Guest Post: Sheila O'Malley on Bill Murray and Sofia Coppola's LOST IN TRANSLATION

Jason Bailey recently wrote an article over at Flavorwire entitled 15 Great Female Film Critics You Should be Reading and my guest blogger Sheila O'Malley was rightfully featured on that list. For my own thoughts on Sheila, take away the 'female' in that title. She is, simply put, one of the best writers on film and music in the world and is a huge inspiration to me so I am so honored by her appearing here again at Moon in the Gutter. I don't know what to say about this piece on Bill Murray...like all of Sheila's personal pieces it is engaging, haunting, intelligent and poetic. I am beyond thrilled to present here today and thanks so much to Sheila for sharing it with us.                       

BILL MURRAY IN LOST IN TRANSLATION by Sheila O'Malley, 2013

It's the day before Bill Murray shows up in Tokyo to start filming Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, and Coppola, talking to the camera, wells up with tears in excitement. Even the way she says "Bill" shows her emotion about the man. She says, and she suddenly seems 11, 12 years old, "It's my fantasy ... I can't wait to see Bill in his kimono. I can't believe he's coming to do this movie. It's my dream." Bill Murray is famously elusive. He has no representation, no agent or manager. How did Coppola "get to Bill" with the offer of Lost in Translation? "Perseverance," she says. She has been open about the fact that he was her only choice for the role of Bob Harris, the sleep-deprived movie star shipwrecked in Tokyo. She didn't want to do the movie if he didn't play the role. Great things come out of such risks, such gambles, and often the great ones are the ones who have no Plan B. In a career as diverse as Murray's, there haven't been too many mis-steps, which is rare. Like Cary Grant, who managed his own career, Bill Murray keeps his own counsel, does what pleases him, and is self-protective to the point of being a total mystery. He started out in films playing weirdos, grumps, and detached anti-social anti-heroes. Ghostbusters shot him into the stratosphere, but for me, it was his sidekick role in Tootsie that showed Bill Murray's uncanny smarts about his own career.


It's a small role, but, in looking back, I think Tootsie was even more important than Ghostbusters or Stripes in Bill Murray's career. It helped to express what he was really all about. I started watching Saturday Night Live regularly during Bill Murray's first season. I was a kid, and much of the show went over my head, but there were two Bill Murray characters which struck a deep chord, both comedically (I understood why they were funny, in other words), and emotionally (I had a huge crush on him, in other words). The first one was the lounge singer, Nick Winters, whose gigs involve performing in truck stops outside the Vegas strip, a moving railway car, and other depressing venues.


Nick Winters is Dean Martin and Elvis Presley in his own mind, and he bellows out his songs with gusto and flourishes, the results often being totally ridiculous. But the trick is that he honestly believes he is playing at The International Hotel in front of thousands of people. Nick Winters is totally delusional, and yet the character is not tragic, we don't feel sorry for him. What I am left with, when I watch the Nick Winters sketches, to this day, is an overwhelming sense of Bill Murray's essence. It feels laid-bare there, in a way I don't get from his other popular sketches, like the Ex-Police, or the co-anchor on Weekend Update. A real key to Bill Murray's long-lasting appeal is in Nick Winters. The other sketch that made a huge impression on me was the "nerds" sketch, with Bill Murray as Todd DiLaMuca, the geek with the pocket protector, who was best friends with Gilda Radner's snuffling-nosed nerd Lisa. What is so great about both of their performances is that underneath the awkward nerdiness and bad jokes, what they are actually playing is an ongoing subtextual love story. Every time he makes fun of her flat chest, every time he grabs her and gives her a "noogie attack", there's a tension of what might happen next. There's a hope/fear that Todd might finally do what he has always wanted to do from the beginning, which is take Lisa in his arms and kiss her like a maniac. It's a character-based sketch, the kind I love best. Bill Murray and Gilda Radner got a ton of laughs as Todd and Lisa, but there are also moments where the sketches almost move into bittersweet poignant territory. In the sketch where Lisa is in the hospital for an operation to correct her "deviated septum", Todd visits her, but unfortunately another student, Charles (played by host Steve Martin) also visits her. Charles has brought Lisa's homework for her, and Todd tries to denigrate his rival's thoughtfulness by sticking his finger down his throat over how gross it all is. But what's really going on is Todd is bummed out that he didn't think to bring Lisa's homework. That nerdy girl lying in the hospital bed is the hottest girl in town: men are fighting over her. And finally, in the "coda" of the sketch, when the rivals have finally left her alone in the room, she turns off the light and lies there for a minute. Then, she turns on the light, gets out of bed, goes to a chair by the door to pick up her teddy bear, walks back to the bed, and crawls into it, snuggling the teddy bear close to her. It's sweet and quiet, and the silence of the audience as they watch her shows that they will follow these two characters anywhere. Would Todd and Lisa ever kiss? Would they ever break through the joshing almost-violent dynamic they have with each other? It's vulnerable work from both of them. And in Todd DiLaMuca, we can see Bill Murray as Leading Man. Not everyone is a Leading Man, but he is, he always was.

