You Won’t See Me, Bryan Ferry (cover version, These Foolish Things, 1973)
You Won’t See Me, The Beatles, (original, Rubber Soul, 1965)

Although Bryan Ferry established a considerable work ethic early in his career – three albums written, arranged and recorded in 1973 – The Beatles set a sizable precedent in 1965 with the Tamla Motown influenced McCartney track ‘You Won’t See Me‘: adding the song as a late contender for Rubber Soul, ‘See Me‘ was recorded during a single thirteen-hour session that saw the Beatles finish three complete tracks (‘Girl’, ‘Wait’, and ‘I’m Looking Through You’) and only requiring – by necessity – two passes at ‘You Won’t See Me’ to get it in the can. (The rush-recording did impact quality control – ‘See Me’ is unique among Beatles songs in that it changes tempo slightly but noticeably, moving from 119 to 113 bpm over the course of the track).

Like everyone else born in the 20th century, The Beatles are mecca when it comes to influence, range of style, and sheer breadth of songwriting ability. Ferry has openly acknowledged the influence the band had on his music (“the best films were American films, the best stars were American stars… and the best music was American, until The Beatles came along” – Disc),  and he would go on to record a number of Beatle tracks – It’s Only Love; She’s Leaving Home; and of course John Lennon’s ‘Jealous Guy‘ – but the relationship for Ferry was never an easy one: as a band, The Beatles were so multi-talented that when it came to artists covering them, the plethora of vocal options presented a problem to outsiders: am I Paul; or John; or George? And am I all three during the harmonies? Joe Cocker was able to overcome this embarrassment of riches with his cover of ‘A Little Help From My Friends‘: all he had to do was appropriate Ringo’s expressive baritone. Covering Bob Dylan is an opportunity; covering Ella Fitzgerald is a challenge; covering a mid-period career-peaking tenor-sweet Paul McCartney is near on inconsolable.

Original full-length photograph // The Beatles // 'Rubber Soul' (1965)

Ferry’s version of ‘You Won’t See Me’ is unfortunately one of the least successful ready-mades on These Foolish Things. Starting with a high-in-the-mix sound effect, an engaged telephone that sounds half-hearted and confusing (certainly sounds dated, even for 1973 – when did phones ever sound like this) and not nearly as effective as Blondie’s urgent ring at the beginning for Hanging on the Telephone (I’m in the phone booth, it’s the one across the hall/If you don’t answer, I’ll just ring it off the wall). Ferry’s intention for the gimmick is to have it draw attention to the first line of the song – When I call you up/your line’s engaged – but something is horribly wrong: his voice is weak and pleading, almost irritatingly timid. On first listen you take a mental note to never answer the phone while this guy’s on the line, no matter how long it rings.

Ferry tries to cut through to the heart of ‘You Won’t See Me‘ by enunciating the lyric with new emphasis – his timing is purposely out-of-sync with the original, but the effect is disjointed, providing little reward or preparation for what follows next – the complete abandonment of the song’s key motif – the climbing and repeated vocal refrain you-/won’t-/see-/-me//you-/won’t-/see-/ me etc. Ferry kills the signature motif by replacing it with piano, so we get plunk-/plunk-/plunk-/plunk. It’s like recording ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction‘ while relegating the famous signature guitar line to glockenspiel. Ferry’s attempt is in keeping with Anne Murray‘s embellishment of her version with fuzz guitar (bzzz/bzzz/bzzz/bzzz) – but at least Murray’s version is funky and in keeping with the original Tamla Motown vibe.

More comfortable with love as an ideal, what’s really missing from Ferry’s version of ‘You Won’t See Me‘ is the nasty undercurrent of the original, provided by Paul McCartney in all his Liverpudlian male-dominant glory: in the opening lines he addresses, nay, scolds the woman by telling her to “act her age” – a position that is hilariously hypocritical given that, if the song really is about his split with Jane Asher, then McCartney screwing behind Asher’s back between 1963-1968 (!) is just what the little woman was expected to put up with, Beatlemania or not. McCartney discussed the song in 1994:

As is one’s wont in relationships, you will from time to time argue or not see eye to eye on things, and a couple of the songs around this period were that kind of thing… I would write it out in a song and then I’ve got rid of the emotion. I don’t hold grudges so that gets rid of that little bit of emotional baggage…

Paul McCartney

Women and relationships are the key topic of Rubber Soul (drugs are the key topic of Revolver). The album is riddled with take-it-or-leave it ultimatums: we listen quite happily to McCartney’s I’m-done-with-you-now songs (‘You Won’t See Me‘/’I’m Looking Through You‘); we marvel at George Harrison’s I’m-done-with-you-now songs (‘If I Needed Someone‘); and we cringe at John Lennon’s I’m-done-with-you-now songs (‘Run For Your Life‘). There are of course lots of romantic bits on Rubber Soul – this is a Beatles album after all – ‘Michelle‘ and ‘Girl‘ are lovely (She’s the kind of girl/You want so much, it makes you sorry) – but the overall feeling is, Jesus Christ woman, if you can’t handle me being a Beatle, then oan yer bike eh!

Perhaps this is why Ferry presents such a timid reading of the track: although capable of being a surly Northern male himself  (I hope something special will step into my life/Another fine edition of you), Ferry rarely sticks the boot in in his songs; his MO is wit and repartee, while The Beatles are quite happy to say I’d rather see you dead, little girl/Than to be with another man. The churlishness of some of the lyrics on Rubber Soul are rightly forgotten in the rush to enjoy the brilliant sunny optimism of the music.

Overall then, Ferry falls pretty flat on this Beatles track, a misstep he would easily recover from with his later versions of  ‘It’s Only Love‘ (1976) and ‘Jealous Guy‘ (1980). Indeed, the Let’s Stick Together cover of ‘It’s Only Love’ soars in comparison to ‘You Won’t See Me’, full of confidence and deft keyboard touches, warm to the touch for those open to the invitation. Even a majestic and inventive guitar solo from Roxy Music guest Phil Manzanera at 1:18-1:46 cannot muster the heavy-lifting required to save ‘See Me’. We might consider perhaps that Ferry felt more in the skin of the looser interpretive strengths of John Lennon than the precision beast that was Paul McCartney in full flight – the tenor vocal and backing harmonies alone making this minor Beatles track fly higher above its station than it perhaps deserves.

Credits: Alan Aldridge, Beatles illustrator extraordinaire;  rare Beatles Rubber Soul shot, LA Times; Paul and Jane Asher, Beatles Bible.

Next: ‘I Love How You Love Me’ – Phil Spector returns with a classic!

The Tracks of My Tears, Bryan Ferry (cover version, These Foolish Things, 1973)
The Tracks of My Tears, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles (original, Going to a Go-Go, 1965).

Teenage dreams, so hard to beat
The Undertones

One of the more over-looked aspects of Bryan Ferry‘s public personae is his dedication, love and respect for the pop music canon – These Foolish Things (1973) not only established a solo career for Bryan Ferry outside of Roxy Music, but his first solo album also invited the listener deep under the skin of its author: if Roxy Music was the creative definition and projection of a perfect (desired) life, then Ferry’s personal and public dedication to popular music was an honest attempt to strip his image of its over-heated rhetoric and celebrate the very DNA of the culture and the social background that had defined him.

