by Spitz, Marc
Their invention seems miraculous given the Dickensian world that Morrissey describes in his memoir: the cheerlessness and isolation of Manchester. That four predominantly Irish Catholic Northern England youths with almost nothing in common would find one another amid this urban industrial wasteland where “birds refuse to sing” is fable making. If Twee has a religion, it is Smiths worship. They are the last quarter century’s only truly holy concern when it comes to rock and roll.
“I had a very small bedroom,” Morrissey has said, “and I remember going through periods when I was eighteen and nineteen where I literally would not leave it for three to four weeks. I would be in there day after day, the sun would be blazingly hot and I’d have the curtains drawn. I’d be sitting there in near darkness alone with the typewriter and surrounded by masses of paper. The walls were totally bespattered with James Dean, almost to the point of claustrophobia, and I remember little bits of paper pinned everywhere with profound comments,” adding, “everything I am was conceived in this room.”
When the teenage Morrissey, living with his mother and working clerical jobs in the Salford section of Manchester to pay for his record collection, engaged with the outside world, he did so via letters, many written to the famous Nick Kent at N.M.E., one of the few similarly music-obsessed pen pals that he could find. “Certainly when I was younger than I am now it was very unusual to come across any other living human who actually heard the records that you heard and it was very unusual to discuss lyrics with somebody,” he has said. Sometimes he would leave his house and walk the streets alone, from the outside a kind of dour, killjoy presence, but in actuality a young man hiding a secret capacity to be jubilant and to spread joy. “My parents got divorced when I was seventeen though they were working towards it for many years,” he has said. “Realizing that your parents aren’t compatible, I think gives you a premature sense of wisdom that life isn’t easy and it isn’t simple to be happy—happiness is something you’re very lucky to find.”
In his hometown, Morrissey was the subject of mockery within the cool Indie scene, dominated by bands like Joy Division and the Fall. Most treated him like a village idiot. His closest friend who wasn’t a cat (named Tibby) was the artist and musician Linder Sterling, who fronted the post-Punk band Ludus and designed the iconic sleeve for the Buzzcocks single “Orgasm Addict.” They’d hang out in graveyards.
The younger Johnny Marr, by contrast, hung out in a cool clothing store called X. He was a flashy, record-collecting teenager who could kick with the cool crowd and didn’t need the protection of a little room. But he needed words.
Marr, then only eighteen, had met Morrissey (four years older) once briefly at a Patti Smith show in Manchester years earlier. He materialized with an unannounced knock on a May afternoon in 1982 at the doorstep of Morrissey’s home on 384 Stretford Street. Smiths obsessives even know the time of day—around one in the afternoon.
Marr had recently viewed a documentary about the great 1950s songwriting team Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (“Poison Ivy,” “Hound Dog,” “Stand by Me,” “Is That All There Is?”) in which Leiber relates a story about a similarly unannounced introduction to his partner. Marr and Morrissey had each already done time in two failed bands, Marr in White Dice and Freak Party (where he’d played with future Smiths bassist Andy Rourke) and Morrissey in Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds and Slaughter and the Dogs. A mutual friend, Billy Duffy (who went on to cofound the Cult), had praised the quality of Morrissey’s writing to Marr, and this stuck in the younger man’s mind. He was well on his way to becoming a shockingly original guitarist, but he didn’t write many lyrics. And so he asked another mutual acquaintance, Steven Pomfret, to bring him to meet Morrissey. He had a precedent and an outsize confidence. He was cool as an Otter Pop. Morrissey—not so much. There was no guarantee they would even get along, much less spark creatively in what has since been described as a more or less immediate way. “Nothing ever failed, nothing ever stumbled,” Morrissey writes.
There are plenty of worthy books that chronicle what happened next: the rise, the fall, the analysis of every single and B-side and album track. It’s an industry now, Smiths deconstruction. I only strain to examine why the band finds such favor among the young each year, and how they became, essentially, the Twee Beatles. Their very Twee intolerance of bullying is surely important to their stature. Within hours of being born, the Smiths were already attacking bullies head-on and giving voice to the world’s assailed innocents, something Morrissey’s lyrics would continue to do for the remainder of his career. “Fame is a kind of revenge,” he had said, and in part it’s retribution meted out on those in society who prey upon the weak.
