Talk Amongst Yourselves - Open Thread (with a side of Glam)

"Virginia Plain" - Roxy Music

Sherman, set the WABAC Machine to England in 1972 -- and watch the Brians -- Ferry and Eno -- create that glam magic of yesteryear.  Note Eno's little homemade looking synthesizer and sequined gloves -- and really, really bad hair. 

Ran out of steam on the post on which I was working.  Hopefully will finish tomorrow.  And it is completely free of any Yglesias bashing. 

Comments

[minstrel hussain boy]

no iglesia bashing?

even though i've led the life of a pampered musician, i spent my summers all through school side by side with the mexicans and other outcasts (back then there were still okies in the fields with us). i picked cantelope, watermelon, lettuce, peaches, hoed cotton with a short handled hoe, and did what ever scut work the farmers needed. i did it so that i could afford little luxury items for the next school year, like clothes, shoes, books. the work was hard, the pay sucked, but it was the type of job that a 15 year old half breed in rural arizona could get.

i have never lost my respect and appreciation for the folks who do that kind of hard work. the construction workers, pipe fitters, tile workers. the trades that are so essential to civilized life, trades that are so important they became surnames like miller, carpenter, cooper, wheelwright, shoemaker, thatcher, and so on.

effete fucking bastahds give me a country style rash.

[big bad wolf]

wow. seen from afar, everything seems so related. like, did tim curry borrow from this-era ferry or was ferry taking from a then-unknown curry or was that ironic feyness just the scene? and was the young john travolta consciously going for a ferry-like look?

a good tune, catching roxy right on the edge of their great years. since it has been a contentious last couple of days i will risk the ire of at least one by observing that my favorite version of "jealous guy" is roxy's.

[Sir Charles]

mhb,

It's very hard to explain to someone who has mastered a craft in which he takes pride that his skill is no longer valuable enough to command a decent wage. There are a couple of other things that are going on on this front as well -- one is the deskilling of certain work through changes in technology. For instance, the application of mastick backed tile to wall board has taken a lot of the skill out of that trade. The second is a perception that owners no longer want to pay for quality -- buildings are viewed as disposable, such that price becomes the only determining factor in who is hired.

bbw,

I would say that Bowie and Marc Bolan were probably the ones who really pioneered the style. I think that Bowie's embrace of a sort of lounge lizard style at times inlfluenced Ferry.

I find the sound of this era Roxy Music more interesting then the later, post-Eno version, where they are clearly Bryan Ferry's band. As captured in this song, early Roxy has a kind of rollicking sound that is a bit rougher than the later stuff, which is very smooth. I think Ferry's version of Jealous Guy is superb. His version of "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" though is a bridge too far.

[big bad wolf]

i won't argue for his hard rain. i do find most of "these foolish things" fascinating and adore it's my party and the title track. both solo and with roxy i both really like and admire ferry and find him exasperating, not infrequently in the same some. there's a genius in many of his readings---insightful, felt, empathetic---but it is intermittent and linked to an often unsuccessful campiness. camp can't be made; it just happens; people took sontang's notes as a how-to. wrong.

[big bad wolf]

the end of that third sentence should be: not infrequently in the same song. senescence is hell

[Sir Charles]

bbw,

I have a definite fondness for Ferry and think when he and the band are at their best they are very, very good. (One of my friends claims that "Boys and Girls" is the greatest make out record of all time.)

One of the things that I have always found interesting is that Roxy Music was very well liked by the punk/new wave crowd throughout the late 1970s (including by me) when one might have thought that Ferry's style would have been considered contrary to the aesthetic of the moment.

My favorite comment about Ferry is that "he was much more likely to redecorate a hotel room than trash it."