For those of us whose formative years were built upon late nights (10pm-midnight) listening the John Peel show, the music of 1977-1979 never dies – listen to that match strike cigarette flame as the first bars of ‘Dance Away‘ are broadcast to the world for the first time, or digest the thunderous bass line to John Lydon‘s post-Pistols classic ‘Public Image‘ and come to understand that, even as a teenager, the only certainty in life is change – and you get the same sense of wonderment, one might expect, that Bryan Ferry felt the first time he heard Charlie Parker, or sang Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. And so, as the next Roxy Music masterpiece took shape amid a background of tension and high expectation (Ferry recorded Foolish Things and Roxy’s Stranded back-to-back) we come to recognize there could be no ‘Mother of Pearl’ without Dylan; without Ketty Lester or Elvis; without The Miracles ‘The Tracks of My Tears’. How could this be so? Let us count the ways..

Central Arcade // Entrance to J. G. Windows Music Shop // Newcastle

I started being a music fan at the age of ten or eleven, and I bought my first record at Windows.

Bryan Ferry

I. The Kingdom

There is something that is both peculiar and captivating about the land and environment that Bryan Ferry grew up in. Like many of us raised in the North, headlines such as “Roman silver found in Fife by teenager” didn’t seem uncommon. To muck around the desolate hills of say, Fife Scotland (as I did), or the plush greens of Herrington Country Park, Newcastle upon Tyne (as Bryan Ferry did), meant that you were occupying – or more likely, abusing – the playgrounds of history. Dads were by-and-large coal-miners and builders, hard-drinkers many of them, living in dreary surroundings against a back-drop of endless history – wars, fallen castles, broken monuments. According to Fife City Council, my own tribe lived in the esteemed “Kingdom Of Fife”. Or just “The Kingdom”. (Even our local shopping mall was “The Kingdom Center” – as far removed from the Promised Land in 1974 as one could imagine). Ferry’s tribe lived in Newcastle upon Tyne, with its 2,000 year history of invaders, Romans, Angles, and Norsemen. The town was one of the earliest industrial centers in Northeast England due to the availability of coal and the possibilities of easy export offered by close proximity to the River Tyne.  Coal grime, then, was under your fingernails, in the blood. And it was history – the past – that whispered its secrets, wrapped in tales of beauty and magnificence:

Over the hills and down the valleys
Soaring aloft and far below
Lying on stony ground the fragments
Truth is the seed we try to sow
‘Strictly Confidential‘

One of the those unavoidable truths in Ferry’s playground was the massive and dominating Penshaw Monument, the impact of which was explained in Michael Bracewell’s essential Roxy biography, “Re-Make/Re-Model: Becoming Roxy Music“: “In the late 40s and early 1950s, looking back up, was Bryan Ferry, then a boy…entranced…”

Strand Power // The Penshaw Monument 1844 // North East England

When my parents were first married they lived in a farmhouse; and there was a hill nearby called Penshaw Hill. On top of the Hill was a local landmark – a Greek monument built for the Earl of Durham. This is where my father was brought up and his family had farmed on the sides of the hill. When I showed this place to Antony Price he said, ‘Now I know why you’re so interested in the visual things: it’s because of that monument.‘

Bryan Ferry

For Ferry, living under this slab of neo-Greek classical architecture represented a “symbol” for art and “another life away from the coalfields and the hard north-eastern environment; it seemed to represent something from another civilization, that was much finer.“ (ibid). This then is the beginning of the definition and creation a “state of mind” that would eventually take shape in the art project Roxy Music. By several accounts (Bracewell/ Buckley/Stump), Ferry was a man at odds with his surroundings – sensitive, out of place – yet possessing a deep understanding and respect for his working-class roots: “My father used to win prizes for his ploughing, but during the Depression the farm failed and he had to work underground, tending pit ponies. He courted my mother for ten years before they got married. It brings a tear to my eye every time I think about it”.  Once comparing himself to “an orchid born on a coal-tip” Ferry recognized he had a depth of feeling: “it was a case of where to channel it” (ibid).

Imagine then the wonder to a kid of a local High Street music shop, standing as strong and as iconic as the classical monuments that first informed his childhood. Better yet, imagine that record store being housed within an architectural gem – The Central Arcade, Newcastle, a temple built in the heart of industrial Newcastle. 

Exclusive Doors // Central Arcade Architecture // 1906

II. Windows

“It’s always sad when I go back to Newcastle and see that certain places don’t exist any more,” Ferry told Michael Bracewell in 2007:

But it’s great that one shop – which was very important for me … – is still there, in an wonderful old arcade, with extravagant tiled floors, rather like the Bond Street arcades. It’s a shop called Windows, which is a family music shop and the only place you really go to buy records. I started being a music fan at the age of ten or eleven, and I bought my first record at Windows.

J.G. Windows record shop is built within the spectacular and durable Central Arcade in Newcastle, the elegant Edwardian shopping arcade built in 1906. An incredible entrance to an incredible and stylish world, shut far off from Northern hardships and reality, the Arcade was designed to house a commercial exchange and newsroom. The book Newcastle Through Time (John and Joyce Carlson) identifies the design of the Arcade as being inspired by the Temple of Vesta in Italy. Temples, Monuments, cobblestone streets holding up the polish of the new, and at the end of the long corridor a gentle invitation of warm light: the record store! Dramatic, certainly. Longlasting, definately. A modern church containing sacred artifacts of music, history, and endless escape.

J.G. Windows is 110 years old and it was Ferry’s high street go-to music shop. “Some of the first records I bought were jazz records” Ferry noted in 2013. Note then the reverence in which Ferry describes seeing a jazz trumpet in the Windows display as a boy:

The windows are full of clarinets, saxophones, electric guitars – a proper music shop, which sold everything. But to just see a trumpet in the window – a real instrument, to look at it and study it!

The fascination and wonder can be heard in the voice over half-a-century later. A real instrument, to look at – to study! There can be no better place to understand the considerable legacy of Roxy Music as conceived by Ferry in these moments: the ‘ideal of beauty’ that was found among the trumpets and the clarinets, the perfect timbre of a perfect visual: Roxy (cinema) Music (sound).

III. The Archivist

An archivist is a collector and, yes, a fetishist, to be sure – remember the creepy lessons we learned in Silence of the Lambs – but an archivist is also a custodian, a caretaker, a steward and keeper of the flame. Speaking to Melody Maker writer and supporter Richard Williams in 1973, Ferry acknowledged “The trouble with doing something like ‘The Tracks of My Tears‘ is that the original was so brilliant it’s hard to touch it.” (Williams). And so it remained. “Ferry’s voice was perfect for his own songs,” David Buckley offers in his biography of Ferry: “where he could shape the contours of the music to suit his undulating and highly distinctive delivery, but when pitted against some of the technically finest singers in pop history, his interpretations were destined to come off second-best.”

This is a fair statement but somehow misses the point, for it feels now, with the benefit of time, that Ferry wasn’t trying to go head-to-head with Smokey Robinson or Brian Wilson, or even Janis Joplin, but was wanting to collect and possess – even own –  his favorite records as perfect artifacts, to get inside them, to understand what made them tick, to unravel the mother-of-pearl coating in order to reveal the oyster within. This is the beginning of ‘Stranded‘. This is the beginning of the theme of the art of obsession, of trying to possess the unobtainable. The nose is pressed against the window; the siren’s sound has done its work: these foolish things await their call.