Through his words and Marr’s music, Morrissey is delivered from countless childhood nightmares, and bullies everywhere are put on notice. The songs connected with the rich and the poor and the not very rich and the very poor. “I sing out to the youth of the slums,” Morrissey writes. There are bands that are merely young men and women who play instruments and sing together, and they are fine and worthy. And then there are bands who become heroes, defenders, catchers in the rye.
“People get picked on because there’s a perceived otherness and a perceived weakness,” says The Perks of Being a Wallflower author and director Stephen Chbosky (both the book and movie versions feature the Smiths song “Asleep”). “I think it’s a chicken-or-the-egg thing. If you loved John Waters’s Pink Flamingos, the Smiths’ Louder Than Bombs, and going to The Rocky Horror Picture Show on a Saturday night, you’re not automatically picked on as a cause and effect. But if you’re the kid who gets picked on, you will find yourself loving Pink Flamingos, Louder Than Bombs, and going to Rocky Horror on a Saturday night. And it’s hugely empowering. You feel like you aren’t alone anymore.”
The Smiths’ “This Charming Man” single, issued by Rough Trade, crashed the Top 30 and led to a now legendary appearance on Top of the Pops in which Morrissey, open-chested like Robert Plant but ringed with matronly beads, twirls a bouquet of flowers the way Roger Daltrey of the Who used to twirl his microphone cord. In an instant, the Smiths combated the notion of front-man masculinity. “When I saw the Smiths on Top of the Pops, I thought, There’s a rock star being not very Punk at all,” says Shirley Manson. “He’s being very girlie, and that seemed exciting.”
You didn’t even have to be human to have an ally in the Smiths. They topped the British charts with an album called Meat Is Murder, and, once given the floor, Morrissey started assailing all those who fed on flesh and never stopped. Even today when he performs the songs, he shows footage of chickens being debeaked and cattle being pummeled by unscrupulous and sadistic workers. The Smiths, like the Clash before them, seemed to be fueled by injustice.
“There were lots and lots of people ready to identify with what I was feeling,” Morrissey said. “Hatred. Hating everything, but not being offensively hateful. It was like hate from quite gentle people.”
By the time one of their final singles was released, “Stop Me if You Think You’ve Heard This One Before,” complete with a video that featured a few dozen young Brits dressed in his classic cardigan sweater, Morrissey was already an icon. Early on, the Smiths offered a sense of being a part of something massive while still feeling like a minority. But soon, they too began to skirt the clichés of rock and roll. Drugs? Check. (Bassist Andy Rourke briefly struggled with heroin addiction.) Creative differences? Check. (Marr was determined to play with other bands, to Morrissey’s chagrin.) Management and financial issues? Check. Ego? Check. Check. Check.
Morrissey sold papers. Once journalists began asking him questions, he had a satchel of quips at the ready; his way with the “pull quote” helped to solidify his rock and roll character, an outsize version of his actual pained, shy, sexually ambiguous self.
“Who last saw you in your natural state?” a reporter from the fashion monthly The Face asked in the summer of ’84. “Almost certainly the doctor who brought me into this cruel world,” Morri
ssey replied. Nobody before or since has been as clever, self-deprecating, playful, and manipulative with a rock journo. “I can get very erotic about blotting paper,” he confessed to another.
Unlike R.E.M.’s albums following the departure of linchpin drummer Bill Berry, nothing that Morrissey (or Marr) has done as a solo artist has tarnished his legacy or the Smiths as gospel. Musically, he has released fine solo material that never really acknowledged a quarter century’s worth of sonic trend. You’ve never caught him out on the arm of a supermodel, male or female. He’s never been snapped by a TMZ reporter at the drive-through of an In-N-Out Burger. And one could imagine him fitting nicely back into the “box bedroom” he describes in his book, whereas it’s hard to imagine Michael Stipe, after the late 1980s, spending much time alone at all. He was producing movies, hanging around with models, wearing message tees, signing what was then the biggest recording contract in history with Warner Bros., and, by 1990, R.E.M. was recording rap-rock songs with KRS-One, all but erasing memories of a college rock band that covered Roger Miller and the Clique and sampled old Japanese monster movies.
