Roxy Music – Stranded

Back in the 70’s, before Rolling Stone magazine began quietly suggesting that the Roxy Music albums weren’t that good, they said, “Two British bands are genuinely stretching the dimensions of pop music. One, 10 C.C., has already found a degree of popularity in the States. Roxy Music has been unable to cross the Atlantic so far, but that should change with this album. Stranded is one of the most exciting and entertaining British LPs of the Seventies.”

At this same time, another magazine said, “Andy MacKay, whose searing sax made Mott the Hoople’s “All The Way From Memphis” an American favorite, has written the tune for “A Song For Europe,” the most impressive track on the album, an awesome example of self-disciplined hard rock.” Yet it was unconventional songs like this that the rags would later cite at too arty, too progressive, cumbersome, and failing in their nature to define a cohesive album. And that just about sums up where the world at large stood with Roxy Music … loving the accessible material and hating the experimental more heavy, nearly instrumental aspects.

It was 1973, the woman on the cover of Stranded was Brian Ferry’s girlfriend Marilyn Cole, playmate model of the year, with this being the first Roxy album where Ferry was not the solo creator of all of the material. Yet even without the presence of Mr. Eno, this was a solid body of work, a change in style certainly, yet still, all of the seem assured of themselves and their tasks, creating another dialectic album infused with juxtapositions, with Brian Eno saying that Stranded was his personal favorite Roxy album, even if he’d not taken part. Take the bouncy innovative sound of “Street Life,” smack that up against the risk taking soundscape of the epic “A Song For Europe,” and while perhaps self-deprecating, the material certainly creates a sensuous emotional atmosphere laced around those pop singles.

The album does embrace the completeness of a street-life, at the time, Brian Ferry was at the height of his game, an unsettling lounge lizard crooner, while Phil Manzanera is nothing short of a magical creative genius with his solo and riffing, Paul Thompsons drumming is resolved and powerful, and Andy MacKay, while on sax or oboe could do no wrong, sounding plaintive haunting and specularly wonderful, and then there’s the lushness the new recruit Eddie Jobson brings to the mix where together they created what can only be described as a dense British version of Phil Spector’s wall of sound.

Seriously, I fully realize that most Roxy Music albums can be challenging at some point as they spin out on your turntable, though Roxy have always bent the rules, sliding somewhere between great rock songs and progressive music. And to that I always suggest to listeners that they should save the songs that ride best in their own back pockets and create their a personal compilation. With that in mind, I can tell you that with eight studio albums, there are no less than forty-two tracks that are intoxicatingly accessible, so completing that compilation should be a no-brainer, with Stranded offering up three of those “Mother Of Pearl,” “Serenade” and “Street Life” … all songs so good that they in and of themselves justify the purchasing the album.

If forced to focus on the shortcomings of the album, I’d say, “Unquestionably Stranded is a solid release, though it does get a bit weighted by some of the gloomy torch songs, along with a rather long and labored gospel number smack dab in the middle, a song I could certainly do without, where Ferry’s vibrato drones on too long and too pointedly.”

*** The Fun Facts: Marilyn Cole was the girl on the album Stranded. She was a Playboy model and eventually married Victor Lownes, president of Playboy Enterprises, after a brief involvement with Ferry.

Review by Jenell Kesler