Q: Is your constant pursuit of the beautiful an attempt to escape the everyday and mundane?

Yes. It’s a search for a better world, really.

Chris Roberts interviewing Bryan Ferry, thirty-seven years after the release of These Foolish Things.

Titbits

My favorite music archivist, speaker, singer, poet and music enthusiast is Henry Rollins: a beautiful heart and mind in the body of a modern warrior. As Morrissey said, it takes strength to be truthful and kind. Between radio shows, tours and books, Rollins is also a collector. He has just released a fascinating new book “Stay Fanatic Vol 1“, a 330 page fanzine.  “If you like music,” says Henry, “going to record stores, to shows, if music is one of those things that is and has always been one of the best friends you’ve ever had, you might like this book.”

Music has always been the one of the best friends I’ve ever had, and was always there when perhaps others couldn’t be. So too for Bryan Ferry: it’s the whole point of These Foolish Things. Perhaps it’s the whole point of his career. So too for Henry Rollins; for John Peel; and for a lad wandering the city alone, trying to find The Kingdom.

Next: Ferry tackles the greatest: The Beatles. December 2019!

Don’t Worry Baby, Bryan Ferry (cover version, These Foolish Things, 1973)
Don’t Worry Baby, Beach Boys (original, Shut Down Volume 2, 1964)

Released May 11, 1964 as the ‘B’ side of ‘I Get Around’, the Beach Boys minor classic ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ was an unabashed homage to Phil Spector‘s ‘Be My Baby‘ by the Ronettes. Coming off the back of a series of teenage angst songs (Don’t Ever Change/Baby I Don’t Care/It’s My Party) Ferry recalibrates These Foolish Things by re-writing some of the lyrics for ‘Don’t Worry Baby‘ and wisely rejecting the drag-car teen drama in favor of an expression of love that is more in tune with Brian Wilson‘s music than the original lyric ever was.

It’s easy to see why Bryan Ferry would include a Beach Boys song on his first solo album, as both band and subject matter personified for the singer an ideal American Dream of the 60s, brimming with potential and pleasure in equal measure. “At least 50 per cent of the things that influenced me were American,” Ferry explained to Disc magazine: “The best films were American films, the best stars were American stars… and the best music was American, until The Beatles came along.” At this stage of These Foolish Things – 7 songs in – the source of the music belongs to America and the great hit-making factory of The Brill Building in New York, with the subject matter veering towards the lovelorn and the heart-broken – ‘River of Salt‘ and ‘Piece of My Heart’ both originally sung and made famous by female singers (Ketty Lester and Janis Joplin, respectively) and presented by Ferry in a straight-forward fashion (if a man singing a song as a woman in a quivering European accent can be seen as straight-forward). Nevertheless, at this juncture of These Foolish Things Ferry avoids the American vistas of ‘Virginia Plain’ with its images of classic Hollywood, Route 66 and James Dean, and steers instead towards the universal – love lost, feelings squashed, narratives spun. That is until we get to The Beach Boys ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ – a song that strives to re-state and confirm the American Dream, with its hyperbolic ode to California, Chevy Impalas, ice-cream floats, and illegal hot rod racing.

‘Don’t Worry Baby’ was co-written by early Brian Wilson‘s collaborator/lyricist Roger Christian. Wilson, the gifted yet troubled singer-songwriter and co-founder of the Beach Boys (and composer/arranger of one of the best pop songs of all time – ‘Good Vibrations’ – even Paul McCartney was in awe of that one), was obsessed with Phil Spector and the sound Spector created with The Crystals (‘Da Doo Ron Ron‘) and The Ronettes (‘Be My Baby’), in particular ‘Be My Baby’ – the song of which ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ is an attempt to emulate and eulogize.

Salon magazine paints a pretty good picture of Wilson’s obsession with Spector, with Wilson eagerly awaiting the opportunity to provide Spector with a self-penned song (‘Don’t Hurt My Little Sister‘): Spector invited Wilson to play keyboards on the backing track, whereby Wilson was cut off after only a few bars, and was told by Spector that his playing was not good enough and he should be on his way.  Weeks later Spector sent the head Beach Boy an official American Federation of Musicians paycheck for the few seconds Wilson performed on the track. Ouch. (The Beach Boys eventually recorded ‘Don’t Hurt My Little Sister’ – it’s a decent song, embodied with the Spector sound). This act of disdain did little to dissuade Wilson that Spector was mecca, and with typical obsessiveness – see the Roxy entry Strictly Confidential for an overview of Wilson’s mental health struggles – Wilson records his thoughts on his home tape-recorder (“Hour after hour of stoned ramblings on the meaning of life, color vibrations, fate, death, vegetarianism and Phil Spector…” according to Beach Boys biographer David Dalton). Wilson keeps copies of  Spector’s ‘Be My Baby‘ everywhere inside his home, in his car, in his studio: “Brian locked in the bedroom of his Bel Air house in the early ’70s, alone, curtains drawn shut, catatonic, listening to ‘Be My Baby’ over and over at aggressive volumes, for hours” (Dalton). The result of this extremism is the birth of ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ – a song that conclusively beats Spector at his own game.

Bryan Ferry’s first album of covers (or “readymades” as he prefers to call them), These Foolish Things is not known for its radical re-interpretation of classic songs (barring the breath-taking opening cut A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall). What is radical about his arrangement of ‘Don’t Worry Baby‘ is his decision to re-write some of the lyrics. While keeping the song-writing credit intact (Wilson/Christian), Ferry tackles and removes the song’s greatest flaw: the tediousness of its original Girls & Hot Rods storyline. Writing in 1964, with The Beatles already penning ‘And I Love Her‘ and ‘A Hard Days Night‘ (and hurtling at astonishing speed towards ‘Eleanor Rigby‘), ‘Don’t Worry’ is sung from the point of view of a teenager who agrees to a street race after bragging about his car.  At root then ‘Don’t Worry’ is a reiteration of the classic cars and Beach Boys idea – getting a bit old in the tooth by ’64 – but Brian Wilson’s wonderful music for ‘Don’t Worry’ works against the constraints of its lyrical narrative, taking the track beyond previous Wilson/Christian car-obsessed curios like ‘Little Deuce Coupe‘, ‘Ballad of Ole’ Betsy‘, ‘Car Crazy Cutie‘, and ‘Cherry, Cherry Coupe‘. Although a car-lover himself, Ferry successfully clocked the lyrical deficiencies of ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ before taking the decision to re-write the lyric and change the emotional sentiment and point-of-view of the original.

