Li: Flesh + Blood

Track Listing: 1. In the Midnight Hour, 2. Oh Yeah, 3. Same Old Scene, 4. Flesh and Blood, 5. My Only Love, 6. Over You, 7. Eight Miles High, 8. Rain, Rain, Rain, 9. No Strange Delight, 10. Running Wild

TWITTER

FACEBOOK

“My friend’s flesh and blood
She lies overtime
You’d nail her if you could
But she says love me for my mind
In my time
I’m not that kind

My friend’s flesh and blood
Night size - a perfect 10”

-from “Flesh and Blood”

And you’re off to the races. Sex, sex, sex, (is that all you think of?) love, more sex, maybe some more love and then the inevitable heartbreak, but then some more sex (yes!).

It’s 1996 and there are only four people in the small independent record store, and of course the three customers head to the cash register at the same time. A young businessman in a suit, a cool looking, hip city guy all dressed in black and myself. The businessman asks the clerk if the three Roxy Music albums he has selected are good.

Not knowing, but not wanting to kill a sale the clerk offers some irrelevant nonsense, After all, the albums were released almost twenty years prior and both the clerk and the customer were barely into their twenties themselves. Simultaneously the other guy and I start raving about Roxy Music hoping to turn both of them on to the band. We start laughing and then take turns discussing the merits of each of the albums.

Oddly, we both focus on Flesh + Blood. The youngster said someone told to him to buy some Roxy Music so he could make out with a girl he was trying to impress. And so he should.

“Some expression in your eyes
Overtook me by surprise
Where was I how was I to know?
How can we drive to a movie show
When the music is here in my car?
There’s a band playing on the radio
With a rhythm of rhyming guitars
They’re playing oh yeah on the radio”

-from “Oh Yeah”

Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, there’s a song playing on the radio, you know the drill, that’s the song cycle basically for the entire album. A song begins with a piano riff followed by a few guitar notes and piece by piece the song is assembled right before your ears as layer upon layer of glorious sound pays its respect to love, sex and rock ‘n’ roll.

The kid seemed confused by our enthusiasm but he goes ahead with his purchase. After concluding our transactions, the dude in black and I head for our cars that happened to be parked near each other on a side street. He turns to me and laughs and says, “the kid will probably waste the albums by having bad sex.”

Maybe he did, but probably not … this is powerful stuff, Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry are just about foolproof. The music endures. The record shop however is long gone.

-RAW

TWITTER

FACEBOOK