what I mean when I say the words Bryan Ferry
I wonder if one can love, enjoy oneself, pray, die from pain, or just die, plain and simple, in another language or without telling anyone about it, without speaking at all. ~ Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or the Prothesis of Origin (1996)
Spendin’ cash, talkin’ trash ~ Dobie Gray, The “In” Crowd (1965)
No matter how long I live, I will never understand your hard-on for Bryan Ferry ~ my child, age 22, after a two-hour car trip listening to my tracks (2020)
It is August 9, 2019 and Bryan Ferry is in Washington Heights, playing the Palace, the United Palace, Reverend Ike’s joint, one night only.
I could still go. As it happens, I have an odd night alone. (Where are the boys? Did they go up to the country without me? I am reading these words I wrote at the time and no longer remember).
What would I see? World Tour 2019. Bryan’s playing songs from Avalon, the ultimate Roxy Music album.
Ultimate: incapable of further analysis, division, or separation.
This is a thing now – bands (or really one final remnant of a band) touring and reproducing a classic album. We’d seen John Cale doing Paris 1919 not long before, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Who’s left? Does it matter? For me it was always, only, Bryan.
The theater itself is a wonder. Built by Thomas Lamb in the Orientalist style (“Indo-Persian” says the Landmark Preservation document) it was the first movie theater in Washington Heights. Broadway and 175th Street. Opened in 1930 - all the “Wonder Theaters” opened 1929-1930. Poor timing? Or the best timing. We live in a building which also “opened” in 1929: the world it was built for turning out to be very different than the world it came into. Was that where celebrity culture really started – the dingy 1930s with its electric marquees and movie magazines? Day of the Locust indeed.
I walk up often into the Heights and marvel at it but never go inside.
But it’s no Real Steel Contagion Dick. Another marquee I visit in Washington Heights. Somebody’s joke. The last time I went it had morphed into Least Kindragon LIC. Who shuffles the letters? Where is the missing “eecto”? Is this a sly reference to ecto as in ectoplasm? Who is the ghost that haunts Washington Heights? (besides me, searching for Bryan)
Among the letters received in favor of a landmark designation for the United Palace
(written letters, not plastic letters on an abandoned marquee, Jenny Holzer style)
- one is from the general manager of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, unnamed - but that’s S’s friend P. The landmark document lists all the architectural features: historical and alterations.
I could just walk up there and see who’s standing on line. That’s still a possibility. Would that be desirable? At that time, a little afraid of a possible Western civ/white supremacist vibe. Fans one finds on Facebook are not reassuring. I worry that this might be sex music for Steve Bannon. A Song for Europe? With Bryan’s sixth form French. What was that khaki uniform he was wearing, around the time that Siren was released? But Fassbinder loved A Song for Europe, for all the French and Latin and heavy chords it was, finally, a song about Eurovision. And it’s a joke actually but no one understands jokes anymore; no one understands the 70s with its ink-squid dinge and shag carpets like lying down in a deadly field.
Eurovision began the year I was born, in Lugano Switzerland. Not me – I was born in Glens Falls New York. Won by Lys Assia singing Refrain:
The years passed far too quickly
And on the path of loneliness I cried
When will the sky be bright again?
When will you return, golden days full of bliss
When do we pick flowers there in the field like back then?
Du gold’ner Traum, komm noch einmal zurück
I had a dream about Bryan Ferry, almost 40 years ago. My (then) husband discovers us together (he has a knife in the palm of his hand) and I sacrifice myself to save Bryan. This was during the early 80s when all the revanchist Vietnam films were coming out and my ex, who was Thai, always looked like the enemy. I wrote the dream down at the time and described what we were doing as “strange goings-on under the sheets” which now makes it sound like a Klan meeting rather than anything sexual. He (Bryan) reminded me of another man I’d had an ambiguous, slightly tortured relationship with who maybe turned out to be gay? But I never knew for sure. Or I knew and have now forgotten.
Mostly what they shared was hair that fell over their foreheads, a hank, a shank, a sharp fall. And they’d put a hand up to grab it and force it back.
The Girl of My Best Friend. A weirdly constructed Elvis title which Bryan covers on Taxi (1993). Except I was the girl, and I was living with his best friend.
There is some indication that grimacing helps to reduce the sensation of pain.
All these people are dead. All these people are dead except for Bryan, and Bryan’s ex-girlfriend Jerry Hall. And, oddly (because he’s the oldest of any of them) Jerry Hall’s newish husband, Rupert Murdoch.
