Re-living the Smiths

[Still Tired]

I’m pretty new to Morrissey having only bought my first Smiths album back in February and it’s pretty scary to look at how big my collection has grown since then, (I’m guessing that’s not what a student loan is really for!) Anyway, I had pretty little knowledge of the Smiths, I was a lot more aware of the solo Morrissey, although I only remembered odd snippets of videos I’d seen over the years. So I’ve been playing catch-up in a big way these past few months and it’s a really odd experience. I think because I have no memories of my own of the Smiths, my only image of what they were like and how they were perceived is through second-hand recollection, however reliable or prejudiced they may/ may not be. I have a few books now: Morrissey by David Bret, Saint Morrissey, Songs That Saved Your Life, and the Smiths Visual Documentary, and each one presents a differing image of that whole era. It’s odd because I’m trying to gain a general over-view of what the Smiths were and the impact they had, but each history I’m presented with has to be cross-referenced and somehow sequenced together with all the other bits I’ve read. In a way, the Smiths could be completely fictional, how do I know which is the truth?! I’m probably just sounding completely paranoid now, but I just find it quite fascinating to be in this situation where I’ve just completely un-earthed this whole part of culture I never knew existed and I’m trying to get a grasp on it, trying to make my own interpretation of it.

I think I’ll probably really get my own answers from actually listening to the music and watching the footage, I get incredibly sensitive towards people putting their own interpretations on to it all, even the interviews I’ve seen can be cut and sliced, removed from their context and used against the speaker. I really don’t like Johnny Rogan’s attitude in the Visual Documentary it has to be said, he’s pretty condescending towards Morrissey, almost threatening in places and tries to ridicule him. And then with David Bret, I’m sure he doesn’t get half of Morrissey’s sarcasm, I can’t think of specific examples right now, but some of the quotes he seems to take at complete face-value when it seems perfectly obvious to me it was something said tongue in cheek!

I guess there are always multiple versions of a history that can be taken of anything, and I expect each fan has his/her own personal take on their experience of that time, and continues to do so. I just wonder what I missed out on, being so new to it all, and I do wonder what I would’ve made of the Smiths if I had been old enough to enjoy them at the time. Knowing me I’d still be oblivious and be kicking myself long after they’d split up! Ok, end of my ramblings; I just wondered if there were other new fans in a similar situation? Or those who did actually live through it, do you find new fans hopelessly un-informed or slightly annoying?!

 

[Kewpie]

Don't worry too much. It's very hard to put in words, but as you've already known the best way to find out about The Smiths is to listen to their outputs. I've listening to them since 1984 and still find something I haven't heard of or didn't know. I know Grant Showbiz(engineer) through my friends and really need to interrogate him every single details!

If you can afford I'd recommend you to get reissues of Smiths Indeed. It's better reading in the perspective of enthusiastic fans than reading unofficial biographies, imo.

 

[lnathan]

That's funny cause I've just done the complete opposite thing. I've listened to The Smiths for 10 years, and have only recently discovered Morrisseys as a solo artist. And I've never before been interested in anything but the music, but now I have become infatuated with the whole "mythology" of Morrissey. It's fascinationg to explore.
I think you should study the lyrics more than anything...that's where the "truth" is (if there is such a thing)

 

[Worm]

I envy you for discovering The Smiths for the first time. I still get a lot of pleasure from listening to my Smiths records, but of course not as much as I did when I first played them. The anticipation as I looked at the names of songs I'd never heard on the record sleeve as I went home to play an album for the first time is a thrill I sorely miss.

Can someone "get" The Smiths if they're just discovering them now? Many other posters have addressed this question before, including me. The answer, I'm afraid, is that no, you can't fully appreciate The Smiths in a historical sense unless you lived through the Eighties.

Now, two points to stress here. One, I used the word "fully" for a reason. You can certainly understand The Smiths by going back and reading up on them, listening to their music and that of their contemporaries, and talking to other fans. I just mean you can't really grasp all of it. Even when I think about those years, I have to make an effort to conjure up the era in which The Smiths existed. And the era is really important to understand, I think, as a big part of The Smiths' greatness was their reaction to the Eighties in the ideas and imagery Morrissey and Marr projected. My second qualification to the previous paragraph would be even more primary: there's no law that says you have to understand The Smiths as an historical phenomenon tied up in the years 1983-1987. Loving music means loving it for whatever it means for you, in your time and in your place. But I'm kind of ignoring this since you are talking about reconstructing, in your own mind, the band's history.

The books you've mentioned are so-so; only "The Songs That Saved Your Life" is good in my opinion. The others are just writers riffing on what The Smiths meant to them, especially Simpson (no matter how much he tries to dress him up in borrowed movements). Rogan's biography is required reading. Mick Middles you should ignore. The books that few people mention, which are absolutely indispensable, are "Those Charming Men" Parts 1 and 2, and any of the "Morrissey In Quotes" books.

