A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths

by Tony Fletcher

  Shortly after his drug bust, a decision was made to reinstate Andy Rourke. As Morrissey put it, with no acknowledgment of how he had fired the bass player, “his leaving seemed more wrong than his staying.”5 There was no absolute guarantee that Rourke had or could wean himself off heroin, and he had not gone into any sort of clinic to do so. (Rather, he had just “gone abroad” for a couple of weeks.) But there did appear to finally be willpower, which, combined with the existing desire to quit, was partially good reason to welcome him back. There was also the very genuine fear of what might happen to Rourke if they continued to abandon him to his own vices; after his arrest, none of them wanted the next news item about their “former” bassist to be that of a fatal overdose, with all the attendant guilt it would bring. (The fact that Rourke did not inject heroin but smoked it made such a catastrophic scenario unlikely for the time being, but a descent into needles and true junkie status had to be considered a very real possibility.) Most important, though, they simply couldn’t imagine the Smiths with another bass player; Rourke may have been the quietest member, he may have been the most subservient, but his contributions had proven absolutely imperative to the group’s success. And in so many ways, he had served as the group’s rock and its soul, emotional terms that double as musical genres, and understandably so.

  A news item in the April 19 edition of Melody Maker belatedly announcing Rourke’s departure “after their recent tour of Ireland” (which had taken place two full months earlier), noted, “No explanation for his decision was offered by Rough Trade” and that “Rourke’s replacement is Craig Gannon, a session musician who has formally played with Aztec Camera.” In the typical fashion of British music press gossip, enough aspects of this statement were accurate for the false ones to be taken as truth too. The fact was that by the time this item hit the papers, Rourke had already been reinstated and Gannon hired as a second guitarist instead; the public statement in Melody Maker that Gannon was to play bass might explain why it has become perceived fact that he was only offered the role of second guitarist as some sort of consolation prize. It was true that Marr had initially approached Gannon as a bassist, but by the time of the meeting with Morrissey in London, Gannon was absolutely certain that he was being considered as a guitarist instead—the only role that would make sense for him—and that when he attended his first rehearsal with the group, at Mike Joyce’s house in Altrincham, it was with guitar in hand, especially as he didn’t own a bass. Johnny Marr himself stated, only that summer, “It was when we got back from [Ireland] that I realized I wanted to get another guitar player in,” which would suggest that he did not hire Gannon for that role as a mere afterthought. And certainly the Smiths were far too mercurial, and Morrissey far too focused on finances, to offer anyone an equal share of anything (including the limelight) based on the idea of it being some sort of consolation prize.

  In reality, The Queen Is Dead was more musically complex than the albums that preceded it, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for Marr to emulate all his various parts onstage; in fact, as a result of his focus on the complex arrangements, his guitar often sounded quieter in concert than audiences might have expected. Marr, of course, was much loved for this finesse, but the thought of being able to bounce off of a second guitarist, to flesh out the live sound without simply relying on volume, had certainly become an appealing one.

  But the decision was not properly thought through. How was Gannon to fit in, for example, onstage, where the Smiths had always been perfectly symmetrical? And as a supposed fifth member, how was he to be paid? Would Marr and Morrissey reduce their own share of proceeds to 35 percent each, affording Gannon the same 10 percent as the rhythm section? Would Rourke and Joyce be asked to take an even lesser share to accommodate him? Or would Gannon be put on a flat wage, like a crew member? Did he need a contract confirming this, and should such a contract clearly express that he had no claim on song-writing? Within weeks of his first rehearsal, Gannon was recording a hit single as a member of the Smiths. Like the rhythm section alongside him, he had no clear idea how he was being recompensed.

  Eager to make up for lost time and afford The Queen Is Dead the maximum possible attention, Rough Trade and its licensees moved into promotional overdrive. To that end, Morrissey and Marr embarked, for the first time, on a visit to America, decamping to Los Angeles for several days with Rough Trade publicist Pat Bellis and current “manager” Matthew Sztumpf in attendance. Given the group’s renewed focus on the States, Sztumpf suggested that they meet with a business friend of his, Ken Friedman.