Like Samson, once Stipe lost his hair, his cool seemed to go as well. A last gasp of Twee friendliness came in 1992 with the release of Automatic for the People, gorgeous from end to end and name-checking both Dr. Seuss and Andy Kaufman in various lyrics, but R.E.M. then seemed to abdicate their Twee throne, and it’s just as well. There’s only room for one king anyway, and Moz sits, probably forever, upon it. Ironically, Morrissey well knew that with the unstoppable (and still desirable to concert promoters who plead for reunions) power of the Smiths, micro-Twee would never be the same again. “Never again would a band like the Raincoats be entertained by Rough Trade,” Morrissey writes in Autobiography. And yet, even as he killed off a kind of micro-Twee in favor of world beating, he is less the villain or the sellout, the joke as it were, than Stipe, Bono, Robert Smith, Depeche Mode or any other soon-to-be-huge peers. They seem to age, and age poorly, while Morrissey exists—like Sinatra, Liz Taylor, Mick Jagger, and to an extent Michael Jackson—in the public eye in a kind of perma-youth, his young, handsome image gracing record sleeves even as he edges toward sixty.
“He’s still the same bedroom boy, baffled by life and rattled by death and not sure how to breathe or eat or negotiate the pavement, except he’s got fame and wealth and adoration, which helps him be a little more human,” Morley wrote of Mozzer years ago. Today Morley is a bit more reverent. “Whatever people think of what he’s done, it does nothing to contradict the idea that the Smiths were the Beatles of this zone. Their ideological power has taken thirty years to dribble into the mainstream.”
If there’s any Twee Stones to the Smiths’ Twee Beatles, it’s no longer R.E.M. but rather another American band that got its start in the early-’80s alternative scene and has now managed to enchant one generation after another while remaining fiercely Indie minded, mocking of fashion, and relentlessly clever. Can you guess? I’ll give you a hint: you may know that Istanbul is no longer called Constantinople thanks to them. And nobody will ever offer this band millions of dollars to play festivals, because they’ve never gone away. “It’s a larger phenomenon in the culture that I’ve come to realize is completely real,” says John Flansburgh, cofounder of They Might Be Giants. Always a medium-popular band with a small but devout following, culture has simply bent their way and enabled them to continue to sell out international tours well into their members’ fifties: it wasn’t planned. “In many ways we might have been at the start of something and were a full beat ahead of something,” Flansburgh says, “but part of me on a very core level profoundly does not get nerd culture.”
Flansburgh and his partner John Linnell skewed nerdier in their early years on New York’s East Village performance-art and No Wave scenes (which nurtured Sonic Youth, DNA, and others). “We were in awe of the No Wave people,” Flansburgh says. He and Linnell, who transplanted to Brooklyn from the Boston area (where they worked in record stores and toiled in bands), wore leather jackets and dressed like sad vampires. Hardcore was going on at the same time, with its thrashing, violent tempos and extreme, often anti-Reagan lyrics. “We thought about putting together a hardcore set just to play this one club, 7A,” Flansburgh says. “We wrote a short series of songs that would help us fit in. The titles make us blush to this day.” He refuses to reveal one.
“We kind of trimmed our sails for stormy weather—the only other examples we knew didn’t have much to show for their effort.”
The feeling of not belonging stiffened their spines. Like the Smiths, They Might Be Giants had a strong sense of “here we are, a band in the record industry, writing and recording.” They seemed to present, and frequently removed, the fourth wall: “Here are the songs.” And the songs were wonderful.
“And now the song is over now, and now the song is over now,” they observed on the very first track on their debut (“Everything Right Is Wrong Again”). Another song, “Older,” observes, “You’re older than you ever were and now you’re even older . . . and now you’re even older.” They could harmonize sweetly, make skronk, play country, crack wise, or just jam (frequently with accordion) without ever losing this sense of scrap and humor.
