I'm going to have dig back a little for this one, as I did my preparation listening at least a month-and-a-half ago. I planned to write this up in late February or so, but then my job got crazy busy, and before I knew it ... well, suddenly, it was now.
There are a lot of things I want to say about my history with The Smiths and how they came to make the My Favorite Bands list. So I guess the place to start is here -- when I first teased this write-up, I mentioned that The Smiths are the only artist on this list that I never started listening to until after they were broken up. Here's how that happened.
When I graduated high school in 1975, I went directly into Queens College of the City University of New York system that September. I did pretty well while I was there, working on a joint major of Drama and English. At the time, I wanted to become a playwright. My focus was on writing and directing my own plays, which I got the chance to do while I was at school. Unfortunately, after doing about 2-1/2 years there, I started having family problems. I wound up dropping out of school and entering the work world, because things became so strained at home that I thought I might have move out of my mother's house on short notice. (She and my father were divorced.)
I worked a variety of low-paying jobs over the next bunch of years, until at some point, I found work as a proofreader. This turned out pretty well, and by 1986-1987, I was making decent money in this profession. At that point, I decided I wanted to go back and finish my bachelor's degree (albeit with an entirely different major, Psychology).
I tell you this because it's how I remember my personal music history. At some point very shortly after I went back to college, I started listening to WLIR, 92.7 FM, Long Island's alternative rock station. I took to it quickly, because it fed my need to hear new music. After WNEW-FM, the station of my teens, had gone south, I had listened to a number of what were already being referred to as "Classic Rock" stations. Unfortunately, they mostly played the same old stuff again and again. WLIR was fresh.
Shortly after I started listening, because of a legal battle too exhausting to get into here, the 92.7 frequency was taken over by Jarrad Broadcasting, and its call letters were changed to WDRE. The format changed slightly, and all of the longtime WLIR listeners (and deejays) will tell you not for the better. But compared to what I had been listening to, to my ears, this was still crisp stuff. (And a few years later, it helped me to meet Denise, as the Village Voice I answered in order to meet her mentioned her love of WDRE and cats. It also mentioned beaches, but I figured two out of three wasn't bad.)
I can't tell you exactly when I heard my first Smiths' song, but it was definitely on WLIR/WDRE. The song was "This Charming Man", and I was taken with it immediately. It was short and had a great hook, with some first-rate jangly guitar and a vocalist whose voice was actually pleasing to the ear.
It was also, to a young man that had gone through 12 years of Catholic schooling, pretty gay.
I later learned that Morrissey, the band's lead singer and lyricist, denied being gay as such, and over the years, he's been characterized in the press as everything from asexual to bisexual to celibate, etc. Who knows. But "This Charming Man" tells the story of a young man whose bicycle breaks down on a "hillside desolate," who speculates as the whether nature will "make a man" of him yet. He is rescued by a "charming man" in a luxury car, and things progress from there (albeit in a very non-explicit fashion). So yeah, however you characterize them, and The Smiths and Morrissey characterize themselves, they were certainly the gayest band that I was listening to at the time.
This in no way stopped me from liking them. While I didn't have any gay friends (that I knew of) in those days, working in Manhattan, I'd certainly had a number of gay co-workers over the years, and I found some of the themes and perspectives of many of their songs to be new and interesting. And while I couldn't fully relate to the theme of coming out to your parents and being thrown out of the house that seems to be present in a song like "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out", I could relate to driving around in a friend's car, drinking and feeling somewhat melodramatically suicidal.
I didn't go out of the way to push The Smiths at some of my old high school friends -- I suspect I would have gotten some strange reactions if I had -- but for me, the strengths of The Smiths' music far outweighed any mild discomfort I might have felt about Morrissey's sexuality, his somewhat effeminate presentation, or some of his lyrics.
Shortly after I started listening to The Smiths (and I had bought the CD for The Queen Is Dead), WDRE started playing a lot of Morrissey's solo material, mostly from his Bona Drag compilation. I quickly bought that, too.
At the time, I don't think I was even aware that The Smiths were broken up, and really why would I be? Their last album (Strangeways, Here We Come) had only come out in 1987. And even if I'd been fully aware they weren't together anymore, bands broke up and got back together all the time. Who knew in the late 1980s and early '90s that they were really and truly done as a unit forever.
Anyway, here's a brief history of the band, and things I want you to know about them. The Smiths formed in Manchester, England in 1982. The core of the band was its songwriting team, singer Steven Patrick Morrissey (just known as Morrissey), who wrote the lyrics, and Johnny Marr, who wrote the music. They were only together from 1982 until 1987, but in that time, they were a hugely important band in England. In the U.S., they were more of a cult band, beloved in cities like New York and Los Angeles, which had strong and influential alternative rock stations, but fairly obscure in a lot of other areas. (To give you an idea of the disparity of their popularity between the two countries, all four of the Smiths' studio LPs charted either #1 or #2 in the UK, but the highest they ever reached on the U.S. charts was # 55.)
