Roxy Music -- "Street Life" (1973)

Education is an important key

But the good life's never won by degrees

Pointless passing through Harvard or Yale

That's easy for Bryan Ferry to say.  He's a suave and debonair international rock star.  Why would he want to waste his youth at Harvard or Yale, listening to lectures from full-of-sh*t professors and researching papers in the library?

Bryan Ferry

You ever see Mick Jagger or Robert Plant or Axl Rose or Bono or Eddie Vedder or Jack White singing in a white dinner jacket?  I didn't think so.  I'm not saying that those guys weren't pretty cool, but they were not as cool as Bryan Ferry was.  He was the James Effing Bond of rock singers.

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Ferry was the frontman of Roxy Music, the group whose music I listened to the most during my law school years (1974 to 1977).  To see the guy, you might think his ancestors were British nobility – he looked and acted veddy to-the-manor-born.  In reality, he was from a lower-class family – his father's job was caring for pit ponies (the small horses who hauled coal in underground mines).

Ferry's onstage style – suave and debonair to a fare-thee-well – often spilled over into affectation and archness.  While the band worked itself into a collective frenzy, full of sound and fury, Ferry would stay cool.  When things got really crazy, he might untie his tie.  But I doubt that he ever actually broke a sweat.

Initially, Ferry's intent was simply ironic  later, Ferry's life began to imitate his art.  He became one of the beautiful people, and was rarely seen without a major babe on his arm.  And most of those babes ended up on the band's album covers.

Salvador Dali and Amanda Lear

Amanda Lear – a French fashion model, singer, lyricist, composer, painter, novelist, and actress who hung out with Salvador Dali before her relationship with Ferry – is depicted on the cover of Roxy Music's second album, For Your Pleasure.  (Lear dated David Bowie after breaking up with Ferry.)

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Girlfriend Marilyn Cole – a Playboy playmate – appeared on the cover of Stranded, Roxy's third album.  That's the album that includes "Street Life."   

Marilyn Cole

OMG, I vividly remember her centerfold!  She was in the January 1972 issue, when I was a sophomore in college.  My suitemates and I spent considerable time gazing at and discussing her Playboy pictures – her centerfold was the first to feature full frontal nudity.  She became the only British "Playmate of the Year."  I had no idea she was the girl on the cover of Stranded:

Unlike Playboy, 2 or 3 lines doesn't do full-frontal nudity, but here's a link to the Marilyn Cole centerfold if you missed it back in 1972.

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Somehow, Ferry missed out on the two German models who appeared on the controversial cover of Country Life.  Bad move, Bryan!

The original cover, which is featured below, was pulled from the stores and replaced with a more innocuous one.  I've got the original cover because I moved fast -- you snooze, you lose:

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Ferry's most famous main squeeze, Texas supermodel Jerry Hall, made the cover of album number five, Siren.  Hall later became Mick Jagger's common-law wife -- they had four kids together.

Here's a picture of Jerry with Bryan during the shoot for that album cover.  Bryan is the one with the sh*t-eating grin on his face:

In Greek mythology, the sirens were mermaid-like creatures who sang such beautiful songs that the sailors who heard them would sail too close to the rocky island where they lived and invariably wreck their ships.  Ulysses outsmarted them -- he made his sailors plug their ears with wax and tie him to the mast as they sailed past the sirens' island, so he was able to hear their songs without risk.

Here's the Siren cover:

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After Hall and Jagger split up, she replaced Kathleen Turner in the role of Mrs. Robinson in the London production of "The Graduate."  

According to the BBC, advance ticket sales for the play got a huge boost when word got out that Ms. Turner would appear nude.

Hall also got buck nekkid in the play, which seems to be the only reason anyone cared about it.  It's not surprising her performance was criticized, but it is surprising her nude scene was panned as well.

The problem that the reviewers had was that the stage was so dark when Hall appeared nude that you couldn't really see her.  (Obviously, most British theatre reviewers are not only male, but also straight.)

Jerry Hall as Mrs. Robinson

"From my vantage point, it might as well have been Jerry Springer," said one disappointed reviewer.  "Two fried eggs in the gloaming -- that's all I saw," said another bummed critic.

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Click here to listen to "Street Life."  (Like a lot of Roxy songs, it starts out quietly and then suddenly explodes.)

Click here if you'd like to order the song from Amazon: