Aaron: With this entry, we hop back across the pond to England as we take up the massively influential band The Smiths. The Smiths are a quintessential indie band. Formed in Manchester in 1982, they released four studio albums and three singles compilations - all on indie label Rough Trade Records - before breaking up in 1987 (in the US they were on Sire records, at the time a quasi-indie label with a Warners distribution deal).
Such a huge amount of material in a five-year window is only one indication of the passion, dedication, and artistic exploration that drove the band to become one of the most influential in rock history, indie or otherwise (for a hint of their influence, just check the wide array of artists who have covered their songs, from the expected, like Radiohead or Jeff Buckley, through the more eclectic, like Bobby Bare, Jr., Mojo Nixon, and Skream).
Such a huge amount of material in a five-year window is only one indication of the passion, dedication, and artistic exploration that drove the band to become one of the most influential in rock history, indie or otherwise (for a hint of their influence, just check the wide array of artists who have covered their songs, from the expected, like Radiohead or Jeff Buckley, through the more eclectic, like Bobby Bare, Jr., Mojo Nixon, and Skream).
Having said all that, I must admit to a healthy dose of trepidation on preparing this entry. As I’ve detailed elsewhere, I was a late comer to ‘80s indie music for many reasons, the main one being that a lot of it seemed to lack the . . . oomph . . . of the hard rock and classic rock I was listening to. I found my way in via older bands (The Velvet Underground) or the more rock-oriented indie bands of the ‘80s (The Replacements, REM) who could supply that oomph. The Smiths have always been another matter, and I’ve just got to go ahead and admit right up front that for a very long time I pretty much hated them. Definitely throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. By the ‘00s, as my tastes were broadening and the rigidity with which I’d approached music for so long was mellowing, I began to allow myself to appreciate The Smiths - in theory - while still not being able to say I actually liked them. I’ve had long conversations with fervent (and occasionally surprising) Smiths fans, sometimes aggressive, sometimes pretty even-keeled. I’ve read up on the band, come to love the sounds of guitarist Johnny Marr, and listened to fabulous Smiths covers by performers I really love.
But if I’m honest, it can still be hard for me to sit down, listen to more than 2 or 3 Smiths’ songs, and think, yeah, I get it. I love these guys!
So I landed on “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” not only a fabulous title, but a track whose many elements speak to a lot of the problems I’ve personally had with The Smiths over the years, but also highlights, I think, what makes so many people love them.
Before getting into the nitty gritty of the track itself, Lew, any general thoughts you have about The Smiths, your history with the band, how much you dig or don’t dig them?
Lew: Like a lot of people in our age group, I’ve been aware of The Smiths since 1986 or ‘87. And, I’d also say that my relationship with their music was somewhat conflicted for the first 15 years or so. My high school girlfriend was a huge fan of The Smiths, REM, The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, so I heard The Smiths regularly. And, I didn’t care much for them. At initial listen, it didn’t sound like anything to me - it seemed that there was nothing memorable about it at all. As we’ve discussed, the music I liked had big guitars, blinding solos, and singers who sang like they were baring their souls - even if the lyrics they were singing were pretty lightweight at times - which was well removed from what The Smiths were doing. (Also, in pure transparency, the beauty of lines about “spending warm summer days indoors/writing frightening verse to a bucktoothed girl from Luxembourg,” and the like, were over my head at the time.) As you say: lack of oomph. The fey, mannered approach to expressing teenage frustration, disappointment, and sadness was not for me. In a lot of respects, Axl Rose was singing about the same stuff, but he sounded more properly outraged by it all. (Years later, a British correspondent of mine referred to Guns n’ Roses as “America’s The Smiths,” if you can wrap your head around that.)
To complicate my perception further, my appreciation for metal was waning in favor of classic rock, which made my contempt for The Smiths even more self-righteous. Classic rock bands like Zeppelin and The Doors were already canonized - their achievements were a given (particularly with the late ‘80s nostalgia for the ‘60s). Both metal and indie bands - and rock music in general - suffered by comparison to music that American society had already designated as culturally valid. In retrospect, I wish I’d seen through the nostalgia of that mindset, but at the time, I lacked the perspective to do so. And, turning back to The Smiths, there was the issue that I still just didn’t dig the music that much. As a friend notably remarked at the time, “why listen to Morrissey, when you can listen to MorriSON?” Plenty of reasons, as it turns out, some of which we’ll get to.
