccentric debut album Roxy Music which delivered on every promise the song Virginia Plain made. Made for a paltry five thousand pounds and produced by King Crimson lyricist Peter Sinfieid ( no expert by any means). Roxy Music was the inspiring work of inspired amateurs who, like the Velvet Underground half a decade before them, were able to ignore the aesthetic limits agreed upon by their psychedelicized elders simply because they didn't recognize such limits even existed.

It may not sound like any big deal now, in this day and age of the Numanoid boogie and other variations on M-O-R minimalism. But there was something radically new and dangerously unsettling about the stylistic invocation of avant-garde names like Riley, Reich and Cage in the instrumental middle of 2 H.B. where Mackay's overdubbed saxophones created an echo-delay effect over Ferry's hypnotic dabbling on a Fender Rhodes piano. If There Is Something, a death-chant sax arid guitar vamp with a country honk intro grafted on, is still capable of setting chilis off and running down one's spine. But Virginia Plain - which wasn't even included on the initial British release of the album - is the Roxy sound in three-minute microcosm, a crash course in how to build a Spectorphonic wall of sound with fuzzed-up guitar, lounge lizard crooning, beeping and feting synthesizers, and an oboe skipping the harmonic fandango. Ferry couldn't agree more.

"It's very condensed, which I thought was a great thing about a single. You had three minutes to say your piece." Noting that Virginia Plain was actually recorded after the first album was completed because the band realized there wasn't anything remotely commercial enough on it to pass for a single, Ferry goes on to admit, "I can't remember how we came up with that arrangement. I just started banging on the piano, I guess [somewhere amid all the cacophonic fun, Ferry can be heard furiously pumping piano triplets]. The closest person influence-wise to that style of keyboard playing was Jerry Lee Lewis. I was always a great fan of his." Then, enjoying the compliment of his own comparison, he adds, "another mad Libra."

Roxy music, as set forth by Roxy Music on Roxy Music, also came delivered in a visual package of deviantly sexual elegance, art-deco flash, off-center camp, and '50s-for-the-'70s. The look developed by Ferry and London fashion maverick z Anthony Price was all leather, glitter, feathers, and hairstyles that looked like the fins on a '57 Cadillac. The initial impact of Roxy's freak chic and avant-pop cheek was so devastating in Britain - already brought to its knees by David Bowie's bisexual flamboyance - because Ferry's mob had meticulously mapped out each detail of the assault before hand. No one thought Roxy Music had a history because what they did had no precedent.

But Roxy Music is no more a record without roots than Roxy Music was madness without a method. Bryan Ferry had taken his degree in the finer arts at the University of Newcastle where he studied under the spell of British pop artist Richard Hamilton, himself a student of big Dada Marcel Duchamp. He'd played tenor sax with some wildly unsuccessful Newcastle soul bands (hence the R&B fixation of Ferry's first two solo albums These Foolish Things and Another Time, Another Place) and failed an audition as a vocalist for King Crimson in 1970. "Bryan," says guitarist Robert Fripp of that Ferry audition, "was a very good hustler. Of all the people we had auditioned, he hustled me more effectively than anyone. I knew he'd be successful."

Ferry admits that when he first started the Roxy wheels in motion, his musical training was next to nil. "I first started playing the piano about two years before the first album. I didn't have any training, but that was kind of a help in a way. It meant I didn't have any aspirations to do tedious solos. I tried strumming guitars, but it felt funny," he laughs chuckling at his own clumsiness, "trying to do two different things with my hands.

"I was also very interested in synthesizers, which was one reason for starting piano. I'd been through art college and had been exposed to avant-garde music, John Cage and all those people. And at that time, I met Andy Mackay. I was looking for someone with a synthesizer just so I could try it out. A friend of mine knew him and said 'I know someone who's got a synthesizer.' He didn't mention that he played saxophone."

In fact, Andy Mackay didn't even play the saxophone when he first met Bryan. His specialty was the oboe, an instrument he played with the London Schools' Symphony Orchestra. After studying at Reading University, Mackay started working with various electronic music groups in London, applying his interest and knowledge to his own compositions which ranged from day-long marathons to fractious minute-long pieces. It was Ferry, or so he claims, who persuaded Mackay to blow some of his ideas out of a saxophone.

"And then," Ferry continues the tale, "we invited Eno to come along and tape us because he had a tape recorder." As befitting someone who calls himself a non-musician, "he didn't have an instrument."

