On Thursday night, my wife and I went to see Bryan Ferry at the Greek Theatre here in Los Angeles. This was the eleventy billionth time we’ve seen Mr. Ferry in concert, so I think we qualify as committed fans. We’re not alone in that; the venue was sold out, and we fell into a nice exchange with other committed fans all around us. The singer, who doesn’t have a new album out, billed this world tour as doing songs from Avalon, by his old band Roxy Music, as well as solo hits, and at the end the guy behind me, of similar age as me, pointed out to me that Ferry hadn’t performed “To Turn You On” from Avalon. Which was true. So it was that sort of crowd.

The first time I saw Bryan Ferry was with Roxy Music, in 1983 in Philadelphia, on what was also the last time anyone saw Roxy Music for a very long time. (They did a reunion tour in 2001, and a few since then.) When you’ve seen the same performer many, many (many) times, and you’ve also seen many, many other concerts (I’m seeing three within the course of eight days — Ferry, King Crimson, and Karen O & Danger Mouse) you can tell the people who are really committed to their act and to their performance. I have a close friend who adores Sting and who has complained about the times when Sting has phoned it in. Mike Love’s version of the Beach Boys, which sounds great in the way a well-trained Beach Boys cover band that happens to have Mike Love and Bruce Johnston in it would sound great, plays for 90 minutes on the dot, and then they are out of there; Brian Wilson, meanwhile, will give it his all, but his all is vastly diminished from what it once was, and the last time I saw the legendary and extremely important-to-me Brian Wilson, well, he sang off-key, and it broke my heart. I’ve seen Elton John all of once (not a fan of his music), but after seeing him early this year at the Staples Center, I came away understanding people’s fanatic devotion to him. I still don’t like his records  — much of it sounds like rollerskating-rink music to me — but in concert, it turns out that he lives up to his reputation as an incredible showman, but that he delivers like a blues singer. I don’t know if that’s because his register has dropped, but whatever the cause, the vocals were administered in an almost thunderous gospel sense, and the tinny sound of the records was gone, his aged three drummers can really hit it, and his show was 100% incredibly enjoyable, especially to a non-fan who quickly found himself converted.

What I would say about Bryan Ferry — in every concert I’ve seen him play and, seriously, that’s at least 10 times  — is that he loves performing and that he brings everything he’s got every time. He also seems to love Los Angeles. In 2014, we saw him in Santa Barbara; he put on a fine show, but it wasn’t the love fest we’ve seen in L.A.  At the Greek the other night, he was positively beaming, because we were beaming at him. He sounds great, and he’s got a great band who’ve been with him a while and who seem to know the entire catalog. On any given tour, Ferry will play the Roxy songs you want, many of his own songs that you want, and then do unexpected deeper cuts you didn’t expect. This time, he played “The 39 Steps” from his 1994 solo album Mamouna, which I think I last heard him play… never.

Top to bottom, we had a glorious evening. The tickets weren’t inexpensive — let’s just note here that the parking was $45 — but our seats were 13th row, which afforded enough proximity to get the full physical effect of a band right in front of you, without getting your ears sheared off. The Greek has excellent acoustics, and its open-air quality assists the atmosphere immeasurably. When you’ve got seats like that, you’re less likely to be obstructed by a human wind sock dancing for two hours directly in front of you, as happened once to a friend next to me in a cheap seat near the back of the venue. You’re also less likely to encounter a middle-aged boozer couple tormenting their young children by 1) bringing them to a Monkees concert they’re not interested in, and 2) getting thoroughly smashed in front of them. No, down in the 13th row, it’s the responsible people, who have made an investment in the evening and are now seeking their return on investment.

Back in the car, and on the way home, and in our house, neither of us had one negative thing to say about the show or any aspect of the experience. We are smart, educated people, surrounded by offbeat highly educated intellects who come to our house and promptly debate things, which means that at heart we are critical people. Even when we’ve said nothing, usually, we’ve made critical notes.

This time? Nothing. It was all splendid. We felt fortunate.

Then, just before bed, the dogs having been patted and the house secured, my wife said, “You know… I hate to say anything… but I hated that jacket he was wearing. It was like… an old man jacket.”