But Bryan’s wife Lucy is dead – I just found that out. I hadn’t been looking — Lucy Birley/Ferry/Helmore committed suicide the day before my birthday, 7/23, in 2018 on a holiday in Dublin. And Reverend Ike is dead. And I think the “other man” is dead and has been for a long time. Not sure about my ex-husband – but (and now it is decades ago) when I came across his picture in the Times one morning, an absurd story, I was amazed that he wasn’t “dead already”. That is exactly how I expressed it to my current husband, going on to say “I can’t believe he’s not dead” like the husband in the old margarine commercial says he can’t believe it’s not butter.
“He had a knife in the palm of his hand” – so I might have been thinking of Brian DePalma. Scarface was out that year, but I wouldn’t have seen it. Blow Up or Dressed to Kill were the last DePalma movies I’d see. Maybe a midnight showing of Sisters.
Actually, mostly of the (former) Roxy Music are still alive.
Andy Mackay (born 7/23) living
Paul Thompson living
Brian Eno living
Graham Simpson (well, he is dead though his bass lives on in Ladytron)
“I didn’t exactly leave I was just too stoned to know what the fuck was going on”
“so fuck me I just took off for Ios”
(of course Ios is now an operating system, not a Greek island, Cycladic, a classic “party island” whilst also boasting the Tomb of Homer)
Graham Simpson was one of the original originals – he’d been with Ferry in his art-school, blue-eyed soul incarnation the Gas Board (but not the Banshees?)
David O’List living
Phil Manzanera living
Rik Kenton
(I can’t find out if he’s alive or dead, but there’s a great Cliff Jones story up on FB). Now going back I can’t find this.)
The one thing that people know about Bryan Ferry is that he was an art student which – first of all was a surprising thing for a miner’s son. But his dad wasn’t a miner, exactly, he took care of the pit ponies like his father before him? A plowman with four horses, something out of Hardy. Or maybe “many [of the German Romantics] had studied mining”. Vertical consciousness. Class consciousness. Vertigo.
And, according to Mark Fisher, it was no coincidence that so many British bands came out of art school. It was basically a two-year grant to do what you wanted. Different from here then, and maybe without the class constraints one might imagine. Of course, it’s all changed now and “art school” in the UK is once again the province of the privileged.
Bryan was an art student who studied under Richard Hamilton and Richard Hamilton worked for years on a replica of a Marcel Duchamp work, a piece which is in Philadelphia so there is a genealogy. And for me (the terror of influence? What phrase am I thinking of? No, surely it is just the anxiety of influence) because I spent my adolescence in a turgid suburb of Philadelphia and would take the train in to spend the day at the museum and the room of Duchamps is where I learned about “art”.
When I made a copy of the Tate article, about Duchamp’s Large Glass
(what Hamilton made a copy of, but without the crack)
– and when I say “when I made a copy” I mean I “printed” it as a pdf so it would sit on my computer’s “desktop” and I could read it at my leisure, or when I remembered it – anyway, when I made a copy, the copy is perfectly legible but all the illustrations are empty – some kind of rights issue I guess? -- rectangles a soothing shade of gray like some especially innocuous Farrow + Ball color. A cross between James White and Stony Ground, with a little Wevet thrown into the mix.
Hamilton’s Large Glass – replica? Reconstruction? Is it The Bride of The Bride Stripped Bare?
A 1956 interview with Marcel at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the gallery – (National Broadcasting Company – with James Johnson Sweeney who was a Guggenheim curator at the time) – they put it in a truck from Brooklyn and it went 60 miles (to Phillie?), one glass on top of the other, flat
Missionary position?
But is that how it broke? A footnote in the Tate article says it broke on the way from the warehouse to Katherine Dreier’s CT home – but that would have been more than 60 miles? Though I guess that depends on where the warehouse was.
Wait -- it was “Lincoln” warehouse in Manhattan. Also, the crack wasn’t discovered until 1931 and she didn’t tell him until 1933.
Katherine Dreier’s Duchamps are now at Yale, including the ineffable, extremely horizontal Tu m’. I am old enough and know enough things that I can type that without having to look up the title. Tu m’ was the last Duchamp work on canvas and includes painted shadows of earlier iconic ready-mades. Bicycle Wheel. Hat Rack. Sort of a Greatest Hits. And lovely color swatches like out of a sample book. The title a mystery you/me/[absent verb]. Swallowed. Unlike the brayed “jamais” of Song for Europe, which Bryan (mis)pronounces with the accent on the second syllable instead of the first. So instead of saying jamais/never, he may be saying j’aimais
I loved
The Lincoln Warehouse Corp, in the 1930 Blue Book listed at 1187-1201 Third Ave, 69th to 70th St.