As years went by, I didn’t think about The Smiths that much. But, moving in to the ‘00s, in the realization that grunge wasn’t the savior we had hoped for, I started looking at more textural music, and - maybe for the first time - really considering the sonic aspects of music from an analytical standpoint. There had been plenty of times in my listening history that I’d thought, “hey, that sounds cool,” but I was at a new plateau, for lack of a better word, in terms of my appreciation for the sounds themselves, and the artist’s intentionality in creating them. As Radiohead became a bigger shape on the horizon, I read about Brit pop - Blur, Oasis, Pulp, early Radiohead, Suede - and kept reading that The Smiths had been a crucial step in its development. So, I decided to give them another try - to improved results! Johnny Marr’s guitar playing and the sounds he chose, the wry bitterness of Morrissey’s lyrics, and his overtly not-rocking style of singing all sounded better to me than they had in the past. Their sound seemed exceptional in the sense that they sounded unusual, I guess, and I was finally in a place to hear that uniqueness. Plus, there were great hooks in the vocal melodies that I had completely overlooked in the past.
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| "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" single |
Aaron: Guns n’ Roses as America’s The Smiths is the weirdest, greatest thing I’ve heard in ages! It actually makes me want to call back for a sec to something I said above. Some of the most . . . “interesting” . . . Smiths fans I’ve met have been English blokes, sometimes pretty hard guys. And that always seemed not to compute to me. I don’t know if it had to do with the way the Smiths were packaged in the US, or what the first American Smiths fans I met were like, or my own biases. But in my US experience, most guys I met who were Smiths fans were Morrisey fans, and most of them were as much into the Morrisey image - things like the gender and sexuality performance aspect of his public persona - as they were into the band itself (I don’t recall anybody in my college years waxing awesome about Johnny Marr or the band’s really tight rhythm section). I think it has a lot to do with differences in music reception in the UK and US (which also connects to the different ways that Brit Pop and Grunge were packaged, promoted, and accepted by fans in the two places).
Which leads me to one other thing I wanted to say as a way of getting into the song. You say the lyrics didn’t speak to you in the way they described feeling trapped, bored, angry. I was exactly the same way. But the line that really first jumped out at me in “Heaven Knows” is one that’s repeated throughout: “I was looking for a job and then I found a job / and Heaven knows I’m miserable now.” That’s one of the best lyrics I’ve ever heard in terms of the way it dismisses the “pure value of work” concept that underlies so much neo-liberal capitalism. Maybe I’m stretching things a bit, but the line is so simple, while also encapsulating such a widely held personal experience with crystaline precision. But in being so widely held, the experience and the lyric that describes it become - to me at least - fairly subversive. And then to be mixed into a song that otherwise is so microcosmic in terms of its outlook and what it’s describing blows up the feeling even more.
In that sense, I can see where your friend with his GnR comparison is coming from. A lot of ‘80s metal responded to the economic hardships of the Reagan years by abandoning responsibility in favor of sex, drugs, rock n roll. But a lot of the bands - even the airier, hair bands - did have their down and out songs that attempted to describe the current social situation and their reactions to it.
So one of the things I’m really liking about The Smiths is how deftly Morrissey’s lyrics move back and forth between the very intimately personal and broader statements about politics and ideology. And he does so in ways that come off as an almost effortless stream-of-consciousness, but which really have a lot of thought behind their construction.
Lew: Yeah, I think the point about Americans becoming aware of The Smiths via Morrissey, and judging the band on whatever impression he made, is a good one. It makes sense in a lot of ways; he IS a charismatic, polarizing front man. But, there’s a case to be made that media plays a role in that, as well - the first few times I heard about The Smiths, Morrissey was the only member mentioned, and generally not for his songwriting. As I remember it, most people who were talking about The Smiths were likely to make at least an oblique reference to the lead singer’s sexual orientation. In essence, everyone that I talked to was convinced that he was gay - or maybe asexual. It’s worth vocalizing that, for all today’s fond looks back at the ‘80s, gay people were still subject to horrible opinions and treatment at the time. A lot of those prejudices are obviously still very active in American society, but in the ‘80s, they were regularly deployed in casual conversation - an effect of which saw Morrissey’s reputation, at least in the States, definitely suffer.