I looked her in the eye and said, “I know! Did you see the cuffs on his shirt? The cuffs of his shirt were huckered! And what about that cheap-ass tie? I used to have a tie like that — when I was 18!”

Bryan Ferry, who from Day One has been an immaculate fashion plate, a rock star noted for performing in tuxedos and for starring in glamour layouts, in our eyes showed up looking like a geezer waiting at a bus stop. We couldn’t believe it.

Otherwise, though, great show!

We’ve all heard the bad news. Occasionally, I like to share some good news here in a vain attempt to balance it out. Here goes.

• Last month, the California Department of Motor Vehicles fined almost 500 not-disabled people for using parking placards reserved for disabled people. Those who were caught had their disabled parking placards taken away and now face fines ranging from $250 to $1,000. This makes me absolutely delighted. My late brother-in-law was in a wheelchair his entire life, my mother now occasionally uses one, my brother is fighting Parkinson’s and has difficulty walking, and I have several friends in wheelchairs.  That’s who those placards — and parking spaces! — are reserved for. They’re not meant for people who just want to park a little closer while they run in to buy coffee — they’re meant for people who face real challenges getting into and out of vehicles and need to park closer and in wider spaces. I wish the DMV great success in finding and fining even more of these thieves.
• On a personal note, my new play is moving along nicely. I knew you were wondering. Plus, my back is, well, back to fully functioning.
• Earlier this week, the great band Devo was nominated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. While this is not as momentous as if the even more revolutionary and distinctive band Pere Ubu had been nominated, this is still well-deserved, and I rejoice in their nomination. Their rendition of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” remains the superior version, far outclassing the first version, by those Rolling fellows. I hope they get inducted and only wish that Bob 2 had lived to see it, but I’m glad I got to see him and the rest of the band while he was still around.
• Incredibly, another band high on my list was nominated at the same time. I have every Roxy Music album and listen to them endlessly. Ditto for Bryan Ferry’s solo disks — every one of them, except that one where he covered his own songs in a precious 1920’s style (no thanks); I’ve also got five or eight of Brian Eno’s albums and one of Phil Manzanera’s. The later Roxy Music albums are filled with beautiful yearning; the early Roxy Music albums are raucous and twisted, stuffed with songs that started fake dance crazes,  proselytized the delights of anonymous post-midnight pickups, and pledged love to a blow-up doll. When you can deliver an anthem built around lyrics like “Plain wrapper baby, your skin is like vinyl … deluxe and delightful, inflatable doll,” you deserve to be in a hall of fame.

So: There. It’s not all bad in the world.

Last weekend, a friend brought over a bunch of sealed box sets of music from Warner Records as a donation to an event our theatre company was having. He also presented me with a gift that his wife had gotten for me a while ago but hadn’t had a chance to give me yet:  a sealed box set of all eight of Roxy Music’s studio albums, on LP. This was a reissue from a few years back; when the set originally came out, circa 1985, on Deutsche Grammophone, I had ordered one (from Europe, I believe) for a then-unconscionable amount of money.

I took the new set inside and showed it to my 18-year-old daughter. She wanted to see inside, so I opened it up and slid out the albums. I immediately noticed that the vinyl was far thicker than it was the last time I’d bought vinyl; that would’ve been about 1979, when records were so thin you could’ve used them to wrap leftovers in. My daughter found it even more remarkable, though, because it turned out she’d never seen a record before.

“You’ve never seen a record before?” I asked. I felt like I’d uncovered a new dinosaur in an archaeological dig. She just shook her head no.

I took one of the albums, Manifesto, over to our turntable. To some of us, Manifesto is notorious for having two versions:  the one with the good (original) version of “Angel Eyes,” and the one with the bad discofied version that annoys us mightily. Decades ago, I’d had a cassette tape version of the album that had the “real” version of “Angel Eyes”; when I’d bought the album on CD some time later, I was horrified to find that this splendid, dirty, nasty-sounding song had now been rereleased with a galloping disco beat and cloying harp sounds behind it. Poor Phil Manzanera was still slashing away at his guitar, but now he was trapped in a Bee Gees nightmare. I wanted to see which version of the song might be on this album from the new boxed set.