The primary lyricist of the original ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ was Roger Christian, a member of the California Hot Rod & Surfin’ Set and a prominent Los Angeles DJ during the 50s. In addition to his day job, Christian was a car-and-surf song composer, and ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ is a standard template of the genre:

I guess I should’ve kept my mouth shut
When I started to brag about my car
But I can’t back down now
Because I pushed the other guys too far

No threat to Shakespeare, but well within the frame of reference for the writer of ‘Car Crazy Cutie‘ and ‘Don’t Worry Baby‘:

Well its been building up inside of me
For, oh, I don’t know how long
I don’t know why
But I keep thinking
Something’s bound to go wrong
But she looks in my eyes
And makes me realize
And she says don’t worry baby

Rhyming looks in my eyes with makes me realize does not qualify Mr. Christian for any literary prizes, but interestingly, Bryan Ferry keeps this line and the entire first verse intact – a hint that Ferry’s concerns in re-writing the lyric was not poetic fussiness but a desire to secure the emotional and gender-sensitive tone of Brian Wilson’s original music without the clutter of Roger Christian’s hot girls/hot cars balladry. Here’s a comparison of Christian‘s and Ferry‘s lyric for ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ (Ferry’s changes in blue):

In Ferry’s version the car race is removed entirely, and the song is turned into a mediation on what the woman’s love means to him. The change is effective as it allows Ferry to write a romantic poem (“Each morning I awake to find…”) and find a tenderness  (“there’s magic in her eyes“) that was never in the original, which suffered such banalities as “she makes me come alive/and makes me wanna drive”. The song shifts out of writer Roger Christian teen-male zeitgeist and expands into a mature song that shows the male narrator discovering – or at least responsive to – his inner feelings, fulfilling the musical vision that Brian Wilson intended for the song, with those gorgeous trademark Beach Boys harmonies and group interplay.

And so side one of These Foolish Things comes to a close after providing an entertaining mix of radical re-interpretation (Hard Rain), expressions of heart-break beautifully rendered (River of Salt), and a re-working of a Beach Boys classic that provides a lyric worthy of a Brian Wilson original. The effect is captivating and moves beyond Ferry’s original intent of the album, which he hesitatingly stated was “for amusement value. I think”:

It’s a very catholic selection, I’ve given up trying to please all of the people all of the time. Some will like it for one reason, some for another…I hope the general point of it will be understood.

Bryan Ferry

Recorded: AIR Studios, England June 1973.

Credits:  James Dean memorial junction – some interesting reading out there, I was surprised to learn that a car pulled in front of Dean resulting in the crash (Dean’s speed obviously a factor – he was training for a car race); Beach Boys promos; Phil Spector walks past his competitor Brian Wilson (again); Bryan Ferry recording these Foolish Things, June 1973; Bryan Ferry Foolish promo.

Next: Foolish Things takes a darker turn with ‘Sympathy For the Devil‘ – woo-woo!

Don’t Ever Change Bryan Ferry (cover version, These Foolish Things, 1973)
Don’t Ever Change The Crickets (original, written by Gerry Goffin & Carole King, 1961)
Don’t Ever Change The Beatles (cover version, 1963)

Few people outside of New York or the music business have heard of the Brill Building. Located at 1619 Broadway in New York City, just north of Times Square, the Brill was the place a great chunk of American pop music was written, arranged, recorded and sold, including ‘Don’t Ever Change‘ written by (Gerry) Goffin & (Carole) King, recorded by The Crickets (sans Buddy) in 1961, providing a Top 10 hit in the UK. ‘Don’t Ever Change’ confirms Bryan Ferry’s assertions that These Foolish Things was intended as a break from For Your Pleasure‘s darker themes and mood. Having cracked ‘Hard Rain‘ and the rare ‘River of Salt‘ (“I’m probably the only person in England with a copy of that”), Ferry decided next to go to the Classic Songwriter’s Songbook and pull down a cut from the famous writing team of Goffin & King – the jaunty ‘Don’t Ever Change’ comes up next and it’s a nasty piece of work, despite its early 60s jaunty beat. The music suggests sunny optimism but the lyric delivers tyrannical rule.

‘Don’t Ever Change’ was written on the top floors (“on the roof”) of the The Brill Building, a stunning art-deco masterpiece that stretched along Broadway between 49th and 53rd streets. A mecca for songwriting talent, the Brill contained 165 music businesses at its peak in 1962. The songwriters worked to order, crafting melodies and lyrics that would define the late 50s and 60s: “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” (Phil Spector, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil); Don’t Be Cruel (recorded by Elvis, written by Otis Blackwell); Do You Know the Way to San José? (the brilliant Burt Bacharach/Hal David); and so many more. Before Carole King become the mega-selling Carole King of ‘Tapestry’ (and the subject of the Broadway show Beautiful: The Carole King Musical) she was the teenager Carol Klein, married at 17 to 20-year-old lyricist Gerry Goffin. They got their break through their connection with Neil Sedaka, who knew Carole at High School and, in a last-ditch attempt at writing a hit before he was dropped from his contract, had composed and recorded a song called “Oh! Carol” (desperate, Sedaka studied the top singles of the day, mapped their melody, chord progression, lyrical styles and developed the ingredients of a hit single – he nailed it). Soon Goffin & King were writing compact, minor-miracle songs that sold by the truck-load – “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (The Shirelles); “The Loco-Motion” (Little Eva); “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” (Aretha Franklin), and the fantastic “Pleasant Valley Sunday” (The Monkees).
In 1963, at the beginning of The Beatles rise to fame, John Lennon was quoted as saying that he and Paul McCartney wanted to become “the Goffin-King of England.”

‘Don’t Ever Change’ is one of Goffin & King’s lesser known songs, made to order like egg salad sandwiches at the local deli. Lesser-known in both status and (to be honest) tunefulness – The Crickets version did not chart in the USA – the song is nevertheless an interesting selection by Ferry who, presumably, had the budget and freedom to choose other Goffin & King songs, say, ‘On the Roof’ or ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ (but not, thankfully, ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’). Choosing to cover ‘Don’t Ever Change’ makes good sense in terms of These Foolish Things – it’s a breezy sing-along three tracks in – but there is something wrong with the song at root that Ferry cannot fix. His version is faithful to the original, with the benefit of being better recorded with deeper, fuller sound, but it neither detracts or adds to the original. The problem is not with Ferry’s take but the dishonesty of the song itself – ‘Don’t Ever Change’ pretends to be upbeat and idealist, but in truth it’s a mean song hiding behind a breezy disguise.

Carole King wrote in her memoir that her ex-husband Gerry Goffin – who she divorced in 1969 – suffered from mental illness following ingestion of LSD, eventually undergoing treatment with lithium and electroshock therapy, and later diagnosed with manic depression. Post-marriage Carole wrote her own lyrics, of which the mega-hit ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ (1971) is in character with her thoughtful and warm work. Contrast this with ex-hubby Goffin’s lyrical mauling of male/female relationships and you get the sense that long-term matrimony wasn’t in the cards, not with Goffin writing songs like ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)’ or ‘Chains’ or even the party-ending ‘Everybody Go Home’.  Goffin was talented, to be sure – his writing on the number 1 hit “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” show a sensitivity to the complications of sexual maturity, and ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ has a killer lyric (“The local rock group down the street/Is trying hard to learn their song/They serenade the weekend squire/Who just came out to mow his lawn”) – but lyricist Goffin typically informs his songs with a controlling hand that sets an uneasy tone that ‘Don’t Ever Change’ cannot escape and Ferry does little to interfere.

The premise of the ‘Don’t Change’ reminds us of ‘Chance Meeting‘ – male menace thinly disguised. You never wear a stitch of lace, we’re told – And powder’s never on your face / You’re always wearing jeans except on Sunday – you’re a tomboy in other words. Oh please don’t ever change, he continues, I kinda like you just the way you are. The narrator ‘kinda’ likes you, so be sure to swear allegiance to his idealized view of you for all eternity.

