David Bowie vs. Roxy Music success in the USA - major discrepancy

That's right it's 1982 get out of the '60s we don't have this mentality any more.

 

Exactly. You could also chart relatively high on a chart like Billboard or Cashbox, but be largely invisible across whole swaths of the country.

Apart from sales, radio was also still very regional. "Constant rotation" in your neighborhood might be "never heard of it" in mine. Other than performances on TV (much more common than today, but still only a handful a week), there was simply no way to have consistent exposure across the nation. It was 1975 before Clear Channel got around to buying their second radio station, adding four more in 1976, and they were all very, very local. After all, what could be more local than radio?

There was also the issue of where you could buy albums. As the 70s began, I was in a small suburb of Dallas, but the only place to buy albums was the grocery store. (For you young'uns, imagine that the only place you could buy books was the grocery store, and you'll have some idea what I mean. Assuming you would want to buy books. LOL) They may have had some wiggle room, but the grocery store didn't control which albums were available. They hired some third party to fill all the bins, fellas known as rack jobbers. Their job was to fill the racks, hopefully to empty them as quickly as possible, and keep bringing in the latest batch

This set up an irony that, even though the town was small and conservative, the rack jobbers put out whatever looked like it might sell. It was all about turnover. Covers MATTERED -- not just for the buyer, but for the rack jobber who probably wouldn't be bothering to distribute the album if the cover didn't look sale-able. I've always thought that one reason Ziggy didn't sell is because the cover was so blah. There was really nothing to it. Kind of blurry, looked like a kid colored a black and white photo with magic markers...which turns out to be not that far off.

Aladdin Sane was another story. That one peaked at #17 in the US, and I think the cover had a TON to do with it. Not that Bowie wasn't all over the radio. He was. And you gotta give RCA credit for not giving up on David after the relative "flop" of Ziggy. They repackaged both Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold The World with much better covers in the wake of Ziggy...but without double-checking the timing, my recollection is that Aladdin had a lot more to do with lifting Space Oddity (also a flop on its original release) than Ziggy did.

I'm going on this tangent to emphasize that Roxy Music's covers definitely stood out, but maybe just a hair too much for small-town Texas. That is, the rack jobbers sure stocked those album covers, but I couldn't imagine the parents of anyone I knew letting that kind of thing in the house. David Bowie looked weird, but even androgyny was an easier sell than a topless woman.

That's the other thing that's easy to forget. Ziggy also sounded conservative in a lot of ways. This may have been intentional on the part of local programmers, but it seemed to me that "Starman" sounded an awful lot like "My Sweet Lord," very strummy and kind of comfortably unorthodox. Rock stars have egos? You don't say! Ziggy certainly didn't seem any more transgressive than Jesus Christ Superstar, which was the #1 album of 1971, or Godspell, released late in 71 and kicking up some dust in early 72. Who cares?

The early Roxy Music albums were far, far more adventurous to my ear. The first album was downright jarring - way further out there than anything David would do for a few more years -- and in the good ol' US of A, when you're further out than David Bowie in 1972-1976, you're probably out too far.

Unless you were Alice Cooper, who was undeniably American, and therefore given a bit more latitude. But Bowie's slow start notwithstanding, there were a couple of dozen songs in regular rotation by 1975, when Bowie first appeared on US prime time TV, which also coincided with his bid for the mainstream with Young Americans, with his first #1 single, "Fame." To this day, isn't Roxy mostly a 2-hit wonder in the US, with "Love Is The Drug" and "More Than This"?

So I'm thinking that David's relative musical conservatism made for easier listening to American ears. By the time Diamond Dogs rolled around, we were already along for the ride, and those poor underdressed gals on the Roxy Music covers were left shivering in the grocery store bins....

 

I think you've answered the question. Bowie had a more traditional sound, and a few of his songs like The Jean Genie and Rebel Rebel tapped into traditional American rhythm and blues, which had an appeal to the US market culminating in Young Americans, which was a sound they could identify with even more than the Brirish. Roxy Music were more obscure; and their American influemces, while strong, didn't really surface until Siren. The Americans had a hard time with art rock, and preferred their music rooted in the American tradition. Bowie combined the two successfully, whereas Roxy were unable to, at least on the albums up to Country Life.