These were, mind you, the dangerous days of Brooklyn, or at least the desolate ones. TMBG have impeccable Brooklandia cred, and it’s in no small way a reason they are now a supergroup. The world came to Brooklyn, and, by extension, Brooklyn came to them. Toiling in then-desolate Park Slope and Fort Greene took decades to pay off but finally did. “We were in a big apartment,” Flansburgh recalls. “Very cheap and very large. It didn’t matter if we played the drums there.” They wrote hundreds of songs, so many that when Linnell injured his wrist while working as a bike messenger, they had a backlog. Soon Dial-A-Song was born. Fans could literally call in to an answering machine in their apartment, triggering a cassette of a newly released song. The format was based on the then-popular Dial-A-Joke service in which you could trade a toll call for a usually bad punch line. It was at once both a novelty and a genuinely practical, alternative means of distribution, and the band continued to offer it to fans even after they started releasing albums again, on Indie label Bar/None.
“It was a glorious thing,” Flansburgh says. It was also rebellious in its own way. “Phone machines were an emerging technology. AT&T owned your phone equipment at the time. You were no more allowed to put a phone machine on your phone than you were to climb up onto a telephone pole and move the wires around—to take that phone and manipulate it and change the wires on your phone, to take a privately held, publicly recognized monopoly and manipulate it. My biggest fear was I would instantly have my phone line cut and I wouldn’t have a phone.” Some of TMBG’s most beloved songs first found life on Dial-A-Song, including their signature Twee anthem “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” a love song to a blue canary-shaped night-light (as a metaphor, of course, for holding on to kindness and youth). Later they would move from the Indies to the majors without anyone crying foul and sell over a million copies of a truly oddball collection called Flood based largely on a re-recorded version of that same song; they would also crash MTV’s heavy rotation with the homemade video for their “Don’t Let’s Start” single a half decade before Nirvana and Pearl Jam arrived. WLIR in New York and KROQ in L.A, the two most powerful modern rock stations of the day, played it constantly.
“We could not have had the career at MTV and alternative radio without Dial-A-Song,” says Flansburgh, “but I don’t think we’d still be here as a band without it.” It was an old contraption, a soon-to-be-out-of-date answering machine, that, in very Twee fashion, kept them fresh and original.
TMBG continued to tour, and, by middle age, their fans began to share their They Might Be Giants records with their children. Noticing this hand-me-down phenomenon, TMBG began cutting out the middleman and composing songs directly for the children, Wu Tang–like.
“For some reason, They Might Be Giants rarely show up alongside
U2, the Rolling Stones and Los Lobos on lists of great bands that have managed to stay together over a long period of time,” the music writer Steve Knopper wrote in the Chicago Tribune recently, observing that the slight might be down to the fact that “the duo have had a sort of novelty reputation . . . the Johns’ nasal voices often sound as if they’re singing children’s songs, even when they’re not actually singing children’s songs; and they pack so many sounds and ideas into each song that their albums seem like rock circuses.”
And still they go on, twenty-five-plus years after the dissolution of the Smiths, with the patina of the underdog. In theaters and clubs one can now hear both past and future Twee kids screaming for their favorites. But with regard to both bands, if three generations know your songs by heart and attend your concerts (or, in the Smiths’ case, the solo shows) together, you are the Beatles and the Stones, no matter how square.
Chapter 8
Slings at the Corporate Ogre
1983–1989
In which a small group of socially and politically conscious entrepreneurs stick to their guns and their values and reject the Big Eighties temptations in favor of small business models and a defiantly amateurish, pure, and childlike aesthetic—which is promptly co-opted anyway.
Punk’s do-it-yourself ethic, which gained real cultural power in the late 1970s and early ’80s, goes hand in hand with the phenomenon of green or “ecological” marketing. It’s rare to put the two together, but there were some thinkers, slightly ahead of the game, in the late ’70s who saw no difference between signing and distributing a local garage band and growing tomatoes and selling them to their friends. As long as it cut out the middleman and took money out of the hands of greedy corporations with their political connections and lax morals and watchdogging, then it was the same political act: recording and rocking, growing and eating.