You don’t know the latest dance
But when it’s time to make romance
Your kisses let me know you’re not a tomboy  

In other words, I like you to be uninformed, awkward and sexually unthreatening – except when I’m having sex with you. And the final kicker: I know you would rather die than ever hurt me. ie. I know you would rather slit your wrists and bleed out instead of telling me what a jerk I am. And less we think that picking on songs written in the late 50s/60s is easy targets in 2019, we can hardly avoid the fact that the final sentiment of the song as a declaration of ultimate control. And for the tune itself – it would take the edge off perhaps if the music provided some respite from the high-handed rhetoric, but instead of sweetening its chorus, ‘Change’ hangs its hook on the descending riff “Sooo pleassse don’t everrr chaaange” that is in the chord of C#minor which in music theory contains the harmonic characteristic of despair, wailing, and weeping: “A passionate expression of sorrow and deep grief. Full of penance and self-punishment” (Ledgernote). Isn’t this supposed to be a love song? Run a mile girl, and then run another mile.

The Beatles recorded ‘Don’t Ever Change’ as part of a BBC session in 1963, and was not released until 1993 (just as Anthology was being compiled and the insatiable appetite for all things Fab Four was gaining force). Instantly forgettable in the Beatles catalog, ‘Don’t’ is notable only for the fact that it takes a rare Harrison/McCartney lead vocal. Perhaps we can see the song as an influence to solo-Lennon ‘Jealous Guy’, with its frank recognition of the failings of its controlling author John Lennon, and which Ferry, much to his credit, made his own in 1980 (“I guess I can relate to it”). You could never see the narrator of ‘Don’t Ever Change’ admitting that he never meant to hurt you, never meant to make you cry.

What is intriguing about ‘Don’t Ever Change’ is its pedigree as a production from the golden-age of late 50s early 60s song-writing partnerships. While ‘Change’ may not be the best of the Goffin & King canon – compare it to the uplifting ‘One Fine Day‘ – its appeal to Ferry during the selection process, in part, may be attributable to it being a part of America’s legendary Brill Building productions, and the idea of song-writing as craft, as a specialized art that required an apprenticeship and learned expertise.

Below Carole King describes the atmosphere at the “Brill Building” publishing houses of the period, a world perhaps that Ferry obviously wanted to acknowledge, promote, and – in contrast to his own brilliance-at-the-last-minute writing practices (see: ‘Mother of Pearl’ / ‘Love is the Drug’) secretly yearned for a Tin Pan Alley discipline of craft and professionalism that had been lost in the individualism of the singer/songwriter 1960’s and early 70s. ‘Don’t Ever Change’ – by the very nature of its title – may be a plea to never change, to return to a level of discipline that focused on the art of manufacturing hits for the youth market, a value and enterprise that Ferry himself discovered in 1973 with These Foolish Things and is still very much with us today as he recorded Bitter-Sweet (2019) with the Bryan Ferry Orchestra, an album that re-makes Roxy and solo Ferry songs in a style that re-creates the nostalgia of the past in a manner that makes it feel ever more potent in the present:

Every day we squeezed into our respective cubby holes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky. You’d sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubby hole composing a song exactly like yours. The pressure in the Brill Building was really terrific—because Donny (Kirshner) would play one songwriter against another. He’d say: “We need a new smash hit”—and we’d all go back and write a song!

Carole King

Recorded: AIR Studios, England June 1973.

Credits: Brill Building drawing, New York Times; Goffin & King songbook/Brill Building exterior and interior; Goffin & King at the office, early 60s; Beatles and Crickets tackle ‘Don’t Ever Change’

Next: Ferry shoots for a Janis Joplin classic ‘Piece of My Heart‘ – you can’t fault him for brave choices!

River of Salt Bryan Ferry (cover version, These Foolish Things, 1973)
River of Salt Ketty Lester (original, You Can’t Lie to a Liar b/w ‘River of Salt’ )

One of the lesser-known cuts on Bryan Ferry’s first solo album These Foolish Things, ‘River of Salt‘ was an obscure B-side single sung by American singer and actress Ketty Lester, written for her by Bernard Zackery, Irving Brown, and Jan Zackery. Never released on an album or as a single in its own right, ‘River of Salt’ is a miniature miracle that never found the audience it deserved. Lester had hit gold previously with the brilliant ‘Love Letters‘, a song that went to the top of the charts in both the US and the UK in 1962 (and one that David Lynch picked up for Blue Velvet). Chasing another hit single, Lester recorded and released three more ballads in 1962 but failed to repeat the success of ‘Letters’. That such a fine song as ‘River of Salt’ could be buried and forgotten as a B-side is testament to the quality of Lester’s output.

In choosing ‘River of Salt’ for the album, Ferry was in many ways drawing attention to his skills and appreciation for pop as a continuum, similar to the Art world reaching back into the (not so) distant past for its raw materials. Choosing well-known tunes was one thing – every one knows The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin – but branching out into jazz and Motown, and giving the nod to artists like Nat King Cole, Ketty Lester, and Smokey Robinson was risky, especially for a working-class English boy from Newcastle. Expressing his love of the form, Ferry had very distinct ideas and tastes about music pre-rock: “The difference between then and now is that where you once had two almost clearly defined categories –  singers and songwriters – you now have a situation where all song-writers have to be performers … and sometimes it doesn’t work very well” (BF, 76). While rock-stars enjoyed referencing their rock roots – David Bowie’s Pin Ups/John Lennon’s Rock ‘n’ Roll – Ferry was reaching back to an earlier musical milieu. While not exactly singing The Great American Standards yet (that would come next in Another Time, Another Place) there was nonetheless an emphasis on classic singer/songwriter partnerships juxtaposed against the titan and preeminent standard These Foolish Things which, by choosing it to title the album, provided Ferry with a new mask: that of the lounge-lizard Romantic, the unrequited lovelorn personality whose confessions are framed by a writer’s self-conscious awareness of his own misery (and charm). A cigarette that bares a lipstick’s traces..

After the literary maelstrom that is Bob Dylan’s highly allusive and poetic ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall‘, Ferry pulls a fast one and gives his audience a 1 minute 48 second love ballad. As metaphor, ‘River of Salt’ is as basic as it gets:

River of salt
Flowing from my eyes
Seems as though
I can’t realize
My love is gone
She’s left this town
River of salt
Keeps flowing down

Metaphors can be exaggerated so much they become comical (as in, “Her tears were a river flowing down her cheeks and beyond”), but ‘River of Salt‘ has an innocence similar to Ferry’s cover of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes‘ with its root metaphor of a lovely flame that dies, creating smoke, then tears (They said someday you’ll find/All who love are blind). In ‘Salt’ the bereaved lover also sheds unending tears while mourning the absent sweetheart. Although simple, the lyric may be onto something – there are no pure salt rivers in the world (according to Earth Science) and so the song taps into the Romantic idea of a bitter loss stretched across eternity, the Artist (hand on brow) writing reams of poetry à la climbing mountains, swimming oceans, walking thousands of miles to prove nothing less than everlasting love and commitment. Ferry knows the pulse of the song is earnestness tinged with a knowing wisdom and delivers it as such.