As mentioned above, The Smiths only ever released four studio albums. However, that's a little deceptive, as quite a few of their best songs were never included on any of those four LPs -- they came out as singles or B-sides, and the only other way to buy them was on one or more of the many solid compilation albums they released. Examples of these songs include such classics as "Panic" (the "hang the deejay" song), "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now", "Ask", "Shoplifters of the World Unite", "Sheila Take a Bow", and "William, It Was Really Nothing". For an obsessive-compulsive person like myself, who likes to collect most of their music on studio albums, this is kind of frustrating, but it is what it is.
As best I can tell, the main reason for The Smiths' breakup was this: Morrissey is a total pain in the ass (more on that in a minute), and as the band got bigger and bigger, Marr, who started out handling all of the band's business functions as well as his musical duties, just got completely overworked. At various times, Marr tried to hire one person or another to take some of the business burdens off of his shoulders. Unfortunately, every time he did, Morrissey would find one reason or another to get rid of them. In a nutshell, it seems like Morrissey trusted no one but Marr to handle the business end of things, and was perfectly happy with Marr doing everything, and why wouldn't he be? At some point, Marr tried to take some time off, an article appeared in the British music magazine NME claiming Marr had quit the band, Marr assumed (apparently erroneously) that the article had been planted by Morrissey to pressure him into getting back to work, and at that point, Marr really did quit.
Now let's be blunt here. Morrissey is ... well, a bit of a dick. He's a terrific singer, and at his best, often an absolutely brilliant lyricist. He can be very whiny and self pitying. He can also be tremendously clever and very funny. And his frequent themes of loneliness and estrangement often cut to the heart of the human condition, which is why almost anyone can find something to relate to in his music. But he's also an entitled, over-sensitive prick who over the years has found a way to insult just about anyone. He's famous for taking offense at something or other and storming out of concerts early, leaving his fans hanging. And his outspoken opinions have, over the years, pissed off right wingers and left wingers alike. The only reason he makes any kind of a living in music is that he's also a bit of a genius.
So what do I like about The Smiths? A number of things. For starters, I've always been a total sucker for a band that consistently produces songs with strong hooks, and The Smiths do this out the wazoo. This can be largely attributed to Marr, who wrote pretty much all of the music.
But I also really like Morrissey's vocals. Some have criticized him for not having much of a range, and if I listen to some of The Smiths' earlier stuff, I can sort of hear what they mean. But he did learn to change things up a bit as his career went on, and I just find his voice enormously pleasant to listen to.
And as for his lyrics, while I've found much of his solo material (especially in his later years) to be a but too strident self indulgent, Morrissey is a more-than-able wordsmith with a sharp wit and a biting sense of humor. Think of "Bigmouth Strikes Again", where he compares himself to Joan of Arc, "As the flames rose to her Roman nose/And her walkman started to melt.") Or the bizarre "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others", were he goes on to observe that it's also true that "Some girls' mothers are bigger than other girls' mothers"). And don't even get me started on "Vicar in a Tutu" or "Girlfriend in a Coma".
If you add all of this together with Johnny Marr's tasty guitar work, you have a truly classic band.
In the years after their breakup, I've found Morrissey's work to be somewhat uneven. However, he's definitely created some classics that are right up there with The Smiths' best work, including "Suedhead", "The Last of the Famous International Playboys" and "Everyday Is Like Sunday".
As for Marr, after years of being criticized as someone who's only comfortable being someone else's second banana (having become a member of a number of bands such as The Pretenders, The The, The Electric, Modest Mouse and The Cribs after the demise of The Smiths), he released a series of solo albums in the 2010's that put the lie to that notion. Unfortunately, as a man then in his fifties, the LPs were largely ignored by the youth culture. But if you're an old Smiths fan (or a fan of well-written pop rock in general), give them a listen (especially 2013's The Messenger and 2018's Call the Comet), and I promise you'll enjoy them. Even 2014's Playland, which I found to be a little less consistent than the other two, had one absolute banger on it in "Easy Money".
So obviously, I never got to The Smiths perform live, as they were already done by the time I was even aware of their existence. And I would never buy a ticket to see a Morrissey concert, because if I shelled out 100 bucks or so and he walked off after 20 minutes because someone hit him with a popcorn kernal, I'd have to kill him. (Denise saw him at Jones Beach before she and I were together, and that's pretty much what happened -- he stormed off of the stage because one or two people tried to climb up there with him -- they were stopped by security -- and he never came back.
As for Marr, Denise and I did see him at The Paramount in Huntington at the end of 2019, and he put on a great show. Ironically, Morrissey was in New York that night, on an off night in the middle of a series of shows he was performing in Manhattan, and the rumor spread wildly that he was going to make a surprise appearance and join Marr onstage in Huntington. Obviously it didn't happen (nor did I expect it to), and Marr even made a joke about it that made it clear it wouldn't be happening anytime soon. But cynical as I am, there's a little kid inside me that hoped. It would have been an amazing moment.
Anyway, I guess that's all that I wanted to say about The Smiths. Next up in this series is an American band I was supposed to see again last year before the pandemic hit (but that show just got rescheduled again to the summer of 2022): The Go-Go's!
