CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
It feels very comfortable—this waiting period. I’m ready to be accepted by everybody. I want to be heard and I want to be seen by as many people as possible.
—Morrissey, Melody Maker, September 1983
In the Sixties records were actually worth something. People went out and bought a seven inch piece of plastic and they treasured it, which they don’t seem to do any more. We’re trying to bring back that precious element.
—Johnny Marr, Sounds, November 1983
As the buzz about the Smiths grew steadily greater, so the stakes rose higher, until it became evident that it would no longer suffice to release a relatively cheap and hastily recorded album in the autumn months. This was in large part because Smiths fans already had an album of sorts: as Peel and Jensen took to repeating the Smiths sessions due to popular demand, so fans started swapping the complete set around on cassette. The number of sessions, the fact they were spread evenly across the two influential shows, and the overwhelmingly positive reaction to them, was unprecedented for a band with just one, non-charting independent single under its belt, and for this reason the Peel and Jensen shows’ role in “breaking” the Smiths can not possibly be underestimated. But if, from the late spring onward, the Smiths effectively “owned” Radio 1’s evening hours, so too was the pressure on them as a result. Nothing short of a classic debut album would now suffice. And after the “playback” (the presentation of the final mix to the group in the studio), Morrissey—for all his previous hyperbole about the album to an increasingly attentive British media—concluded that this was not it. “He just decided he didn’t like it,” said Marr. “That was entirely his prerogative, and that was a big call to make on your first album.”
The “Troy Tate” album, as it came to be known by Smiths fans (officially it was to be titled The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) was, for the most part, a fine record. Some of its fourteen songs sounded much better than the versions eventually released: “Reel Around the Fountain” in particular, perhaps because it was mixed, mastered, and even (test-)pressed onto vinyl, turned out to be the song’s definitive statement. Tate’s version of “Jeane” still came out as the second single’s B-side, and was greatly loved for it; and the initially intended bonus track “Pretty Girls Make Graves” eventually made it to release and sounded perfectly fine, especially for the addition of Audrey Riley’s cello. There is evidence in all this to suggest that if the other tracks had been taken through to the mastering process, they too might have been similarly revered.1
Certainly, these songs had their fans. “I actually prefer those versions of the first album,” said Mike Joyce, while Joe Moss acknowledged, “There is something brilliant about them because basically they captured how the band were live,” inadvertently pinpointing both their strength and their weakness. “It was very much of its time,” confirmed Marr. The problem, then, was not with some of its parts, but the sum of its parts. Taken together, as a complete album, the fact that it reflected the Smiths as they had entered Elephant Studios that hot summer—untutored and inexperienced, or “bleak” and “northern” as Johnny Marr reflected on the final mix—was no longer good enough. The fact that the second Peel session had showcased four brand-new songs, pointing toward an entirely new level of musical sophistication, only made a rethink of the album more pertinent.
In the long run, Geoff Travis took the blame. “That was way too impulsive a decision,” he said of appointing Tate. “I learned a lot from that. Because recommending producers to bands is almost the most important thing you do as an A&R person apart from signing people.” For his part, Andy Rourke noted that much about the proceedings—the heat of the summer, the confinement of the basement studio, and especially the quality of the engineer (the Elephant Studios of the 1980s was never considered a top-grade facility)—contributed to the perceived drawbacks. Clearly, nobody wanted to make Troy Tate the fall guy, especially the band. “He was a lovely guy,” said Marr; a “talented musician,” observed Rourke. And yet the producer was all but destroyed by the album’s rejection. “Disappointment is not strong enough a word,” he said of the scrapped Smiths sessions while promoting his own subsequent solo release—which Morrissey generously and genuinely raved about when offered the chance to review the singles in Melody Maker. After two albums on Sire, Tate retired from the music business and refused to ever talk again about the Smiths on record.