I don’t remember the criticism of Morrissey being based explicitly on his sexual orientation, but I do remember it coming up pretty frequently in discussions about The Smiths, with the upshot being that if Morrissey was gay, maybe he should stop being so whiny about it. It’s a little hard to parse some of that, because there is probably a case to be made that for all of Morrissey’s good qualities as a singer and lyricist, there are points at which the specificity of his style and delivery works against him (shades of Guns n’ Roses again?), and he definitely plays the tortured soul act to the hilt. Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that popular understanding about his sexuality informed the notion of him as whiny, effete, or at the very least, incapable of ROCKING OUT.
Of course, it’s also probably worth noting that the band’s performance didn’t work in their favor in the US during the ‘80s.The jangly pop aspects of their sound weren’t really popular on ‘80s radio, Tom Petty notwithstanding (and even he detoured from the Byrds-influenced sound that I associate with his early music for “Don’t Come Around Here No More”). In fact, guitars weren’t dominant on pop radio in the ‘80s, until fairly late in the decade. Not that they weren’t present in pop songs, but there were probably at least as many songs that featured synthesizer as the primary timbre as there were guitar-oriented tracks. So, the overt guitar, featured front and center, in The Smiths’ sound was a somewhat unifying factor in the entire “college” band scene, which allowed bands like REM, 10,000 Maniacs and The Smiths to be seen as part of the same genre, despite being well removed from one another in terms of songwriting - they didn’t use guitar in the way that metal bands did, but the sound of the music was guitar-based, and the production was sparse when compared with the lush, New Wave-influenced sound that was more common on the radio.
Which, I guess, is a long way around to say that I agree with you, but it’s worth going into, because one of the things that I think of, when I think ‘80s pop, is a preoccupation with what was only just becoming understood as the potential of synthesizers, sampling, drum programing, etc. A lot of the big budget music of the decade has an almost gimmicky interest in those things. So, by necessity almost, The Smiths’ comparatively stripped sound, as carefully arranged as it was, really does come across as somewhat working class simply by virtue of the fact that it wasn’t as big and experimental as what pop was doing. Which, in its turn, seems to resonate really well with the resigned sentiment in Morrissey’s “I went looking for a job” line.
Aaron: I know we need to get talking about the song itself - and I really want to because it’s a fantastic song that I’ve come to love. But it’s worth circling around some of the cultural stuff a bit more, if that’s okay. I don’t want to drive the subject into the ground, but you’re spot on about the relationship between issues of gender, sexuality, and indie music in general, but particularly a band like The Smiths. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that gay panic was pretty rife in 1980s America. Much of ‘80s culture was a backlash against the ‘60s and ‘70s, and a lot of that backlash masked some pretty serious misogyny and homophobia, both of which carried severe threats of abuse and violence that the macho posturing of the era endorsed, even if somewhat tacitly.
And growing up where we did, especially in the wake of Charlie Howard’s murder, that threat hung over the head of anybody whose actions, dress, and, yes, musical tastes could cast them as somehow outside of the box of ‘80s gender norms. I don’t know if I’m exaggerating the situation, but I was certainly aware of it. Every time a jock-type called me “faggot” in the boys’ room, I knew a smack to the head or worse could be next. It wasn’t a common occurrence, but I’m sure the threat of it affected me in lots of ways that, looking back, I’m not completely proud of. And I don’t mean at all to imply that the threat to straight guys who might be square pegs was somehow comparable to what gay men and women had to live with. But I do think that threat served as a kind of enforcer of ‘80s gender norms. I look back on the guys in my school who said, “fuck it, I’m going to listen to whatever I want” with admiration. And I wonder if some of my disdain for them at the time (or at least their musical choices - some of them were my good friends) wasn’t at least partly rooted in a resentment that they were maybe just a bit braver than I was.
