The Smiths, "I Know It's Over"

Late one night during my senior year of high school, I was driving down East Market Street in Warren with two of my best friends, Brad and Mark, in the car.  Brad was riding shotgun, and Mark was afloat in the back—that is, not in one seat or the other, but moving from side to side as he felt appropriate, as the car trundled down the road.  At least this is what I remember.  I was doing probably about 40 mph when Brad hit the Eject button on the car’s cassette player.  Less than a second later, we were at a dead stop, pulled over by the side of the road.  I had hit the brakes, hard.

I wrote a minute ago that this happened late in our senior year of high school, because that context matters.  Brad, Mark, and I had been an inseparable trio for three years, and I had known and loved them each as brothers for far longer than that.  I’d met Mark at age ten, when he’d moved in from Canada to the house across the street from me on Red Oak Drive.  A couple years later my family finished building a house on the other side of town, four doors down from Brad and his two brothers.  Mark and I had drifted apart for a few years after this move, during which time Brad and I had become close friends.  Mark had found his way back to us, I dunno, sometime during my sophomore year.  And as I say, we had been inseparable.  But by this time we knew each other a bit too well.  Our tics were tiresome, our jokes were old—college loomed ahead of us on the horizon: something new, wide open, with big possibilities.  The weight of this town, with its weekend parties we’d first hear about Monday morning, with the girls who did and didn’t (mostly didn’t) care for us, was dragging us down.  I don’t remember what we’d been up to on that particular evening, but most likely we had spent it in one or the other of my or Brad’s finished basement, watching yet another Bill Murray movie we’d rented from Blockbuster Video with a handful of our other regulars in the gang.  Or maybe we’d stayed up to watch Letterman.

In any case, it was just another night in a string of nights going back three years, during the course of which we’d fucked around and figured out to a limited extent who we were and what we stood for, but by then all this was known information—covered ground.  We were running out of these nights, and I think, too, we were looking four, five months into a future when we’d be elsewhere, separated.  Breaking off for good, potentially.  We were grappling with what all that meant, and at the same time we were maybe just a little fed up: with Warren, Ohio, with Caddyshack, and with each other, definitely.  Which was why Brad, in what amounted to a first-degree breach of known shotgun protocol, suddenly and without comment (at least initially) ejected the Smiths tape I had playing on my car radio.  Which gesture in turn precipitated my near-instantaneous slamming of the brakes. 

Mark lurched forward, grabbed hold of the two bucket seats in front of him, and tipped himself back into a resting state.  Brad pulled the cassette tape over his right shoulder, out of reach of my grasping hand.  I push-buttoned free of my seat belt.

“Put it back in,” I instructed.  It seems likely that there had been a dispute between us earlier in the night—possibly over the choice of the Blockbuster rental, which was always a source of friction between the Brads back then.  As I consider now how quickly Brad and I assumed battle postures, it makes sense that there might already have been a conflict simmering here: resolved several hours ago, to all appearances, or at least let drop, but we still had a bad taste in our mouths.

“No,” Brad said.

“Put the tape,” I paused for effect, “back in.”

“I’m tired of listening to nothing but that mopey shit.”

Looking back on this from thirty years’ distance, I can see that Brad very likely had a point here.  I had been playing nothing but the Smiths in that car for months.  Maxell C90 cassettes with full LPs copied onto them from CD, one album to a side (Side A: Meat Is Murder, Side B: The Queen Is Dead), or in the case of Rank, the whole C60 given over to the one live album.  From time to time I subbed in other dubbed cassettes—Side A: Cake by the Trash Can Sinatras; Side B: Crawdaddy by the Darling Buds—but the Smiths were the meat and potatoes.  A solid 70% of the mileage I put on my car that year had accrued against a soundtrack consisting of songs composed by Morrissey and Marr.  A reasonable person had good cause to complain.  In the time since, other friends have advised me that Yeah, the Smiths thing in your car was a bit much.

