John Porter had every reason to feel fully satisfied with his own (renewed) standing in the Smiths camp. “Panic” had just become the group’s first top 20 hit in two years, very nearly making the top 10. (Unavailable to perform on Top of the Pops, the Derek Jarman film was used in the Smiths’ absence, much to their delight.) Porter was now looking forward to finishing off “Ask,” which he considered another classic in the making, albeit with a difficult final mix ahead of him. “There were five of these picking guitar parts, playing the whole way through,” he recalled. “And in the middle it was all going to disappear into a kind of wash—and you could hear seagulls. It was very complicated but I had it all written down. I had this map of where stuff would be and what was going to happen.” In the meantime, he had “tossed off” a rough mix for the band to listen to on their travels. In Los Angeles, as he recalled, Morrissey told him that he didn’t like the mix. “I said, ‘Well I haven’t mixed it yet.’ Which shows how much communication there was between everybody! And he said, ‘Oh, well I’ve asked Steve Lillywhite to mix it.’ I was like ‘Oh … that’s … he can’t mix … this is our great creation.’ ”
It was equally evident of the Smiths’ communication process that Steve Lillywhite recalled that the approach “came from Johnny, not Moz.… I had never met Moz,” while Marr insisted that the idea “definitely didn’t come from me.” (Geoff Travis owned up: “I’m sure that was us [who] got Steve Lillywhite involved.”) Regardless, Porter had expected that the mix would necessitate several hands on an automated desk and was disappointed to discover that Lillywhite mixed it on his home studio in Ealing, using Marc Wallis, Porter’s former assistant who had helped make “How Soon Is Now?” such a masterpiece. Wallis recalled, “We had no automation at Steve’s studio, so we set it up in sections, all hands-on, proper old-fashioned mixing. It was just a day’s work. Wasn’t a big deal.” Lillywhite confirmed as much: “Considering how big they were and the opportunity I could have had, I should have booked a proper studio and done it properly. But I did it in my own home studio by hand. And actually it turned out pretty good.”
It did. Though famous at the time for producing the arena rock of U2 and Simple Minds, Lillywhite had come up through the post-punk ranks with the likes of Siouxsie & the Banshees, XTC, and the Chameleons, and his mix of “Ask” was perfectly restrained. All the same, he said, “I do remember Johnny saying he loved the mix but that the middle bit with the seagulls wasn’t how he’d envisaged it. But I don’t know what his vision was for that.” Which was precisely John Porter’s objection. Porter was similarly perturbed to hear that “Golden Lights” had been farmed out to Stephen Street, who inexplicably sent Morrissey’s voice through a flange effect and buried the bossa nova guitars, rendering the song every bit as atypical as any of the similarly LinnDrum-accompanied instrumentals and, by general consensus, the only true disaster in the band’s entire catalog. The Smiths had never previously excused themselves from the final mixes of a single and would not make the same mistake again.
Porter was not the only unhappy Englishman in Los Angeles. Geoff Travis had heard through the grapevine about the EMI deal and, rather than keep talking through lawyers, decided to confront the group about it in person. He got his chance at the soundcheck at Irvine Meadows. Steven Baker from Warner Bros. was with him, backstage, where he recalled “the band walking by, the question being popped, and somebody turning around and affirming it.” Travis may have taken this casual affirmation in stride; after such a long and protracted battle with the band for their loyalty, it probably seemed par for the course that, just as everything seemed to be progressing perfectly, the group would sign to EMI regardless. Steven Baker, however, by nature a mild-mannered man, expressed his feelings by punching the backstage wall in frustration—an act that caught Johnny Marr by surprise and gave him cause to wonder whether EMI’s American executives would prove similarly passionate about the band.
The Smiths, said Baker of his reaction, “certainly have a right to their feeling to what Sire/Warner Brothers/Rough Trade were doing for them, and what they needed to do next to survive as a group. If the deal’s up, they get to do what they want. And if they didn’t think we deserved to resign them, that’s their business. But you can still have your feelings about a group. And that goes beyond whether they can sell any records or not. It’s just the pleasure of working with a band, and the band then saying, ‘We want to get a divorce.’ I normally take things in stride, but that really pissed me off.”
