Monday Music: Looking Back at a Classic Debut
Roxy Music’s Eponymous First Record Turned 50 This Month
The first thing you see is the cover. The model posing, 1950s style. Vargas-like. Seductive. Vulnerable. Perhaps a bit too vulnerable, as though she was there not by choice. As though the game she was playing has turned dark. (Robert Christgau described her as a drag queen, but the credits list her as Kari-Ann Muller photographed by Karl Stoecker.)
You’re not sure what to expect. Not sure what this new British band is offering. You put the vinyl on the turntable, drop the needle. Listen.
First comes the crowd noise. Like a packed restaurant or bar, or a concert hall lobby before a show. Voices, and other bits of sound. Rising in volume. The ear is moving closer. Into the source. Into its depths.
Then: Piano. A left-handed figure that echoes The Beatles’ “Lady Madonna” or maybe a bit of the Stones. A little bluesy, but brief. Just a few turns and then the rapid-fire drums. A guitar slices through it all as Bryan Ferry breaks in, pre-crooner Ferry singing “I tried but I could not find a way.”
And we’re off. The lead track, “Re-Make/Re-Model,” rising from the chatter. The album unfolding, announcing Roxy Music as something different, but somehow familiar, growing out of what we knew but feeling a bit off.
Roxy Music’s self-titled debut dropped in the United Kingdom on June 16, 1972. Fifty years ago. The single “Virginia Plain,” would be released later, and added to the album when it was released in the United States several months later. The album hit no. 10 in the UK, but barely registered in the United States, probably because its sound pushed against the stadium rock and easy-listening rock sounds coming to dominate album-oriented radio. The band would chart in the United States a few years later, with a different line-up that featured a slightly smoother sound, but it is this rough ad-mixture of styles, growing from the glam movement (Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust was released the same day), but encompassing much more.1
I wouldn’t come upon the album until almost a decade after its release, age 18 or 19 at Penn State. I was at the small radio station, WEHR, where I DJed, browsing the modest record library. I came upon the band’s greatest hits record, knew “Love is the Drug,” and borrowed the LP, listened to it in my dorm room and then made it a staple of my playlists. The station had several of the other Roxy Music records, all adorned with the same kind of cover art, and I played those records as well.
I kept coming back to was “Virginia Plain,” and “Re-Make/Re-Model,” which were rawer and sounded like the records coming out of England in the late-‘70s and early-‘80s
The music charts in June 1972 featured Sammy Davis Jr’s “Candy Man” and the Fifth Dimension. Cat Stevens, Dr. Hook, Neil Diamond. The AOR stations (album-oriented rock) were playing harder music — Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple — but not the discordant sounds or Roxy Music’s debut, sounds we would come to associate with punk and the New York art-rockers later in the decade.
Christgau said the album “celebrates the kind of artifice that could come to seem as unhealthy as the sheen on a piece of rotten meat,” but that made sense because “it's decorated with enough weird hooks” to give it substance. The album is not perfect, as Christgau writes. Side two lacks the tightness of side one. But, no matter. The album is more than the sum of its parts, more than the curiosity or cult-favorite one might think.
All Music’s Stephen Thomas Erlewhine, writing with the benefit of hindsight, describes the music as “Falling halfway between musical primitivism and art rock ambition,” and “a startling redefinition of rock's boundaries.”
This is why the album holds up. Why, despite not selling that well upon its release, it still matters. It is a precursor of later musical trends, a bridge, and it is an absolute thrill to listen to, even today.
Glam can be overlooked as an important genre, but it featured Roxy Music, Bowie, T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, and The New York Dolls, along with many throwaway bands. Its use of ‘50s sounds and song structures, updated, its mix of poetic and stream-of-consciousness lyrics, and gender-bending visuals deserve a lot more attention.