CENTERSTAGE

CENTERSTAGE

MA BELLE AMIE

THE SMITHS Fox Theater, Detroit August 14, 1986

by Bill Holdship

It all boils down to the collapse and decay of the British Empire. You could blame it on Margaret Thatcher. Or on Joy Division. Or on dreary Manchester and Northern England. Whatever the symbol, it has everything to do with the sorry state of Great Britain. But where the Sex Pistols were about rage and anger, the Smiths are about resignation. God save the Queen, snarled Rotten. Screw that, thinks Morrissey. The Queen is dead.

This was overwhelmingly evident when the Smiths closed their short but powerful set with the title track from their new LP, using the album’s morbid cover as a stage backdrop, while Morrissey danced like a klutz imitating a pretzel, and held a “The Queen Is Dead” placard not unlike Joey Ramone’s “Gabba! Gabba! Hey!” sign. The overall effect—haunting music, moody lighting, stark portrait, rock ’n’ roll band, village “idiot”—had an effect akin to Edvard Munch’s The Scream painting or the cover of Joy Division’s Closer LP: frightening, depressing but strangely fascinating...and draining, though the latter had something to do with the lack of air conditioning in a hot hall.

And yet the audience—ranging from mohawked cadets to Benetton junkies plus loads of Morrissey clones— continued dancing, not to mention jumping onstage to touch their hero. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least 50 people made it up before the end of the second encore. The girls screamed and squealed when Morrissey removed his shirt, as he danced, teased and flaunted his sexuality a lot more than you’d expect from someone who claims to be “celibate.” They even screamed and danced and tried to get onstage when he sang the slow “I Know It’s Over” for the first encore.

And I can see how, if I were a young college student and had just broken up with a girlfriend, I might’ve very easily related to that song’s lyrics which equate a romantic break-up with death. But, you see, Morrissey seems to equate decay with everything around him, be it love or McDonald’s hamburgers. From the time the Smiths opened with “Still III” until they closed their second encore with “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” Morrissey’s lyrics were a celebration of depression.

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I mean, good God, the only other stage backdrop used during the course of the show was a cemetary entrance for “Cemetry Gates.” Taken in conjunction with the recent success of Robert Smith and the Cure, it makes you think that there must be a lot of depressed kids out there in the rock audience today, that is if they even listen to and identify with the lyrics.

Morrissey is a kook, plain and simple— though he’s much, much more manipulative than he’d want you to believe. His mental state seems a bit unhealthybeing alone doesn’t have to mean misery or even loneliness, which is one of many things you can learn from a good shrink—and he often succeeds in passing off self-centeredness as “sensitivity,” which is no small talent in itself. But let’s not forget that rock ’n’ roll has often thrived around kooks. Plus: Morrissey does have a sense of humor—that was obvious, ironically enough, the first time I heard “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” “This song was made famous by Whitney Houston,” he said while introducing “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side,” and he ended the show by playing a soprano recording of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone”—so let’s chalk him up as, say, a Jim Morrison (or James Dean) for the psychotic ’80s, and leave it at that, OK?

Then there’s the music—which has never seemed to gel for me on their first two “legitimate” LPs the way it does on the Hatful Of Hollow collection. Unfortunately, the band only played three songs from that LP, their “greatest hits” album, so to speak. Fortunately, The Queen Is Dead is the Smiths’ best and most well-conceived real LP to date, perhaps one of the best records of the year—and excepting “Meat Is Murder” and “I Want The One I Can’t Have,” the thrust of the concert was material from the new LP (though they skipped “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others,” my personal fave and Morrissey’s funniest song ever).

The Smiths are a real rock ’n’ roll band in a classic line-up sense, and you gotta at least respect them for that. They disdain synthesizers, hate videos, and “Panic,” their new anti-deejay song, was one of the highlights of the show and arguably the Smiths’ best composition thus far. They are an amazingly prolific band (which makes one wonder why they didn’t do a longer show). And they have rock roots popping up all over the place. This was especially evident when the band went immediately from “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” with its Marvin Gaye/“Hitch Hike” by way of Lou Reed/“There She Goes Again” riff into the Bo Diddley-derived “How Soon is Now.” You can hear traces of everything from the Kinks (“Frankly Mr. Shankly”) to the Velvet Underground to the Monkees (listen to “What Difference Does It Make?” and tell me it isn’t the same riff Boyce & Hart used for “Saturday’s Child”) in their melodies. They performed the music admirably, and the addition of a second guitarist to handle the overdubs Johnny Marr plays on vinyl made them sound all the better.

So I’ll give them an “A” for music, and—despite The Queen Is Dead—say they still need some improvement on attitude (there was a bit of arrogance and audience teasing on display here), even though a majority of the crowd probably couldn’t have cared less. They simply came to dance.