Bill Murray carries with him a slight potential of danger, we sense he could turn cruel at any moment. His detachment makes him a natural commentator on the human condition, but it can also isolate him, it can also make him unsympathetic towards his fellow creatures. Often comedians, so used to having to "get laughs", try to be likable in their film roles, they want the audience to be on their side. Bill Murray never had that problem. Groundhog Day tapped into his darkness, an essential part of him. Years of character parts solidified Murray's position as one of the most interesting actors working today, and Wes Anderson jump-started a third (or fourth) wave of his career with Rushmore. There we get Bill Murray's essence, too, only now shaded with middle-aged melancholy and sour cynicism. But what would have happened to Bill Murray's career if he hadn't been convinced by Sofia Coppola's "perseverance" to play Bob Harris in Lost in Translation, which brought him his first Oscar nod? It's not a given that a role like that would have come along for him, in the natural course of things. His days as a Ghostbusters superstar were seemingly in the past. Someone had to think it up, someone had to dream about him in that way. Coppola did. I always felt fluttery with excitement when Bill Murray showed up in a movie, and this sensation has lasted, what, 30 years? That's insane longevity. Coppola was very smart in how she utilized that in Lost in Translation. Murray had to recognize that this, this role ... this one would change things for him. He said that he read the script and immediately thought, "Yes. I know this. I already know this." Murray was right to trust her with his carefully guarded persona. She pulled back any veils that might be between us and him and revealed all of those elements we have sensed in him from the beginning: his caustic outsider status, his world-weary eye-roll (that could either be hostile or affectionately inclusive), his well-known ambivalence about his own fame, and his surprising capacity for piercing sudden tenderness (which is what I always felt reverberating beneath his shenanigans with Gilda Radner in the "nerds").


While there are so many moments I love in Lost in Translation, it is in the karaoke scene where, by some magic trick of mood, music, performance, and free-floating associations, we can see the history of his entire career, poured into the vessel created for him by Coppola. The first time I saw the scene, I honestly felt like I had died and gone to heaven. I couldn't believe it was actually happening. This ... exists now? If the scene had been self-conscious or arch in any way, it wouldn't have worked. Coppola loves him, and you can tell she does by what she allowed to happen in that scene. Let him go, let him be, let him be himself, and stand back. Marvel at him. You can feel Coppola marveling at him in the way she films that scene. And she doesn't give him just one song to sing. She lets him sing two.

The first song he sings is Elvis Costello's "What's So Funny About Peace, Love & Understanding?" The first time I saw the scene, of course, Nick Winters from so many years ago flashed through my mind, and how happy Nick Winters was, in his own fantasy of being two steps away from being a member of the Rat Pack even though he's singing in a dive, wearing Elvis knock-offs and silk shirts opened to the navel. Bill Murray launches himself into Costello's song with gusto, and suddenly, somehow, the space gets tremendously emotional. It's almost chaotic. The emotions are there in how he sings the song, certainly, but it's how Coppola films him as well. It's almost like he's in a stadium, singing to the cheering masses. While you get the sense that this is the most fun Bob Harris has had in years, there is also a wild sadness underneath it, so wild that it is probably frightening to even acknowledge its existence. That wild sadness was always there in Bill Murray's work. It's never more palpable than in this scene. Scarlett Johansson, in her pink wig, then gets up and sings The Pretenders "Brass in Pocket", expressly doing it for Bob, who is so relaxed by this point that the openness of his face is actually a little bit heartbreaking.

But Coppola is not done with this location, this event. We then see Scarlett, holding the mike, and saying, to an imaginary crowd in an ultra-serious voice, "Ladies and gentlemen. Bob Harris." He takes the mike, and admits to her, "This is hard." The way he says that line encapsulates everything I have loved about Bill Murray from the very start of his long career. Again, it's like he's Nick Winters, lost in the fantasy of being some tormented rock star about to sing a ballad he wrote that means a lot to him and it's going to be "hard" to get through it. Bill Murray knows it's funny, Bob Harris knows it's funny, and then, like quicksilver, the moment passes, and he starts to sing "More Than This", and this signifies a swoon into another mood, a quieter one. He's no longer standing, like he was for the Costello number, but sitting beside the pink-wigged young woman who has suddenly come into his life, and he hasn't slept in four days, and the way he sings the song makes it sound like it is coming from out of the dream he wishes he was having.

