If I were forced to pick a favorite record of The Smiths, it’d probably be Reel Around The Fountain, the penultimate track on “Hatful Of Hollow.” (Ordinarily I would put the quotation marks around the song and not the album, but the cover of Hatful Of Hollow just so happens to state its name in quotes and so I thought it necessary to refrain from putting quotes around “Reel Around The Fountain.” I can’t help myself…I’m a converse anti-symmetrist. It’s like a religion with me.) The guitar is so feathery and yet so incisive, the bass alternately scrappy and pretty, always confident. And, of course, Morrissey carries the melody with panache. I like the drumming, too, sputtering and a bit nervous. Great song.
When I was a teenager in the 80s listening to vinyl, I preferred the version of “Reel Around The Fountain” that was featured as the first track on The Smiths’ self-titled album. Whereas the version of the song on Hatful Of Hollow was basically a live performance (it was a John Peel session), the version that opened the eponymous LP was a relatively slick studio production. Morrissey’s voice is given echoey treatments, there are subtle but fancy sprinklings of piano, the tempo is a bit slower (and a lot more even) than on the Hatful Of Hollow recording…the studio recording on The Smiths is definitely the more professional and more adult-sounding version of the song. I suppose that as a teen I craved the measured gait and smooth gloss of adulthood, but now that I’m middle-aged I get a kick out of the rawer, more energetic, more frantic sounds of youth.
I discovered The Smiths when I was 14, and it was a pretty big deal. Like all adolescents, or at least most of them, I yearned to be cool, and I imagined that, since I felt so uncool, coolness must feel the opposite of how I felt. And I was a depressive youth, given to bouts of melancholy and fits of outright despair, and so I thought that the cool people must be the happy, self-assured, easygoing, satisfied-with-life people and that the whiny malcontents such as myself were all a bunch of losers and write-offs. But my worldview changed with The Smiths, who were so clearly cool and yet so unabashedly mopey and pathetic. The Smiths taught me that I needn’t fear an inability to be content, that happiness was no prerequisite for coolness. This world may not be right for me, but I could be just what this world needed, the coolest thing in town. I could be the bee's knees, all the bees' knees.
The Smiths are a particular favorite of mine, but I could go on and on about the 80s rock and pop that helped to forge my identity and values and attitudes about life (REM, The Jesus And Mary Chain, etc.). I just love 80s rock! I wish I could go back, like Marty McFly went back from the 80s to the 50s (well, not exactly like that...I'd want to get younger as I traveled backwards in time). I realize that the 80s weren’t really the best decade for rock ’n’ roll (that distinction would go to the 70s or the 60s, I guess) and I realize that an hour of Mozart or Schubert or Beethoven is worth more than all of rock ’n’ roll put together but, still, 80s rock is the music that has most touched my heart.
Were you born between 1960 and 1975? If so, I would like to hear your story about how 80s rock inspired/moved/influenced you. Please post your memoir as a comment to this blog entry. And don’t be shy or embarrassed. This is a no-shame zone. Did you think that Bono and Sting were cool? Big deal. Who didn’t? I doesn’t make any sense now, of course, but those were weird times. Next to Ronald Reagan everyone seemed cool, and people with one-word names seemed extra cool. Did you pop your collar and wear epaulettes like Simon Le Bon did? Don’t worry about it! Go ahead and post pics if you want. It’s all good. It’s all, like, totally good.