Seymour Stein, when the news reached him, was apoplectic—until it appeared that when the Smiths had renegotiated their contract with Rough Trade, reducing the term by one album, the label did not do likewise with Sire, to the American company’s possible benefit. “In the process of making this deal I discovered that there was one extra album owed to Sire,” confirmed EMI’s David Munns. “So the idea was that we would sign this four-album deal but the first album would not include North America and they would give it to Seymour. But I said, ‘No give it to me, and I will license it to Seymour.’ They agreed but they didn’t tell Seymour. So when this all came out, Seymour was very upset. He was yelling down the phone at me but that was too bad. He didn’t want to get his last album through EMI. I just told him to fuck off.” It was probably mere coincidence, but The Queen Is Dead peaked in America, at number 70, the same week that the American label found out the band had jumped ship.
Most of this was beyond the Smiths’ purview while in California. Of greater immediate concern was the breakdown in trust and communication between the band and Sophie Ridley. Mike Hinc ended up staying on the road to try to mitigate the remaining dates—of which there were many. The fact that Johnny Marr and Hinc did not get along made the agent’s task that much harder.
Understandably, given so much chaos and confusion, Craig Gannon retreated further into his shell. His girlfriend, the first truly serious relationship of his life, had come over to join him in Los Angeles, and the pair made a point of going to the beach on their own. Once the tour resumed its travels, heading across the Southwest and then the Deep South, Gannon found himself distanced from Marr, who was seen to snap at the new recruit. Marr confirmed that he and Craig “did have a couple of fallouts,” but that they were because “he damaged a hotel room,” adding, “That wasn’t a sacking offense, but it pissed me off.”
Frightened of flying at the best of times, Gannon increasingly opted to travel overnight on the crew bus, further isolating himself. (This also gave him the opportunity to join some of the crew in eating steak, away from the band’s no-meat policy.) Gannon’s gradual disappearing act reached an almost inevitable conclusion when he was inadvertently left behind in New Orleans, something only ascertained when the entourage checked in at the airport. (Mike Hinc stayed behind to travel up to Tampa-St. Petersburg with him on a later flight.) The previous night, the group had played a small university auditorium in New Orleans, where the promoter would later recall two specific and dramatically conflicting memories of the backstage scene prior to the show: his doing cocaine with Johnny Marr in his office, and then watching Mike Hinc have to physically accompany an exhausted Morrissey on to the stage to perform. (“The amount of time it took to get Morrissey onstage was getting longer and longer,” said Grant Showbiz. “There was this great game he’d play of wanting to be asked fifteen times, if it’d been fourteen the night before. Johnny was like ‘Let’s Rock!’ and Mozzer’d be ‘Well, somebody’s gotta ask me another seven times.’ ”)
In short, the wheels had come off the tour.
“The schedule we had was unrealistic, it would break any man,” said Andy Rourke. “We were all tired. And when you get tired you lean on things like drink and drugs. We were all becoming crazy. We were going insane. But nobody was telling the other person that they were going insane. So everybody was going quietly insane on their own. And then there came a breaking point.”
“It wasn’t just ‘I’m tired,’ ” said Marr. “Everyone was very upset.
When there’s too much alcohol and drugs around, things get very melodramatic.”
Following the show in St. Petersburg, there were only four concerts left: Miami, Atlanta, Nashville, and the sold-out finale at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, one of the most magnificent seated venues in America and an opportunity for the Smiths to end the tour in triumph. For Morrissey and Marr, the only ones making the decisions, it may as well have been a hundred shows; they simply couldn’t see that far ahead.
