Having found Neuma's closed down, we found our way to Re-Bar, where Scream Club had already screamed. But somehow -- I believe it was Julianne's imprecations -- they agreed to recapitulate their show. Having driven down from Olympia, they had a car stereo handy, which provided the backing tracks, appropriately booming and distorted. We all smuggled our drinks out to the parking lot. Ange arrived with suitcase; always have the airport taxi drop you off at a seedy bar after midnight. Oliver got photos; sadly, no notational nor notional device can capture the splendid absurdity and pleasure of the event, the sense that the You Had To Be There meter had just blossomed red. Or in the case of the wigs, pink.
Click the link immediately below to read a revelatory four-minute feature on "More Than This," as performed by Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music and Bill Murray, as performed by Greil Marcus.
Byran Ferry is a god, and Roxy Music was his court. As a stylist—and that’s what he is, not an icon, not a performer, not Lesley Gore, not Bob Dylan, people he would love to be—or to have been—no one touches him, just as no one touches Neil Young. They have their own styles. Their styles are narrow, so much so that they can seem merely self-referential.
Maybe so. “More Than This,” from Roxy Music’s “Avalon,” from 1982, twenty-two years ago that can feel like last night, summed up everything the band’s style ever implied, everything it ever wanted. “More Than This” is the essence of the story the band told, and at least half of the story Ferry always meant to tell—no, you can’t fit his version of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” into “More Than This.”
It begins with Phil Manzanera’s high-stepping guitar, and then Bryan Ferry on a swing, pumping slowly, going just a foot higher with each pass—all you can do is sigh. All you can do is shake your head, that anything could be so perfect.
Now, this is my karaoke number because I love it. When asked to pick a song this popped into my head without a thought. But after I chose it, I realized that behind that choice really was karaoke—Bill Murray in a Tokyo karaoke bar singing “More Than This” in “Lost and Translation.” For this moment, anyway, the title of the movie is strange: in this moment, every word is enunciated, singled out as a thing in itself, made plain: every word is exposed. You realize that the man Bill Murray is playing, in his attempt to seduce the woman played by Scarlett Johanssen, in his attempt to seduce himself, to convince himself that he is still sexually alive, cannot afford to miss, even to elide, a single word. The song is the truth; in this moment, the only way Muray’s character can imagine telling the truth is literally. But the truth of “More Than This” is anything but literal; the truth of the song is that to remake the song as fact is to show how afraid of the song you really are.
For me anyway, after twenty-two dissolving years of listening to the tune, Bill Murray’s halting, heartfelt version was a shock: the shock of discovering that “More Than This” has words. Lyrics.
Absolutely terrible lyrics, on the order of “Castles in the sky/ Castles made of sand/ You and I will last forever/ My ring upon your hand.” You hear not a word of this when Bryan Ferry sings the words that he himself wrote.
More than this—nothing. Those are the words to “More Than This.” As far as I’m willing to go, that is the complete lyric.
Roxy Music’s “More Than This” is a drift, a float. The sounds coming out of Ferry’s mouth, except for the chorus, when the whirlpool is stopped, when it’s centered, when he steps out as if to make a speech, are a golden smear.
Four minutes and fifteen seconds long, the song begins to fade after two minutes and thirty-two seconds. You hear “More than this—nothing”—and then Phil Manzanera, who has simply been counting off the rhythm behind Ferry, play his solo. It’s maybe eleven bent blues notes—there and gone in under three seconds. It is the most elegant and ephemeral distillation of the guitar solo, any guitar solo, imaginable, and it brings up a question. What is a guitar solo? What happens when the singer steps back and gives the song—its themes, its argument, its imagery, its story—to a musician?
What happens is the admission that certain things can’t be said in words, but they can be said. Almost always, when this happens in a song, there’s a sudden thrill, a catch in the heart—even if what follows is bland, blank, time and no more than time.
Posted by jane at April 22, 2004 09:45 AM | TrackBack