  Friedman was a tall, confident, garrulous, twenty-five-year-old Californian who, like Scott Piering before him, had started out promoting concerts in San Francisco. Specifically, in handling U2’s first show there in 1981, he had befriended that band’s manager, Paul McGuinness, who encouraged Friedman to follow a similar path. The spring of 1986 found him the highly successful American representative already for Simple Minds, UB40, and Shriekback. Of these, Simple Minds were far and away the most popular in America, having just launched into the commercial stratosphere with the number 1 American single “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” via its use as theme song for the hit John Hughes movie The Breakfast Club. The benefits of a musical tie-in with Hollywood were nothing new, of course, but the mid-1980s represented a moment when the two entertainment industries came to fully recognize the potential of cross-promotion, especially once it became apparent that the thirtysomething writer/director/producer John Hughes had somehow tapped the emotional zeitgeist of the current American teenage generation, or at least the part of it that went to see movies in droves and bought the associated soundtracks.

  This relationship was not always welcomed by the fans of bands—like the Smiths—who felt that “their” music, which was already catching on more rapidly than they might have liked due to exposure on MTV and the increasing popularity of college and new-music radio, was being misappropriated by the mainstream via Hughes’s hit films. The Breakfast Club offered a good example: a comedy of sorts, it told the story of five disparate high school students who spend the day in detention and ultimately find commonality. The denouement comes when the “basket case” character (played by Ally Sheedy)—an outsider, dressed in black, wearing baseball boots, certainly the only one of the five who looked like they might have been a fan of the Smiths or similar acts—is given a makeover by the “princess” character (Molly Ringwald), turning her into a conventionally pretty girl by which she suddenly becomes the object of desire for the “athlete” (Emilio Estevez). There is a clearly stated assumption that only by conforming like this to accepted mainstream values could the so-called basket case find so-called happiness.

  In the wake of The Breakfast Club’s runaway success, Hughes—a committed music fan—ensured that the soundtracks for his next two movies, Weird Science and Pretty in Pink, were heavily loaded with appropriately teen-friendly but somewhat left-of-center New Wave. Pretty in Pink was in fact named for a five-year-old song by the Psychedelic Furs, the British post-punk group whose modest success had seemed like a worthy goal for Mike Joyce back when he joined the Smiths. Molly Ringwald assumed the role this time of a poor high school girl, Andie, who works in a hip Chicago record store, Trax. Her best male friend is Duckie (Jon Cryer), himself a witty, alternative, Smiths type of guy, whose long-standing romantic yearning for Andie has always gone unrequited; she favors rich preppy Blane (Andrew McCarthy) instead. Duckie’s rejection is demonstrated in a scene where he lies, forlorn, in his rundown bedroom, listening to “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.” (It was not the only major piece of product placement for the band in Pretty in Pink; the Smiths were given their own section in the record racks at Trax, with a color poster of them from 1984 placed prominently on the stockroom door.) There is no denouement, no justice for Duckie: it is still sensitive rich guy Blane who gets together with Andie at the high school prom.6 To what extent any of the Smiths, especially the avid movie-watcher Morrissey, fol
lowed these nuances may never have been asked of them; it was probably enough at the point that Morrissey and Marr landed in Los Angeles, in the spring of 1986, that both the Pretty in Pink movie and its soundtrack were riding high in the charts (the latter on its way to a million-plus sales), and that the Smiths were winning new fans without having to do anything for it. Nor were they alone: the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, on which “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” served as the final song, additionally included New Order and Echo & the Bunnymen as well as the Psychedelic Furs. Their scene was bursting wide open.

  Sztumpf called on Friedman with the view that perhaps the American could represent the Smiths in the States while Sztumpf concentrated on the European side of their business. Friedman, with the American industry very much at his fingertips, had every reason to be intrigued by the highly credible (and teasingly commercial) possible addition to his roster. “I wasn’t like a groupie,” he recalled of his exposure to the Smiths at this point. “I didn’t know every song. I knew enough to know that they could have been huge. I knew the Smiths had that same formula that every great rock group has. That Peter Buck and Michael Stipe had, and Mick and Keith. It’s the faggy poetic lead singer and the cigarette-smoking, drug-taking, model-shagging guitar player. I thought, ‘These guys have that formula but they’re both so over the top.’ Johnny believes everything he reads about the Stones and the Who and Eric Clapton so he takes as many drugs as he reckons all these guys did. And Morrissey is the master manipulator of the press: he’s gay but he says he’s celibate, he takes it even further than Mick Jagger did, or Freddie Mercury. So I knew these guys were going to be huge—and in L.A., they already were huge.”