In his place came John Porter, the former Roxy Music bass player and producer who, as an additional credential for the Smiths, had produced Quiet Life by Japan, a favorite of both Andy Rourke and Morrissey. The Smiths had met him on August 25, when recording their second David Jensen session. According to Marr’s recollections, he had not initially been assigned as their producer that day; rather, they met him in the canteen prior to the session and, said Marr, “as soon as I found out that he was John Porter, we were all keen to get him in on the session.” (All the more so as they had felt a lack of interest on the part of the BBC’s assigned producer at their first Jensen session.) Though this would have been a breach of the BBC’s authoritarian bureaucracy, it would have been well within John Porter’s impish nature to convince another producer to switch sessions based on positive first impressions with a group of effusive teenagers (and one reserved twentysomething).
Porter brought a new dimension to the group’s sound at Maida Vale that day—especially to the guitars, layering acoustics and electrics in and around one another to the point that the four songs he recorded with them, in eight hours, sounded almost like finished masters. Thirty-five years old at the time, Porter was already a veteran at Maida Vale (“I must have done over a hundred bands there”) and had gathered a reputation within the industry “as a cleanup guy. I did a lot of records that had been started with other people and for whatever reason hadn’t achieved a satisfactory result.” After the BBC session, as dissatisfactions emerged with the Troy Tate album, the Smiths recommended him for that role and Geoff Travis gave him a call to that effect.2 But Porter recalled that after listening to the Troy Tate recordings, he returned to Travis saying, “How much money have you got? Because I think it’s going to cost more money in studio time to fix it than to do it all over again.” The decision to scrap the recordings entirely was not made immediately; as late as mid-September, weeks after they had worked together on the Jensen session, Morrissey appeared on BBC’s Radio London and played the Troy Tate production of a song entitled “I Don’t Owe You Anything,” which had first been unveiled two weeks earlier on the Porter-produced Jensen session. The album, Morrissey then said, was “being remixed by John Porter. He has just waved his magic wand and it’s very fruitful.”3
Certainly the Smiths—the playing members, at least—immediately bonded with Porter, who, likewise, saw them as kindred spirits. “When I first went in the studio in London I was a clueless kid from the north,” he said of his entrance into the music business in the late 1960s, “and I recognized, although they were very tied up in their own success even at that stage, they were clueless kids from the north too. And I … felt like a father figure. Particularly Johnny, I felt like he was a younger brother in many ways.”
Porter’s relationship with Marr would prove pivotal to the group’s progress. “He was my mentor in the studio,” said the guitarist. “I was like a sponge, and I had a lot of energy, and he had a lot of experience without really ever being given such an opportunity to teach. I couldn’t have been with a better musician, because he’s a master of recording guitars, and very, very patient. So every idea he threw at me, I would run with—and vice versa.” Porter quickly convinced Marr that it was a smarter idea to use a capo than to tune the guitars up a whole step or more, as they had been doing with the earlier songs to accommodate Morrissey’s vocal range—and regularly breaking strings in the process. And it certainly didn’t harm their instant friendship that Porter was married to Linda Keith, the former girlfriend of Keith Richards, and the woman responsibl
e for seeing the talent in Jimi Hendrix at a Greenwich Village club in 1966 and not resting until she acquired him a manager. The fact that Porter smoked almost as much pot as Marr, and was not beyond countering it with “uppers” when necessary, furthered that camaraderie.
With the future of the Tate album still up in the air, Porter was assigned to produce four songs for the second single, led by “This Charming Man.” (The others were “Accept Yourself,” “Still Ill,” and “Wonderful Woman.”) Allocating all of £500 to prove himself, he chose the studio Matrix near the British Museum because “you could get a good sound in there and it was really cheap.” His first act of inspiration was to take the three-second guitar intro to “This Charming Man” and append it with an additional section that had lain somewhat hidden under the verse on the Peel session. (While Marr was seen constantly with a Rickenbacker at this point, this particular guitar track, as with many other famous Smiths riffs, was recorded using Porter’s own 1954 Fender Telecaster.) The elongated riff established a pattern of guitar intros to Smiths singles, a nod to the likes of Chuck Berry in that regard that simultaneously served to elevate Johnny Marr into the same category of greats. It also demonstrated that a good guitar intro could sell a whole song—something of a quaint notion that summer of 1983 when, to paraphrase Decca Records’ famous rejection of the Beatles, guitar bands appeared to be on the way out.