What I find particularly interesting about all that in light of this series is how far outside those normative gender roles the metal guys of the ‘80s were, especially as the decade went on. If you look at a picture of The Smiths, they look pretty square. Aside from a bit of product in their otherwise short hair, they come across as “normal,” average looking guys, at least in terms of the 1980s. Whereas Motley Crue, Twisted Sister, Poison, etc., were all sporting super long hair, makeup, and fishnets. And I’m sure that their leather, chains, and dog collar aesthetic stems directly from a highly visible strata of ‘70s gay culture.
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| Poison in the mid-80s |
Do you buy that?
I feel like I’m getting way off the subject of the song, so if you’re ready to circle back round to that, be my guest. But I’d also love to hear any more thoughts you might have on this topic.
Lew: I think you hit a lot of worthwhile points. First off, with regard to the metal bands, it was pretty standard that a metal band, at least of the glam variety, would have to put at least one song (and probably more than one) about having sex with women on their albums. And these weren’t Prince-style songs that spoke frankly about sex - no metal band ever wrote a line like, “you don’t have to be beautiful to turn me on” - rather they tended to be juvenile, and edged as far as into misogyny as safely possible. There are some exceptions to this - Ozzy Osbourne, for example, never recorded any songs about sex that I can recall (I think there’s a song on Bark at the Moon that references an incubus, but that’s about it). But, in general, I agree that the rabid, sex-crazed personas in songs like “I Want Action,” “Seventeen,” “Still of the Night,” “Shake Me,” “Ten Seconds to Love,” etc. were at odds with the styled, sequined outfits, lipstick, and eyeliner, and definitely read now as posturing, rather than as genuine expressions of sexual desire.
As far as the presence of homophobia in high school, you’re right there, too. If you were going to get beaten up by a jock, there was a good chance it would be because they thought you were gay, or at least that that would be tied up in whatever happened, to some degree. I was never beaten up, but like you, I was definitely aware of the danger. And, however one describes the effect of that awareness, there is no question that whether or not you were a homophobic person, the threat of violence could play a role in dissuading one from aligning oneself with cultural artifacts that seemed to suggest gayness - liking The Smiths, for example. In retrospect, I realize it probably wouldn’t have mattered, but at the time, it felt like logical analysis of the situation.
To turn back to the song that we’re discussing, it is important to note, if only as a juxtaposition, that Morrissey chooses an approach to discussing sex that is almost diametrically opposed to the pro-sex, glam metal pose. “What she asked of me at the end of the day, Caligula would have blushed. ‘Oh you’ve been in the house too long,’ she said, and I naturally fled.” It’s an fascinating lyrical moment, which, while initially seeming to confirm the varying rumors of Morrissey’s gayness or asexuality, probably also served to vocalize teenage male fears that they wouldn’t be able to perform when they finally got the chance (not that most teenage boys would be caught dead admitting to something like that). At the very least, it expresses a fear of feminine sexuality, which I find revealing and surprisingly honest (while at the same time feeling the need to distance myself from it, personally - haha). What do you think about that?
Aaron: Well I think you’re getting into one of the things I’ve come to love so much about his writing. It’s not just the ambiguity - there’s that, too - but it’s more like the multiplicity of meaning. Not that the meaning is unclear, but that it could be all those things you mention at once. I really admire his ability to build layers of meaning around really sparse lyrics - there are only about six or seven lines in the whole song, repeated and interwoven. But because he can move so deftly from almost pure description (“Two lovers entwined passed me by”), to descriptive but more personal (“happy in the haze of a drunken hour”), to something more impressionistic (“What she asked of me at the end of the day . . .”), the lines seem to reflect on and build on each other.
For example, the first mention of the drunken hour leading to misery seems a bit mysterious, but then after we hear lines about the cruel people in his life, his abysmal work life, etc., when that line comes back later in the song it takes on new meaning and much greater depth.