"I could feel at the time There was no way of knowing
Fallen leaves in the night Who can say where they're blowing
As free as the wind Hopefully learning
Why the sea on the tide Has no way of turning More than this you know there's nothing
More than this tell me one thing More than this there is nothing."

Bill Murray has always been a little bit hard to pin down. I think he likes it that way. I think it's one of the reasons why his career has lasted so long, and has had so many interesting dips and turns. He resists classification, and has always stood a little bit outside of the normal path. If he is going to lend his persona to a director it has to be for a damn good reason. Sofia Coppola gave him a damn good reason. She had been dreaming about him for years. It shows. There's a reason why Bill Murray refers to her as "The Boss".


***Thanks again Shelia for this incredibly moving and wonderfully informative piece!***

Bryan Ferry Unveils His Olympia Cover Starring Kate Moss

I am so extremely excited about Olympia, the upcoming solo album from Bryan Ferry that is due out in late October. This is Bryan's first album of new material since his stunning Frantic collection nearly ten years ago, and Olympia's first single "You Can Dance" is absolute vintage Ferry. Bryan just unveiled the cover of the album, which features a lovely new shot of the incredibly iconic Kate Moss (a personal favorite whom I am thrilled to see on a Roxy-Ferry sleeve), and I wanted to share a preview here. More information on Ferry's upcoming album, which features everyone from Brian Eno to Dave Gilmore to The Scissor Sisters, and new single can be found here for those interested.

Deluxe and Delightful

Info on what looks to be my dream-show can be found here...

Classic Song Chronicles: "Jealous Guy" (John Lennon)

While the title track “Imagine” is undoubtedly the most famous song off Lennon’s masterful 1971 LP, it is the haunting “Jealous Guy” that has become the most covered. Growing up with the legendary album, I must admit that “Jealous Guy” has always been my favorite, and as I have gotten older it has lost none of its hypnotic and powerful pull for me.
Lennon originally wrote the tune for “Jealous Guy” after The Beatles returned from their visit to India as “Child of Nature”, a song that was left off The White Album.



The discarded song stayed in Lennon’s head throughout the next few years and he brought it back to life during the Imagine sessions with new typically ultra-personal lyrics focusing on his relationship with artist, collaborator and muse Yoko Ono.



“Jealous Guy” is one of the ultimate John Lennon songs as it shows so many aspects of his volatile and passionate personality. Beautiful sounding but with a real line of bitterness underneath, the song offers up an apology without a resolution. It’s as though Lennon is explaining a line of behavior he has no plans on changing.
Despite the fact that the song includes Lennon’s own undeniably effective piano playing, the haunting harmonium work by John Barham, Jim Keltner on drums and the ever present Klaus Voorman on bass, the real pull of the track is Lennon’s pleading vocal take and an eerie mid-song whistle that would go on to influence Billy Joel a few years later on his equally mesmerizing "The Stranger" in 1977.

“Jealous Guy” wasn’t released as a single in Lennon’s lifetime (it finally appeared as a 45 under his own name in the mid eighties) but its impact was immediately felt. Of the dozens of cover versions of the song, one of the earliest by late soul legend Donny Hathaway remains the most effective:



Rod Stewart and The Faces began performing the song live in the mid seventies shortly before they split up, and the tune lent itself well to their scrappy but ferociously great playing, and is heard well in this rehearsal version:



The most successful version of the song (and truth be told, perhaps the greatest) was released by the peerless Roxy Music in 1980 shortly after Lennon had been killed outside The Dakota in New York. Armed with one of Bryan Ferry’s most enduring vocals and the band’s typically immaculate playing, Roxy Music’s version would ironically turn out to be their only number one hit in Britain, and it served simultaneously as a lament and tribute to an extraordinary talent taken all to soon.



Everyone from The Black Crows to Kiss have performed the song since. Much missed Elliot Smith was an unabashed fan of the track and his tender version would pop up often in his live shows throughout the nineties:



The most original version of the song came courtesy of Lou Reed at the Come Together tribute concert in 2001. Lou’s pulverizing and passionate version of Lennon’s track instantly became a ‘Lou Reed Song’ in the famed New Yorker’s hands and it’s a shame he hasn’t (to my knowledge) revisited it since.



Vivid, unflinching, and altogether haunting, "Jealous Guy" remains one of John Lennon's most beloved tracks and, along with the raging "Crippled Inside", it is the key song off his most commercially successful album.