Elsewhere in his arrangement, Porter restructured Andy Rourke’s bass line to give it more of a Motown punch and introduced a series of sudden stops for added dramatic effect. These were some of the oldest tricks in the production book, but it was the first time the Smiths had worked with someone who suggested them. “It was quite a big change,” recalled Porter. “And they were a bit put out by it, I think. But quickly they got into it and dug it and it was fine.” As they then dug deeper, Porter’s initiatives took the form of the little audio tricks that help give a great production its polish (ones that Tate, for all his enthusiasm, did not have in his arsenal of effects). For the clanging guitar barely audible before the sudden stops on “This Charming Man,” Porter suggested taping down the guitar strings and dropping a knife or a screwdriver on them—and it worked. And for “Wonderful Woman,” one of the Smiths’ earliest compositions, and one that the group could easily have run off as a live-performance B-side, Porter and Marr stayed behind at the end of the session working through the night on the song’s final, ringing chord. “He had the patience to do things like that,” said Marr. “And if it didn’t quite work right, he’d rewind the tape and do it again. And do it again. And again.” Marr realized how fortunate he was to find a thirty-five-year-old producer who was willing—and capable—to work so hard. “I’d leave the studio at seven thirty in the morning, reeling, having forgotten ninety percent of what I’ve just done. And then sleep and come back that afternoon. And then I’d listen to all these tiny little details and just think, ‘Wow, that was really worth it.’ ”
Morrissey, by contrast, was resistant to delivering his vocals more than three or four times at most. This was in part his innate understanding that the emotional feel of an early “take” was more important than the clinical perfection of a later one, but it also reflected a general disregard for the recording process, which quickly put him at odds with his new producer. “I wanted everyone to feel at home in the studio, because if you feel good, you play good,” said Porter. “So straightaway, I tried to explain the process to everybody. Mike and Andy, to a certain extent, were fine—‘Just get on with it.’ Johnny was very interested. And basically if we were in the studio for eighteen hours, Johnny and I would be there for eighteen hours. It was a process that we both were into, every stage of the game. Straightaway with Morrissey, from the first session, I tried to do the same with him. It’s like, ‘These are the fades, this does this, this is your voice on this fader, it goes to this, it’s got these, this is the harmonizer, we’ve got echo, we’ve got delay.’ Morrissey wouldn’t touch it. He just looked at me like, ‘Are you mad?’ ”
“He didn’t click with Morrissey; they were like sandpaper together,” said Andy Rourke of Porter, who felt that the (lack of a) relationship had to be viewed with equal culpability, inasmuch as “I think Morrissey felt shortchanged by the time that was invested for the vocals.” For his part, Rourke walked into the studio with “massive respect for [Porter] anyway because he played bass with Bryan Ferry,” and came away equally impressed, citing him as being “like everyone’s favorite uncle.”
That feeling was mutual. “Andy had good ears,” said Porter, noting that “my reservations initially were stronger about Mike. I thought Johnny and Andy had more technique, if you will; they also had more, probably, in common in terms of music that we liked. My favorite music has always been R&B and black music—the JBs and the Meters and New Orleans music and funk—and the rhythm section was everything.” By comparison, Porter’s experience as a producer was that “English drummers were not very tight,” and that “punk people couldn’t play,” which put Joyce at a double disadvantage. “You build a house on a strong foundation, and it’s only as good as the drums,” said Porter. “So my focus was very much ‘Let’s get the drums tight.’ They don’t have to be complicated at all, but we need to have a good feel. That was seventy-five percent of it. Everything else came after that. So I was hugely concerned with the drums.” To compensate for what he saw as Joyce’s inconsistencies, he had the drummer record to a metronomic “click track.” Even then, there were enough imperfections that the Matrix Studio recording of “This Charming Man” ultimately involved a lot of “edits”—the splicing together of different taped sections—as opposed to the capturing of a genuine live performance.
