January 2006 Archives
If the undertaking of this four part series hasn't made it abundantly clear from the onset, I'm currently on what you might call a serious Smiths kick at present. For the last decade or so this has become sort of a quarterly tradition, wherein which my moderate Smiths consumption elevates to something of a mania, until eventually I can hardly listen to anything else. And though the escalation of these jags typically reaches an absurd and irrational level on little more than their own self-consuming fuel, the Smiths kick is always inspired by something close to what one might call tangible: a previously unheard bootleg or demo; a new appreciation for a lesser song; a lyric circumstantially shone in a new light, or that had somehow escaped my ears altogether for these many years. Obsession festers best in the smallest spaces.
Case in point: this particular period of consumption was spurred by something as simple as a lyrical incongruity previously overlooked between two versions of a relatively obscure B-side. Because of the Smiths' penchant for anthologizing their works while the band was still active, there's a tremendous amount of overlap between their three pre-break-up collections. This is especially true between the latter two, Louder Than Bombs and The World Won't Listen, as they were designed to serve the same purpose, just on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Besides the inclusion of one of Marr's well titled, but otherwise forgettable instrumentals ("Money Changes Everything"), the later record appears to offer nothing not otherwise available on the considerable longer Louder Than Bombs, and as such I've never found much reason to pursue it. But the devil, of course, is in the details: as it turns out, World actually features an alternate, lyrically superior version of "Stretch Out and Wait," a customarily strong b-side for which I hold particular reverence. Only two lines differ (On the high rise estate/what's at the back of your mind?/Oh, the three day debate on a high rise estate/what's at the back of your mind?" becomes "All the Lies that you make up/what's at the back of your mind/your face i can see, and it's desperately kind/but what's at the back of your mind?"), but that was enough—obsession is hardly a logical mistress. It's this sort of minutia that has kept me returning endlessly to Morrissey over the years as numerous other heroes of my adolescence have taken their place in the annuls of my history: the effortless density of Morrissey's lyrical work—self-absorbed, plagaristic, romantic, and ridiculous as it usually is (telling?)—offers me a seemingly inexhaustible well upon which to percolate... through new angles, new interpretations, new perspectives. Yes, I'm being sincere about this. No, I'm not entirely proud of it.
Now that I've throughly alienated everyone, let me quickly redirect your attention to the topic of episode two: the Meat Is Murder era. As the band grew less and less enchanted with the promotional abilities of Rough Trade, the label decided to make their big American single push by promoting "How Soon Is Now?" to A-side status, to surprisingly little fanfare. In retrospect, it seems sort of unfathomable that such a clearly classic song—as evidenced by its continued rotation on American "modern rock" stations—barely pushed it's way into the top 200, even with the backing of their American major, Sire. With one of the most instantly recognizable intros of all time, "How Soon Is Now?" is probably the clearest single example of Morrissey/Marr's sheer force at that or any period of their working relationship—and despite it's near 7-minute running time, captures the Smiths at the height of their commercial potential. The "How Soon Is Now?" single was backed by the restrained beauty of "Well I Wonder"—only Morrissey could make lines like "Gasping, dying, but somehow still alive/this is the fierce last stand of all I am" and "Do you see me when we pass?/I half-die" sound understated.
That same month, the band released Meat Is Murder—an album that represented a somewhat startling shift in tone from their first record—which promptly shot to number one on the albums chart. The self-defined singles band that somehow couldn't manage a runaway hit song was now in the uncomfortable position of being an album band. Ironically, Meat Is Murder is the Smiths at their least effective in album format. Though Marr's studio technique had clearly made vast improvements over the self-titled debut, Morrissey's heavy-handed politicking ages sourly—and despite the anger and conviction in tone, his words undermine the music here in a way that's not really seen anywhere in the Smiths catalog. By this point, Morrissey had become an outspoken media manipulator—casually supporting violent extremists in both the IRA and Animal Liberation, and openly calling for the immediate death of Margaret Thatcher. An album awash in strong societal violence, Meat Is Murder kicks off appropriately with "The Headmaster Ritual," a memorable addition to the long history of pop indictments of corporeal punishment in the British school system (see also: Pink Floyd, Radiohead, etc), and ends with "Barbarism Begins At Home" and "Meat Is Murder," two needlessly long, terribly heavy-handed attacks on child abuse and carnivorism, respectively. "Meat Is Murder" is the particularly disappointing—with its ridiculously ham-fisted (pardon the pun) slaughterhouse samples, and flawed assessment that "death for no reason is MURDER," "Meat..." failed move even those sympathetic to the cause. The Smiths got political on wax for the first time, and the results left much to be desired.