Inside Roxy Music 1972-1974

Gearing up for the release of the double disc THRILL OF IT ALL collection that is getting ready to hit American shores, I was finally able to catch up with the near hour long INSIDE ROXY MUSIC 1972-1974 last night.
I have read a lot of complaints about the British INSIDE series, that has profiled everyone from Syd Barrett to Kate Bush, but I must admit that I am quite fond of it for the most part. While it is true that these are essentially unauthorized low budget productions with limited archival material and no input from the bands themselves, there is something so refreshing about the fact that they really are about the music and not the artist’s personal lives. I find them all really welcome in our age of sick and draining tabloid journalism run rampant.
INSIDE ROXY MUSIC 1972-1974 follows the pattern set up by the other shows in the series where we see a group of musicians, fans and critics being interviewed (talking head style) about just what it is that captivates them so much about the artists in question.

The Roxy Music panel is fairly strong although I must admit that I wasn’t familiar with most of them with the exception of late period bassist Mark Smith and the Roxyrama founder. Still, despite not knowing them, I found them all to be compulsively watch-able, well spoken and intelligent.
The show starts with a discussion of the band’s legendary first single, the blazing VIRGINIA PLAIN, and how unique Roxy Music were from the get go. Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground are correctly mentioned throughout the show as being one of the pivotal influences on Roxy, especially in relation to that first single and STREET LIFE. Interesting comparisons are drawn throughout including an interesting talk on A SONG FOR EUROPE’S connection with David Bowie and why Roxy continue to impress and be talked about long after most bands from the period have faded into obscurity.
Much is made of the dynamic between Ferry and Brian Eno, and the disagreements on Eno probably provide the documentary with its most bracing moments. Particularly telling are the differing views on Eno’s replacement Eddie Jobson who is viewed as musically more sophisticated but perhaps not as creative…an interesting but not totally accurate view as I have always found Jobson’s work to be quite extraordinary especially on the majestic COUNTRY LIFE album.
My favorite aspect of the disc is the serious discussion on how incredibly inventive and original Ferry is. I have stated before that I consider Bryan Ferry as important as any rock artist from the past forty years and seeing his often undervalued work treated with such respect and care was extremely satisfying.
Archival clips from the BBC are spread throughout and even broken up into pieces like they are here, they still show Roxy as one of the most visually and musically astonishing bands of this or any other age. One critic notes that it was like they were aliens who had fallen to earth and viewing these clips, that seems absolutely true.
Like I said, this isn’t a program at all interested in the personal lives of these artists. So no Jerry Hall, no information on the fights between Ferry and Eno…just an hour of serious discussion on why the songs and albums of Roxy Music remain so absolutely essential and vital.

The main problem with the disc is how short it is and the fact that it just covers the first half of Roxy Music’s career. I would love to see a volume two on the underrated second half, a period which is in many ways even more confrontational and interesting than the first. Also looks at the solo careers of Ferry and Eno would be absolutely essential and are hopefully in the works.
Fans of Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno should absolutely take a look at INSIDE ROXY MUSIC 1972-1974. While it is no way definitive and just contains a smattering of performance clips, it will remind you of the undeniable triumph this band was and why their music continues to prosper to this day.

Roxy Music's The Thrill Of It All DVD Will Be Released In The States!

I was thrilled to find out this morning that the new Roxy Music DVD collection, THE THRILL OF IT ALL, will indeed be released here in the states and will be a two DVD set and not one as originally reported. I had previously posted on the UK release of this and I was frankly worried it would not come out here. Here is a link to order it and it streets in February.

The complete track listing of this important release can be found here. The totally mindblowing clip above will be featured on the upcoming disc.

Roxy Music Archives Finally Hitting DVD

My vote for the most important archival music DVD release of the year streets at the end of this month in England. ROXY MUSIC: THE THRILL OF IT ALL promises to be an absolutely mind blowing double disc set featuring tons of rare television footage, and live work from their monumentally important career.
No word as of yet, that I can find anyway, on a US release but it appears that the discs will be all region so there hopefully won't be too many compatibility issues. To read the full press release, please click on the link above. While there, you can also vote to have Bryan Ferry knighted (I'd personally rather see him and his extraordinary group put into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame) and read a new interview with Phil Manzanera that mentions Brian Eno was indeed involved on all of the tracks for the upcoming Roxy Music release, their first studio album since
1982's AVALON. He also mentions that Roxy have been contracted to deliver not one, but three new studio albums.
Roxy Music are my all time favorite band, and I can't wait to get my hands on this collection.

