That the group reached a zenith on this tour may have been because it was operating as a team. The core crew—Showbiz, Featherstone, Powell, Hallam, and Barton—had been with the Smiths almost two years already. Security officer Jim Connolly, whose role became increasingly important in the bigger venues with their attendant frenzy, had earned Morrissey’s trust. Matthew Sztumpf appeared to operate as a manager should, staying out of the band’s way while making sure that the top echelon of business was taken care of; Stuart James had been through enough to have earned the group’s respect while understanding their needs; Mark Gosling brought a professionalism to the production that ensured the shows ran on time, that the traveling American PA crew was encouraged to permit the stage invasions despite fear of damage to their equipment, and that the complete ban on meat backstage extended even to the heavy-duty union crews that governed venues like the Beacon Theater, where Andy Warhol was among the many celebrities to witness the band from the seats out front.
Given that Morrissey had been such a student of American music in general, the New York scene in particular, his sudden godlike status would have been expected to have had a profound effect on his psyche. But despite the tour running efficiently, there was a lack of experienced counsel in this regard. “I think Morrissey needed the most looking after, and perversely, I think he didn’t feel like he needed looking after,” said Grant Showbiz, who had more experience of touring America than anyone else in the inner circle. “That joy at his own company and belief in the way he did things meant that he needed more help taking advice on things like … how to relax. How to keep himself healthy. How to express the after-show … I sometimes used to think, ‘What is Morrissey doing now, as we are shouting loudly in a room with drink and people who want to talk to us and tell us we’re wonderful, what is Morrissey doing now? Is it all being internalized, is he asleep, is he reading a book?’ ” The problem was that nobody really knew. The rest of the Smiths’ entourage was too busy having fun.
“That whole tour was head-turning,” said Andy Rourke. “England is such a small place and people have a small mentality. So to be thrown into America and have all this adoration … Fame is a strange thing and everyone handles it different. Between us band members, we never talked about it. For me, I launched myself into drugs and drink. I don’t know what Morrissey launched himself into: hot chocolate and Oscar Wilde books? We were young kids … I was twenty-one when I went to America. And there’s no handbook for handling fame. No instructions.”
“You come out of the ’80s in the UK, and you’ve come up from some council estate in Manchester and someone wants to send you off business-class on some jet to New York, you’re going to make the most of it, aren’t you?” said Mark Gosling. “The Brits abroad have always been like that.” With quality cocaine in plentiful and inexpensive supply, Gosling found himself “roped into a role as the supplier of things that kept everyone going.”2 The three playing members, and most of the crew, were enjoying the rock ’n’ roll aspect of touring America; Morrissey was coping with the adulation aspect on his own.
“When the sticks went down and the microphone went off, Mozzer kept himself to himself,” said Mike Joyce. “Maybe we should have dragged him out a bit more. He did have some friends, but nobody else would know them. Very arty. I felt very inadequate, as if they couldn’t wait to get away and talk about great authors! Andy felt that way too. Johnny maybe less so.”
“Everyone loves getting caught up in that ‘Here he was off on his own, and then the other three were sitting around,’ ” challenged Marr, who cited the example of he and Morrissey heading off to buy records while on tour as evidence that it was otherwise. “That is just bollocks. You can’t do that for five years when you’re best friends. Morrissey and Angie spent a lot of time going round together, especially on the American tours. They had their own relationship, which I was and am very proud of. He and I would go and do stuff together. He wasn’t entirely isolated. There were times when he wanted to be, and that’s when we let him be like that. You do whatever your friend wants.” In Toronto, for example, where the theater was within a giant theme park, the singer was sufficiently relaxed as to take in the fair rides after soundcheck alongside Billy Bragg. In 1985 in America, the pressures upon Morrissey seemed to be easily outweighed by the rewards.
The American tour was short by many standards, and wisely avoided areas in which ticket sales may have been slower and reactions less hysterical. As it turned out, “How Soon Is Now?” did not cross over into the pop charts. And Meat Is Murder had peaked on the American album charts just before the group arrived, stalling outside the top 100, though that still represented a significant achievement for a British band that was coming up through the alternative channels. And over the course of the tour the relationship with the record company was repaired as well. On the West Coast, Lenny Waronker came down to meet Johnny Marr at soundcheck and talk production techniques, and Seymour Stein demonstrated his allegiance (and lack of hard feelings about the New York snub) by flying out to L.A., jumping about in the front rows at the Palladium, and taking Morrissey out for a high-profile power dinner at the Ivy, where Paul Simon was brought over from an adjacent table to meet Sire’s latest star. The tour concluded with that vast crowd at Irvine Meadows Amphitheater and a greater stage invasion than usual that led to the longest-ever encore of “Barbarism Begins at Home”—a full fifteen minutes. It was the last time the Smiths would play that song.