Phil Manzanera (real name Philip Targett-Adams Manzanera) originally enlisted as Roxy's soundman before eventually replacing ex-Nice guitarist David O' List. He remembers that at Roxy's early coming-out gigs at private London art crowd functions Eno mixed the sound and played his tapes simultaneously. "It was an enormous mixer, too. Eno used to mix the sound for the band and play his tapes from the back. People would come up to him and ask him questions about this and that synthesizer and he'd just go 'Sssh, go away' and start playing. And in the beginning, there were no amps on stage. It all went into the mixer directly."

Ferry, however, is quick to point out that Brian Eno's role in Roxy Music is far too overstated for his comfort. He cites For Your Pleasure, the second and last Roxy album to feature synth-tape experiments, as one of his two favorite Roxy records (the other, surprisingly, is Flesh + Blood) and insists that in the band's formative years Eno "was a very good person to have in the band. But we were coming very close to becoming a parody of ourselves, which is why I really didn't want to work with him anymore, in the context of Roxy anyway.

"You see, Brian couldn't really do anything on stage. I was becoming more involved in singing and I felt I couldn't really fulfill both functions,playing keyboards and singing and Brian didn't play keyboards. So I felt we needed a good keyboard player. Eddie Jobson was great on stage because he would always play the part on the record."

Always imitated but never duplicated, Phil Manzanera holds a special place in Bryan Ferry's musical heart. Coming from a man who admits "I need to be pushed, especially when writing songs," Ferry's description of Manzanera as someone "who has always been very good at liking what I do" is high praise indeed. Not surprisingly, Manzanera is also very good at playing guitar and his personalized fusion of traditional rock riffing, oblique harmonic extensions, and fluid but logically applied chops seems in retrospect to be the only appropriate foil to Mackay's atmospheric honking and the transistorized pastels of Eno and on later Roxy records, Eddie Jobson.

The product of a cosmopolitan upbringing which included stopovers in Cuba, Venezuela and Hawaii, he represents the mediating force in Roxy's collection of extremists. As a teenager, he developed concurrent interests in the high commercial pop of The Beatles and the Acid Age assays of early Soft Machine. At the same time he was gigging around London with a hopelessly psychedelic band. "I would go to record libraries." as he told a Downbeat interviewer last year, "and listen to Charles Ives, Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, musique concrete. And it all sort of sunk in." His solos on In Every Dream Home A Heartache (For Your Pleasure, '73), Amazona (Stranded, '74). and the alien electronic break announcing Manifesto bear him out.

The frustrating thing for Ferry was that, with all of the talent, imagination, and ambition at Roxy's disposal, the band had painted itself into a corner with For Your Pleasure. "When you've done the frantic thing," he explains referring to that album's high-octane drive an Side One and the disconcertingly expanded arrangements of The Bogus Man, Grey Lagoons, and the title track on Side Two, "you want to get more relaxed." He sites his first solo album, These Foolish Things, as a major turning point for both him and Roxy. The experience of recording other people's songs and working with other musicians - many of them cool studio cats - gave him a new perspective and confidence in the actual making of records, reflected in the artfully polished sheen of Stranded (recorded only a few months later) and later Country Life and the sorely maligned Siren.

"I became more experienced in the process of making records and more self-assured. That tends to make you want to clutter things less and not rely on a wall of sound, but to say 'Can I really stand up and do something that is very simple?'"

And he angrily denies charges that the last two Roxy albums before the split were deliberately watered dawn for American consumption. "I could never understand," he acknowledges, "the initial American reluctance to subscirbe to the whole Roxy thing." And it is true, he continues, that Roxy was looking more at America if only as a new challenge or as Ferry puts it "a fresh reason for making records. Whenever we went over to America, we were always very conscious of the fact that nobody played our records. We felt left out."

That changed with Love Is The Drug, the group's only American Top 10 entry and the song that typifies Ferry's trimline approach to songwriting and recording. Hopelessly limp compared to the implosive thrust of Street Life or the dark sensuality of The Thrill Of It All, Love Is The Drug is nevertheless an instructive lesson in how to make a popular record without completely blowing your credibility.

"For a start," Ferry relates, "it was Andy's chord sequence. But when he played it to me in the studio, it was very slow, more like A Song For Europe. I thought it was a very good sequence, I could hear a nice melody in there, and I thought it would be good to speed it up. I wanted it to be a dance record, which was one of the reasons for simplification of the basic elements in it."

What Ferry intended to be simple was dismissed as predictable, something which can actually be said for parts of Siren. The band sounded tired and indeed they were. Remarking on what might have happened to Roxy had they not agreed on Ferry's famous "trial separation" after the U.S. Siren tour, Manzanera pours on the sarcasm when he says "we would have broken in America - both ways."

