Bigmouth strikes again

Steven Morrissey — the unstoppable lover of animals, the bard of ‘80s misery pop, and spokesperson for elephants kept in Filipino zoo cages — has released his memoir, and like the subject himself, it is a series of outspoken positions delivered by a man whose ego has remained strong, nurtured like a hothouse flower despite decades of exile from Smithsville.

Let’s start with the imprint. Penguin Classics is usually reserved for the classics — the Homers and Jane Austens and James Joyces and George Orwells. Does Morrissey see himself as a literary giant fit to sit next to volumes of Oscar Wilde? Perhaps. When word of his planned memoir was revealed in 2011, he reportedly said: “I’d like to go with Penguin, but only if they published it as a Classic.”

They did. And, to his credit, though windy and repetitive at times, Morrissey’s Autobiography has as much right to claim itself as a classic as Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Vol. 1 does. The difference from, say, Eric Clapton’s memoir or Slash’s is that Morrissey, like Dylan, is a wordsmith: he knows how to construct sentences that can slay dragons, or just slay you with laughter. Also like Dylan, he knows how to curate his own myth: like James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man, Morrissey can paint, in retrospect, vivid pictures of his youthful influences — everything from A.E. Housman to The New York Dolls, with detours into student caning, Patti Smith, T.Rex and ‘60s TV trash such as Lost in Space. That show’s devious stowaway Dr. Smith made a big impression on young Morrissey: someone unreliable, duplicitous, shifty and non-masculine; versus the bold, bland, masculine father figure, Major West. The lesson? “Effeminate men are very witty, whereas macho men are duller than death.”

This insight may have led to the yin-yang interplay between Morrissey and his guitar-slinging partner in The Smiths, Johnny Marr. When the two first meet, each, he believes, finds “the vital facet the other needs.” As axeman, Marr was “hard and studlike,” whereas Morrissey was what you might see next to a picture of “fey” in the dictionary. This male-female dichotomy may also have been a result of watching the David Bowie-Mick Ronson tandem during their Spiders From Mars tours — Bowie the girl, Mick the hard-rocking boy. In any case, the singer is convinced at an early age that “people respond to the masculine.” The trick of The Smiths was to wrap their wordy world-weariness in pristine, sugary guitar capsules, suggesting both the swagger of rockabilly and early rock ‘n’ roll, as well as the rawness of glam and world music.

Many readers will instantly skip ahead to the Smiths chapters, but these are few and as brief as the band’s career (1982-1987). What is not so brief is the singer’s list of grievances against former bandmates, particularly drummer Mike Joyce, who he berates at length for suing Morrissey-Marr for a bigger share of Smiths royalties. This is where Morrissey shows himself to be a bit of a bore: dozens of pages detail the holes he sees in Joyce’s case; it may make for an interesting brief before the court, but it’s not really what we care to read about.

Besides which, we are dealing with a classic unreliable narrator in Morrissey: someone who’s never been in doubt of his talents and the enduring importance of his words and legacy; someone whose ego soars to heights previously unimaginable in rock bios; someone who recites the chart positions of each of his albums and singles like a rabid baseball fan spouting stats during the playoffs; and someone who regards himself as 100-percent blameless in just about every sticky encounter. So everything he says requires a big chunk of rock salt to swallow.

Yet he is a skilled raconteur. His prose is as slyly amusing as Martin Amis’s in the memoir Experience. Take his hotel breakfast buffet visit with David Bowie:

David hovers over what are horrifically called ‘cold cuts.’ I nestle up beside him. ‘David, you’re not actually going to eat that stuff, are you?’

Rumbled, he snaps: ‘Oh, you must be HELL to live with.’

‘Yes, I am,’ I say proudly, as David changes course and sidles off towards the fruit salad.

Morrissey — the vigilant vegan — makes it a lifetime mission to save others from “the burning fires of self-imposed eternal damnation.” Another exchange with Bowie highlights Morrissey’s other badges of honor: chastity and sobriety.

David quietly tells me, ‘You know, I’ve had so much sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive,’ and I loudly tell him, ‘You know, I’ve had SO LITTLE sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive.’

Witticisms like that almost justify his perch next to Oscar Wilde on the bookshelf.

Naturally, someone whose lifelong subject has been himself — as all good artists’ subject must be — does provide rare glimpses into how he became the performer he is today. The sections on his first live performance and what it felt like watching solo singers on TV growing up are insightful: “My eyes and ears are caught only by the solo singers; town-crying to all people at all times, television troubadours minus jingle-jangled nodding musicians… There is no way out for the solo singer; introduction, statement, conclusion, quick death — all conveyed in the pop sonnet, with no winking glance over to guitarists in order to ease the setting.” This hints at the second part of his career as a solo act, something his pal Michael Stipe envies; he tells Morrissey he wished he’d gone solo from R.E.M. “I didn’t ever want to go solo,” Morrissey admits. “I thought The Smiths would run for at least 30 albums.”

And yet they didn’t, and despite ending arguably the ‘80s equivalent of the Beatles, Morrissey never did actually go “solo,” always surrounding himself with bandmates, landing his barbs within the three-minute pop combo package.

So why did The Smiths break up? You won’t find a clear answer in Morrissey’s Autobiography. You will hear that various overtures have been made in recent years for a Smiths reunion — both from Marr and, oddly, drummer Joyce — but these, like Beatle reunion rumors in the ‘70s, have evaporated again and again.

For someone who hates the press, one vocation the singer may have alternately slipped into is that of professional critic: he takes a sharp bead on music, film, culture and the personalities of cities in the book. Accurate, but often whiny and unforgiving.

And Morrissey can come off as an oddly cold fish in his own book — the type who goes all teary over an injured cat or bird, but whose veins flow with ice water when it comes to describing a fan who was abducted and murdered after watching one of his concerts. He admittedly has a hard time letting people inside his life. (“I am impossible.”)

But, like the Manila Zoo elephant Morrissey once pled for, the singer’s memory for slights goes on forever. (“Time heals but time also disfigures,” he writes.) The roster is lengthy, including drummer Joyce, now “fattened” and “lazy” off Smiths royalties; but also high up on the shit list is Rough Trade’s president Geoff Travis, who the singer palpably loathes. Travis’s sins are chiefly not loving The Smiths enough, not realizing what a valuable property they were, and hanging the reputation of his indie label on their success. He generally despises the media, yet seems surprised that his outspokenness earns him, not only the lion’s share of quotes, but frequent jeers. He chides Rolling Stone magazine for never putting The Smiths or his own solo mug on the cover. He cuts American label Sire’s Seymour Stein for never getting Smiths records into the Top 10. He disses Manchester’s club maven Tony Wilson (of 24 Hour Party People fame) for pooh-poohing the Smiths when they were hot (though later admitting his “biggest regret” was not signing the band). Basically anybody who didn’t perceive that The Smiths were greater than the rest is cast into the dustbin.

But the truth may be harder to take: artistic greatness and commercial success don’t necessarily go hand in hand, or hand in glove for that matter. It may have taken the world years to accept The Smiths, despite their fanatical fanbase (Morrissey notes he “went through 300 shirts” per year touring, all of them torn from his body). It may have taken years for bands to meticulously distill “the Smiths sound.” Some bands just weren’t meant for their times, but instead are, like The Smiths, destined for history.