First, I had to clear stuff off our turntable. It isn’t really a turntable, or not much of one; it’s one of those cheap all-in-one units designed to look retro, but with every component vacuum molded from recycled foam cups or something. Here, it’s one of these:

I call this the Crosley Crummy Sound F, because that’s what you get out of it. Yes, theoretically it will play a CD, or a cassette tape, or an album, or the radio, and sound of a sort will come out of it. It’s an all-in-one that my beloved wife, who musically speaking has a cowbell for an ear, proudly brought home one day from a department store. The music it generates sounds like it should come with a monkey on a chain. Most exasperatingly, all of those little press buttons arrayed across the middle don’t light up and have tiny raised lettering that blends perfectly with the background, meaning that those labels cannot be read even with our overhead lamp on, and so every button pushed is a mystery. Whenever I’m instructed to do something with this sound box, I have to get a flashlight to see what those buttons say.

The stuff now cleared off the machine’s top, I lifted the lid. Emma watched in fascination. She hadn’t seen a turntable either.

“Never?” I said.

“Audrey had one in her house,” she said, invoking a childhood friend, “but nobody ever turned it on.”

That was understandable. When’s the last time I played an 8-Track tape?

I put the record on and it started spinning and playing and she oohed over it for a moment, and then I went on to do whatever it was I was going to do. I came back about 20 minutes later and heard nothing happening. I went over and looked and the record had finished playing but was still on side one.

“You know you have to flip it over, right?”

“Oh.” She hadn’t known.

So I showed her how to flip it over. Then I showed her the lever to lift and drop the needle. I started side two. Some time later, she asked if she could switch the record — “Sure!” I called back — and heard the album Siren start mid-song.

I took a look. “Um, you see those grooves?” I asked. “Those are the spaces between the songs. You missed the beginning.”

“Oh!” she said.

So I showed her more carefully how to place the needle, while an image came to my mind of the guys from “American Pickers” showing somebody in a barn in the woods exactly how a Harley from a hundred years ago would have to be hand-cranked.

I couldn’t think of anything else to explain about the record or the record player — I’d explained that records needed to be flipped in order to hear both sides; that the needle needed to be raised and lowered via that lever; that the spaces in the tracks denoted the separation between songs; and I’d cautioned her not to jump up and down or she’d put a scratch in the record. I strained to think what could possibly be left to explain, but couldn’t come up with anything. But as I moved away, I saw her looking closely at the inscrutable indicators on the front of the unit.

Finally, she asked, “How do you know when the song is done?”

“Huh?”

“How do you know when the song is done?”

I couldn’t figure out what that meant — until finally I realized that she was thinking there’d be an LED readout, like for a CD:  “Track 1.” “Track 2.” And so forth.

“You don’t hear it any more,” I said. And went to get the newspaper.

Two last things:

1. I was delighted to learn that, yes, thank you Lord, the LP has the original version of “Angel Eyes”; and
2. It’s been a week now and nobody has played any more records

I just found out about a great new music podcast, Sound Opinions, in which two very knowledgeable taste-makers bring a lot of insight to an hour-long discussion about music. Their range is wide and their taste is informed. On the most recent show, they discuss music with economist Paul Krugman, who notes that given the dire state of the world economy he needs music more than ever. Other discussions cover the music of Bob Dylan, R.E.M., Neil Young, and others.

Here’s a link to the page about their recent show with Brian Eno. Eno, it should be noted, is not in the studio with them — they’re in the U.S., and he’s speaking with them from England — but these guys are so natural, so comfortable, that it sounds like they’re all sitting together talking over tea. In this particular interview, Eno is given just credit as an early pioneer of important musical trends (new wave; sampling; spoken word over music; ambient music; using the synthesizer as an instrument; and many more), and is asked smart questions about how he chooses collaborators (David Bowie; David Byrne with or without Talking Heads; Robert Fripp; Devo; Bryan Ferry with or without Roxy Music; as well as a couple of bands I don’t care about, such as U2 and Coldplay). The interview is played against the backdrop of music they discuss, from Eno’s vast repertoire, in such a way that every bit creates a new and better understanding of connections and influences across his 40-year career. (In the process, teaching me something new about “America is Waiting,” a song of his with David Byrne that I’ve been listening to with great appreciation for 30 years.) If you’re at all interested in music — and musical trends — of the past 40 years, I highly recommend this interview.

