Track #18: “Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now” by The Smiths (1984)

Welcome to Track Chatter, where with each post we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we approach the 1980s through examinations of Heavy Metal and Indie music. 

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).

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!

With that in mind, I decided to push myself a bit in choosing the track for this entry. My first instinct was to go for “How Soon Is Now,” a song that even non-fans know. It’s a killer track, with one of rock’s great guitar riffs and some of Morrisey’s sharpest, most effective lyrics. But that seemed too easy a choice (I mean, everybody loves “How Soon Is Now,” right?). My second choice was “There is a Light That Never Goes Out.” This was the first Smiths song I really got to know. I received a fantastic mix tape back in 1990 with tons of indie stuff on it - Echo and the Bunnymen, Bad Brains, old U2, Social Distortion. I played the hell out of that tape in the summer of ‘90. Fast forwarding being a pain in the ass, I ended up hearing “There Is a Light” hundreds of times or more, and it really grew on me. It’s a perfect example of a Smiths track - archly romantic, with lyrics boarding on the maudlin that become transcendent, and great shimmery guitar. But that seemed like an easy choice, too, one driven more by nostalgia than a desire to really get to know and appreciate the band better.

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?

Track #16: “I Will Dare” by The Replacements (1984)

Welcome to Track Chatter, where with each post we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we approach the 1980s through examinations of Heavy Metal and Indie music.

Aaron: With this entry we jump across the pond for our first look at an American contribution to the 1980s scenes we’ve been discussing – that seminal, rag-tag, punk/power-pop band from Minneapolis, The Replacements. And we’ve got a very special treat this time around – joining us for the discussion is my old friend Chris Dall, himself a resident of Minneapolis. More importantly, it was Chris more than anybody else who switched me on to the great indie music that had been coming out in the 1980s. And it was Chris, most definitely, who turned me into the ‘Mats fan that I remain today.

Lew and I will both take part in the conversation, but since Chris is our guest, we’ve asked him to choose the track up for discussion and to give it a brief introduction. So, Chris, what can you tell us about the song we’ll be talking about?

Chris: For my contribution to this blog and its examination of ‘80s musical genres, I’ve chosen the song “I Will Dare” by The Replacements, the band that, along with REM, introduced me to what was at the time called “Indie Rock.” I first became aware of The Replacements in 1986, when they released their first major label album, “Tim,” made a drunken appearance on Saturday Night Live, and by some accounts had already sold out. Knowing nothing about them but what was on that album, I immediately fell in love with their music. By the end of 1986 my cassette of “Tim” was pretty well worn, and I wanted to explore what had come before.

“I Will Dare” is a song from The Replacements’ 1984 album Let It Be, the third full album by the band’s original lineup: lead singer and songwriter Paul Westerberg, guitarist Bob Stinson, bassist Tommy Stinson, and drummer Chris Mars. Let It Be was the band’s last album on Twin/Tone records, a Minneapolis-based label that helped launch the Twin Cities music scene to national prominence. Many ‘Mats fans will tell you this is their best album, not simply because of the great songs it contains, but because it captures everything that their fans loved about them: their attitude, their sense of humor (they named the album Let It Be for gods sake), their sloppiness, and their ragged imperfection. Whether or not it’s their best album is a question for another day, but to me it is the album that truly encapsulates them. It’s a ragged, glorious, shambling mess, a musical stew of rockabilly, Clash-inspired punk, hardcore, metal, piano balladry, and even folk rock. It’s the sound of a band that had imbibed more than 30 years of American and English pop music history was hurling it back in the face of the MTV generation.  It’s kind of like a Replacements show, minus the alcohol.

That fact that Let It Be has no one song that really captures its essence makes it hard to select one song to write about, but I ultimately decided on the one that begins the album. What strikes me about “I Will Dare” is that on an album marked by shambling, unfocused sprawl, it is perhaps the most concise and complete song ever written by Paul Westerberg. At its core it’s really a simple song. There’s no bridge, just verses and chorus interrupted by a guitar solo (and a slightly off-key mandolin solo by none other than Peter Buck of REM), with a great shuffle beat driven by the drumming of Chris Mars and the bassline of Tommy Stinson. On first listen, the song sounds deceptively upbeat and jangly, but what comes through on repeated listens is the hard, punk edge of the bass and drums, with the driving overlay of the lead guitar mimicking the bass line. It’s punk rockabilly, raw and pure and vibrant. And lyrically, it has all the classic Westerberg themes: inadequacy masked by bravado. “How smart are you?/How dumb am I?/Don’t count any/of my advice.” And what makes this song great is that it sounds just as fresh today as it did when I first heard it.



But now to the question that this blog is taking up: where does it fit on the musical spectrum? It’s raw yet not completely unrefined, stripped down but not primitive, rough-edged but melodic. It’s not punk, nor is it New Wave. The Replacements were never either of those things, but they incorporated elements of those genres into their sound, both stylistically and attitudinally, and essentially grafted them onto what was a “classic rock” template. And to me that’s what Indie rock was essentially all about. Taking a lot of the musical influences of the past and creating something new by stripping the music down to guitar, bass, and drums and then layering on melody, spirit, and emotion. And it seemed then, as it still does today, to be a reaction to the musical excess of the MTV era.

So I’ll toss it now to Aaron and Lew: what do you guys make of “I Will Dare”?

Track #14: "A Forest" by The Cure (1980)

Welcome to Track Chatter, where with each post we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we approach the 1980s through examinations of Heavy Metal and Indie music.