These are crucial to understanding The Smiths because they contain all of the manifesto-like ideals of Morrissey and Marr taken from the interviews they gave in 1983-1984. The difference between the ideals of Morrissey and those of The Smiths is, in my mind, gigantic. Morrissey is about himself. The Smiths were about broader ideals. Go back and read the early interviews, where Morrissey talks about the fourth sex or singing about illness, for instance, or Marr talks about what music means for young people. These are the only really vital bits of information you need apart from the music.

The fact is, the one and only truly fascinating thing to come out of the literature that has grown up around Morrissey and The Smiths over the years is how stubbornly and consistently writers have ignored what Morrissey and Marr said they wanted The Smiths to stand for. As intellectuals these writers can't get their minds around the simple, childlike, sugary ideals of pop music-- that its magic would somehow unlock and set free all the Utopian ideas that have been trampled by dishonest, money-grubbing artists and record companies for years and years and years. Critics try for impartiality in their analyses because they have to. Brett Anderson can freely gush about "This Charming Man" being Single of the Decade in the NME in 1994, but critics must forever be explaining and rationalizing music or else they will appear to be exactly what they are-- fans.

Thus when The Smiths spoke of their ideals, the ideals had to be ignored by the cynical critics-- even those who liked them!-- who insisted on talking about The Smiths as "Morrissey's band", or Morrissey himself as a gay singer, or whatever. You can't just say, "Well, the music is good because I was humming the melody every day since last Tuesday". Unlike literary criticism, for example, which at its best adds depth and color to the books under the microscope, pop music usually resists the best attemps to explain it. No matter how rich and well-informed your appreciation of the songs, in the end they either touch you or they don't. I'm a person who expends a lot of energy thinking about this kind of stuff, but I know full well that I only like songs that hit me in a place in which thought has little influence.

The beauty of the best bands, like The Smiths, is how they move in a sphere beyond the merely intellectual. The most concise description was given early on by Morrissey-- or maybe it was Marr-- which is that The Smiths gave the audience something for the head and something for the hips. That this was their explicit ambition is significant, and why the early interviews should be looked at first. If the music itself enthralls you but you want to know more about the band and its era, my advice, in short, is to try and understand The Smiths as they understood themselves.

 

[mozmic_dancer]

Hello, Tired.

First of all, don't get discouraged. There are just so many books and articles on the Smiths, it can be overwhelming. Plus, don't expect neat and tidy Smiths analysis from our century's greatest minds either, for the Smiths had just as many detractors as they had disciples. You have the music (that's a good start) and you got some great recommendations here on some reference books.

I was 17 when I heard Hatful of Hollow on my brother's stereo in 1984. It made such an impression on me because it sounded nothing like what was being listened to or played on the radio at the time. They were like everything a pop group shouldn't be in 1984; their clothes were more retro than current, they played guitars instead of synth instruments, and Morrissey was the most unlikeliest frontman in the world, with his daffodils and glasses and his vast knowledge of pop music, literature and films (no one ever asked David Lee Roth what he was currently reading, that's for sure.) The music of the Smiths as well as the lyrics of Morrissey reached me in a very personal way. I suspect that the Smiths still do for some young people today, for the kinds of issues young people had in my day were not that much different than now; feelings of isolation, rejection, unrequited love, and anger at authority. This may seem silly to admit (you may even scoff at this) but my favorite Smith song is Ask. The reason why was because I never heard a singer sing about shyness; as if I believed Morrissey was singing it just for me.

I won't bore you no further with my recollections; most of them are just too personal to share anyway. If you haven't read the articles and interviews at this site, please do. These are not NME-type retrospectives; these articles and interviews all were written in the Smiths heyday. Some articles and interviews include topical references and events going on at the time. I hope they are of use.

http://foreverill.com/interviews/index.html

 

[Briansd]

Well said. I had the pleasure of finding the Smiths just as they broke up. So I missed the anticipation of release after release, and being from the US I could not identify with the 80's in the UK. That being said, the mixture of Johnny Marr and Morrissey touched me in ways that no other band had or still have to this day. It is what I call the "Pure Pop" effect. They simply got it right.

I am an avid Morrissey Solo fan too, however, The Smiths are very different and arguably far superior.

In my opinion, the new music is great but still missing something. I suspect the missing ingredient is Marr. Now if we could only get Modest Mouse to fire the singer and hire Moz. lol Yea right!

 

[Still Tired]

Thanks so much for the replies and reading suggestions, I’ll follow those up. I am most definitely having a lot of fun ‘discovering’ the Smiths, I find myself losing hours out of each day listening to them, just lost in a completely different world. And I watch the videos with a kind of shocked amazement and joy, it’s been weird associating the image I had of the current Morrissey with the skinny be-spectacled, gladioli waving figure of that era! And then to see the intense and powerful raw energy of the early concert performances, the atmosphere seemed so incredible, I’ve not seen anything like it before. But then Morrissey has changed so absolutely since then I think, both as an individual and an artist, that’s why I find it odd with being able to associate so closely to a lot of what Morrissey stood for back then and what the lyrics expressed, but knowing also knowing that was 20 years ago. It’s like I can listen to the music in my own little bubble on a personal and intimate level, but then I read all the history etc surrounding it all and it almost takes something away from me, like how can I be experiencing it for the first time when it’s music that was so engrained with that specific period?! I don’t know, maybe I’m thinking about it too much!