[big bad wolf]

SC, i'd never heard that one before. that's great.

you are right about the affection for roxy in that group in that era. part of it, i think, was that roxy had, underneath that sheen, a very hard edge. there are a couple of songs on country life that even today when they pop up on my ipod can strike me as tough to take, that low, slow throb. part of it, i think, was glam led into punk, both temporally and that's what the listeners heard---a lot of us grew up on bowie and t.rex and then found roxy and mott and then the english scene was the actual anger that those bands had been stylized representations, making the affinity fairly natural. and part of it was that what teenage punk doesn't secretly want to be the coolest kid and date models.

[minstrel hussain boy]

make out record? can't really beat johnny mathis, almost any of them...

the best cover of "hard rain" was by leon russell, "mad dogs & englishmen" era.

come to think of it, "asylum choir 2" is a damned fine make out album.

of course, with the right make out partner, the music is really inconsequential.

[minstrel hussain boy]

here's leon

with the shelter people.

[Sir Charles]

bbw,

I was a big Mott the Hoople fan as well.

The band that probably straddled the glam/punk world best of all was the New York Dolls.

(Isn't "Be the Coolest Kid and Date Models" the motto on the Ocasek family crest?)

Another band of that time that was sort of sui generis but always part of the family was Television. They didn't really sound like anyone else -- they played long, slow, expansive songs in the era of short and fast, and they were defined by musical virtuosity in the age of three chord bashers. But they were always accepted in the punk world.

mhb,

Nice. I also like Leon's cover of "Jumping Jack Flash" that he did at the Concert for Bangla Desh.

My most amusing make out album selection was John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" when I was a freshman in college. I was not what one would describe as a sophisticate, but my roommate who grew up in NYC had a very large and broad record collection. I knew Coltrane played jazz saxophone and for some reason thought that this would be by definition sexy music. I can safely report that it is not.

[big bad wolf]

LOL, in a good way, becuase i hear the chant "a love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme . . ." in my head in the background.

i have marquee moon in my office as we "speak." i was going to give it a spin, not having heard it in years.

the dolls were great. there was a year or so in the early 80s when david jo played two or three times at the westgate lounge at the westgate lanes in brockton. this after having played the regular boston clubs for years and going back to them later. i've always wondered what the story behind that was. probably not, given that it was brockton, anything to do with the quite good motto you're created for the ocasek family crest.

[Joe]

Big Bad Wolf and Sir C, did glam come out of prog rock or was it a reaction to prog rock ? I always thought punk was the primary reaction to prog rock. As somebody born in 1971, I wasn't really sentient when these movements were happening. Did punk then grow out of glam ?

The thing about glam is that it's visually very ornate-- e.g. Bowie with his crazy costumes and stage shows, but it's an interesting point that, musically, a lot of glam is pretty straightforward. On the other hand, prog rock always struck me as musically ornate (and annoyingly so for me).

[Sir Charles]

Joe,

I would describe it as a reaction against not only prog rock, but "cock rock", see, e.g. Led Zeppelin, wimpy singer-songwriter shit, and the kind of horrifyingly bad pop that dominated the airwaves in the mid-1970s. There was a pretty putrid array of stuff on the radio.

Most glam rock was actually pretty stripped down musically (if not visually) and not that fundamentally different from the music that punk musicians played. (Everyone seems to have listened to the Velvet Underground.) The leap from the New York Dolls to the Ramones is not that great.

[oddjob]

Unrelated to above discussion:

Another interesting post, I suspect is more correct than not, and in at least part (from a more historic perspective) probably helps explain the rumblings to end the filibuster.

[oddjob]

The times, they are a-changin'.

Hat tip, TPM.