An Anniversary Worth Celebrating

Since we past the fifty year mark last year of Elvis' appearance on the Ed Sullivan show it seems like there will be an endless number popular culture anniversaries that can be celebrated. One that I didn't want to let pass was the fortieth anniversary of what I consider to be the most important album released in that watershed year of 1967.
The number of influential and mind bending albums released during 67 is staggering with just a few of the most notable being The Beatles SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND, Pink Floyd's PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN, Jefferson Airplane's SURREALISTIC PILLOW, The Kinks SOMETHING ELSE and I could go on and on. None of these, admittedly brilliant albums, compare though to my ears to one poor selling album that would have been gathering dust in the V section of your favorite local record store 40 years ago.
Released in March 1967, THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO was an album unlike anything ever heard before. Although it barely scraped the bottom half of the top 200 in the spring of 67, for the people who bought it became a watershed moment. It is ground zero for modern music and I would argue the most influential album ever made.
With the financial and artistic support of Andy Warhol (credited as producer although Dylan producer Tom Wilson actually handled it) The Velvet Underground at this point was made up of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker and a tall German model and actress named Nico.
New Yorker Reed had met Welshman Cale a few years before while they were both employed at a knockoff songwriting and recording company. Reed's astonishing street wise poetry and feedback drenched guitar stylings and Cale's classical avant-garde training would soon collide into the most searing sounds rock had ever heard.
The story of how The Velvets formed and met up with Warhol has been repeated so many times that I won't go into it here so I will flash forward to the album itself and my thoughts on it.
The thing that continues to give THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO so much power after 40 years is that it simply sounds like nothing else in popular music. No matter how many thousands of bands that have attempted to copy it's sound or Reed's words, the album is still its own separate universe. It is also one of the few recordings that doesn't have a clear starting point. With Elvis you could hear many of the blues artists and pop singers that he had heard growing up and with pretty much everyone after him you can hear Elvis, but songs like VENUS IN FURS or THE BLACK ANGELS DEATH SONG don't seem to have any starting point. They still sound like a clear beginning, some sort of musical big bang that hadn't been dealt with in rock before.
I would never slight the contributions of Maureen Tucker's primal revolutionary drumming style, the crystal purity of Sterling Morrison on guitar or the haunting vocals of Nico but it is hard to deny that THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO's main elements are Lou Reed and John Cale.

I have heard the studio take of HEROIN probably over a thousand time and I have dozens upon dozens of live recordings of it but there is still a moment in its original VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO take that still gives me chills and causes me to stop whatever other thought processes I might be having. It's the section that features Reed singing one of the most brilliant and chilling passages in rock history,
"When the smack begins to flow
Then I really don't care anymore
About all the jim-jims in this town
And everybody putting everybody else down
And all of the politicians makin' crazy sounds
All the dead bodies piled up in mounds"
and then Cale's Viola literally sounds like it is taking off into a completely uncharted splintered universe. The sound of Cale's viola along with Tucker's rapid heartbeat like drumming has still been unmatched for all out intensity in rock. You'd have to pull out an Ornette Coleman-Don Cherry collaboration or one of Albert Ayler's wilder moments to sonically come even close to what The Velvet's are doing on this album, and it all falls into place that moment when it feels like Lou Reed and John Cale come face to face with the most impending of all darkness and the darkness retreats screaming.

Much has been made of Lou's lyrics on this album and it is all justified. No one before or since has managed to capture urban angst or the frustrations of addiction, depression and ultimately redemption better than Lou Reed. The journey that he began in these grooves with tracks like HEROIN continues to this day. Much more than being rock's dark prince Lou Reed has reminded us for forty years now that there is indeed light at the end of the longest and blackest tunnel.

