Today’s birthday boy, Bryan Ferry, was the front man for
Roxy Music, one of the best bands of the Seventies. Roxy’s run lasted from 1972
till 1982—they arose as glam with a vengeance, bringing together the
lounge-lizard stylings of Ferry and to some extent sax-player Andy Mackay with
the glammier, prog-like style of Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, the band’s
distinctive guitarist, and gradually became a main purveyor of tasteful “adult
rock.” Ferry was the main composer, though sometimes Manzanera or Mackay
collaborated with him. Eno went his own way after the second album, which meant
the overall aural dynamics became less avant-gardist, though the quality of the
song-writing improved, at least up through Siren
(1975).
Today’s song sends me back yet again to 1973. I think I’m
going to try to impose a moratorium on music from that year which is the
single-most cited year in the Song of the Day series, so far. While there is something
worthwhile in all 8 Roxy studio albums (there’s quite a gap between Siren and 1979’s Manifesto), “Mother of Pearl” stands out as not only the first Roxy
track I ever heard—on the radio no less—but also, to my mind, Bryan Ferry’s
finest. The song is definitive for what I take Roxy Music to be but it’s also
definitive for what I most appreciate Ferry for.
Ferry’s persona, developed in his songs and showmanship, is
a kind of rakish ladies man, Byronic and flirting with bathos. His sufferings
are the woe-is-me of the man who can’t help but feel accosted—poor fool—by any
charming or lovely female in his vicinity. It’s as if beauty—in human form—acts
as provocation always and only. But of course, once attained, any object of
desire tends to inspire ennui, that disaffection with one’s lust and detachment
from one’s desire that quite cowls the spirit. So Ferry tends to be singing
about how much he wants X or how barren his life is now that it’s bereft of X
or how dull it is now that it’s clear that X is not at all what he wanted.
Occasionally, he’s just a guy enjoying his good fortune with his babe of
choice, and sometimes he’s distressed by his treatment at the hands of a
particular object of desire—which I suppose almost makes her a subject—and,
particularly, on the album Siren when
the object was a specific person (model Jerry Hall, pictured on the cover),
that state of affairs tended to produce some grand wallowing (two songs I love
on that score are “End of the Line”—which flirts (as well as Roxy can) with
Country—and “Another High,” where the lifelong ladies’ man tries to re-imagine
himself as a certain lady’s man, once she’s having none of it).
“Mother of Pearl” is a great soliloquy by a guy who stops,
in the midst of his “party-time wasting,” to reflect on why he never seems to
get his prize. The object of his pursuit turns into a pumpkin by morning?
Perhaps, but Ferry is able to work up some wonderful poetic conceits to suggest
the stakes of the chase, and of the loss that occurs when each Miss misses the
mark. “With every goddess a let-down / Every idol a bring-down / It gets you
down / But the search for perfection / Your own predilection / Goes on and on
and on and on.”
The kind of perfection he has in mind? Mother of Pearl,
which, in the poetic realms to which he’s paying courtship, might as well stand
for the Muse: “Lustrous lady / Of a sacred world.” You know, that figure of
forbidding beauty who will not be attained, nay mortal, nor even caressed save
she be seduced by the very best—the most artful and clever, or passionate and
disarming—palaver that one can provide.
“Thus even Zarathustra / Another-time loser / Could believe
in you.” Well might we reflect on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in his hermit’s cave
beguiled by moonlight in a spider’s web—so nacreous, don’t you know—or by his
own Ideal. Even philosophers can have an ideal that takes human female form,
more an Athena than an Aphrodite, no doubt. Maybe even an Artemis? “… something
/ Just out of reach, glowing / Very Holy Grail.” [We’ve already got one . . . It’s a verrry
nice-eh.]
So our hero pines for that girl “highbrow, holy / With lots
of soul / Melancholy shimmering,” possessed of “Serpentine sleakness” (“like a
simple tune”) who might also better those “career-girl cover” types—“exposed
and another / Slips right into view” (bed one model, you’ve bedded ’em
all—and this one cried “ennui—oui—oui” all the way home).
And it’s not just that Ferry’s lyric dallies so well with
this wan and heartless mood—“thinking of life’s inner meaning / And my latest
fling” (a priceless pairing)—it’s that his vocal drips, no, breathes dry irony,
as well as brandishing its surfeit with a cartoonist’s sense of caricature. Not
only does he know his target—“so-so semiprecious in your detached world”—he
knows all the feints and foppery of this languishing poet-lover: “Oh looking
for love / In a looking-glass world / It’s pretty hard for you”—where both desired and desirer spend
all their time looking at themselves mirrored in the most perfect object either
can find. For the nonce.
So that the refrain—“Mother of Pearl / I wouldn’t trade you
for another girl”—becomes a statement of disaffection with what the world can
provide (“I’ve been looking for something / I’ve always wanted / But was never
mine”) in favor—arguably—of what that more precious world within can provide.
The pearl in the oyster, let us say, the gleaming little nugget that one
cherishes in those hidden recesses, hermit in a cave fashion.
The song begins with a rave-up meant to mimic the kind of
clubbing atmosphere that should be the source of the kind of “what’s that
coming ’round the corner” heart-stopping encounters our boy lives for, then
quickly steps down into a morning-after shuffle, with wonderful little fills
and asides from Mackay and Manzanera and Eddie Jobson, as the singer airs his
griefs. Suffice to say it’s a song that, first heard at 14—virginal would-be
poet and Nietzsche-fancier as I was—amused me greatly as indicating strong
enough reasons why the rituals of courtship would probably not go well.
Divine intervention /
Always my intention / So I take my time
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