'Push'

It's Rob Thomas and Matchbox Twenty:

Sex and Candy

Marcy Playground:

'Into You Like a Train'

The Psychedelic Furs, live from 1981:

Roxy Music Live at the Inglewood Forum September 28th (VIDEO)

I saw them play in Pasadena in 1979. Turns out they're back on tour, playing the Inglewood (Kia) Forum Wednesday night. 

Amazing.

At the Los Angles Times, "50 years ago, Roxy Music invented rock’s future. Now they’re taking a well-deserved bow":

Phil Manzanera, the 71-year-old guitarist for art-rock pioneers Roxy Music, is leaning into a computer camera backdropped by a nondescript hotel room. The band has assembled in Toronto, where they’re rehearsing for their first U.S. tour in two decades, and Manzanera is relearning their repertoire after a long spell away from it. “I haven’t really played those songs for 10 years,” he says with a trace of concern. “And so it’s all like coming back fresh.”

Roxy Music has come together for the first time since a run of shows across the U.K. and Australia in 2011. (The band will perform at the Kia Forum on Sept. 28.) They are venturing back to the States in celebration of being a band for 50 years, with large breaths and pauses and solo adventures peppered throughout.

“We were never going to be the Beatles, like a bunch of brothers,” Manzanera says. “Luckily we’ve come together as this unit, which you could call a band, but it is not as straightforward as that. Now it’s about the joy of rediscovering those songs and playing them live. If we don’t play them, who’s going to?”

Roxy’s permanence in music culture — they were inducted into the Rock & Roll of Fame in 2019 — belies the decades in which the band’s cachet, mainly among musical adventurers and high-cheekboned jet-setters, far outstripped its popularity.

In the fall of 1970, Bryan Ferry had lost a job teaching ceramics at an all-girls school near London, in part due to his holding frequent record-listening sessions during school hours. Having floundered a bit after finishing art school a couple years prior, Ferry put an ad in the paper, looking for bandmates to collaborate with him and an old art-school classmate, bassist Graham Simpson. Saxophonist Andy Mackay replied to the ad, bringing along his university pal Brian Eno, who could work a synthesizer and owned a tape machine. The original iteration of the group was rounded out by guitarist Roger Bunn and drummer Dexter Lloyd. In search of a name that signified “faded glamour,” Ferry chose Roxy Music.

By 1972, Manzanera had come on as the group’s guitarist, Paul Thompson had replaced Lloyd as the drummer, and Roxy Music was off and running, releasing five albums between 1972 and 1975 alone, all of them critically acclaimed while finding modest commercial success. (In the U.S., their highest-charting hit was the taut and funky “Love Is the Drug,” which reached No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100.) Their albums gained praise for their inventiveness, the band being credited with pioneering a new wave of art rock, wherein the visuals and onstage stylings were just as meticulously thought out as the lush production and incisive lyrical wit of the songs.

Ferry, now 76, acts as the band’s emotional conductor, of sorts. His voice is malleable — sometimes a distinctive and melodic drone, something one might hear in a smoky jazz lounge, sometimes soaring to beautiful highs. But his writing is what most commonly stands out. Ferry is one of the great architects of the love song, a lyricist who approaches the concept of love from all angles: the inception of romance, the tentative and uncertain bridges between affection and even greater affection, longing and heartbreak and bracing for the inevitability of loss. For all of the artistic flair surrounding Roxy Music, at the core, under the care of Ferry, they were a band in constant pursuit of considerations of love.

But there was also artistic flair. Their album covers were striking and sometimes controversial (the cover art for 1974’s “Country Life,” featuring two scantily clad models, was censored in the U.S. upon its release,) and the music itself was undeniable. By 1982’s “Avalon,” the band’s consistent members were Ferry, Mackay, Thompson and Manzanera (those four are now on tour; Eno is not participating.) They took a hiatus after 1982, despite “Avalon” being the group’s most commercially successful record.

There has been a renewed interest and excitement in Roxy Music in their time away. “Avalon’s” swelling “More Than This” was memorably karaoke’d by Bill Murray in the Sofia Coppola film “Lost in Translation.” The sinister “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” from 1973’s “For Your Pleasure,” gained renewed interest after being featured in a pivotal scene in the show “Mindhunter.” The group’s consistent presence in the cultural atmosphere has a lot to do with the fact that they were, very much, ahead of their time, in terms of vision and influence. But it is also attributed to the fact that, despite not releasing an album in 40 years, their songs still sound fresh. Manzanera’s logic on this is simple.

“We always recorded on analog tape, and actually played together in a studio,” he says. “That sound seems to have quite a long life span. You listen to all the great songs that are still so popular from the ’70s, and they were beautifully constructed; they sound as if they could have been recorded yesterday.”

Not only their influence on music, but also on performance, on how bands present themselves and use the stage as a canvas, it has all endured. That influence spans decades, from peers like David Bowie in their early ’70s heydays to new wave founders like Devo, Talking Heads and Blondie. By the time they had stepped away, acts from the Cars to Pulp to TV on the Radio were charging through a new rock landscape with the style, affect and sound once pioneered by Roxy Music.