  Friedman and Marr shared similar personalities, and it was no surprise that they immediately hit it off, the former taking the latter on a tour of the musical landmarks of the city’s famed Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter scene. Marr then suggested Friedman meet with Morrissey, too, and after sharing an introductory drink at the hotel bar, those two went off on their own cultural tour of the city, this one taking in the famed Duck Soup bookstore and various Hollywood stars’ residences. Friedman got on well with Morrissey, too: “The fact that I wasn’t obsessed with him helped. Once he opened up, the campier he got, the more he wanted to know about old Hollywood, specifically Gloria Swanson and Marilyn Monroe. It was all divas.” By the end of the visit, Friedman was being touted as manager.

  “Ken was a big thinker and an ambitious person,” said Marr. “And saw that we could be big in the States, without a doubt. And he had some success, and he was young, too, and he was kind of maverick, and he was a very charming guy.” Shortly after returning to the UK, Matthew Sztumpf was let go. (“I wasn’t there long enough for royalties to be commissioned,” he told Johnny Rogan, “so I just billed them for my services. I’d fulfilled my purpose, but they paid me, and I enjoyed it while it lasted.”) Marr claimed that Sztumpf’s firing was not his decision. “I really liked Matthew. I remember being really embarrassed, it being really awkward. This mild-mannered guy was really unhappy about it. He came to me and demanded ‘Why?’ And I just said, ‘I can’t tell you.’ I didn’t know he was going to be hired and I didn’t know he was going to be fired.” If Marr was becoming increasingly frustrated by his partner’s capricious business decisions, he was still not willing to stand up to him on them—but in Ken Friedman, he now saw the potential for someone who could properly assume the difficult role of Smiths manager, and he intended to pursue this one to fruition.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-THREE

  This image of a typical Smiths fanatic being a creased and semi-crippled youth is s-l-i-g-h-t-l-y over-stretched … it’s not really true at all. Smiths concerts are really quite violent things—we even have people breaking their legs and backs. If the audience was a collection of withering prunes those things wouldn’t happen.

  —Morrissey, i-D, October 1987

  Time away from the public eye turned out to be the best thing possible for the Smiths. While a constant presence is always a good thing for a new band, a substantial break indicates a major group’s confidence that it is no longer only as good as its last hit, but as good now as its long-term reputation. And for all the fuss about hit singles and lack thereof, the Smiths’ reputation was still very much intact, as proven by the emphatic manner in which they ran away with the NME Readers’ Poll (Britain’s most prestigious) for 1985. Some fifteen months after appearing on the Oxford Road Show, the Smiths’ return to the live TV studio on the BBC’s Whistle Test on May 24, 1986, promoting their first single release in eight months and additionally unveiling the Smiths as a five-piece, served as the very definition of the term “eagerly awaited.”

  In its own way, their performance that night of “Bigmouth Strikes Again” (and, later in the show, “Vicar in a Tutu”) proved as powerful as that of “This Charming Man” on Top of the Pops in 1983, when a young Noel Gallagher had watched Johnny Marr and had his future decided for him by the experience. This time around, it was the turn of Andy Bell, who would join Gallagher in Oasis after many years in his own band, Ride, and Bernard Butler, who would co-lead the very Smiths-influenced group Suede; Butler videotaped the performance that night and watched it relentlessly, studying Marr’s technique in particular: “So many people thrash on the guitar, but his wrist is moving really gently,” he noted of how Marr tamed the typically masculine Gibson Les Paul guitar while Gannon, sandwiched between Rourke and Morrissey, fleshed out the sound on Marr’s Rickenbacker. All five members, even Mike Joyce, sported the casual rocker uniform of jackets and blue jeans, though Morrissey, with a tie done up to his collar and the hearing aid reaffixed to his left ear, had more the air of an overgrown schoolboy—until he began moving, at which point he came across as the consummate performer his fans knew him to be. Lights poured down on the group from every direction but in front. In all regards, the Smiths looked and sounded more like a major rock band than ever before. And, depending on perspective, they looked and sounded better for it too.