“We were just burned out,” recalled Marr. “Burned, burned out. And that’s all there was to it. Looking at it philosophically, we were in a position to deliver on performances and tour at a certain level, but again, the perennial issue: not having management meant that we didn’t have the support setup to get us through it. It’s amazing that we got as far through that tour as we did. Because when you’ve got the right tour manager, and input from the record company, it’s very hard. But when you don’t have the right tour manger, and no input from the record company, and you’re inexperienced, and young at that level, with no guidance, things are going to give. And where guidance would have come in, would have been: ‘First off, go to bed now.’ ‘No, really, we’ve got to stop and get some food.’ ‘Stop drinking so much.’ ‘Hey, look, that guy’s feeling a little bit sensitive, turn the music down, chill out, and watch a movie on the bus.’ Just those things that you know from a bit of maturity.… But we were all pretty headstrong, and the thing is … young guys don’t look after themselves very well. And they definitely don’t look after each other very well.”
“You can only ever get in debt with sleep; you can never get in credit,” observed John Featherstone, who agreed with Marr’s assertion that “the degree of exhaustion was largely to do with lack of management.” As Featherstone saw things, “There’s a natural tension between the promotion folks pushing—and the band’s management pushing back. From a PR person’s perspective, their metrics of success is that if you can get the band on the phone, on the radio, on TV, 24/7, then you’re doing your job. And a lot of the pushback comes from management. There was none of that pushback going on. I remember them doing [publicity] stuff at all ridiculous hours of day and night.”
And just as there was no one to push back against label demands, there was no one to push them forward to the end of the tour, to cancel all remaining interviews if need be, promise them a holiday when they got back, offer all sorts of bonuses and incentives, but to let them know that these four shows mattered. As Featherstone put it, “It turned into ‘It’s just four more shows, it’s no big deal.’ ”
“We weren’t seeing the complete picture there,” admitted Marr, years later. All he knew at the time was, “I didn’t want to complete the tour.” By his own confession, he had driven himself to complete and total sickness. It had never been uncommon for him to throw up before taking to the stage out of pure nervous energy, but in America he had then taken to consuming alcohol during the gigs, on an empty stomach. It was, he explained, partly out of a “want to calm the nerves down, partly out of relief at the end of the shows. Because from the halfway point, I was just really relieved. So by the end of them, the crowd had worked me up, the event had worked me up, and I’d worked myself up so much.” Marr later figured he was downing at least a bottle of Rémy Martin a night, and the post-show party typically continued through all hours back at the hotel. Though he was hardly alone in his indulgences (Rourke confessed to drinking equal amounts of Rémy, and Gannon admitted that he and the rhythm section typically closed out the bar every night), the others were not carrying Marr’s weight of responsibility. Andy Rourke recalled being brought to Johnny’s room at one point by Angie, to find his friend “in bits on the bed, feeling really ill, dead upset.” Rourke worried that Marr was having “a nervous breakdown” but, much like the others with regard to his own heroin problems, “didn’t know what to do.” Angie, apparently, did, and Marr increasingly came to rely on her for sustenance and support, and even for elements of tour management. “She had a credit card and good sense, and she was on the case.”
Morrissey, though he avoided the worst of his playing partners’ excesses (“I never heard the word [cocaine] mentioned,” he insisted in 1989 of the Smiths on tour), was not beyond the occasional bout of hedonism himself. There were frequent visits to the hotel bar, the rare sight of him smoking a cigarette, and a drunken onstage conversation with Marr where the pair admitted they didn’t know what song they were playing. And Morrissey, hampered already by the fact his preferred lifestyle was at odds with that of the rock ’n’ roll tour, was under no less public, personal, and professional pressure than Marr. He had become a demigod in the States to rival his “spokesman” reputation in the UK, and he had done his best to live up to expectations, throwing himself across the stage like a dervish every night, exalting in the acclaim but simultaneously working for it; he’d challenged security when they wouldn’t let kids up to dance or to the front of the hall, sometimes physically; he’d conducted more interviews than made sense, and all without any real attention or assistance from anyone but his security man, Jim Connolly.6 When Marr declared his inability to continue the tour, Morrissey was not able, and perhaps not willing, to convince him otherwise.