Aaron: Seventeen Seconds, The Cure’s second album, was released in April of 1980. It’s safe to say that I had no clue about the album’s release or the band itself. Looking back, I’d like to think my favorite song of 1980 was AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” but if I’m honest it was probably something like “Take it on the Run” by REO Speedwagon. What can I say, I was young! Nobody I knew listened to The Cure in 1980, none of my friends knew who they were. And it’s pretty likely that very few people in the US knew the band. In the UK, while the band’s early releases couldn’t be considered break-out smashes, the albums did fairly well in the swirling, heady post-punk days when the likes of Goth, New Wave, and New Romantic hadn’t yet ossified into generic convention. Seventeen Seconds reached number 20 on the UK album charts.

It might be worth pointing out that April of 1980 was really only barely the 1980s – so many signifiers of the decade had yet to fall into place. In the US Ronald Reagan was not yet president and in the UK Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister for under a year. E.T. was still two years away, Top Gun six, and MTV wouldn’t debut until the following summer. Pacman was still six months from landing on US shores, and the world had two and a half years to wait for Thriller.

Into this era of transition, The Cure released their second album, approximately a year after their debut, Three Imaginary Boys (which would be renamed Boys Don’t Cry for its US release in early 1980). Seventeen Seconds is often considered the first of The Cure’s “goth” albums – a label front man Robert Smith regularly resists. While the album features drones, spooky sound effects, and some lyrics heavy on gloom and sadness, all hallmarks of goth, it also includes elements of ambient music, shoe gaze, and a sort of Romanticism evoked by Smith’s highly expressive voice.


We've posted the above rather than the original video (which can be found here) because it includes the entirety of the song.

Had I heard this entry’s track for discussion, “A Forest,” in 1980, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have known what to think of it – stupid? boring? – I don’t know. Certainly not for me. Yet listening to it now, one can hear how incredibly influential the sound of early Cure music would become to indie bands from the 1980s and beyond.

Lew, listening to the song in its historical context, it sounds to me like something almost completely new. What do you think? Does “A Forest” sound distinctly ‘80s to you? Can you hear the music to come, or does the song still have a 1970s vibe to it?

Metal v. Indie in the 1980s: Introduction pt 2

Welcome to Track Chatter, an occasional blog where two long-time friends and music lovers geek out about songs. With each entry we choose one track to discuss in depth, from a variety of angles. This entry is part of an introduction to a new series looking at Heavy Metal and Indie songs from the 1980s.

In the first part of the Introduction, we spent some discussing our own thoughts about the '80s - both as we experienced the decade and also through the lenses of history and nostalgia. In this part, we'll talk (a bit) more specifically about the upcoming series and the types of songs we'll be chatting about.

We ended the previous post with Aaron posing three broad categories of pop music from the '80s as something of a loose framework for thinking about how the decade's songs have been treated by history. Lew takes it up from there . . .

Lew: I think your groupings capture what we’ve been discussing quite well. As you say, it might be that one could debate which songs and artists are included in each category, but I think the categories themselves are strong, and probably could be relevant when discussing any decade of music. I also agree with your suggestion that we keep these categories in mind as our discussion moves forward. So, with that in mind, I think we’re in a great place to introduce exactly what we’ve got planned for this project.

We’ve been discussing our experiences with music during the ‘80s (and of the ‘80s), and we’ve both been fairly vocal about what music speaks to us best from the decade, so I don’t think it will be a big surprise that we’re going to be talking metal and indie. They’re two genres that were relatively under the radar at the beginning of the decade (more so in the case of indie, I guess), and enjoyed quite a bit of success in one way or another by the end. It’s going to be interesting to track the evolution of each genre from an internal perspective, as well as the cultural significance that each of them developed throughout the ‘80s. Each of us will select five tracks for discussion, and we’ll roll them out, one at a time. It will be similar to The Beatles project in that sense, except that the artist we’re discussing will change for each entry. Aaron, do you want to say anything about the process that you’ll be using to select your tracks?

Metal v. Indie in the 1980s: Introduction pt 1

Aaron: Welcome to Track Chatter, an occasional blog where two long-time friends and music lovers geek out about songs. With each entry, we choose one track to talk about, from a variety of angles – lyrics, musical style, structure, production, and so on. We’ve recently wrapped up a project in which we discussed one song from each of The Beatles' UK studio releases.

With our new series, we thought we’d go in a slightly different direction – rather than pick one specific artist or band, we’re going to talk about songs from a particular decade: the 1980s. Yes, that overcooked oldie is coming up again. But our hope is that the spin we’re going to put on the discussion will lend it a relevance that a lot of more nostalgic appreciations of the decade don’t always convey. We’ll see.

But before we layout the ground rules of this series – the limitations we’ve imposed on ourselves, if you will – perhaps it’s worth having a chat about the decade in general. Lew, is there anything that can be said about ‘80s music that hasn’t been said already, and maybe hundreds of times?

Lew: You know, my depth of knowledge as regards critical writing on the music of the ‘80s is probably not that deep, so I’m not sure if my perspective is original or not. But, I guess there are a couple of things about the ‘80s as a decade of music that are immediately significant to me. 



First, and probably most obviously, the ‘80s was the decade in which the forms of popular music, which generally still exist and populate the landscape of pop music today, came to full prominence. For example, prior to ‘80s the differentiation between what could be called heavy metal and what would be interpreted as hard rock was not an especially meaningful distinction, with your Thin Lizzies and Foghats occupying a place not greatly removed from Deep Purple or even early Judas Priest. By contrast, by the time Metallica released Kill ‘Em All in 1983, it was pretty obvious that they were doing something quite different from AC/DC. Equally as important, the ‘80s is the first decade in which you start seeing hip-hop emerge as the massive artistic/social/commercial phenomenon that it has been for the last two decades (at least). Those are two strong examples, but one could discuss punk, indie or dance pop and I think the idea that we see those forms evolve to something fairly close to their current iteration during the ‘80s is still apt.