Both Manzanera and Ferry, with whom I spoke in early August from his home in London, are not explicitly focused on the band’s legacy, saying that it isn’t something they think about until someone mentions it to them. But there is the reality of time, and what time affords a band of people who have created over a long enough stretch of it. There are also, very literally, monuments to this kind of introspection, even if it is unnamed by the band members.

This year, Ferry has released a book of his lyrics, spanning both Roxy and all of his solo albums. It is a massive but joyful book to traverse, as Ferry’s lyricism comes across on the page like reading small, delightful short stories. Stories of love, or the anguish of love. Songs that unravel intimacy, sometimes finding the unraveling unsatisfying, but knowing it must be tended to. There’s an ever-present longing in the songs, but also a space where one is bracing for the impact of giving themselves over. “Preparing oneself for the worst,” Ferry says, shrugging and smiling. Forward-facing as ever, Ferry does admit that organizing the book itself, and sitting with the wide range of lyrics he’d penned over the years, did provide him with small regrets and sentimentalities.

“As you get older, life becomes more complicated and writing time becomes, I guess, precious and limited. Some of the songs, when I was compiling the lyric book, I thought, oh, I wish I’d had another week to spend on that. Or I wish I’d edited that out. But maybe it’s just as well that there was an immediacy about them. Being up against the wall time-wise can be a good thing for artists. For writers.”

Whether they feel like tangible attempts at solidifying and firmly upholding legacy, both the book and the tour gaze fondly upon the past greatnesses of the group and its most central figure. The Roxy tour setlist is a tight 20 tracks that spans just about two hours of performance. Anchored by their cover of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” the majority of tunes bounce through Roxy’s sprint of stunning ’70s albums.

“It was all such a rush of time,” Ferry says about that era. “We found this derelict house in Notting Hill and it was quite picturesque, freezing cold, just trying to get this program of work assembled. When we went into the studio, we did that really fast and then it all started to accelerate. That’s when it started getting really hard and I learned to write very quickly, but it was really exciting because I suddenly felt, wow, we have an audience.”

That audience extended to the States, and across generations. Roxy Music became notorious for their romanticism, the flourish in their performances, the eccentricities of future superstar producer Eno pushed up against the brilliantly calculated charisma of Ferry. Their performances, even now, unlock an elsewhere, a place to escape to that seems, to the eye of a spectator, to be fabulous. The only party you’d ever want to be at...

Still more.

 

'Touch Me'

The best live version you'll find. My goodness.

The Doors:

'Hello It's Me

It's Todd Rundgren:

'Brand New Cadillac'

"I said, 'Jesus Christ, where'd you get that Cadillac?!!'"

The Clash: 

'Shine'

From Collective Soul:

'Build Me Up Buttercup'

The Foundations:

'Slow motion riders fly the colors of the day...'

Chicago, "Saturday in the Park." 

'Fly Away'

It's Lenny Kravitz.

'Personality Crisis'

The New York Dolls. 

'Rebel Rebel'

I miss him so much, David Bowie.

'Dog Days Are Over'

It's Florence + the Machine.

'Paranoid'

Black Sabbath. So classic.  

'The Way'

Here's Fastball:

'Love My Way'

The Psychedelic Furs.

There's an army on the dance floor

It's a fashion with a gun, my love

In a room without a door

A kiss is not enough in
Love my way, it's a new road

I follow where my mind goes
They'd put us on a railroad

They'd dearly make us pay

For laughing in their faces

And making it our way

There's emptiness behind their eyes

There's dust in all their hearts

They just want to steal us all

And take us all apart

But not in

Love my way, it's a new road

I follow where my mind goes
Love my way, it's a new road

I follow where my mind goes
Love my way, it's a new road

I follow where my mind goes

So swallow all your tears, my love

And put on your new face

You can never win or lose

If you don't run the race

Yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Ah-hoo, Ah-hoo, Ah-hoo, Ahh-ahh-ahh-ahh, ahh-ahh-ahh, ahh
Ahh-ahh-ahh-ahh, ahh-ahh-ahh, ahh...

'Open Your Eyes'

From the Lords of the New Church:

Video games train the kids for war.

Army chic in high-fashion stores.

Law and order's done their job.

Prisons filled while the rich still rob.

Assassination politics.

Violence rules within' our nation's midst.

Well ignorance is their power tool.

You'll only know what they want you to know.

The television cannot lie.

Controlling media with smokescreen eyes.

Nuclear politicians picture show.

The acting's lousy but the blind don't know.

They scare us all with threats of war.

So we forget just how bad things are.

You taste the fear when you're all alone.

They gonna git'cha when you're on your own.

The silence of conspiracy.

Slaughtered on the altar of apathy.

You gotta wake up from your sleep.

'Cause meek inherits earth...six feet deep.

Open your eyes see the lies right in front of ya.

Open your eyes...