The tour proved additionally memorable for the fact that, on June 20, in San Francisco, Johnny Marr and Angie Brown were married in a civil ceremony. Andy Rourke, Marr’s longest-standing friend within the Smiths’ entourage, served as witness, and with no show that night, the Smiths threw a major wedding party for the couple at the Westin Miyaka. “It was a nice day,” said Rourke. “But it was just weird. It didn’t seem real.” For those who knew Johnny and Angie to have been made for each other, the question had never been “if” but “when.” That the couple chose to formalize their commitment almost six thousand miles from their families in Manchester perhaps said more about their entwined devotion to the family that was the Smiths than any disharmony with their blood relatives back home.
A couple of weeks later, back in Britain, Morrissey tried to put the whole American experience into words for Eleanor Levy at Record Mirror. “It was very hysterical, very wild, very passionate, very moving. All those things people never believe! It was really quite stunning, even for me, to see it happen. We went over there I think, with quite a humble nature and we didn’t expect any fanatical fervor or uncontrollable hysteria. Therefore, when it happened I was rendered speechless.” From his time living in Colorado as an anonymous social inadequate, Morrissey had firsthand experience of the blandest, most crass elements of American pop culture, politics, and everyday living. Now, from the vantage point of the touring icon, it all looked very different. “Meeting the people there was an extraordinary eye opener because one is fed all these fixed impressions of the American music buying public and they didn’t turn out to be that way. They turned out to be rational, incredibly sensitive poetic human beings.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY
Don’t forget I’m still only 21. I really do believe that Johnny Marr and The Smiths have many many years ahead of them and plenty of surprises in store. I can never see myself working with anybody else.
—Johnny Marr, Melody Maker, August 1985
The Smiths didn’t need to release a new record. They’d already put out two singles and an album in 1985 and were still barely halfway through the year. But the concert at the Oxford Apollo in March 1985 had been recorded and broadcast by the Radio 1 evening show, and even by the exacting standards of the Smiths, it was a particularly high-quality recording of a band that was now known as one of the best live acts in the world. Plans were duly made—even before the Smiths went to America and got yet better onstage—to release a live EP from the concert, led by and named for “Meat Is Murder,” wh
ich had developed into a high point of the live set.
Live EPs had something of a noble tradition in the UK. They were often used as limited-edition giveaways to assure strong first-week sales of a single or an album (as had helped the Jam go straight to number 1 with “Going Underground”), and sometimes to showcase a new band in its best light (as per Eddie & the Hot Rods and their “Live at the Marquee” series). Occasionally they became major hits in their own right: the Specials had gone to the top of the charts with a live EP in 1980, a perfect confluence of circumstances that saw a group still very much on the rise leading its release with a markedly different version of an album track (“Too Much Too Young”), then following it with no fewer than four previously unreleased cover versions.
The Smiths’ scenario was quite different, though: they were out of stockpiled new material, not given to playing other people’s songs, and no longer the new band in town or radio favorites. A live EP would, by its very nature, require Smiths fans to repurchase songs they mostly already owned in studio formats; many additionally already had the Oxford concert on cassette from the BBC broadcast. Throw in the fact that “Meat Is Murder” was almost six minutes long, morally challenging, and commercially untenable, and they were setting themselves up for a major fall. That might explain why, despite having a catalog number assigned and multiple test pressings ordered in both 7″ and 12″ formats, “Meat Is Murder” was dropped as the lead track at the last minute. In its place, the studio version of “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” became the A-side instead.1 “Something from the LP should be released because I think they’re too good to be buried,” Morrissey had said back when “Shakespeare’s Sister” came out (which was of course the perfect moment to act on this belief), but although it was unquestionably one of the finest compositions and strongest productions in the band’s entire canon, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” was just as long as, and barely more commercial than, “Meat Is Murder.” The Smiths were merely swapping the frying pan for the fire.
To make it a more palatable length, the single version of “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” did away with the song’s instrumental reprise, which eliminated much of the majesty but did nothing to make it more radio-friendly. And in the process of switching out a live song for a studio one, they second-guessed their original intent. Though it was always a long shot, a live EP, properly designed and promoted accordingly, would have made for an interesting concept if not necessarily a chart hit, and could just have won over the loyal Smiths fans and served its artistic purpose. A four-month-old album track backed by various live versions of familiar songs smacked of something else entirely, and was unlikely to be snapped up by any but the most fanatic of all Smiths fans; its only real hope of success was in gaining massive airplay, which Geoff Travis tried—in vain—to convince Morrissey was unlikely.
“That was the biggest argument I ever had,” said Travis. “Because I just said, ‘It’s not a single.’ And Morrissey said, ‘It is a single.’ And I said, ‘It’s not a single, and if we put it out, it won’t do very well, and then all you’ll do is blame us.’ ” “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” barely scraped into the top 50. It was the Smiths’ first flop. “And did we get any recognition?” asked Travis somewhat rhetorically long after the event. “No, of course not.”