The musical set-up on ‘River of Salt’ is fantastic, and the track can be seen as a breakthrough in romantic sincerity for Ferry, a writer who in his own work prefers distance and irony to get to the heart of the matter. Richly recorded, bass and drum set the pace and are framed by a lovely electric piano chord introduction, laid down by professional session player Dave Skinner (who played for Roxy on the 1979 ‘Manifesto’ tour and solo Manzanera and Ferry records). By contrast the Ketty Lester recording is a bit stiff in these opening bars, with the double bass prominent but not particularly well-recorded, and the corresponding drum accompaniment sounding like it is being played with cutlery. In contrast, Ferry’s cover version is like hot chocolate in front of a roaring fire and white tiger rug. His vocal is (almost) stripped of its trade-mark quiver, and is delivered straight: Bryan Ferry the lounge-lizard/troubadour is born here, in this track, and in under two minutes he has set the stage for the appearance of his white tux and dickie-bow, glitter eye-liner be gone.

In most respects These Foolish Things is a love album. Songs like ‘Tracks of My Tears’; ‘Don’t Ever Change’; ‘Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever;’ ‘Don’t Worry Baby’; ‘River of Salt’ strive to capture and represent love’s sentiments in all its various colors and Ferry is keen to present them to a young 70s audience.  What is telling is that he tackles these originals from a vantage point of sincerity and eagerness to please, as if covering a track like ‘River of Salt’ note-for-note is the purest form of flattery. After dealing with love as a postmodern game of signs and signifiers – ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’; ‘Ladytron’; ‘Editions of You‘ – Ferry shifts his writing towards regaining (or finding) love in its full range of emotions. He does so from two directions: writing his own songs and covering the songs of others. While For Your Pleasure is cold to the touch, purposely distancing love in favor of a blow-up sex doll or bogeyman sex, These Foolish Things tackles love as an emotion lived and experienced by other people – in its 1 minute plus Ketty Lester’s ‘River of Salt’ has all the emotion it can handle – and so in his musical arrangement Ferry chooses not to mess too much with the established formula, as if by not doing so he might spoil a song that had once provided a lifeline to his personal feelings and experiences. For Ferry, Foolish Things was only “half successful” (NME) because he felt he did not experiment enough on the source material. If he had done so with ‘River of Salt’ it is very likely that the Third Roxy Music album Stranded would have been a very different recording – mature, yes, but insulated and aloof, instead of warm and tropical, full of emotional heat. Without ‘River of Salt’ it’s possible we might not have had ‘A Song for Europe’ … and where, dear friends, would that have gotten us?

It often seems that Ferry is using his music, not as an end in itself, but as an attempt to create an identity for himself, a reality beneath all the style.

Allan Jones

Next: The template for ‘Every Breath You Take’: Ferry covers ‘Don’t Ever Change‘, the same team that brought you hits from The Partridge Family, The Hollies, The Cookies, and Rod Stewart – Ladies and Gentlemen, Gerry Goffin and Carole King!

Recorded: AIR Studios, England June 1973.

Pics: Detail of the 1672 sculpture Entombment of Christ, showing Mary Magdalene crying; RMS composite, ‘River of Salt‘ original pressing & original Love Letters LP; signed BF Foolish Things; below, it’s tough to make a living in the music business: Ketty Lester in Blacula (1972).

Til next time!

A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall Bryan Ferry (cover version, ‘These Foolish Things’ 1973)
A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall Bob Dylan (original, ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ 1963)

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?

I. Where Have You Been?

There is a moment at the beginning of Ken Burns heart-rending documentary The Vietnam War when Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall provides the soundtrack to a chilling and moving prophecy: something dreadful and abhorrent is on its way, and the blue-eyed sons of a generation are going somewhere they may never return from, and if they do return, they may never be the same again.

Another blue-eyed son – Bryan Ferry – takes Dylan’s anti-war anthem and turns it inside out, downplaying and de-emphasizing the poetry while heightening the music and tunefulness of the original. It’s a fair trade, and one that still stands as an astonishing cover version of a folk classic.  Strikingly original and as tuneful as hell, Bryan Ferry chose to re-record the song as the lead track on his first solo album These Foolish Things, and in doing so scored a surprise hit, reaching number 10 in the UK charts in October 1973 (Viva). Success came at a price however: the single was controversial for its stomping (literally) on sacred ground, and it also created a schism in Bryan Ferry’s writing – a trend towards  minimizing lyrical density in favour of cover songs and a heightened mainstream sensibility  – an inclination, thankfully, still far away on the horizon as 1973 unfolded, they year that delivered two classic Roxy Music albums (For Your Pleasure, Stranded) and a surprising, even innovative, “one-off” solo release in These Foolish Things. As Ferry drily noted, 1973 “was some year of work.”

As Brian Eno left the band in July 1973, the Roxy Music band-members felt the pain of losing their original line-up and their hard-earned musical identity. Andy Mackay felt angry enough to come close to quitting Roxy and joining Mott the Hoople (with whom he had played on their single ‘All the Way to Memphis‘ during the recording of For Your Pleasure). The saxophonist even insisted on creating a solo personae in the vein of a Ziggy Stardust alter-ego, as if to hedge bets for the future. (“I’m changing my name to Eddie Riff,” he told the NME in the same issue that Eno’s departure was announced). Phil Manzanera recalls the period as being, understandably, highly contentious and difficult: “When Eno left we were in danger of imploding completely” (Rigby, 86). After some breathing space and tempered negotiations – Manzanera and Mackay would receive writing co-credits on future Roxy Music recordings – the band decided to continue, Manzanera for one observing that “I hadn’t had my fill of being in a pop band yet” (Stump, 99). Band members also felt that doing solo albums would be a good way to relieve creative tension and so followed the two Brians on their solo album path, while retaining the Roxy Music brand as their raison d’être:

What’s interesting about Roxy is that most people in bands don’t do solo albums until they’ve been together for years. We all started doing solo albums almost immediately. We always had our own agenda, and as long as there was enough common ground we stayed together. There was always a possibility I could have left when Brian Eno did. I felt very loyal to him.

Andy Mackay

For his part, Bryan Ferry still felt that Roxy Music was the main thing, yet considered the Roxy ‘state of mind’ as malleable and applicable to other art projects. So he set upon the idea of recording an album of pre-written “ready-made” songs, some standards, some well-known classics, all of them personally important to Ferry as they spanned several decades from the 1930s through the 1960s, re-creating in spirit the set-list of his previous R ‘n’ B band The Gas Board.  Confiding to Melody Maker that “The people who did the best songs were pre-Beatles” Ferry was keen to surprise his audience, so much so music writer Hal Norman maintains that by its very contradictory nature These Foolish Things “remains as much of a revolution in the head as the great LPs of ’67 or ’77.” While this errs on the side of hyperbole – The Beatles and Sex Pistols be damned! – there is little doubt that Ferry was in new territory in 1973: for the post-60s generation originality was King, and anything less than an artist writing, recording and playing songs of striking originality was met with suspicion. Covering other people’s tunes demonstrated a lack of talent, a throw-back to Frank Sinatra‘s generation and the jazz standards of the 50s. No matter that John Coltrane had savaged the old Broadway chestnut ‘My Favourite Things‘ to create a be-bop revolution, the current thinking was that a Neil Young or a James Taylor wrote from their own observations  – meaning and expression was a gift to the audience by Artist, who toiled in everyday experience to bring the fruits of their insight to the masses.  Even Ferry was initially cautious in his ambition. “It wasn’t that I wanted to have another career,” he explained,  “I saw it as a one-off album”:

I must have been encouraged to do [a solo album] by Mark and David [Enthoven]. I thought it would be great to do a different kind of album to For Your Pleasure, one which wasn’t as dark and had a lightness in the way that, say, Picasso does ceramics which are fun, and also does dark and mysterious work as well. I’m sure the album had good and bad repercussions. It opened Roxy Music up to a more mainstream audience. On the other hand, I might have pissed off the purists.