Equally compelling is John Cale. Like Reed, Cale has had one of the most ferocious and compelling careers of the past four decades, consistently releasing as many masterpieces as any of his peers, including Lou. The sound captured on THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO is these two warriors stepping into the ring for the first time battling off every conceived notion that a serious music fan might have of rock music, and the final bell still hasn't sounded on them.
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO is perfect in every respect beyond the most obviously brilliant tracks like HEROIN, WAITING FOR THE MAN and VENUS IN FURS. It contains some of the most startling ballads in Reed's catalogue like SUNDAY MORNING, FEMME FATALE and I'll BE YOUR MIRROR. These songs, with all of their doubt and vulnerability, still rank among the finest songs of lost love and yearning ever written. The album is also filled with a handful of perfect rock songs like THERE SHE GOES AGAIN, RUN RUN RUN and EUROPEAN SON that chronicle both Reed's and Cale's love for rock at it's purest. It was no coincidence when Cale turned Elvis Preseley's HEARTBREAK HOTEL into one of his greatest tracks as a solo artist or that Reed would cite Presley's THAT'S ALL RIGHT as the creation of rock music. For all of their avant-garde leanings, these guys really loved the basic foundation of rock and roll and that comes through clearly on this album, it just so happened that no one had ever played it quite like them before.
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO was of course a major failure upon release and it is hard to cite the exact moment of when it began to become the legend it is. You can hear the rumblings of it when David Bowie began to cover I'M WAITING FOR THE MAN in the late sixties but the exact moment is near impossible to place. It just feels like the album wasn't there and then it was...the moment of its release is rock music's point of B.C and A.D.
Brian Eno has that famous quote about how only a few hundred people bought the first Velvet Underground album but they all started bands. That's one of the most accurate thoughts in rock history and starting with the first Roxy Music album you can began to see the creative string that THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO album had dangled for other artists to grab onto. After Roxy Music, a virtual catalogue of the greatest albums of the last thirties years sprang directly from the bruising sonic masterpiece of The Velvet's first lp. Album's like Pere Ubu's DUB HOUSING, PiL's METAL BOX, Jesus and Mary Chain's PSYCHOCANDY and My Bloody Valentine's LOVELESS all the way up to the upcoming White Stripes record would be unthinkable without the Velvets. Thousands of others ranging far and wide between Joy Division to Vanessa Paradis or Television to The Birthday Party have continually paid tribute to The Velvet's and the extraordinary legacy they left.
Nico would never record with the full unit again although she would work with Lou and Cale at different points in her audacious and always brilliant solo career. My favorite Velvet Underground album remains the follow up to THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO, the chaotic and pulverising WHITE LIGHT WHITE HEAT. That would be the only record with just the four core group members and to me it is their ultimate work. The third album and LOADED are also masterpieces and it is hard to think of another group that has such a perfect, if small, studio catalogue. Start at track one on THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO and go to the final track on LOADED and you have one of the most seamless and extraordinary bodies of artistic expression in music history.

I was 15 when I got my first copy of THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO. It was on vinyl and there was a small scratch on the record that caused a rhythmic popping sound during FEMME FATALE. I often thought that little pop was my own little secret version of the album and it's that sound and the music on this remarkable album that have stuck with me now for nearly twenty years of my life. I have no doubt that it will be something that I will have with me when I take my own eventual exit into the great unknown Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker and Nico travelled to forty astonishing years ago.

Dust Off Those Grooves (Chapter 13) Bryan Ferry The Bride Stripped Bare

Bryan Ferry's furious 1978 release THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE was a relative failure upon initial release and is now mostly remembered in the context of Jerry Hall leaving him for Mick Jagger. Rolling Stone exclaimed in the headline of their original negative review that the album was "more Edith Piaf than Muddy Waters" and I always wondered why that was considered a bad thing.
THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE is one of the great break-up albums of all time as it is an album that had Ferry responding to punk and the criticism he had fell under after his first solo albums.
No band had been more progressive or acclaimed than Roxy Music in the early seventies but by the time of the brilliantly subversive MANIFESTO and FLESH AND BLOOD they were becoming more and more disdained by groups and critics who had forgotten what the word irony meant. So THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE is an incredibly ambitious album, one that sees Ferry trying to answer his critics with a reminder that he could indeed rock while still maintaining the cool and slightly sinister air that he had developed for himself with Roxy Music.
THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE is an album obviously made by a man in distress. It is one of the most authentically paranoid albums ever recorded and it is a startling cohesive album considering it is a mixture of original songs and cover versions.
Ferry is one of the great underrated singers of the rock era, he is an extremely talented song stylist who has the unique ability (like one of his idols Elvis Presley) to take seemingly any kind of song and make it uniquely his own. He is also an incredibly important songwriter and when he is at the top of his game (FOR YOUR PLEASURE, COUNTRY LIFE, FRANTIC) he is pretty unmatchable.
Ferry had been unhappy with 1977's IN YOUR MIND, even though it contained several astonishing tracks and the brutally good guitar work of Chris Spedding, and he wanted THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE to signal a new beginning for him.
The album opens with the surprisingly volcanic SIGN OF THE TIMES, one of the shortest and most potent songs Ferry has ever recorded. It's crunching twin guitar attack of Waddy Watchel and Neil Hubbard combined with some of Ferry's most biting lyrics proved a thrilling starting point. The single famously failed at the height of the punk movement but it holds up just as good as say anything off The Clash's second album that was released around the same time. When Ferry spits out, "Here is a rainbow for your hair" we know that glam is truly over and that we are in the midst of something far more desperate and real.
The album's second track, CAN'T LET GO, is its most famous as Ferry and Roxy Music have revisited it live many times throughout the years since THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE original. Again the duel guitar work by Watchel and Hubbard is incredible and Ferry delivers one of his most pained and impassioned performances. Never has anyone so known for being so cool, that they are almost cold, sounded so vulnerable. The song has been looked at as an obvious message to Jerry Hall but there is the sense that Ferry is singing also to the time period that he came from that was obviously disappearing.
The albums next two tracks were two of the most surprising choices of Ferry's career up to that point. The famous soul track HOLD ON I'M COMING had been a major hit for Sam and Dave in the sixties and Ferry's crunchy version is a fine cover with again his impassioned vocals carrying the track. Even more surprising was the tough version of J.J. Cale's SAME OLD BLUES. Ferry sounds absolutely possessed with anger on this track with Alan Spenner's impressive bass playing standing out.
The gorgeous ballad WHEN SHE WALKS IN THE ROOM marks the albums halfway point and it's a lovely track with Ferry singing lines like, "And your fair weathered friends fail to speak, they're so afraid still waters run deep". The song's final few moments with Ferry and Waddy Watchel harmonizing the title is incedibly haunting and absolutely devastating sounding when you consider what Ferry was going through at this point in his life and career.
Al Green's TAKE ME TO THE RIVER shows just how much bad luck Ferry was having at this point. Originally ridiculed for his version, it would soon become a monster hit for the Eno produced Talking Heads with David Byrne obviously more inspired by Ferry's version than Green's original.

THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE'S masterpiece follows with Ferry's thunderous stab at The Velvet Underground's WHAT GOES ON. Ferry transforms Lou Reed's original into a frustrated and impassioned plea and when he suddenly starts incorporating lyrics from The Velvets BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT into the mix we are caught in one of Ferry's great moments. The accompanying video featuring a bearded and weary looking Ferry is one the indelible images in a career full of them.
Another beautiful ballad follows in CARRICKFERGUS and like CAN'T LET GO we have Ferry admitting his inability or need to move on. It's a lovely version of a much often performed traditional Irish song.
One last cover is THAT'S HOW STRONG MY LOVE IS and Ferry's version hearkens back to not only Otis Reddings version but ironically Mick Jagger's vocal take on The Rolling Stones cover. All is fair in love and war it seems.
The eerie THIS ISLAND EARTH closes the album and it would have been right at home on one of Roxy Music's early albums. It is worth noting that Ferry's excellent keyboard work here resembles some of Eno's solo albums from this period which gives a good example that these two have always been in a way connected.
Ferry has recently returned to THIS ISLAND EARTH with some remarkable live performances and a BBC session which saw this great lost track getting an amazing response. It is one of Ferry's loneliest numbers and one of his best.

THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE was Bryan Ferry's biggest gamble and biggest failure in the decade which he owns as much as David Bowie or any other iconic figure you can think up. It was troubled from the beginning as it was originally planned as a double album (the scrapped songs showed up later as b-sides) and an odd, half-hearted marketing campaign sealed it's fate.

The album is not often mentioned among Ferry's best and while it doesn't have the majestic draw of his greatest albums it does give us a rare glimpse of one of our coolest and most important artists at his most open and vulnerable.

Ferry's newest album, Dylanesque, has just been released and the much anticipated new Roxy Music studio album will hopefully arrive later this year.

Please note that the above WHAT GOES ON sleeve collage comes from the remarkable THESE VINTAGE YEARS site. Visit them at www.vivaroxymusic.com for a comprehensive and up to date guide to the wonderful world of Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry.

Dust Off Those Grooves (Chapter Ten)