From Rough Trade’s perspective, there was a cost factor to this. Singles were not cheap to promote to begin with, and Morrissey’s increasing demands for advertising and, in this case, his insistence on fly-postering, meant that “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” may have ended up being a financial setback for label and band alike without generating the additional Meat Is Murder sales to compensate. But there was also a loss of prestige—both externally, in terms of the Smiths and their public perception as a hit singles act and internally, in terms of the final collapse of what had started out as such a mutually respectful relationship. “I remember feeling very disillusioned about losing that argument,” said Travis. “I just felt that showed that Morrissey was losing the plot.”
It probably did not help the Smiths that they released “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” the week before Live Aid, which took place in London and Philadelphia on Saturday, July 13. The largest musical charity event in global history, Live Aid had the unintended consequence of either launching, reviving, or merely accelerating the careers of a number of its performers—including U2, who would now permanently leave behind any semblance of cult status. The Smiths were not invited to appear at Live Aid: Morrissey’s comments about the event’s organizer, Bob Geldof, and the Band Aid single that had preceded it, had made sure of that. The Smiths were, however, invited to appear on Terry Wogan’s talk show the following Friday, July 19. At a point at which British TV was just beginning to experiment with the idea of regular musical guests in such a format, the offer carried enormous promotional clout: the Wogan show was a phenomenon, with more viewers than Top of the Pops (which with “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” the Smiths missed out on for the second single in a row), and though the genial Irish host had made his name as a housewives’ favorite on Radio 2, far away from Smiths fans, he was not particularly disliked by the youth. Appearing on his show was something of a risk on the part of the Smiths, but a calculated one—and an additional opportunity to remind a massively distracted record-buying public that Live Aid hadn’t had a monopoly on great British talent.
It was also something of a coup on the part of Scott Piering. However, the group’s “plugger” appeared to have forgotten his own written warning from earlier in the year. For, while three of the Smiths dutifully showed up on the BBC set that Friday afternoon, Morrissey did not. Nor could he be found. It was left to a highly embarrassed Matthew Sztumpf, clearly wondering what he had gotten himself into, to attempt to placate the initially puzzled and then increasingly angry BBC producers. “That was the low point of my career,” he told Johnny Rogan. (It was also the last straw for Sztumpf, and his final involvement with the Smiths—for the time being.) “The embarrassment was having the members of the band and myself sitting in the studio waiting for him, and the lack of consideration Morrissey had for us. The least he could have done was tell his band!” This was pertinent. On previous occasions when Morrissey had bailed on a group commitment it had been in tandem with the group, and they understood and even agreed with his reasons. In this case, it was an arbitrary decision—and they did not know why he had made it. In public, “we closed ranks and backed him up,” said Johnny Marr, who ultimately presumed that Morrissey had decided, “It was just not something that we should appear on.” All the same, he said, “It would have been nice to have been told that Morrissey was not going to be there and that we didn’t need to go there. That aspect of it caused a little crack in my resolve.”
The fact that “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” had been released in the midst of legal action between the band and its label had introduced a degree of paranoia, with each side second-guessing the other’s tactics. Certainly, it was beyond coincidence that in the wake of the Wogan no-show and the single’s chart failure, the music papers were suddenly full of speculation that the Smiths were about to leave Rough Trade for a major label. The rumors gained traction for a couple of weeks and then appeared to conclude when Johnny Marr was featured for the first time as Melody Maker cover star and announced, “The next collection of Smiths songs”—though he did not mention an album—“will definitely come out on Rough Trade and I’m pleased to be able to say that.”
Across London, at Manchester Square, EMI’s new managing director, David Munns, read of the unrest in the music papers and decided to act on it. Munns had spent most of his professional life at EMI, but the last five years of it in Canada, away from the day-to-day buzz of signing and breaking British acts at the premier British major label. He had come home to find that while EMI had maintained its market share, thanks largely to the phenomenal success of Duran Duran, it was still known throughout the industry, as he put it, as the label that “wou
ldn’t protect the creative juices of a band named the Sex Pistols.” The news items in the music papers trumpeting the discord between the Smiths and Rough Trade was therefore music to his ears.
“Without this being an A&R decision, I thought that if we could sign the Smiths it would go a long way towards restoring our credibility,” said Munns. “It was exactly the sort of act that, if you could put it on the EMI label, would mitigate some of that Pistols thing. And there are not many acts that have any kind of name or reputation that come on the market very often.’ ” That EMI had put them in the studio back in 1982 only to “pass” on them was irrelevant to his thought process—both because Munns knew nothing about it and because there was no proof that the Smiths would ever have become a “name” act had they signed to EMI back then.
From Munns’s perspective, the relationship between the Smiths and Travis had already soured; it was therefore entirely appropriate for him to make enquiries as to their availability. “I started ringing Alexis Grower,” said Munns, “and I rang him all the time—every two weeks. Every time I had a spare minute, I said, ‘I want to sign the Smiths, are they out of their deal?’ ” For now, given that Rough Trade had initiated its own protective proceedings in the wake of Grower’s challenge to their contract, the answer was no. But Munns was not used to taking that for an answer. “I kept saying, ‘You make sure you tell Morrissey that EMI is calling all the time.’ ”
A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths Page 44