There are, however, considerable joys to be found on Meat Is Murder, primarily in the records more understated songs. Inspired by the riff to Elvis' "Marie's the Name (of His Latest Flame)," "Rusholme Ruffians" is a particularly perfect Smiths moment, a brutal, superbly visceral retelling of Morrissey's adolescence at spent being "educated" at the yearly local Boxing Day fairgrounds. (For a period, Marr took to introing the song live with a brief cover of "Marie...," as documented on the live album Rank.) Also totally brilliant is the painfully brief "What She Said"—one of the band's most aggressive songs, and following a familiarly suicidal theme, Moz again struggles with the importance of mind over body and vice versa—and despite all of the "Heady books" the titular character read, concludes that it "took a tattooed by from Birkenhead/to really really open her eyes."
The other glory of Meat Is Murder is proof that even in lesser songs, Morrissey is miraculously equipped to save sinking ships with the power of one well-placed line. A prime example is the relatively unremarkable "Nowhere Fast," another of Morrissey's cheekily (pun intended) ridiculous songs saved from drowning with the perfect "And when I'm lying in my bed/I think about life and I think about death/and neither one particularly appeals to me". (incidentally, "Nowhere Fast" is from whence the Slender Means Society finds its namesake.)
In spite of the hit record they had in Meat, the Smiths chose to immediately release a non-album track as their next single—the solid, if somewhat underwhelming suicide script, "Shakespeare's Sister." Backed by the aforementioned "Stretch Out and Wait," "Shakespeare's Sister" did surprisingly poor business—reaching a lowly number 26 on the pop charts, and further straining their relationship with Rough Trade. It was also roughly about this time that bassist Andy Rourke was handed his first ultimatum regarding his increasing dependancy on heroin.
Some four months later, the Smiths would release their first proper single from Meat Is Murder, making the bizarre decision to go with the powerfully uncommercial "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore." It's fate was unsurprisingly similar to that of "Shakespeare's Sister." The band was quick to add the singles' plight to the laundry list of complaints they already harbored against Rough Trade (not to mention Morrissey's paranoid theory about a radio conspiracy against the Smiths), but just two months later released another single on the label, "The Boy With the Thorn In His Side." "Thorn" was standard early Smiths fair which could have fit comfortably on either Hatful Of Hollow or their debut, but what was particularly notable about the single was its flipside, again featuring a pair of the Smiths' greatest compositions: "Rubber Ring" and "Asleep."
Brilliantly played, "Rubber Ring" is Morrissey at his most powerfully self-referential—a song that begins by mourning the death of personal reverence for pop songs "that saved your life" as you grow older, "Rubber Ring" twists into Morrissey's own clever plea for pop immortality: "I'm here with the cause/I'm holding the torch/In the corner of your room/can you hear me/and when you dancing, and laughing, and finally living/Hear my voice in your head and think of me kindly". There is scarcely a more perfectly Morrissey moment.
In spite of minor flirtations with other songs now and again, "Asleep" will forever remain my very favorite Smiths song, and quite probably my second favorite song ever. It's suicidal resignation is perhaps the bleakest of Morrissey's songs—humorless, whispering, desolate, and utterly miserable, but free of the absurd melodrama that often weighs down his more heavy-handed sentiments. Asleep is, quite simply, a perfect song—and as such, understandably difficult for me to do justice in blog form.
Following another belly up single ("The Boy With the Thorn In His Side" stalled at 26), the Smiths were openly frustrated about their relationship with Rough Trade, and suggested that they planned to part ways with the label. Rough Trade secured a high court injunction to block the group from recording for another label under the stipulations of their contract, with the red tape momentarily suspending the release of the band's just completed masterpiece, The Queen Is Dead.
Forgive me any factual errors in the following tirade, but it must be expected that when charting what may, however embarrassingly, very well be the most dominant single factor of one's life for the better part of a decade, there is bound to be at least a hint of selective mythology, erroneous extensions of truths, and just plain inventions of the imagination. Forgive me further for my trepidation, but it has some grounding—this will certainly be the most difficult entry I have ever cast into the forgotten annuls of The Greatest Band of All Time. For one, because I could never hope to do justice to my very personal relationship to the Smiths in the tossed-off body of a blog entry. For two, because I can whole-heartedly type sentences like "I could never hope to do justice to my very personal relationship to the Smiths" and feel positively sincere doing so. For three, because my affections for the Smiths competes with that of virtually everyone I have ever shared kinship, and is appropriately dwarfed by the continued allegiance of a worldwide army of confused, disaffected, spotty teenagers, as well as every generation that has preceded them since roughly 1983. Nothing I can say here will keep me from sounding anything less than a deluded, mouth-foaming adolescent—and that's the only way, really. Because for most people who care, the Smiths are the closest approximation pop music can muster to honest to god first love—deified, idealized, haunting, and never, ever to be repeated. The Smiths are, in total seriousness, the closest thing I have ever had to a religion—and the fact of the matter is, in most company, this fact sort of embarrasses me. In spite of their near universal acceptance socially, there is very little in this world less dignified than true, unabashed Smiths fanaticism. And while I'd never claim to be the craziest Smiths fan—one of my very best friends, who is tattooed with Morrissey lyrics, once jumped out of a moving car when she saw the man himself standing at a street corner, a friend of a friend reportedly had an affair with one of Morrissey's producers just to get closer to the Mozzer, etc., etc.—the fact remains that I am a grown man of 25 who still can't break free of his teenaged obsessions with a band that lasted merely five years, released only four proper studio albums, and broke up a month before I started the second grade. The Smiths very well may have ruined my life, and yet I've found time nearly every day for roughly ten years to listen to at least one of their songs. Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before: The Smiths are the Greatest Band Of All Time.