It showed. When the results were presented to Rough Trade, Geoff Travis immediately announced that he did not hear what he had already pinpointed as a “hit single.” His complaint, recalled Porter, was, “It’s all very fuzzy; you can’t hear the snare drum.” When this version, what came to be known as the “London” mix, was eventually released on a 12″ single, Travis’s doubts were proven entirely correct. Marr’s reputed fifteen different guitar tracks dominated the mix, draped in reverb, to the exclusion of everything else—not just the vocals, which sounded far too pleasant, as if yearning for radio airplay, but also the rhythm section, which was buried way back in the mix, perhaps because it was weak to begin with.
Porter suggested a longer or “proper” mix session.4 Travis instead instructed him to record it all over again, and this time in Manchester, at Strawberry, where the Smiths had made “Hand in Glove” and where they were reunited with engineer Chris Nagle. To ensure a solid rhythm, Porter painstakingly pre-programmed Joyce’s entire multiple drum parts on an electronic LinnDrum and had the group record over the top of it. Some producers, especially those working for major labels at the time, might have left it like that: the sound of the LinnDrum haunted and came to date so many recordings from 1983. But that was never Porter’s intent. Once all the other parts had been recorded—including Morrissey’s vocals (assembled again from three separate takes that, according to Nagle, caused the singer to doubt his abilities and disappear from the studio on an hours-long walk as a result) and the multiple guitar overdubs—Porter brought Joyce in, who “played it through in one take.” As far as Porter was concerned, in relieving the drummer of the pressure to establish the recording’s foundation, he had set him free. Chris Nagle had never seen any producer employ this tactic before; he had considerable doubts that it would work, let alone that Joyce would pull it off in a single take. When it proved successful, he left the studio with what he described as “full respect” for Porter.
The Strawberry version—“This Charming Man (Manchester)” as it would occasionally be identified—achieved everything that the trial marriage of Porter and the Smiths had originally set out to accomplish. It built upon the commercial appeal that had been so evident in its initial Peel version, and it exuded the confidence within the band that was almost contagious at this p
oint; indeed, said Marr of his partner Morrissey’s contribution, “it’s the exuberance of his activity that is, in my mind, as caught up in that record as the sound of the guitar.” It had a shimmering production quality that sounded suitable for daytime radio; and it allowed Morrissey and Marr to shine equally as the band’s evident stars even as the rhythm section’s propulsive beat gave it a potential appeal on the dance floor.5 Heard alongside “Hand in Glove,” it was almost hard to believe that this was in fact the same band, such was the progression in six short months. John Porter was duly handed the commission to rerecord and produce the debut album from scratch, and Rough Trade set to work trying to achieve what may have seemed at the time if not entirely impossible, then certainly improbable: securing the label’s first major hit in the midst of the Christmas market.
John Porter was not the only one who had doubts about Mike Joyce’s abilities, and if the producer was unaware of this, that was only because the Smiths were already so adept at closing ranks. Negative comments had been ongoing since Joyce first joined the group and had peaked once already, in June, when the group started playing London on a regular basis. Si Wolstencroft, who had belatedly turned into a Smiths fan, witnessed such an occasion, at the Brixton Ace. “Mike ended a song too soon, and there were some very important people there, and everybody was fuming about it, and I drove Andy home after the gig, and he said, ‘Well, I’m going to try and put you back in there, so you can get a second chance at it.’ ” Being friends with the group, Wolstencroft was using Moss’s Portland Street space to rehearse with the Colourfield (featuring Terry Hall, formerly of the Specials and Fun Boy Three), and Joyce feared the worst after seeing another drummer’s kit in the room. In the end, said Wolstencroft, “it never happened because Joe said it was too risky, didn’t want to rock the boat.”
A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths Page 28