 

Mmmmmm, i remember that country life album cover! that was very naughty at that time, and as a 15 year old i loved it!

just read that america didn't like the cover and changed it, typical.

 

Bowie's music in the early/mid-70s had stronger links to American music (Dylan, Velvets, NY Dolls, Alice Cooper, Chuck Berry, James Brown,...) as well as his references to the Stones and Beatles, so he was more easily embraced by US record buyers.
Roxy were more original in their approach and didn't really sound like anything that had come before (despite slight references to American music).

 

Am I the only who finds some of the Roxy Music album covers to be not so much alluring as lurid and a bit tacky? It's not that I'm easily offended or anything, but something like Country Life (which was famously censored in the U.S.) just looks kind of tawdry and jaded. Has Ferry ever commented on exactly what they were trying to get across there? Avalon seemed like a refreshing change of pace.

It's easy to forget how long Bowie had been trying to break through. He had been on the British scene since the mid 60s and scored a minor hit with "Space Oddity", which I gather was viewed as something of a novelty song. He attempted the proto-metal of The Man Who Sold World, followed by the singer-songwriter sensitivity of Hunky Dory. He kept changing up his look and his sound, hoping that something would connect. By the time of Ziggy Stardust, he was just determined to become a rock & roll star, practically willed it into being. And it worked. He created a mystique that fans were attracted to and he had the songs to back it up. As others have noted, sexual ambiguity aside, the music on Ziggy Stardust was really pretty conservative compared to something like For Your Pleasure. Roxy Music definitely had a more artsy European sensibility that wasn't going to play in Peoria. Meanwhile, Bowie's shift over to a more soul inflected sound only further solidified his position in America.

 

It is a visual clash between high art and low art, in much the same way Roxy played with that same dichotomy in a musical sense.

Country Life is an British lifestyle magazine for the horsey set, something Bryan Ferry has always aspired to. At the other end of the publishing scale is the kind of cheap, exploitative photography found in the tabloids and men's magazines. The two girls in the photo are supposed to have been 'caught' by the flash of a paparazzi's camera.

There's also a bad visual pun, just to ram the point home. (Think about the first syllable of the first word of the title.)

 

Not really. Bowie was a huge superstar in the UK, and had several markets covered (the serious young man, hordes of screaming teenage girls - watch the Ziggy farewell show) where as Roxy were more for the serious young men. Bowie released lots of singles, Roxy not that many, I think in the early days they saw themselves as more of an album band (but they could certainly knock out a great single if they wanted to).

I mean as a kid, exposed to just Top 40 radio and TOTP, I knew loads of Bowie songs but only really Virginia Plain.

 

I always loved their album covers, but the 50's kitsch, retro-futurism, pulp fiction and lurid shock (behind opaque pine green plastic) of their first four albums did not help to sell them in America. Post-modernism was a rather highbrow concept at the time and putting a "dish" on an album cover probably confused most potential record-buyers (while the cover to Avalon confused those who were already on board).

But Bryan Ferry acolyte Ric Ocasek certainly put the concept to good use on the first couple of Cars albums. America's answer to Roxy Music... and Top 10 chart-makers to boot.

 

I lived in a town of less than 10,000, one of Chicago's outer suburbs that was surrounded by farms and undeveloped land at the time (not a bad place to grow-up). We happened to have a small appliance sales and repair shop in town that dedicated half the store to records. But the local 5&10, Walgreens and the grocery stores all had record racks too. I remember those displays vividly and something like a Jimi Hendrix album really caught the eye. But if you were tagging along (or being dragged along) to the grocery store you still had to get parental approval to buy one of those LP's, even if you had your own money! You can bet that a lot of parents plumped for The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper because of the Norman Rockwell cover painting. That album was always on display.

It's funny to remember... a very different world.

 

Eventually. It was originally packaged with opaque green shrink-wrap and a title sticker on the front so the cover pic was concealed. But after a while there were copies with pine needles front and back. I think distributors had a choice... I don't remember seeing too many of the censored covers. But in some parts of the US you can be sure they never saw the original cover on display.