And in a bio of William Randolph Hearst by David Nasaw, “The press had visited and written about San Simeon [!] and the Bronx warehouses, but no one knew that there were tapestries, carpets, textiles, and hangings in storage at the Lincoln Warehouse on Third Avenue in Manhattan between 69th and 70th Streets…”
San Simeon also one of the odder of Ferry’s solo songs, referencing Hearst so it’s not really a coincidence. “tiger skin rug love”. From Frantic (2002).
MD. He’s wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt. Yes, he does seem “at home” as he says. Nude Descending – he wanted to be “of his time” and Cubism was his time. He wanted to include movement.
The formula of the chocolate grinder. “completely dry drawing” mechanical – accuracy – no idea of chance.
“ah, well, chance is another question”
“Hamilton recalled in 2005 that he purposefully screwed the extrusions together rather than welding them as a piece so that the frame could be taken apart and put together again and used in different locations.”
Hamilton’s version does not reproduce the shattering:
“In 1966 he stated: ‘The breaking was an unpredicted calamity which caused, however, little distress in its victim. This new version is made on armour plate glass – a provision likely to preserve the appearance of its model’s youth’. During a conversation with Jonathan Watkins published in May 1990 Hamilton reiterated: ‘it is nice to see the Glass as it was when young. I think the reconstruction serves that purpose’.”
Nothing can break the same way twice.
The glass as it was when young.
Michel Leiris in October Vol 112 (Spring,2005 – translated by Richard Sieburth, when was it originally written?):
“Between The Bride as painting and The Bride as a series of documents there is a significant gap, indicative of Duchamp’s valorization of the-game-as-living-thing over the-painting-as-dead-thing and expressed by the gradual passage of the subject of the painting (which is already a machine with all its moving and interlocking parts: the “stripping bare” of the bride) into what will become the subject of the box: i.e., the very creation of the painting itself, exhibited in all its successive stages and multiple ramifications, with an emphasis on its genesis and not on the dead moment of its completion—“the apparition of an appearance”, to quote one of the most revealing of the notes scattered throughout the documents.”
Ferry’s album (Ferry’s LA album) The Bride Stripped Bare came out in 1978, the year I graduated college. And got married. Robert Christgau gave it a B+, referencing the “apparent sincerity of the singing”. It was recorded after Jerry Hall left (him). It’s a callback, to art school and Richard Hamilton. To the beginning of getting the girl or not getting the girl.
Richard Hamilton’s collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) He was working on a retrospective when he died in 2011. He’d been to the U.S. for the first time in 1963, a distraction from mourning his wife Terry O’Reilly who’d been killed in a car accident. He was there for the Duchamp retrospective in Pasadena. He met Duchamp who invited him to Cadaqués where he eventually bought a house.
Bryan calls his covers “readymades”.
When he covers the songs of others, not the covers of his own albums. The Roxy covers. Infamous. They add up to 9 women (studio albums only) if you don’t count the twins purportedly hidden among the mannequins on Manifesto. I can’t spot them.
9 malic molds, to quote Duchamp.
1972: Kari-Ann Muller (Roxy Music)
1973: Amanda Lear (For Your Pleasure)
1973: Marilyn Cole (Stranded)
1974: Constanze Karoli/Eveline Grunwald (Country Life)
1975: Jerry Hall (Siren)
1979: (Manifesto)
1980: two models, three javelins (Flesh + Blood)
1982 Lucy Helmore (Avalon)
9 malic molds. 9 malic models. The apparatus of the Bachelor. The Bachelor’s Pad.
From the Norton Simon Museum website (about their Nine Malic Moulds, a “version” (recreation?) made for the 1963 show in Pasadena:
“Nine Malic Moulds represents nine types of jobs that could be held by men, these bachelors, in 1915: a priest, a department-store delivery boy, a gendarme, a cuirassier, a policeman, an undertaker, a flunky, a busboy and a stationmaster.”
Priest
Delivery Boy
Gendarme
Cuirassier
Policeman
Undertaker
Flunky
Busboy
Stationmaster
(a cuirassier is a soldier defined by his sword)
(aren’t gendarme and policeman the same thing in different languages?)