I got an email today from Bryan Ferry that his new CD “Olympia” had just been released and that I should go buy it. Which I wanted to do, right away. I’m happy downloading most CDs that I want, but I wanted an actual physical copy of this one, to go with the actual physical record-label copies I have of all his other CDs both as a solo artist and with Roxy Music. I figured I’d stop on my way home and pick it up. And that’s when I realized that Burbank, with a population of 108,000 people, probably no longer has a record store where I could buy this.

Yes, we have several stores selling used CDs (and LPs). And yes, we have a small music store that sells hip-hop and urban music. But Music Plus and the Virgin Megastore  went out of business, and The Wherehouse has devolved into a store that carries mostly used CDs and only a smattering of new releases. Best Buy carries some CDs, as do Target and KMart, but I’m not betting they’ll have this. Which means I would have to go to Amoeba Records in Hollywood to get this.

It seems odd in an era of more choices and more convenience to suddenly be faced with fewer and less. I guess I’ll wait a week before going to Amoeba, because then I can get Brian Eno’s new disk, which comes out November 1st, as well.

Bryan Ferry + Phil Manzanera + Flea + Nile Rodgers = “Avalon”-era Roxy Music meets the dance floor.

I don’t have a lot of interest in pleasant music. Yes, I can hear that it’s soothing, but I can’t figure out why you’d want music to soothe you. I want music to snap me out of it, to communicate something new in an interesting, dynamic way that’s impossible to refute.

So, it’s easy to see why I like a lot of what I like:  Roxy Music, Talking Heads, David Bowie, the ubiquitously written-about (here, anyway) Pere Ubu, TV on the Radio, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth, Van Dyke Parks-era Beach Boys, King Crimson, and the like. What are the common elements? Intellectualism, contrapuntalism, dissonance, and surprise. What else do many of them have in common? Brian Eno.

It’s impossible to track the music I like without repeatedly stumbling across the name Brian Eno. The best Bowie albums? (Lodger, Low, “Heroes,” Outside.) They all featured Eno writing,  producing, providing “atmospherics,” or a combination of all three. Same with the three Talking Heads albums truly worth owning, including the astonishing Remain in Light. Eno has had the immense good taste or good fortune to work repeatedly with the likes of Robert Fripp, Harold Budd, John Cale, Philip Glass, David Byrne, and many others, and I’ve gotten this far without mentioning another act he’s produced by the name of U2 because their music does nothing for me. Along the way, he invented ambient music and made a lot of money doing so.

Eno can’t “really” play music, although his ability to twiddle knobs on early synthesizer systems and tapeloop machines he stapled together in the early 1970s enabled him to play live with Roxy Music. As someone with lots of ideas and very little skill, Eno is the prototypical modern artist. The abstract expressionists couldn’t paint, Martha Graham’s dances don’t look like dance, there is some doubt that most of the current academically hailed playwrights can write a play, and Brian Eno can’t play an instrument or read music. When asked by one interviewer if he would have been a music had he been born at an earlier time, the 61-year-old Eno said no, because his instrument would’t have been invented yet. What instrument is that? “The recording studio.” There is obvious enormous benefit to the presence of a naif. Why does Eno’s 1974 album Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy still sound so fresh, and so wrong? Because it wasn’t  hampered by someone who knew how to do it “right.”

The past few years, Eno, who is also a painter, and is a painter in a similar way that he is a musician albeit with more training, has been doing installations of changeable art created by a random shifting interplay of abstract images, shown against a backdrop of ambient music. He’s now brought that show, “77 Million Paintings,”  to Long Beach, where I’ll be seeing it on Sunday with a friend similarly well-versed in all things Eno before, miracle of miracles, we’ll also catch a lecture by Eno at the Carpenter Center that evening. Yes, I got those tickets almost as soon as the event was announced; good thing, too, because the lecture sold out almost immediately. I’ve been following Eno and his work with great interest for 30 years, and this is the first time he’s made an appearance anywhere near me, so I wasn’t going to miss out. Expect more here after the event.

Brian Eno and David Byrne on their multi-decade collaboration, and why, for Eno, Frank Zappa provides an example of precisely what not to do in music.