Bryan Ferry

Moving fast then – ‘Foolish Things’ was recorded in June 1973, with single and album released in September and October (at the same time Roxy went into the studio to record ‘Stranded‘), Ferry wisely stayed within his comfort zone by working with the members of the established Roxy Music machine – Paul Thompson was invited to play drums; Phil Manzanera played guitar on the Beatles cover of ‘You Won’t See Me’; For Your Pleasure musician and friend John Porter played bass and co-produced with Ferry; AIR Studios was re-booked; John Punter was back for co-production and engineering assistance; and as per the previous two Roxy albums, cover design was by Nicholas De Ville and photography was by Karl Stoecker. Andy Mackay and Brian Eno did not participate – which should come as a surprise to absolutely no one given the subterfuge and fall-out of the summer.

Utilizing Marcel Duchamp‘s idea of ready-mades or ‘found-objects’ – a pop-art trick Roxy Music had used so well on ‘Virginia Plain‘ and ‘Editions of You‘ – Ferry was keen to stick to mentor Richard Hamilton’s credo that art should be “Popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business” (Hamilton). This opened the way to throw another brand into the mix – that of the solo star, a beefcake teen idol called “Bryan Ferry”. The message to his audience and fellow Roxy band-members was clear: damn the torpedoes, I have ideas to burn, I can make it on my own. In doing so Ferry hit the nail on the head: the record sold by the bucket-load.
II. Who Did You See?

‘Hard Rain’ starts with the plaintive and familiar sound of Bryan Ferry’s electric piano tapping out a D-chord intro: it’s telling that the rhythm is slightly choppy, irregular, a human touch  – until four short seconds in, when the sound of violins slowly creep into the mix, precise, panning across both speakers. Ferry takes a breath at .09 and the voice is introduced, mid-range. Paul Thompson kicks in at .16 with a deft double-stroke roll and we’re off to the races, the rhythm catching fire for an extremely original and entertaining 5.19 minutes of pop perfection.

The introduction and selection of ‘Hard Rain’ for this, the opening cut on Bryan Ferry’s first solo album, is inspired and provides context for much of what follows for Ferry and Roxy Music in the 70s. Take innovative song selection and album sequencing for starters: in its original format Dylan’s track is a brilliant, if musically repetitive, question-and-answer poem that was ten minutes+ plus live, and six minutes fifty-five recorded – influenced by French Symbolists Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarme, and others, Dylan took the question and response format from multiple sources, some religious, one of them in the style of a centuries-old Scottish border ballad called “Lord Randal” with its question-and-answer format: “Oh where have you been, Lord Randal, my son; And where have you been my handsome young man” (FT). All sources helped imbue his song with striking images of conflict and apocalypse. The effect was a rain-driven “surrealistic downpour” (Riley) that became increasingly important and prescient for a country who, in 1963, was incubating hostility in Vietnam. (In another world, in some faraway galaxy, it is nice to imagine a society that heeds the warnings of the poets and assigns the Generals and war-mongers the noble job of grocery shopping and child-rearing). Intensely cinematic, Ferry’s choice is inspired – so wrong it’s right – and the sequencing on the record surprises as we move from ‘Hard Rain’s five minutes plus (the longest track on the record) to Ketty Lester‘s ‘River of Salt’ (the shortest).

The first few moments of ‘Hard Rain’ also introduce a significant moment in the history of Roxy Music: the debut of new band member, the fantastic and compelling multi-instrumentalist Eddie Jobson.

“Who can replace Brian Eno?!” Andy Mackay fumed to the NME when the split was announced to the music papers in July 1973. The answer to Andy’s question is, Eddie Jobson can.. Or, to be more precise, no one can. But Eddie Jobson was not a replacement for Brian Eno – he wasn’t hired to mix sound at live concerts, or manipulate Phil Manzanera’s guitar in the studio; he wasn’t hired to provide theories of being in a rock band or explain the role of ‘non-musician’ – quite the opposite, the gifted and multi-instrumentalist Jobson was hired to enhance and strengthen the musicianship of Roxy Music, to provide a wide breadth of support for live concerts, where keyboards, synth, violin and more could be supplied as the songs required, while Bryan Ferry took center-stage as singer and centerpiece of the live Roxy line-up. This view of Roxy as a professional and much sought-after viable recording & live music entity was what had kept Bryan Ferry awake at nights during the writing and recording of For Your Pleasure. Now the message had clarity – the goal of all marketing initiatives –  resulting in no audience confusion on how to receive and enjoy the b(r)and. Glamour. Style. Pop and rock perfectly captured and presented – the best integrated guitar, drums and saxophone in England, and not an earthworm in sight. Now the parts were in place, Ferry began to extract the spoils of war and put the (very young) 18-year-old Eddie Jobson to work.

“Did you know I was the entire orchestra on Bryan’s first album?”

Whether by grand design or sheer luck – Bryan Ferry was familiar with Eddie Jobson via a close family connection, both men hailing from North England, County Durham – Jobson was an incredible find for Roxy Music, enhancing the band’s sex appeal via his youthful presence (he was eighteen when he joined Roxy) and musical skill, topped off with a visually arresting translucent plexiglass violin that was as thrilling to look at as it was to listen to. Moreover, Jobson contributed immensely in the studio, not only honing and applying an exquisite taste in musical embellishment, but also bringing his creativity and skill to some of Roxy’s best recordings (‘Song for Europe‘, ‘Out of the Blue‘ and ‘Sunset‘ among many). And so too is the case with Ferry’s first solo outing – if you ask most people about Ferry’s cover of ‘Hard Rain’ it is the strident and multi-layered strings that are most remembered. “I came up with the choppy strings,” Jobson recalled of the sessions:

My credit on [These Foolish Things] casually says “strings” but I don’t think people realize that I not only wrote all the string parts, but I individually over-dubbed the violins, violas and cellos until my fingers were blistered. I also added the double bass parts by playing them on viola at double speed and then slowing down the tape (Jobson, 141).