(“flunky” would seem to split the mold as a function that can occur in different fields)
(can priests ever marry? That may be the problem)
It may be that policeman occurs in the city and gendarme occurs in the country.
(He does covers because he can’t write fast enough.)
He divorced his wife Lucy. Or she divorced him? There are competing tabloid stories about a dramatic plane landing in Kenya (Christmas 2000) after which they both came to (separate) life-changing conclusions. His was that he couldn’t die without finishing a particular album; hers was that she had to divorce Bryan.
She then married a man who had been mauled by a tiger in his youth. (I think there is a call-back to this story but with a sex reversal and a lion instead in an Endeavor episode. Or is England simply riddled with personal petting zoos featuring the exotic and ferocious?).
More suicides around Lucy: Alexander McQueen, Isabella Blow. L’Wren, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend (but this is a different part of the story).
Ray Johnson. No, he had nothing to do with these people. Except some attenuated Warhol-Hamilton link.
Although his girlfriend (who had his child – this whole lot is an insanely braided genealogy where mothers in particular are always changing partners and father-ship is unclear) had no idea he was marrying Lucy and claimed he was the best lover she ever had, was very sorry to have to give him up.
No one knows who their father is, really (a conclusion I draw from Lacan though I’m not sure it’s one that he himself reached).
Anyway, his girlfriend claims he’s the sexiest man alive which is hard to see in the photos – the mauled face not his fault but that Beatles moptop haircut surely is…
Earlier, Jerry Hall left Bryan for Mick Jagger. In the Stones vs. Beatles Tiger Beat competition, I would pick the Stones every time. Is it for imagined authenticity? Because I know that’s a lie. Even so, I would never have left Bryan for Mick, not even early Mick, androgynous Mick, Performance-era Mick.
Revolution: it is important to remember that May 1968 was also when Enoch Powell gave his “Rivers of Blood” speech – no, wait, it was before May, it was April, April 20, Hitler’s birthday, a date which would prove later to be a lode stone for right-wingers of every ilk.
April is the cruelest month
1983: Banana Republic purchased by The Gap – we are all colonialists now.
Town and Country has a putative list of Jerry Hall’s boyfriends. Between Mick and Murdoch, there was
George Waud (producer of Snakes on a Plane)
Tim Attias (hedge fundie)
Benedict Allen (“explorer”, author of Mad White Giant)
Warwick Hemsley (property developer, another Australian)
Armand Leroi (evolutionary biologist, modern-day teratologist)
Which, if you squint, makes an impressive array of many of the themes of our fin de siècle/début de siècle: white supremacy, minstrelry, rentier capitalism, empire and the revenge of the penal colony exiles of the white underclasses.
She married Murdoch in March 2016. She has a lot of children to look after.
Is Your Love Strong Enough was on the soundtrack to Legend (1986) – it had originally been an outtake from Avalon.
[Legend was the movie where Alice had worked with Mia Sara and tried to hook Stan up with her. Though I was right there. On the spot. He didn’t stand a chance, at least on the basis of men she went on to marry (both sons of famous people – Sean Connery and Jim Henson).
Tom Cruise was in it which means nothing to me but Tim Curry (as the Lord of Darkness!) Also, Billy Barty who had appeared in the film version of Day of the Locust, a decade earlier. Alice played a goblin, Blix. There’s a scene of implied castration (of a unicorn’s alicorn). Ridley Scott filmed this instead of Tristan and Isolde.
Mickey Rooney was considered for one of the major (small) characters but “he did not look small enough next to Tom Cruise”.]
Bryan gave up smoking in 1989? When he was 44. I quit in 1994 when I was 38.
Armand Leroi’s latest scientific publication (May 2020) looks at neutral models of evolution (which assume an absence of natural selection). The abstract states “We suggest that the ability of neutral models to fit low-information distributions should not be taken as evidence for the absence of selection.”
Was Jerry Hall just such a neutral model?
Barthes spoke in the lectures that make up the Neutral in words that could apply to Bryan: “Memory and forgetting are equally arrogant.”
Chris Jones called Bryan the “Overlord of Lounge Lizards”
Barney Hoskyns said he was the “Melancholic of Glam”
In 2019, Leroi collaborated with other authors on a volume On Revolutions (not yet published). They claim to be presenting a way of identifying revolutions from “a measure of the multivariate rate of change called Foote Novelty”. It is a background/foreground measure. It was developed for measuring audio novelty so the idea of extending it to larger and political phenomena seems…ballsy? Daft?
Jonathan Foote introduced the notion in a 2016 paper:
“…the self-similarity for past and future regions is computed, as well as the cross-similarity between the past and the future. A significantly novel point will have high self-similarity in the past and future and low cross-similarity. The extent of the “past” and “future” can be varied to change the scale of the analysis.”
Leroi has written about musical evolution often and one of his recurring ideas seems to be that consumers as much as producers are responsible for musical “evolution”. This follows up on Barthes death of the author.
Of course, you have to use spectral analysis to get here.
Frantic: to make up for Hiroshima, the Japanese release included a bonus track: I’ll Forget More Than You’ll Ever Know (a 1953 hit for The Davis Sisters before Betty Jack was killed in an auto accident the week it was released).
The Davis Sisters were not sisters! Just as I’m reading a Cincinnati Enquirer article about their accident (from August 3, 1953) my eyes land here: “On the other side they recorded “You’ll Never Know”
just as YouTube, where I’d gone to hear Ferry’s version of I’ll Forget had advanced to the (Sheffield? Newcastle? 1974) Valerie and the lyric “we’ll never know”.
It was a head-on collision – the other car driven by a Francis Whitemire, sergeant stationed at Clinton Country Air Force Base in Wilmington OH. A driver who’d been behind him for 20 miles gave evidence that he’s witnessed “weaving and speeding”.
All of the glory is a pantomime. Mother of pearl?
From the YouTube comments:
“The best version ever! I had this same one on an old vinyl bootleg called, "Champagne and Novocaine". According to that this was from a '75 show in NYC. I'm pretty sure this was John Wetton on bass as the style of playing is very different than Jon Gustafson's approach to the song. The Roxy Music website says Wetton played on the Country Life tour '74 to early '75 and includes 2/21/75 as a show in NYC. Oh ya, Jobson's great little keyboard break leading into the 2nd part of the song is a Hohner D6 Clavinet :-)”
says Dennis M. and it sounds like he knows whereof he speaks.
Skeeter Davis (who was not really a Davis) went on to a successful solo career, one of the highlights being 1963’s The End of the World, a crossover hit. In her Wikipedia entry, the claim is that this song is “the first popular example of Sound on Sound where the erase magnet was disabled and the artist sang along with the recording…therefore, it sounds like a duet in places.”
It is not a song about the actual end of the world (something which seemed perishingly close at many times during the 60s) but a hyperbolic romantic complaint that the world (in fact) continues post-heartbreak; “why does the sun go on shining”…
Roxy was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame March of 2019. I find an interview, CBS This Morning (my mother loves this show), shot at the Lambs Club, NYC: Bryan’s answer to “why the costuming” is that everyone in the band, early days, was introverted and dressing up just made it easier.
Was The Strand from The Strand Hotel in Rangoon? Classic Empire. Mauled by a tiger.
Imagine if Bryan Ferry was your pottery instructor. A job he was fired from and we are left to wonder why.
Virginia Plain, Top of the Pops from 24th August 1972 – the kids don’t look so hyped. Their debut single. Bryan’s wearing slightly metallic green eyeshadow, just like a pan I inherited from my mother and wore at around the same time. Pale pale green, arsenic, really. Bryan grimaces for the camera close-by. Could you accuse him of affecting gay-face? In every dream-home, a fag hag. I don’t think so. For years I assumed Eno was gay, or maybe I just didn’t care. In an essay from ’78, Angela Robbie looked at the difference between “girl music” (pop) and cock rock. For all the belt-notching, cock rock was by boys, for boys. Girls wanted androgyny.
Richard Hamilton’s piece in the Tate, $he, 1958. The archness of the commentary, the reduction of woman to appliance, albeit sexy appliance. Backless dresses, mindless fucks. He’s a lad, after all. There is a different kind of homage embedded in Roxy, in Ferry – how many songs about blow-up dolls? Instead of reducing women to blow-up dolls, he elevating blow-up doll to muse. Hans Bellmer, Sears Roebuck.
Just because there are no answers doesn’t mean you don’t ask the questions.
It wasn’t a sneer, or not a sneer like Elvis. It was teeth-baring, an antediluvian smile. It does not signal aggression.
I never wanted to be one of the cover girls, the malic molds. The reason desire was never fulfilled wasn’t because the object was unobtainable. The object was not the object, could not be the object. Desire can’t be satisfied. Want is wanting. In the end is our beginning. Jamais.
Jamais.
1 april 2021