But in that moment, in explaining the action he’d taken, Brad had only compounded the problem.  It wasn’t enough that he had ejected my tape from my car radio.  Now he was casting aspersions on the Smiths.  Right away Mark saw that the situation had escalated, and he snapped to attention.  Barely five minutes from getting dropped off home for the night, but now he was pulled over on the side of the road and right smack in the middle of something.

“Guys guys guys guys guys,” he pleaded.  “Stop.  It’s not worth it.”

“Put it back in.”

“Drive the car.”

“Put the tape back in.”

“Drive the car.”

“Guys guys guys guys guys—”

I don’t remember how this got resolved.  I feel like if I called Brad tomorrow, and then Mark the next day, I could get two different answers about what happened next.  It’s more likely they don’t remember, either.  Truth be told, I’m surprised that the three of us aren’t still sitting in that car, in that frozen moment of time, with Brad and I each refusing to give in, and Mark frantically trying to work out a peace, displaying a YOU MUST CHILL level of anxiety and concern that to any outsider would have seemed disproportionate to the stakes of this dispute, but was in fact perfectly measured and appropriate here.

This was 1991.  I was seventeen, clumsy, and shy.  Morrissey, Marr, Rourke and Joyce (and occasionally Gannon) meant the world to me.  And my closest friend—Brad would later be the best man at my wedding—had chucked them out of my tape player and declared their works, which in that moment I might have declared to be the single most important lifeline of my teenage years, to be “mopey shit.”  I can smile about it now, as they say (Apple Music, Spotify), but at the time it was terrible.

Where did all this come from?  How had we—how had I—arrived at this place?

Let’s rewind the tape.

My working hypothesis about the Smiths is that everyone who has ever heard their music has hated them on the first listen.  Maybe the first ten listens.  I know I did.  My friend Cheri put “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” (Apple Music, Spotify) on the back end of a copy of the Cure’s Standing on a Beach that she’d dubbed for me, as there was room at the end of the tape.  “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” (Apple Music, Spotify) featured on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, and Sire Records had put the B-side “Work Is a Four-Letter Word” (Apple Music, Spotify) on its Just Say Yes compilation.  “Girlfriend in a Coma” (YouTube) played regularly on 120 Minutes on MTV.  It seemed like Morrissey and Marr were cropping up everywhere, hanging awkwardly around the edges of the in-crowd that truly had my attention: the Cure, INXS, O.M.D., Depeche Mode.  The thing was, Morrissey’s crooning voice and sophisticated—let’s go ahead and say it: pretentious—lyrics didn’t sit well with me.  It was all too much.

Then for some reason I took the plunge and bought that live album, Rank, on CD. 

Critics love the Smiths, but they don’t love Rank.  Five-star ratings abound for Smiths records on AllMusic, but Rank gets only three.  Pitchfork gives Rank a weak 5.4 rating, calling it “inessential” and “a contractually obligated bit of barrel-scraping,” after awarding The Queen Is Dead and Hatful of Hollow the full 10 points that Pitchfork reserves for masterworks. 

For me, though, Rank is the Smiths record I go back to, time and again.  The recording was pulled from the sound desk of the Kilburn Ballroom in London on October 23, 1986 (bootleg video here).  It’s a powerful two-guitar assault: Johnny plays lead like his mop-top is on fire and Craig Gannon fills in all the remaining white space.  Andy and Mike bring a real kick, too, on bass and drums.  And front and center on the mike is Morrissey, howling, grunting, gurgling, scatting, yodeling: bringing the heat by any means necessary.  The Smiths are a rock ‘n’ roll force on this record.  The curated and gentle small-room sound of the studio recordings—and The Queen Is Dead in particular—is decidedly off the table.  You can hear punk rock influences in this, alongside the rockabilly, sixties pop, and everything else.  This album didn’t just open the door to all my Smiths-binging that followed: it blew it clear off the hinges.