No Roxy musician was out of work for long. Ferry continued making solo records in the face of increasing disinterest (he has complained in one interview that his U.S. label pulled tour support out from under him just before his one American solo concert trek in 1975). Manzanera continued to draw from a pool of progressive English fusioneers including Eno, Soft Machineman Robert Wyatt, bassist Bill MacCormick (Random Holo-to-be), and drummer Simon Phillips for his extracurricular records. Mackay was the dark horse of the lot; he can now live comfortably on the royalties from his soundtracks to the British TV series Rock Follies while indulging in dodgy solo efforts like In Search Of Eddie Riff (including such schlocky gems as his reworking of Ride of the Valkyries) and his fuzak-y audio-chronicle of a recent trip to Red China, Resolving Contradictions.

"But that fits in with the whole concept of Roxy," claims Manzanera, "to have strong individuals in a group together, to have certain things in common but to have different tastes, to go off and do their own things."

History in general has been very kind to Roxy Music. While the band was off plowing solo pastures for four years, their influence was busy parting the New Wave in England and, ironically, America, where young rockers - who weren't much into their teens when Virginia Plain blew the doors open - were modeling their outrage on that of Roxy's. Television reportedly sought out Eno's production services in the hope of getting the Roxy sound (the resultant demos showed they didn't come close). Siouxsie met some of her future Banshees at a London Roxy gig. Richard Hell was a big Siren fan and you can't help but hear a little Ferry through the cracks of David Byrne's voice on early Talking Heads recordings. U.K. electronic bands like Ultravox and the Human League base their sound not on the Teutonic drones of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream but on the sonic strategies behind the first two Roxy albums.

Now Roxy Music is forced to compete with their own legacy, coming back together just at the time when their influence is most pervasive. That would certainly explain the lambasting Ferry got for The Bride Stripped Bare, the album on which he finally stepped out from behind that comically pretentious veneer of arty insolence and really laid his tortured soul on the line. Flesh + Blood, for better or worse, is a slicker variation on that, like Ferry said of Manifesto, "more mature, therefore less outrageous." Only where, you might well ask Ferry, is the fun, the novelty, the "general bizarrity" (as Ferry once called it) in that?

"We feel there are a lot of new bands," - he answers, "in a better position to do that at the moment. When you come out and start doing something, you're much more prepared to take risks and rely very much on your initial outburst of energy and enthusiasm - which does mellow and change over the years. I don't like to think we're making totally conservative M-O- R music. I think it's a case of self-expansion, doing something that is a personal challenge to yourself, even if some of the audience isn't particularly interested. I get really upset when people think we're a band from the '60s," he complains. The next Roxy album will certainly make them think twice.

Roxy Music, and Ferry with them, have their '80s cut out for them. But it's hard to believe they don't relish the challenge. Contrary to the very tips of their platform boots, they insisted tomorrow always comes as early as on Re-Make/Re-Model, the first track on the first album. "Next time is the best time we all know / but if there is no next time, where to go?" Roxy got us this far. Now just follow the tracks of Ferry's tears.

ROXY MUSIC'S EQUIPMENT

Phil Manzanera's guitars are a Red 1963 Custom Firebird Black Beauty and a 1957 Les Paul Custom. His amps are a Mesa Boogie and a Gender Twin Reverb, both with Electro Voice K 120 speakers and he uses a Conn Strobotuner. Phil's effects are Eventide Harmonizer, Roland Chorus Echo Unit, Roland Analog Echo, Mutron Wah-Volume pedal and a Schaeffer Vega Radio Mic System.

Saxaphonist Andy MacKay blows the Selmer Alto, Soprano and Tenor Sax, the Malerne Oboe with a Schaeffer Vega Radio Mic System with Shure SMII Mini mics and a Roland Chorus Echo. Peter Cornish uses a custom built pedal board which includes 2 MXR Phase units, MXR Flanger and Octave Splitter and Mutron Wah Volume pedal.

Gary Tibbs goes with a 1964 Fender Precision Bass, a 1978 Wal Custom Built Bass through a Bassman 135 Amp and Cabinet and he uses an MXR Flanger. Neil Hubbard's guitars are the Gibson 355 Semi-acoustic and a 1962 Fender Tele through a Fender Twin Reverb with JBL Speakers and a Mesa Boogie with Eminence speakers. Plus he also uses the Mutron Wah/Volume pedal.

Keyboardists Paul Corrack and Brian Ferry use the Farfisa Pro Duo Twin Manual Organ, the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, 2 Selina String Machines, the Yamaha CP 70 Grand Piano with MXR Graphic Equalizer, a Wurlitzer electric piano, a Yamaha CS 80 Synth and a Roland Chorus Echo. All run through Yamaha A411 cabinets and tuned by the Conn Strobotuner. Finally, Drummer Andy Newmark beats on Tama Drums, using a Gretsch snare with Tama fittings and uses Paiste cymbals.