Mirroring Steve's now ancient tome to his Greatest Band of All Time, Guided By Voices, I hope to spend a few days reflecting upon the Smiths in what I'm stretching to call their four "periods"—a bit of misnomer, considering that in their brief existence, they have very few hints of major stylistic shift. The "periods" of observation will instead be broken down by records and related singles—also sort of a weird tactic, considering that the Smiths, arguably the last great singles band (or "group," as they preferred), have never really been defined by their albums proper. In fact, the Smiths are in a lot of ways the polar opposites of Steve's GBOAT—their discography carefully contained in a succinct four propers, a couple of compilations, a live album, and a few stray b-sides that amount to roughly 70 total songs, a negligible number of failures among them.
Born famously from the streets of industrial Manchester, the Smiths—Steven Patrick Morrissey, Johnny Maher, Mike Joyce, and Andy Rourke—were all notably descended from recent Irish immigrants, a fact of some ridiculous importance in the casual prejudice of 1960-70s England. Primarily the marriage of two very disparate, yet equally motivated egos, the Smiths officially began in 1982 as a songwriting partnership between 23-year-old pop obsessive Morrissey and 18-year-old jack of all trades Maher, who had both struggled for some years individually with other lesser projects (the Nosebleeds and White Dice respectively and most notably). A fledgling (though rather mediocre) rock journalist, Morrissey had listlessly spent his post-scholastic running a fan club for the New York Dolls, attempting (and failing) to learn a number of different instruments, writing (and occasionally publishing) a handful of pulp-y pop culture tomes of little consequence (James Dean Is Not Dead and The New York Dolls), and doing his best to stay unemployed. Morrissey's once-promising aspirations toward pop fame seemed relatively ripe for the dustbin by the time he was approached by the unlikely Maher, a talented, calculating rock kid with a similarly deep appreciation of Pop in search of a songwriting partner. Distant acquaintances, Maher had some years prior been impressed by some of the lyrics Morrissey had penned with the now-defunct Nosebleeds, and decided to arrange a meeting romantically inspired by the story of songwriting powerhouse Leiber and Stoller's first encounter—arriving on Morrissey's doorstep to insist they start a partnership. Within a few days, they had "Suffer Little Children" and "the Hand that Rocks the Cradle".
Within a year or so, the duo had secured bassist Rourke—an old school friend and former bandmate of Johnny's—and drummer Joyce. The fledgling foursome released their first seven inch on Rough Trade at the crest of the label's many years of brilliance, in the form of "Hand In Glove" b/w "Handsome Devil." The disc was clearly a less than subtle statement of purpose—with two of the most elusive, sexually complicated, and defiant songs Morrissey would ever pen for the group. "Hand In Glove," with its strong suggestions of a forbidden love where the "Sun shines out of our behinds" was a relatively unlikely debut, but a perfect first wrung of the Smiths mythology. The most explicitly carnal of all of the self-professed a-sexual Morrissey's Smiths work, "Handsome Devil" is also one of the most menacing—with casual (possible) allusions to an untamed thirst for sexual violence, as well as some possible hints of pedophilia. "All the streets are crammed with things/eager to be held/I know what hands are for/and I'd like to help myself/you ask me the time/but I sense something more/and I would like to give you what I think you're asking for... I crack the whip and you skip/but you deserve it". Additionally, it's with "Handsome Devil" that Morrissey debuts his now familiar fascination with gender confusions, referencing both a pair of "mammary glands" that he wishes to get his "hands on," which he follows with "A boy in the bush is worth two in the hand/I think I can help you get through your exams," and ultimately inquiring "When we're in your scholarly room/who will swallow whom?" atop one of Maher's (now Marr) rare bludgeoning riffs. The quiet, poetic violence of "Handsome Devil"—though largely abandoned in later work—was a theme repeated regularly throughout the songs produced in the first couple years that Morrissey and Marr were together, but never again would the seem quite so darkly mysterious as with their debut, which quietly underperformed Rough Trade's initial hopes.