 

That's precisely the point I was trying to make in my post. Bowie's Ziggy persona may have seemed otherworldly, but the music was (though good) still fairly conservative and radio friendly. Roxy Music were doing more to push boundaries creatively/artistically than Ziggy-era Bowie. I agree that those early Roxy Music albums are more adventurous, challenging, and unique, and that made them a much harder sell in the US.


(But then the two kind of traded places in the mid-to-late 70s. Roxy Music started becoming more commercial and safe, while Bowie became more adventurous and forwarding thinking, at least through 1980.)

 

Maybe it's because I started listening to rock radio in the 80s but over the years I have heard "More Than This" and "Dance Away" played more than "Love Is The Drug".
Of course if you link airplay with LP sales you find Roxy Music had a few LPs that sold moderately well over time, I still see copies of Manifesto, Avalon and Flesh & Blood turn up at pawn shops and thrift stores.

 

If America didn't get Virginia Plain it was never gonna get the rest
You had to be inBritain in 71 to vaguely understand WTF was going on
Bowies earliest albums had this quality but he soon embraced a more commercial seam
Roxy was always decadent ethereal even when Eno left, Eno left to infect the rest of the world via production, not reproduction

 

When Eno joined up with Bowie of course!

Eno was the thing that made Roxy Music so different.

 

I'll never forget the look I got in a place I worked when I put on some early Roxy Music. This guy, mostly into dance music, just couldn't get his head around the sound of it, he didn't like it, like it was alien to his ideas of music.

But as has been said above, Bowie was more rooted intraditional and then emerging forms of American music. Not just rock, but something like Drive In Saturday is a doo-wop record, and of course he did the whole funk thing with Fame (which even JB stole from).

 

Agreed..

 

lol, good story. Roxy Music was always a hard sell, even here in the NYC metro area back in the 70's.
Love Is The Drug was the big radio hit.
Mostly the city kids liked them. I always thought they were very cool. I new I was on to something when I first went to Max's Kansas City night club in NYC. Everybody liked them there.

 

A perfect summary of what I was trying to say. We agree completely.

Holy cow! I missed this!

I do think that David's real leaps warmed up with Diamond Dogs, then got (thin) white hot for Station to Station -- but you're absolutely right, of course. Low launched him into the stratosphere. There was nobody on the planet (not even Mars, as far as I can tell) who was even trying to play David's game. What the hell even WAS his game? Low is one of the pinnacles of anything that has pinnacles for me.

I do think it's possible to overstate Eno's contributions to Low and "Heroes" in particular, but it's impossible to miss that Roxy Music was on hiatus for four years (1975-1979) when David was non-stop off the hook. Roxy's first couple after their return didn't do much for me, but I do love 82's Avalon. Not as ambitious as their early stuff of course, and "More Than This" might have been a bigger hit for a crooning band like Spandau Ballet, but there's not a wrong note on it for my money.

But fellas, I think you nailed it.

 

Um, nothing except "The BEATLES". Think that made a difference?

 

Roxy never consistently delivered the way Bowie did. And does. What is so hard to understand about that?

I'm more surprised at the Duran Duran bitterness displayed in this thread. I thought we had gotten over that decades ago.

 

Very provocative indeed.

 

No bitterness towards DD from me their music is enjoyable but disposable to me. They are just not in the same league as either artist mentioned. They created incredibly catchy music and there's nothing wrong with that either. Just my opinion of course. As to Roxy, their first five albums were incredible and pushed boundaries and, yes, even inspired Bowie much as he inspired him. I believe Roxy's first 5 are every bit the equal of Bowie's best.

 

firstly, As much as I ADORE Roxy Music, David Bowie is just better. The man is untouchable and his career was so varied, something for everyone to enjoy. Secondly, I think Roxy were a bit too distinctly English for Americans to enjoy.

 

I couldn't disagree more. Roxy Music were very consistent. Bowie was the shape shifter, leaning on his collaborators for inspiration. It was fun to follow at the time, but I think a lot of potential fans were waiting for the real David Bowie to stand up. Problem was, there is no real David Bowie.