There are a couple other things I really like about the lyrics that I think add depth to the song. First, I really dig the way the situations he describes are in the past, but the refrain is in the present. It adds a delicacy to the state of his misery. Was the drunken hour far in the past - the good times? - but these days he’s miserable? Or has the happy drunken hour just finished, and something - some thought or reflection - during that hour has spurred on the misery. It makes the descriptions of misery both situational and more permanent. If that makes sense.
I also love his use of the word “naturally” in the line you quoted above. Why “naturally”? I may be wrong, but I think people generally use this when they’re describing situations in which their behavior would be familiar to the listener - or, at least, predictable. I like it here because it adds a depth of personality to the lyrics - in a way, I think, it establishes (or, more likely, acknowledges) Morrisey’s relationship with his listeners. As in, you all know me, you know what I’m about . . . of course I naturally fled!
A lot of ‘80s songwriters were experimenting with such impressionistic and playful lyrical styles (Michael Stipe being a well-known example, but I think Robert Smith, too . . . as we discussed in our entry on “A Forest”). And if I’m honest, that’s probably another reason I had a hard time with The Smiths and other indie bands of the time. I guess I really liked having things spelled out for me - or at least having innuendo obvious enough for my teen brain to figure out! It took me a long time to temper that literalist streak in myself, not just with music but other arts as well.
Lew: Great analysis of the lyrics! And, I think it’s an important to note that there were other songwriters experimenting with similar styles at the time. In a way, that may be one of the hallmarks of the ‘80s alternative movement, and possibly one of punk’s most worthwhile contributions to songwriting: that sense of personalizing a song, so that it wasn’t just adherence to a form (or tradition), but something that one could inhabit and alter to more closely convey one’s aesthetic intent. That’s kind of a mouthful, but all I really mean is that songs like “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” and “A Forest” are (as you say) impressionistic, to the extent that, while I’d call them both well-crafted, the lyrics are really just a snapshot of something the writer has thought of, or imagined, with no real context provided. For the purposes of the song, we don’t know anything about Morrissey’s life that has led to the state he’s in now, or even what his general situation is - aside from working-class, and unhappy. The absence of that context allows his lyrics to be simultaneously personal and pretty much infinitely relatable for anyone who has lived a working-class existence. Which, as we’ve remarked a couple of times here, goes a long way toward inverting my impression of Morrissey from high school and beyond as a snobbish intellectual. Or it just proves conclusively that you can be a snobbish intellectual and a “working class hero.”
So, per my observation above, your callback to “A Forest” got me thinking about form, because while “A Forest” and “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” both have very definite hooks, neither of them has a chorus. Both songs have a cycle of chord progressions that they move through, but there’s never a strong sense of having arrived in another section of the track - more that there’s a transition occurring that will eventually lead back to the A section, which is the primary hook of the song. I’m sure that we could think of numerous examples of this kind of structure if we tried, so I don’t mean to imply that this is a revolutionary device. The form we’re discussing, particularly in terms of “Heaven Knows,” is essentially a refrain. That said, in the ‘80s landscape of choruses, where the verse is frequently a set up for a colossal hook, it’s worth a mention. Quickly scanning through Smiths songs, I thought of some great choruses - “Shoplifters of the World,” “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” “How Soon is Now” among others - but there are also a number of well-known tracks that don’t feature a defined chorus, or use the first line of the song as a refrain, including “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side,” “Panic,” and “Hand in Glove,” to name a few.
So, while The Smiths weren’t innovating song structure, per se, the effect of the form in “Heaven Knows” gives the song an anachronistic quality that really prevents it from being rooted in the ‘80s. The more I listen to it and think about it, the less I hear any real artifacts of the ‘80s in it at all. For intents and purposes, lyrics notwithstanding, it sounds to me like it could have been written and recorded in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s. Do you agree with that, and if so, does it strike you as rare?
Aaron: On first reading that, it didn’t resonate with me at all! Then I thought about it for a while, and started to come around to your way of thinking.