The intensive string over-dubs changed the music beyond recognition – the Dylan original was a classic finger-picked ballad/protest ballad in the vein of folk icon Woody Guthrie (with whom the unknown 19-year-old Dylan visited regularly during the famous folkie’s final years).  The finger-picking style – with thumb picking out the base line and middle fingers picking out the rest of the chord – is a great vehicle for writer/poets who prefer to place emphasis on sound and alliteration, the steady rhythm serving to unclutter the poetry and message. John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero‘ is a classic of the genre, where the beat is steady and simple throughout, yet the message is barbed and to the point. In this regard, Dylan’s ‘Hard Rain’ is designed to be listened to. Indeed, Dylan took the question and answer format in part from the sacred text Child Ballad No. 12 Lord Randal and it does carry a sense of religious fervor that one suspects Ferry responded to – he didn’t care much for the political aspects of the song (“I can’t be bothered with all that Cuba Crisis stuff” (Viva)), but the devotional format would have made sense with Roxy recording the evangelical ‘Psalm‘ from Stranded almost concurrently with ‘Hard Rain’s’ release.

Lyrically, Ferry largely keeps to Dylan’s word choice, dropping only the repeated personal pronoun – instead of I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains, Ferry’s version go straight to the verb form as in “stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains”/crawled on six crooked highways and so on. These minor edits keeps each line moving at a fair clip. Ferry’s cover of ‘Hard Rain’ also adopts the Q&A format, with each verse the narrator asking a specific question, with answers coming from the young son. Verse 1 asks Where have you been? (Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?/Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?). Verse 2 asks What Did You See? Verse 3 asks What Did You Hear? 4 asks Who Did You Meet? And the final verse asks the most important question What Will You Do Now? Ferry used this call-and-answer format to maximum effect in his famous (and very early) promotional video for the single: sitting at his Grand white piano, squeezed between the instrument’s cover and soundboard, Ferry looks directly to his viewers and asks his questions. A separate camera picks up the dialog as he turns his head dramatically to answer and describe what he sees/hears/meets (Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter/Met a young woman whose body was burning/Saw a etc). An important aspect of Dylan’s song is retained and dramatized in the promo video as we, the audience, become the ‘blue-eyed’ son making our way through this tangle of poverty, ignorance and violence.
III. What Did You Hear?

By the time the first verse is underway, Ferry, Jobson and Thompson are inter-locked, moving swiftly towards twelve misty mountains and six crooked highways. At .44 we hear the winning sound of The Angelettes affirming Ferry’s conclusion that “it’s a hard (hard!) hard rain’s a-gonna fall.” The Angelettes – Pat, Jan, Sue and Julie – were a harmony girl-group from Manchester, and along with Eddie Jobson, serve as a North England talent coup for Ferry, as he hired them for the AIR studio recordings and for his (now lost) appearance of the song on Top of The Pops. This is the first instance in a long career that Ferry uses female singers for vocal accompaniment – an attribute used extensively for future solo and Roxy Music recordings. While the commercial fortunes of The Angelettes never matched their skill for harmony and innovation, the fact that they contributed so much to ‘Hard Rain’ is often over-looked due to the humorous rag-tag chorus of the promotional video (complete with cross-dressing Coronation Street alumni), yet they shine on the album, particularly on ‘Hard Rain’ and the successful Beach Boys cover, ‘Don’t Worry Baby‘

If Verse 1 sets the ball rolling with heavy rock, strings and dynamic drumming, then Verse 2 builds the sound picture with the introduction at 1.05 of John Porter’s guitar. In an effort to paint pictures in words and music, the guitar is the first instrument that sonically responds to the horror of the lyric, recoiling with a shake and a twang at I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’ (1.21). Intending the song to be heard (before it was seen) Ferry applies sound-effects liberally: “The sound of a thunder” produces thunder-claps at 2.02;  “Heard the roar of a wave” and we hear the sound of waves crashing at 2.08; Heard many people laughin’ brings forth studio laughter (2.17) and so on. In fact, it may be the effects and laughter that got up the noses of hardcore Dylan fans and critics – how can laughter be appropriate in such an apocalyptic song? – but this is both the attraction and ultimate success of this cover version – it’s grand, crass, pompous (in the best 70s sense), ironical, inspired, and above all, reverential. Taking on the mantle of the poet who “died in the gutter” new poet Ferry assumes the role of Dylan the Clown (who cried in the alley) only to be mocked by the chorus – announcement of his death is met with a sarcastic “awwww” at 2.21. Sounds like everyone in the control room – including the Angelettes – had fun with that one.

Over the course of the five verses in this six minute song, music and effects are carefully added to build a tapestry of ominous visual images and puns. The question and answer effects continue (black dog: “howwwl“/rainbow: “sprinkkkle”), yet there is a sense at the half-way point that we could conclude here and all would be fine, slow fade. A good cut for the BBC and the singles market.  But the story is not over: we have been, seen and heard, but have yet to absorb the lessons of human history, so the young one volunteers to “a-goin’ back out ‘fore the rain starts a-fallin’.” Ferry is up for a-goin’ back out, and carries the second half by beefing up the instrumentation and vocals for the remaining two minutes 40 seconds of the song.

Facing an emotional challenge – the young son will most certainly face death if he goes back out into the black forest (Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden) – the chorus and guitar build their lines to a harmonious climax. But the song is designed for Ferry by Ferry, the new solo star, so he creates room in the final verse to highlight his vocal performance and power, raising his naturally odd inflections across several closing lines:

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten

Ferry sings brilliantly here as he spits out Where the people /Where the pellets/Where the home/…/ culminating in a fantastic staccato rhythm that requires an (audible) sharp intake of breath to get through the climax:

And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it

Here Ferry declares his right to sing Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall‘ and re-interpret this classic folk song, turning it away from its acoustic roots to the world of foot-stomping teenage-rampage Glam. It matters not a wit, the message is the same: he will tell it, speak it, and continue to breathe it, for truth never goes out of style. A song re-made without compromise, Ferry gives a giant to-hell-with-you to the snobs and critics, and climbs to the top of the mountain streamline as a beacon of light, a reflector of the new modernity.

In Memoriam: To all the men, women and children killed and injured in New Zealand, March 2019. To the families of those left behind, we are sorry for your loss.

You may have chosen us but we utterly reject and condemn you.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern

Next month: Brian tackles a sad-song metaphor – ‘River of Salt’

Recorded: AIR Studios, England June 1973. Various different versions of ‘Hard Rain’ release potent emotional energy – The Staple Singers engage in a powerful 1968 call-and-response that maintains a steady beat, and intensifies before the final verse; so too with Joan Baez, her unmistakable voice holding us in rapt attention. By far the most emotionally charged and profound take on the song, building to tears by the final verse, is Patti Smith‘s Bob Dylan’s acceptance speech at the 2016 Noble Peace Prize. At 1.54 Smith completely freezes (her word), and there is stunned silence from the Nobel crowd as she tries to get back to the verse lines. With a disarming “Sorry…I’m sorry.. Can we start that section.. I’m sorry…I apologise.. I’m so nervous” and a wide smile, she gains a well-earned round of applause. Emotion and good-will fill the room. It’s a profoundly moving moment, and Smith tackles the tough last verse cleanly with her frailty acknowledged and her humanity intact.

Pics: BF close-shot cover These Foolish Things; RMS composite Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Bryan Ferry (in studio recording TFT); various editions of the single; Eddie Jobson; EJ and BF making boogie at the old Grand piano; RMS composite from ‘Hard Rain‘ promo video plus some Bob Dylan shots pinched from the internet; RMS composite the magnificent Angelettes; RMS composite official BF ‘Hard Rain’ promo vid.