  Confidence in the new lineup had already been instilled at a long-overdue recording session earlier in the month, for which John Porter had returned as producer. This decision came as a shock and a disappointment at the time to Stephen Street, who knew he had just made a brilliant album with the band and could only conclude that maybe he was “slightly more Morrissey’s choice than Johnny’s choice to make records with.” Marr had been pleased with Porter’s work finishing off “Frankly, Mr Shankly” on short notice, and the pair had been working together again that spring on the new Billy Bragg album, Marr’s most serious bout of “moonlighting” to date, although not anything that Morrissey appeared to mind. (When Marr played his set piece “Walk Away Renée” in the studio, Bragg begged to record it and, rather than sing a cover version, wrote a spoken-word treatise that night about a youthful infatuation that finally ended when “she cut her hair and I stopped loving her.” It was a line that bore all the hallmarks of a Morrissey classic and would be remembered as one of Bragg’s finest lyrics.) But whether stated or not, the decision best reflected the understanding that while Street was an outstanding engineer who had enabled the Smiths to make the grade as an albums act, Porter was a phenomenal producer who had delivered them five UK top 30 singles in a row, and their most requested songs in America. This was no small matter given that they wanted to concentrate on their most emphatic and potentially commercial anthem to date.

  The chord structure for that song, “Panic,” was lifted right off of “Metal Guru,” the T. Rex single so beloved by Marr and Morrissey upon its release in 1972, back when John Porter was highly present on the glam scene himself as part of Roxy Music. The words, as always, had come together later in the day. Specifically, they were influenced by the events surrounding the Chernobyl disaster of April 26, when a Russian nuclear reactor had exploded and caught fire, and in typically secretive Soviet fashion, news of the catastrophe had been muzzled until a radioactive cloud caused alarm be
lls to ring, quite literally, at a nuclear plant in Sweden, 1,100 kilometers away, two days later. Smiths legend had it that when Morrissey and Marr first heard Radio 1 report on the disaster, at the latter’s house (presumably on April 28), the DJ Steve Wright followed up immediately with “I’m Your Man” by Wham!, a choice so blatantly incongruous that Morrissey finally had lyrical motivation for a song title he’d been kicking around for months. The anecdote might well be true, though “I’m Your Man” had been off the charts for several months already, and Morrissey hardly needed further provocation to attack Wright, whose highly ranked afternoon show treated all popular music as secondary to his madcap party format. (Scott Piering had reported, a year earlier, that both Wright and his producer “have openly expressed dislike of the Smiths in general.”) What really mattered about this anecdote was that Smiths fans had a backstory to a song that conjured up the image of an unnamed crisis unfolding through a roll call of British cities: London, Birmingham, Leeds, Carlisle, and later the rhythmic tumble of “Dublin, Dundee, Humberside.” In fact, only when he came up with the solution—“Burn down the disco/hang the blessed DJ”—did Morrissey appear to clarify the problem: that “the music they constantly play says nothing to me about my life.” From there it was obvious that he had found his hook and he hung the remainder of the song on it: “Hang the DJ,” repeated almost ad infinitum. It was Margaret on the Guillotine in half as many syllables, and just as powerful.

  “Panic” came together with great ease in the studio. Despite Porter recalling that Gannon “diplomatically stayed out of the way,” the teenager nonetheless played some of the key riffs on the recording. That was true too of the B-side, “The Draize Train”—the third (and, it would turn out, final) Smiths instrumental, for which Morrissey declined to write words because “I thought it was the weakest thing Johnny had ever done.” John Porter had always noted that his main creative contention with the Smiths singer was their markedly differing opinions of American black music, rhythm & blues in particular, and if it therefore offended Porter any to produce a song that called to burn down the disco, he (and Marr?) may quietly have sought satisfaction in recording a bonus B-side that presaged the shifting mood on many an underground British dance floor. At the Haçienda, Mike Pickering’s Friday night residency, “Nude,” now prominently featured an American variation on disco, “house music,” which had begun to make its presence felt with a new generation of Thatcher’s bastard children who felt that rock music said nothing to them about their lives. “The Draize Train” was vari-speeded upward to precisely the same tempo as this early house music—120 beats per minute—and alongside its various synthetic keyboard sounds that appeared to render this more than mere coincidence, initially included an additional pulse that could have made it a genuine contender for the Haçienda dance floor. Curiously, this effect was ultimately jettisoned for an entirely different sound, one that was equally close to its composer’s heart and much more pervasive in the mainstream at the time, that of electric guitar “noodling”—as close as Marr had yet come to filling out the vocal-free spaces in a Smiths composition with solos.