To me, at this point, The Smiths sound so ‘80s that it’s hard to think of them as otherwise. To be sure, they don’t sound ‘80s in the way we outlined in the introduction to this series or in a lot of the ways that most people think ‘80s. As you said, with songs like this one, there is no big, catchy hook. The production is a bit richer than a lot of ‘80s stuff (which, more on that in a minute). But also I wonder how much of my thinking about both the ‘80s and The Smiths has changed from having lived in the UK and Ireland for the past several years. The Smiths are so much more mainstream here than in the US - you wouldn’t be surprised if they came on the jukebox in a pub where rock was the order of the day. When Johnny Marr’s autobiography came out this autumn, I heard reviews of it on several mainstream radio shows, with the hosts often talking about their favorite songs, lyrics, etc. So maybe just being exposed to that constant “mainstreaming” of The Smiths has led me to adjust the way I think of them, and in my mind I’ve slotted them into “typical ‘80s.”
But also, there’s something about this song. For example, the super busy bass lines sound really ‘80s to me, especially considering the bass’s tone (I don’t think it’s fretless, but there are a few spots in the song where it gets really fidgety and it almost sounds fretless). The bass goes almost unnoticed because the production is so full, or at least it seems to me. The bass and drums really work as the foundation for Marr’s and Morrisey’s shimmery guitar and vocals, which I guess I do think makes it stand out from “big” ‘80s music. But at the same time, on close listen, the style of the bass sounds really ‘80s. Add to that the incredible breakdown (is that the right term?) right before the Caligula verse . . . the soft touch of it all, and the way Marr’s guitar quickly reestablishes the tune feels so “modern” to me, at least in comparison to earlier rock ‘n’ roll or doowop-inspired vocal rock.
However, having said all that, I do agree that it resists a certain pop structure and vibe that a lot of ‘80s music - even alternative music - seems to have been bound to. Is that what you meant by lack of a verse-chorus-verse structure feeling anachronistic? And I’d love to hear any other thoughts you might have about the song’s sound production.
Lew: You make a good point; while “Heaven Knows . . .” doesn’t sound ‘80s in the sense of having the snare triggering a sample, fledgling attempts at programming synth parts, or any of the other production artifacts that one might associate with ‘80s production, they are definitely part of the sound of the ‘80s, simply being a hugely influential band that existed during the decade. And, I think it is important (for me) to be reminded that although they barely broke through over here, The Smiths were a huge success in the UK. In retrospect, I suppose it’s a bit like saying Appetite for Destruction doesn’t sound ‘80s just because the production is a lot more bare bones than many of its contemporaries - that album is one of “the sounds” of the 80s, regardless of the production choices (not to harp on that comparison).
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| Andy Rourke |
After listening to this bass part, I took a minute to listen to a few more Smiths tracks to see if I’d been missing out on similarly awesome bass playing, but at a fairly cursory examination, it seemed like a lot of the other tracks had the bass mixed lower, less active, and sometimes doubled by a guitar (because Johnny Marr obviously doesn’t get enough guitar tracks on these songs!). It would be sad to think Andy Rourke had a lot more to contribute, and didn’t get to because Marr and Morrissey were driving the bus, but on the other hand - what do you expect when you’re in a band with two guys like that, I guess.
“Heaven Knows . . .” is actually produced fairly sparsely, when compared to a lot of other Smiths songs, which really helps the bass to come through, and Johnny Marr’s, or the producer’s, decision to pan most of the guitar tracks to the exact same spots on the left and right (like seriously - there are acoustic and electric tracks panned to the exact same location), really helps, as well. It’s one of those charmingly wonky productions that you don’t hear much anymore, and would probably cause ridicule if you did, but I have to admit, I really sort of love the amateur-ish quality of it.
I think we’ve said quite a bit about this track and the way our lives have intersected with The Smiths. Do you have any closing thoughts you’d like to share?
Aaron: Only to say that, after all my trepidation, I’m really happy to have gotten around to The Smiths - and I’m really happy about how long it took us to write this entry because it’s meant that I’ve spent months coming back to this song and to the band. It’s completely changed my mind not only about The Smiths and Morrissey, but also about a whole genre of ‘80s British music that I’ve totally opened up to over the past several months. I can safely say, that of all the tracks we’ve covered on this blog, this one has been the most enlightening and rewarding for me, personally.
Coming Next: a change of pace (or is it) when we return to metal and take on the rise of thrash!
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