How Bryan Ferry united three iconic guitarists for one single solo
Perfectionism can be a real problem when it comes to music; just ask Bruce Springsteen.
Oh, when you see him performing songs like ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Thunder Road’ to sold-out stadiums around the world, no doubt you believe that his perfectionism has done him well, but you have no idea how close he was to scrapping those tracks entirely. That’s right, some of the best rock songs ever written were almost completely banished because Springsteen spent too much time on them.
While Born to Run is celebrated as one of his greatest albums of the modern age, when he initially wrote it, he resented it to the extent that he wanted to start the whole thing again. “After it was finished? I hated it! I couldn’t stand to listen to it,” he said, “I thought it was the worst piece of garbage I’d ever heard. I told Columbia I wouldn’t release it. I told ‘em I’d just go down to the Bottom Line gig and do all the new songs and make it a live album.”
You could argue that ‘The Boss’ put a bit too much pressure on himself going into the record, and that’s what led to such a reaction, as after having a couple of mediocre releases, he was adamant on making the best record ever. “I wanted to make the greatest rock record that I’d ever heard,” he said, “And I wanted it to sound enormous and I wanted it to grab you by your throat and insist that you take that ride, insist that you pay attention, not to just the music, but just to life, to feeling alive, to being alive.”
Springsteen obviously isn’t the only artist who has put an ungodly amount of time and effort into some of his music. Bryan Ferry did the exact same thing when he began working on his song ‘Slave to Love’, with the difference being that when Ferry finally finished the track, he didn’t resent it; he knew that he had made something magical.
Producer Rhett Davies remembers the moment that the song was finished, noting that the air in the room felt lighter as they finally applied a full stop to a sentence that was looking like it could go on forever. “It was finally finished at three in the afternoon,” he said, “When we heard the completed song, there was just elation”.
So, why did the track take so long? Well, I suppose you could blame Neil Hubbard, as he came up with a guitar line that everyone else working on the song had a bit of magic injected into it. “Neil Hubbard had the most wonderfully soulful tone,” recalled Ferry, “And we recorded him early on to build the song around him”.
Once that initial recording was down, Ferry knew that he had the foundation for a great song, but he just didn’t know how to build on top of it. When you have a piece of music which could be turned into something classic, it’s hard to understand what the next step should be. Eventually, he got there, but it took a lot of help, particularly with the song’s guitar solo, so much so that he enlisted the help of three different six-string legends in a bid to put it together.
“The guitar solo in the middle is actually three interweaving guitarists,” he said, “[David] Gilmour, Keith Scott and Hubbard”. Over the top? Maybe. But when the end result is a song this good, nothing is too extreme.