A handful of popular BBC sessions followed, soon after which the Manchurians least likely found their first official controversy in a story entitled "Child Sex Song Puts the Beeb In a Spin,"—wherein The Sun questionably cobbled together some of Morrissey's more allusively suggestive lyrics—from "Reel Around the Fountain," "Handsome Devil," and "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle"—and confusingly report that the band were advocates of pedophilia. Certainly the songs weren't entirely free of troubling allusions to youth (It's time that the tale were told/of how you took a child/and you made him old," "there's sadness in your beautiful eyes/you're untouched, unsoiled, wondrous eyes... They'll be blood on the cleaver tonight") nor explorations of the flesh ("Fifteen minutes with you/well, i wouldn't say no/...you can pin and mount me like a butterfly"), but with Morrissey's evasive, intentionally ambiguous lyrical structure at the time, it's impossible throughout to really discern more than just an abstract comprehension of his suggested narrative, despite some arguable connotations. Morrissey of course firmly (though again somewhat aloofly) denied any leering intentions, and the controversy soon quelled.
The band's first serious commercial break came by way of their second single, the instantly and lastingly infectious "This Charming Man," which hit the top forty, and saw them performing on Top Of the Pops for the first time. One of Marr's shiningly melodic guitar achievements, "Charming Man" was backed in various formats by a handful of additional cuts that would prove to further expand the Smiths' thematic mythology via some of Morrissey's many cultural and personal fascinations (an aside: these fascinations are also evident in his hand selection of the "cover stars" of the Smiths' mounting releases—people like Terrance Stamp, Elvis, Joe Dallesandro, James Dean, etc.—each a pin-up from Morrissey's fame-following adolescence): the classically British kitchen sink motif of "Jeane" (Jeane/I'm not sure what happiness means/but I look in your eyes and it isn't there"), the ridiculous dark comedy of "Wonderful Woman" ("I'm starved of mirth/Let's go and trip a dwarf"), and the outsider self-analysis of "Accept Yourself" ("I once had a dream and it never came true/and time is against me now"). Next came "What Difference Does It Make?" the lead-off single from their long-awaited debut album, with a now familiar theme of an unspoken dark secret defiantly threatening a love affair—which happened to fare even better at number 12 on the charts.
A month later, the Smiths' hastily recorded, self-titled debut hit the shelves, and landed with some disappointment. Originally featuring only two of the band's powerful introductory A and B sides ("Hand In Glove" and "What Difference Does It Make?"), The Smiths remains a somewhat muddy affair—setting the pace for a career of seemingly strange ambivalence toward the album format. Still, the record introduces the band as a startling force straight out of the gate, and features, more than anything, some of Morrissey's most memorable lyrical material—even if a lot of it was arguably plagiarized. Another of Morrissey's most effective talents is his ability to devour and appropriate pop and literary sources for lyrical content, and, to appropriately paraphrase the man, claim these words as his own. (For a quick reference, check out this interesting, lengthy, and incomplete Morrissey Sources Guide.) Even where the production might fail (the band largely acknowledges that their BBC sessions are generally superior), there's scarcely a lyrical dud on The Smiths, which is certainly more than can be said for the rest of the band's records. Particularly brilliant is the afore mentioned "Reel Around the Fountain," along with the totally essential "Still Ill", and the chilling finale of "Suffer Little Children," about the serial child killing Moors Murderers that haunted much of Morrissey's Manchurian childhood. More importantly, The Smiths marked the darkest, most dangerous creative period the band would ever undertake—before fatal fame would send Morrissey's (still brilliant) vision to some points of near caricature. It was the time before the Smiths became THE SMITHS, when Moz unleashed the bulk of his most confrontational couplets, hidden behind Marr's most reserved presence.
The band rounded out the year with non-album singles "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" and "William, It Was Really Nothing"—the latter of which featuring a couple of songs written and recorded in the studio over the span of a few days, which would later become two of the band's most memorable songs: "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" and the eternal "How Soon Is Now?" Both singles, as well as all of the remaining non-album tracks and radio sessions, were soon compiled on the bargain-priced Hatful Of Hollow—which, like most of the Smiths' compilations, is arguably more essential than their albums proper. Also that year, Morrissey also persuaded one of his early idols, British pop singer Sandy Shaw, to record a version of "Hand In Glove" of her own with the band—the track finally vindicated when it reached the top 30 the second time around.
At the close of 1984, The Smiths were on an insane creative and commercial roll with scarcely two years under their belts, and were well on their way to becoming the most important British rock group of the '80s. And then after that? The Greatest Band of All Time, of course.
