11. Bryan Ferry, These Foolish Things (1973) 
The greatest covers album of them all, no contest--a great album on its own terms, and one of the highlights (if not
the highlight) of Ferry's career, including his work in Roxy Music (I rank it right up there with
Siren and
Stranded, my two favourite Roxy albums, and a cut above all the others.). It's interesting to me now to read how the critics reponded to
These Foolish Things at the time, because the vantage point from which they first heard it is completely opposite of the vantage point from which I first heard it--and from which I still, to some degree, continue to hear it. Music critics in the early seventies tended, understandably, to judge the album by how well the performances stood their ground alongside the originals. It's the fallback criteria to use when discussing any sort of song covers project: how do the new versions stack up? Me, I had no idea when my brother brought this album home, probably in the summer of '74, that most of these songs were covers. I understood immediately, within 30 seconds of hearing "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," that it was the most thrilling pop music I'd heard up until that point, but I didn't know it was a Bob Dylan song, and it wouldn't have meant anything even if I did (I had only the faintest idea at that point of who Bob Dylan was). When I finally started to work my way backwards through Ferry's highly personal hagiography (a term I choose carefully, as it implies both idolization and worship), I naturally tended to judge the originals against the covers, using Ferry's recordings as the base line. The first time I heard Dylan's "version" of "Hard Rain," which was probably in the late '80s, I thought it at best a sparse-sounding disappointment, at worst a folkie-acoustic desecration--how dare he! Where's the thunder, the laughing, the dance beat, the hoe-down? (I've since grown to love Dylan's version as well, but that first encounter was pretty jarring.)
Several months ago, finally putting an end to years of curiosity and a holy grail-like fixation, I managed to track down the two remaining originals from
TFT I'd never previously heard: Ketty Lester's "River of Salt" and the Crickets' "Don't Ever Change." Suffice to say, to a North American listener, they are the most obscure songs on the album, but even at that I was astonished at just how short both of them came up against Ferry's versions. Both tracks put one of the accomplishments of
TFT into much greater focus for me. They're both nice enough songs--pleasant pop and soul trifles--but upon hearing them, it really hit home just what kind of visionary it must've taken to hear something in them that was worth covering in the first place, and then to transform them into such definitively personal performances.
Take "Don't Ever Change." The Crickets version [
mp3], with its Everlys-across-the-Mersey feel has a swinging, happy-go-lucky vibe. It's a somewhat corny ditty--though not objectionably so--about accepting a girl for who she really is, yadda yadda ("I kind of like you just the way you are" rings the chorus, predating Billy Joel by a decade). All fine and good, if more than a little bit so-what? Ferry, on the other hand, invests an extraordinary amount of musicality and emotion into his version [
mp3], and the results are unforgettable. Paul Thompson's drumming pushes the beat front and centre with a funky send-up of Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part 2" rhythm, and the chorus is filled out with some wonderful (pre-ABBA) Euro-piano flourishes. But what really sets the
TFT version apart is how Ferry transforms the entire mood of the song simply by changing the last two syllables of each verse ("Sun-day," "tom-boy," "hurt me") from the ascending reach of the Crickets version to a descending downward slope, lending the song a quivery emotional servitude barely even hinted at in the original.
The transformation of "River of Salt," while more subtle is no less authoritative. Ketty Lester's version [
mp3] is a likably anonymous mid-tempo soul song, with a light jazzy underpinning, performed on a very even keel from start to finish. Ferry [
mp3] again accentuates the rhythm track (though this time by highlighting its delicate nature, perhaps imagining how Norman Whitfield would've arranged the song for Marvin Gaye), and zeros in on a smoldering intimacy and a wistfulness curiously bereft, to my ears, in Lester's reading. In this regard, and all across the record,
TFT is as notable for what it
uncovers in its source material as for what it covers. It imagines worlds inside these songs, worlds far removed in some cases from what the song's creators were even aware of.
That said, I wouldn't make too big an issue of the fact that in a few cases
TFT betters--trounces, usurps, however you want to put it--the original versions of the songs it covers. In a way it's kind of beside the point, because one of the real coups of this record--one of the many things that makes it a vastly more interesting listen than, say, John Lennon's cover album--is the breadth and originality of the material covered. (I don't mean to say that the early rock and roll songs Lennon covers are unoriginal, but rather, that his personal selection of tunes is startlingly uninspired.) Not only was it quite the bold, if not altogether cheeky, move in the early seventies for Ferry to re-model Dylan, the Stones, and the Beatles, his album almost functions as a form of pop criticism, or at least as a really surprising DJ set, with its canny selections of girl group music, Beach Boys, and Motown. His playlist absorbs both well-regarded soul and hard rock staples ("Tracks of My Tears," "Piece of My Heart") and early girl group hits surely considered quite tacky, if not altogether passé, in 1973 ("It's My Party," "I Love How You Love Me"--exposure to the latter song for many North Americans came a few years earlier via none other than Bobby Vinton). The real value of these versions is not that they're superior to the originals (some are, some aren't, most are simply immeasurable in that regard) but rather, that they complement the originals so well. Ferry's versions don't diminish their sources, they enhance them; they redefine the songs not merely by changing their meanings but by multiplying them, opening them up with vivid, and sometimes bizarre, interpretations. (Unfortunately, this is just as true for the album's one dud as it is for its gems. In pushing "Sympathy for the Devil" as far as it can go without bursting into flames, Ferry merely underlines the track's
über-kitschiness. I don't agree with critics who say this is intentional--in his
Phonograph Record Magazine review, Greg Shaw refers to Ferry's "
deliberately [my emphasis] inappropriate phrasing"--anymore than I believe that "Hard Rain" is Ferry's attempt to mock Dylan. Still, for some listeners--i.e., clueless pre-teens like myself--his version did serve something of a critical purpose, in that I never so completely trusted the Stones version again after hearing Ferry's. I probably would've got there on my own anyway, but you never know.)
I've barely scratched the surface of what this album means to me, but I'll leave it at that for now--and anyway, this isn't the last time in this survey we'll be hearing from Monsieur Ferry. Bowie's
Pin Ups is on deck, and there are also some interesting parallels to be drawn between it and
TFT, though the strongest parallel to Ferry's album isn't another covers album, or any album at all, but rather, Guy Peellaert's and Nik Cohn's
Rock Dreams,
a book which, coincidentally (or not?), was first published in 1973.
Rock Dreams is an ultimate fan's fantasy of pop music, and like
TFT, it makes explicit some of the implicit emotions in pop. Nick Coleman in the
Guardian describes Rock Dreams as both "the pornography of rock" as well as "its stained glass window."
Cohn himself suggests that it is "a gallery of stills from movies that had never been made, except in our imaginations." Those are as good a clues as any in describing what Ferry does all over the place on
These Foolish Things.