When the dust settles on the remarkable career of David Bowie I believe two things will become evident. The first being that this man is the most innovative and important artist of the rock era and secondly that he reached his artistic peak in, not in the 1970s, but in the 1990s.
Bowie's artistic disintegration in the eighties has been well documented in many publications and after reaching his nadir with the heartbreaking Never Let Me Down album Bowie would begin to formulate the most impressive artistic comeback in rock since Elvis in 68.
Bowie's first step towards redemption was the savage project he formulated with guitarist Reeves Gabrels. Tin Machine is typically made fun of these days but one listen to the first album clearly shows just how necessary that band was. Blasting away the eighties, with one of the most brutal albums by a major artist ever, Bowie buries every over-produced and under-written song he had spent the previous five years performing.
After the furious Tin Machine period where Bowie would successfully alienate the audience that had adopted him in 1980's he would re-enter the studio with none of than Let's Dance producer Nile Rodgers. At first it seemed like Bowie was stepping backwards but it soon became apparent that Bowie was attempting to recapture his voice by going head to head with one of the men whom he had originally lost it with. The talented Chic founder Rodgers would find Bowie to be a very different artist from the one whom had made Let's Dance the decade before. Bowie took full control and produced an album that was at times heavily flawed but always interesting. Black Tie White Noise would debut at number one in Britain and would contain a couple of tracks that could be counted among Bowie's best, including the terrifying Jump They Say, but it wasn't a masterpiece to rank among his finest work. Bowie was already quietly getting ready to deliver that.
1993 saw director Roger Michell approach Bowie with the idea to provide the soundtrack to a mini-series he was working on entitled The Buddha Of Suburbia, based on the novel by Hanif Kureishi concerning a young man attempting to come of age in 1970's England. The idea that Michell had was to originally use Bowie's work from the seventies but Bowie liked the story immensly and agreed to provide new material.
Recorded in Switzerland, The Buddha of Suburbia is the great lost David Bowie album. Out of print for years and the weakest seller in his catalogue, some hardcore Bowie fans don't even know about it. Yet it is in these ten tracks where he hear Bowie truly reclaiming his art and it would signal the trilogy of masterworks (Outside, Earthling and Hours) that he would produce in the years following its release.
The Buddha of Suburbia would see Bowie returning not just to the strong song writing of the early seventies but also the longer instrumentals that had populated Low and Heroes.
Harking back to early compositions like The Bewlay Bros. and All The Madman the title track of the album would become one of the greatest of all Bowie songs. A lovely and exciting song that would recall not only the early seventies but would also see Bowie tipping his hat to newer British bands he admired like Suede and The Stone Roses, it is one of the great 'British' songs Bowie has ever recorded. The line 'Elvis is English and climbs the hills' among others would mark this a Bowie's homecoming and within a few years he would take to performing in a Union Jack coat.
After the stunning title track the album switched gears completely into a six minute plus instrumental entitled Sex And The Church. The song is a weird mix of house and free jazz with Bowie providing some buried spoken word throughout. Nicholas Pegg, author of the indispensable The Complete David Bowie, would note that the song's conclusion would sneak bits of The Jean Genie in before suddenly ending.
South Horizon is reported to be Bowie's favorite on the album and it is a delicious instrumental that sounds like Roxy Music doing a Cecil Taylor song. Mike Garson's piano is at it's most experimental here and the song weaves a hypnotic six minute groove.
The seven minute track The Mysteries sees Bowie returning to the ambient like instrumentals that he cut with Eno for Low and Heroes. It is one of Bowie's best moments as an instrumentalist and it would pay tribute to an expiermental moment in popular music that I still don't think has topped.
Strangers When We Meet would provide the album its next great moment and would serve as one of the most perfect pop songs Bowie has ever delivered. A glorious five minute side that Brian Eno loved so much that he would have Bowie record a second version two years later to close their astonishing Outside album.
Dead Against It is the most frenetic song on the album and would be selected as the B-side to the title track single. Untitled #1 again has Bowie harking back to his work with Eno in the seventies. Lush, sweeping and lovingly rendered with a line, "It's clear that some things never change", that sums up the entire album.
The album would close with one final stunning ambient piece, Ian Fish U.K. Heir and a reprise of the title track featuring a solid, but unnecessary, Lenny Kravitz guitar solo.
The Buddha of Suburbia is an album that manages to do the near impossible task of looking back and forward at the same time. It also works as a perfect introduction to the massive scope of Bowie's career as it seemingly features something from every one of his musical persona's.
The album has had a strange release history. Originally a botched British only release that was incredibly released as a straight soundtrack and not a new Bowie album. It managed only to get to 87 on the British charts and quickly slipped out of print. It finally got a quiet American release in the mid 90's with a new cover and that version also fell quickly out of print. It remains the only Bowie album that is currently not in circulation. It is also one of Bowie's favorites of all of his own work and he would draw heavily on it for his All Saints instrumental album.
Bowie would soon, after recording Buddha, be back in the studio with Brian Eno for the audacious and already influential Outside album. He would continue to grow more and more confident throughout the 90's and this decade with a series of albums that I believe will hold up as well as his best work from the 70s.
Dave Thompson in his fine study of Bowie's career renaissance, Hallo Spaceboy, would note that Bowie is, "moving into what will unavoidably be described as the next phase of his career from a position not only of contentment, but also of unparalleled creative strength". That is correct and for anyone curious to hear the moment when Bowie truly regained his genius should seek out the most elusive of all of his work, the magnificent Buddha Of Suburbia.