“Normally you could give Morrissey a reason to continue,” said Mike Hinc, “like, ‘There’s four sold-out shows, and huge lawsuits if we don’t play them without reason.’ Morrissey would usually say, ‘Let’s do it.’ But none of the band wanted to do it. The wives certainly didn’t want to do it.” (Hinc, like many involved in the touring process, was not enthused by the group’s partners coming on the road.) “There was just no one [who] wanted to go on to do it. Someone, somewhere said they weren’t going to make any money from the tour … nobody knew at that time because it was something in process and the figures hadn’t been done. Because of that, it was a case of, if they weren’t going to make any money why should they continue? And there was the question of why had they done all this? Whether those reasons were chemical, alcohol, or just sheer fatigue I don’t know; the energy had run out of the door.”
The final decision was made by Morrissey and Marr at the group’s hotel in Tampa, Florida, the day after the St. Petersburg show. Everyone else in the entourage was excluded from this conversation. John Featherstone recalled “sitting on the beach at St. Petersburg with Grant [Showbiz] and Phil [Powell], just not wanting to go back to the hotel. Because stuff was going on and we didn’t really understand it; it really felt like there was some very serious stuff going on here. It was just incredibly uncomfortable. We had lost the model of the old forum, of everyone sitting down and saying, ‘How do we figure this out?’ There was this strange dynamic that changed in the end with the addition of Craig, from my perspective. [He] tipped the balance of the band more towards Mike and Andy’s type of ‘lads out for a laugh,’ and less in terms of the balance of Johnny and Morrissey’s higher goals—without judgment to Mike and Andy. I think what happened there was, that tended to fragment and fracture the band more than it had done in the past. I don’t blame Craig for that; it’s not his fault, it’s just a factor of him being around. Certainly the way I recall it, there was a tendency for Mike and Andy and Craig to hang out, and Johnny to be on his own a bit, and Morrissey to be on his own a bit—rather than it be a gang of four of them.” It was something of a familiar rock ’n’ roll story: the communication that had seemed so natural when everyone traveled together in a Renault splitter van had disappeared amid a world of limousines, air shuttles, private hotel rooms—and additional musicians. As a result, said Featherstone, “It almost felt like Johnny and Morrissey were daring each other not to play Radio City.”
“I wish we’d played it,” said Marr of the show’s intended finale many years later. “For the significance. Because we were conquering everywhere else, and it would have been another great story to tell.” At the time, he admitted, “I don’t think I personally recognized the significance of playing Radio City, and it’s almost
news to me that there were other gigs after Florida. Because we ended the tour in Florida.”
While Morrissey and Marr were coming to this conclusion, out on the beach Andy Rourke went for a paddle in the ocean to cool off—only to return to the shore screaming. Initially he thought he’d stood on some glass, given the jarring pain and the fact that when he went to the shower on the beach, he saw blood spurting out of his ankle in rhythm with his pulse. Then he was told that he’d been stung by a stingray, and advised to seek emergency treatment immediately; if the stinger was embedded in his leg, he was told, it could kill. He recalled the agony: “The pain went up my leg, then up both legs, then it hit my balls, and it felt like I’d been punched in the balls. Then it went up, and my heart started beating fast and when it hit my head … I thought I was going to die.”
Mike Hinc helped rush Rourke to the hospital, where the vagaries of the American medical system meant that, without insurance details or a credit card immediately at hand (the bass player had traveled in his swimsuit), he was left to fend for himself with the pain until someone else came from the hotel with the paperwork. Once the insurance issues were finally settled, Rourke was given a tetanus shot, and his foot placed in a bowl of warm water, assured that it would draw out the sting in half an hour; he was understandably frustrated not to have been given such straightforward advice an hour earlier. It all seemed a perversely typical bout of drama to accompany the one that was taking place back at the hotel—until the doctor on duty told Rourke not to stand on his injured foot for a few days for any length of time, and Mike Hinc immediately asked for official medical documentation to that effect. The Smiths now had a viable reason—albeit an excuse—to cancel the final four dates. “And that’s what we used for the insurance company,” recalled Hinc. “That’s why nobody got sued for it.”
A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths Page 53