THE STORY OF A SONG : Roxy Music - Virginia Plain (1972)

Bryan Ferry once claimed that his principal songwriting influence was Smokey Robinson, but the listener would be hard-pressed to spot the connection between that Motown artist and the strangulated croon and sci-fi sound effects of Roxy Music’s first single. If there is a precursor, it is in the hypnotically rhythmic style of The Velvet Underground, a group that Roxy’s resident boffin, Brian Eno, eulogized as a major influence (on him, and on everyone else who had heard them).

The sonic force of the song is monumental, a wall of sound that collapses into a pile of rubble: Eno coaxing space-age noises out of his suitcase-shaped VCS3 synthesizer, an ad hoc guitar solo by Phil Manzanera, Ferry’s pounding piano and Shangri-Las-style motorbike revs, recorded by a miked-up roadie riding through central London with the cables trailing behind him.

Ferry’s oblique, sloganeering lyrics draw on a painting from his art-student days, blending tobacco-ad imagery with a portrait of Warhol acolyte Baby Jane Holzer, whose bouffant hairdo—or “Holzer mane,” as he termed it—had caused a fashion sensation in 1964. Indeed, the influence of Warhol himself, as Pop Art guru and erstwhile Velvets producer, is keenly felt throughout the song, every line being steeped in Americana—a world of teenage rebels at the drive-in, hipsters jiving, all-night cha-chas, and the 1933 Fred ’n’ Ginger musical Flying Down to Rio. The lyric is a collage of pop-culture references that parallel the collision of golden-age cinema and rock ‘n’ roll in the band’s name. And it’s all a very long way from “Tears of a Clown.”