The knock on the Smiths’ music is indeed that it is “mopey shit,” and I won’t argue otherwise.  Themes of loneliness and alienation are central to many, if not most, of their songs.  But consider the alternative: pop music in the early 1980s.  Song after song after song about dances and parties, flash clothes and flirting and oh, you look so good, baby.  That music said nothing to me about my life.  Burn down the disco, hang the DJ (Apple Music, Spotify).  Whereas Moz sang for all of us who were on the outside looking in, asking the question: why not me? 

It’s important to note: mopey shit was just one of the Smiths’ active ingredients, though, and while it’s absolutely the mope that gives them a foothold in the consciousness of any teenager who feels off-center and in the margins, there’s a difference between a foothold and a grip.  And it was the rest of the formula that put me in their grip.  It was the sharp wit and one liners, the literary-ness, the sarcasm, and more than anything the way Morrissey puts everything on the line that made the Smiths so compelling.  Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath: meet Oscar Wilde.  In the spotlight, belting out every last preoccupation and grievance that comes to mind with commitment, perfect diction, and clever storytelling, Moz was the standard bearer for every awkward, bookish kid who felt he had as much a right to be heard as anyone else.  It’s a real trick, taking the mike and strutting on stage, singing about your criminally vulgar shyness.  But Morrissey did it and was credible.  Whatever you might think about him, then or now, you can’t say he’s not genuine.

If you glommed on to the Smiths as a teenager, you were probably grasping for drama and overstating the Romantic sweep of your living conditions.  I’ll own that.  Few people in this world would have called me an underdog, back in the day.  Still, though: big picture aside, teens construct their own hierarchies and systems of power, and my gang and I were decidedly not players in that space.  Our rational minds understood that these rules about inclusion and exclusion were stupid and fake, but at the same time they felt pretty goddam real, because we lived with them all day long.  In that respect it never hurt to hit Play on the tape deck and hear a voice agree with you that all of this sucked.  And if that voice should tell you moreover that you’re better than this—you’re with us, well, it might actually even help.  And so for me the Smiths were more than sympathetic; they were uplifting.

Years later, having aged out from under the rules, and from an adolescent’s maddeningly narrow sense of <What Matters> and wildly distorted sense of <How Much>, I can listen to and appreciate these songs on a different level.  What I took for Morrissey’s literal position on a range of matters may actually have been—in many cases, not always—ironic.  There’s a real sophistication and nuance here amid the man’s many emphatic pronouncements.  This makes sense: when he composed these lyrics, Morrissey had one foot in adolescence and another in adulthood.  It’s that “Does he mean it? All of it?” ambiguity that makes songs I’ve played hundreds of times over the course of my life rich and interesting, whenever I come back to them.

The song I’ve picked today is “I Know It’s Over” (Apple Music, Spotify).  It is the very quintessence of mopey shit.  Oh, Mother: I can feel the soil falling over my head.  That’s downright melodrama: enough so that Adult Me is reading a wink into it, whether or not Morrissey’s own eye is involved.  Nevertheless, it is also beautiful and powerful, a combination for which I am always a sucker.  It has signature Johnny Marr guitars on it, the drums are fun as hell—I play this a ton on my set down in the basement—and it’s just the right track, I think, for this post.  Other readings from Rank include the ranging and political “The Queen Is Dead” (Apple Music, Spotify), evocative country-English “Rusholme Ruffians” (Apple Music, Spotify), Wilde-beats-Keats “Cemetry Gates” (Apple Music, Spotify), and show-closer “Bigmouth Strikes Again” (Apple Music, Spotify), which is an absolute barnburner.  Oh, hell: play this whole record all the way through, and you won’t go wrong.

CODA: I’m writing all this out in the Year of Our Lord 2023.  Last summer Morrissey played a four-date residency at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.  Mark somehow pulled tickets to the last of those shows.  He sent photos.  A few months later, Brad texted his son, Mark, and me video he’d taken of Johnny Marr opening for the Killers in Detroit.  Following up on this, Brad said Johnny played a terrific set, but in his heart of hearts he was jealous that Mark had gone to the Moz gig in Vegas.