[big bad wolf]

joe, i don't know exactly. i'll tell you what i think i know and how it seemed to me as a 1961 baby growing up in the boston area, where the radio played stuff that you had to work to find in most other places.

i think glam and prog rock were both primarily british and that they arose contemporaneously in the late 60s and early 70s. two new things, but new in different ways. glam, as you say, was often straightforward rock literally dressed up in crazy or, for the times, challenging costumes. this was back when men didn't wear dresses, and bowie being a rock star and saying he was bisexual was a big deal. where to draw the line on what was glam and what wasn't can be difficult, i think. a lot of it was poppier, but bowie and mott and roxy were, as i said giving stylized representation to a lot of anxiety and angst and anger that their audiences felt. they did so in different ways, bowie almost entirely through theatrics and dramatic and allegorical albums; mott through odd costumes and working class solidarity and sarcasm; roxy through a coal-miner's son's travels through a world very different from where he'd come from, alluring yet unfamiliar and with dangers unthought of. here in the u.s. the dolls took the jagger look, the dresses, the makeup, and the diy ethos to an extreme and said, it seemed, we're a bunch of funny, surprisingly smart, fuckups wearing weird clothes and playing loudly and not particularly well.

in this sense, it seemed there was a clear line in what i was hearing on wbcn and buying in the record stores between glam and punk. glam was out there; so was punk. glam was rocknroll; so was punk. glam was about posing as a rock star, not being a rock star. in this sense, i think the lines from some glam bands to punk were clear and natural. remember too that the pistols, for all the real anger and real dysfunctionality were backed by malcolm mclaren, the showy impresario who would later bring us bow wow wow. so i think that punk externalized many of the same feelings that glam repressed and stylized, and so certain themes of glam help give us late 70s punk.

if, as i think, glam provide some postive substantive impetus to punk, prog clearly provided the negative impetus. prog was pretentious, and managed to be so on both the conservative and avant-garde sides. the really boring bands---especially ELP (ouch that hurts even to type) and the later yes---were self-consciously adding grandeur and technique and depth to rock music, as if we wanted the music to be staid and respectable and more like something our parents might want to hear. the hard-to-listen-to (again this is personal) bands like king crimson were both modernly artsy and grand at that same time and that seemed primarily self-involved. yes fripp could play, but did we want to listen. apparently not, and apparently a lot of young musicians were pissed. in this sense, punk came out of prog.

the other reaction, the one i could never fully understand, because damn it they weren't the greatest rock and roll band in the world, was against the stones, as well as the other high-living rock stars like zeppelin. i could excuse the ridiculous life of at least some of these "dinosaurs" because i loved their music. and becuase i was living in massachusetts not london. the east coast punk scene, as i experienced it, was less nihilistically angry than the london or l.a. punk scenes. but then i may just have been sheltered.

[big bad wolf]

i love this christgau review of a mott compliation:

The Ballad of Mott: A Retrospective [Columbia/Legacy, 1993]
I could cavil about omissions, "Death May Be Your Santa Claus" especially. But 20 years after the fact, you remember great bands for their sound as much as their songs, and these guys had one. They were prepunk, everybody knows that, but too often the "pre" is given short shrift. So remember this: committed to sarcasm, dystopia, and noise, they never took refuge in punk's inspired-amateur minimalism. On the contrary, their expansive mess was pure '60s, as was their penchant for the elegiac and the lyrical. It's a synthesis 10,000 garage bands have fucked up since. The 10,001st was Nirvana. A

[Sir Charles]

I think our descriptions are pretty similar. (I like your take on Roxy -- it is amusing that Ferry was a working class kid. His imaginary world was anything but -- "We are flying down to Rio" indeed.)

I think the reaction against the Stones was 1) that they had started to phone it in a bit as of Goat's Head Soup; 2) Jagger had become a celebrity in a very mainstream sense and even then was in danger of becoming a self-parody on stage; 3) it was pretty hard to relate to the lear jets and cocaine lifestyle; and 4) simple jealousy. But like you, I think the music -- especially from 1968-1972 is unassailable and as good as it gets.

Mott the Hoople was a strange amalgam of the sounds of the Stones, Bowie, Zeppelin, and Bob Dylan. It sounds like a mess, but it worked pretty well. I like some of Ian Hunter's solo work too -- "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" is a great Rolling Stones song.

[oddjob]

For those of you who were/are fans of the game "Mousetrap".

(Hat tip, Chris B. at Sully's blog.)