Hi mozmic, I completely understand you loving Ask, I have a great fondness for ‘You’ve Got Everything Now’ for virtually the same reason, when I hear the lyric, ‘No I’ve never had a job because I’m too shy’ it makes me crumble because I’ve never heard someone articulate that feeling before, it just seems like the most wonderful thing in the world that he could do that. And so many of the lyrics perfectly fit into my life right now, of generally feeling a bit lost and isolated, and I find it interesting to think I’m 23 now, the same age Moz was when it all began.

Another thing that amazes me is the extent of their creative out-put over five years, I do find it remarkable to listen to the evolution of the band and how much they crammed into their relatively short life-span. I recently got ‘Strangeways’, it seems like the most perfect collection of songs on an album, but it also seems light-years away from the first album, the change is incredible. Well, change, but still the same essence. I do feel like I’m taking a very different view of it all from experiencing it now, all in retrospect. I used to be a Michael Jackson fan bizarrely, (how taste changes!), and to consider Thriller being around at the same time as ‘The Smiths’ and ‘Meat is Murder’ is almost baffling to me! I think in that comparison I can understand how the Smiths weren’t even a counter-culture but just completely off in their own space. It is quite extraordinary to think they could do that, be so vastly unique.

Thanks for your comments Worm, it’s really interesting to consider the band’s actual intentions rather than all the labels since attributed to them, I’m starting to get quite good at seeing through all the motivations behind the criticism I read. And I think that’s so true, if anything, reading these things only detracts from the power of the music, and what the band were in general, it does become something very personal to experience I guess. And right now I feel like I’ve never loved music quite so much! That’s quite a perfect line about music for the head and the hips; it perfectly describes how I enjoy it, sometimes unable to keep from dancing, or sitting digesting each lyric in a very private way.

 

[Worm]

Morrissey is different than he was in his days in The Smiths, yes, and although for awhile I couldn't really accept that, now I find it wonderful. Morrissey at 47 complements the Morrissey at 23 in surprising and gratifying ways. The man he is now completely validates the man he was then, because (among other things) it shows that he was not a permanent child, forever moaning about life's bitter cruelties, but was far more realistic and level-headed than his detractors thought.

The basic attack against The Smiths and Morrissey's solo career is that somehow his growth was stunted, that he was a whingeing, effete, career teenager-- Morrissey put all these attacks into the words of a father in "Dial-A-Cliche" ("grow up, be a man, and close your mealy mouth!"). To put it more concretely, there is added to the back catalogue tremendous power by having the man who once bleated "I am human and I need to be loved" out on the town in Rome, clad in Gucci and God knows what else, having drinks with artists, loving and having sex with men (or women?), and above all so free in his actions that he can say, apparently with some honesty, that he doesn't recognize the former self who wrote "How Soon Is Now?".

It's not turnabout or self-betrayal. He's taking the early songs and underlining them, not crossing them out. Happiness or health, in some form or another, must be a real possibility in his words, from "Hand In Glove" to "Life Is A Pigsty", or else all of his nay-sayers are right. If you sing "I am human and I need to be loved", you'd better mean it. You'd better sing from the heart, and with naked honesty, and not carry on because gloom and depression are trendy, or because life seems empty and meaningless and you want to reify the world's existential coldness at every turn (hello, Robert Smith). When I listen to Morrissey now, all I can think is, "Yes, he was right in '83, in '84. He was right all along". I'm not sure I'd be saying that if he were still carrying on like a teenager hidden in rags on a hillside desolate.

All of which is to say, you've picked a damn exciting time to discover both the new Roman Morrissey and the older, more miserable frontman of The Smiths-- tellingly, he called himself "The Voice" back in the old days, and in a sense that's all he was, a disembodied moan floating in the wind over the moors. Now he's so much more.

 

[mozmic_dancer]

Thank you for your kind words, Tired.

Is it really so strange to hear and identify with music recorded 20 years ago? Sure, the Smiths were a product of their time, yet the songs and its themes seem to have transcended over time and context now to be heard and enjoyed by new ears. Even Morrissey, the quintessential pop fan himself, has no problem discovering and rediscovering the music of his youth, perhaps for comfort or even inspiration.

Observing Morrissey's progression from the Smiths to solo artist is really fascinating. If he's changed, he changed for the better both personally and as an artist. According to him, he claims he still holds that power to be both medicine and poison to his audience. Fortunately for me, I've build up very strong immunity from whatever poison he chooses to dish out. As for his sweet medicine, it still holds the power to cure whatever ails me at the moment.