Red Hot Chili Peppers Out with New Album, First with John Frusciante Since 2006 (VIDEO)

At the video, the band's first single from the record, "Black Summer."

Here, "‘Unlimited Love’ by the Red Hot Chili Peppers Is the Group’s Mildest Album Yet":

The 12th studio LP from the band features their classic sound but little that’s new or exciting.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have often seemed on the verge of implosion, but so far the group has always bounced back. The Los Angeles quartet, whose mix of punk and funk proved hugely influential in the 1990s and beyond, has scaled heights few current rock acts can touch—a performance at the Super Bowl in 2014, 100 million records sold. But every few years the hard-living outfit finds itself on the brink of collapse. After the massive success of the band’s 1991 breakthrough “Blood Sugar Sex Magik,” wunderkind guitarist John Frusciante left the Peppers and struggled mightily with heroin addiction. Lead singer Anthony Kiedis, bassist Flea and drummer Chad Smith have all had their share of substance abuse issues as well.

Mr. Frusciante rejoined and then left once again after 2006’s “Stadium Arcadium” to focus on his solo work, which is strange and sometimes wonderful and has earned him a cult following. The two records without Mr. Frusciante were decidedly uneven—one poor (2011’s “I’m With You”), the other intriguing (2016’s unusually lush “The Getaway,” produced by Danger Mouse and mixed by Radiohead associate Nigel Godrich ). Yet despite all this tumult, somehow the Red Hot Chili Peppers have endured.

On “Unlimited Love” (Warner), the group’s 12th studio LP, out Friday, Mr. Frusciante returns to the fold, for the first time in 16 years, as does super-producer Rick Rubin, who was integral to the group’s earlier success but hasn’t worked with them in over a decade. With the personnel behind the band’s biggest hits all back in place, it’s not surprising that the new set feels like a deliberate return to basics. The production is ultra-simple, keeping the focus on the group’s most identifiable qualities—Flea’s percussive bass, Mr. Smith’s rock-solid backbeat and Mr. Frusciante’s minimalist guitar.

And then there’s Mr. Kiedis. Plenty of people have poked fun at the silliness of his lyrics over the years. When he’s not crooning a ballad, his primary strategy is to deliver stream-of-consciousness observations pitched somewhere between a hepcat disc jockey from the 1960s and an old-school rapper. But if he’s heard the complaints, he’s chosen to ignore them, and goofy choices abound. This is apparent from the opening track and first single on “Unlimited Love,” “Black Summer,” which finds the frontman tossing off non sequiturs such as “My Greta weighs a ton” and “platypus are few” in what sounds like an Irish brogue. But the tune’s catchy and memorable chorus—traditionally a band speciality—blots out the song’s shortcomings.

Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions—the following “Here Ever After,” “These Are the Ways” halfway through the record—killer choruses are in disconcertingly short supply on “Unlimited Love.” The songs are well played and logically arranged but also weirdly inert. As one midtempo groove follows another, we recognize Flea’s popping bass and Mr. Smith’s steady snare, but the song constructions are rote, enlivened only by the occasional guitar excursion from Mr. Frusciante.

On the one hand, the band and Mr. Rubin show remarkable restraint—there’s no attempt to dress up the group’s sound or bring it in line with current trends, and the simple arrangements will be easy to replicate live. But many songs feel half finished. As is typical for Mr. Rubin’s productions, each instrument is loud, heavily compressed and in your face. Which is ironic given that this is easily the Peppers’ mellowest record: The tempos are mostly slow, and there’s very little in the way of power chords. Unless you’re listening closely, the songs on this lengthy album—17 tracks, 73 minutes—bleed together.

The skeletal, funk-inflected R&B of early Prince seems to be a primary influence. This sounds promising on paper, but Mr. Kiedis’s attempts at lyrics about love and companionship fall flat. He has little to say about the finer points of relationships, and on the bland “She’s a Lover”—the most obvious Prince nod here—he falls back on groan-inducing come-ons like “She’s so full of learning curves.”

Here and there, Mr. Kiedis looks back on his life in music. The third track, “Aquatic Mouth Dance,” pays tribute to some of the group’s early influences over a busy bassline while horns add a touch of color; the fifth cut, “Poster Child,” is especially nutty, as he free associates about music history with no particular point in mind (“ Steve Miller and Duran Duran / A joker dancing in the sand / Van Morrison the astral man”). Mr. Kiedis sounds like he’s having fun, but these songs don’t hold up to repeated listening.

The penultimate track, “The Heavy Wing,” is one of very few places on the record where the Peppers really rock out, but the closing “Tangelo,” yet another quiet ballad, brings them back to earth. It’s so spare, the only things that pop out are awkward lines like “the smell of your hello” and “the smile of a knife / Is seldom befriending.”

The band and Mr. Rubin have been at this far too long to make a truly awful album—these are pros who know how to get these songs to the “listenable” stage, at the very least...

Dude's a little critical, eh?

Ima listen to the record and I'll let you know.

Still more.

 

'Lady Madonna'

It's you-know-who.