“A sad fact widely known
The most impassioned song to a lonely soul
Is so easily outgrown
But don't forget the songs that made you smile
And the songs that made you cry
And the songs that saved your life…” - The Smiths, 'Rubber Ring'

Okay, before we go any further, I have a confession to make: from the ages of 17-19 or so I was a massive Smiths/Morrissey fan, replete with all the crippling shyness (which is not nice, despite the Morrissey lyric in 'Ask') and bookishness and despair and depression that almost inevitably entails from fan(atic)dom of the Moaning Manchester Moaners Magnet. Though I have to say I am not gay, as a good few males who found themselves listening with rapt interest to Steven Patrick apparently came to find out before coming out.

With an intensity that can never be replicated in full adulthood (cos nothing ever resonates as much in later life as the stuff you're into when you're a hormonally-driven teenager and life is new and exciting and mental; you always find yourself coming back to youthful influences to some degree in later years) I listened obsessively to this strange, beautiful, mournful man's wistful melancholic melodramatic depressive musings and knew that I had found somebody who 'understood' me and everything I was going through as a person with problems with self-confidence and self-esteem. Seclusion, confusion, delusion, illusion? Yes, no, maybe; any combination thereof. Who knows.

All I know is that I felt that the man spoke to me directly, as he spoke to many others, without garnishing the truth, with humor and wisdom and clear-eyed-cum-romantic soft hopeless fury, raging against the coming of the adult light and life and indeed even love, and I found his work to be a great comfort to me during a very difficult and demanding period of my life. And yes, I know the age I am talking about is difficult for everybody to a greater or lesser degree, and I'm not trying to make out I suffered any more than many other suffer during the same stage of their lives, but I was just…pretty badly fucked up beyond youthful angst parameters, to be perfectly honest. And we'll just leave it at that.

Anyway. Moving swiftly along from stirring the embers of memories that still contain bad emotional heat and charge and crackle. I got into The Smiths just as they broke up in 1987, and listened to them until Moz's first solo album in 1988, 'Viva Hate'. I was the first person in Falkirk to buy that record, waiting anxiously for the box containing it to be opened in the now-sadly defunct Sleeves records, and I thought it was great.

But time moves along and new things come into your life and by the time 'Kill Uncle' came out in 1991 my unrequited, intense, embarrassing-in-retrospect emotional love affair with the art of the self-styled Last of The Famous International Playboys was well and truly over. I haven't bought a Morrissey record in 15 years, and don't really much care. I know there are still obsessive fans of his who have followed his whole career slavishly, with some of them seemingly having chosen to freeze themselves in a moment of their lives from decades ago. Seems pretty sick and pathological to me, and they're doing themselves a deep disservice, but hey, let them get on with it.

But having said that, as any Morrissey (ex) fan knows, there is an inescapable black hole of teenage angst part of you that will always be his, no matter how hard you might try to forget him, and I still found/find myself listening to certain keys tracks of his every now and again, marveling at how time and life experience change song meanings, how what I thought they meant was so clearly wrong. Or not. My own life, however, has of course changed vastly in the 20 years since I first started listening to Morrissey. I have had a good few mad adventures, grown up, moved from Scotland to America, got married.

My life still has the odd Morrissey component, I must admit: I am pals with Mark Simpson, who wrote the excellent psychobio 'Saint Morrissey' (contacted him after reading and loving it and we've been pals for a coupla years now) and I am getting a short story published in a book of short stories entitled 'Paint A Vulgar Picture' that Serpent's Tail are putting out in 2008 based on Smiths songs or song titles. So, as I said, there was never to be a full true escape from the gravitational pull of Planet Morrissey since my navel-gazing fandom years.

My wife Ellen was a Smiths fan in the 80s too, which is ironically funny, and it was her that told me he was playing in Chicago this past November, having found out from a woman named Sharon she met through work and who is also a Moz fan. I though to myself, ah, what the hell, might as well go along and see what the depressed old Catholic bugger's up to these days, and I got Ellen to get us tickets online. Having been away from the man's music for so long I didn't think I'd know more than three or four songs, if that, because he has a fair few solo albums out now, and he would only play one or two Smiths songs if we were lucky. I saw him live many years ago and he didn't play a single song by his former band, so I didn't think the omens were all that good.

The night of the gig arrived and I admit I felt slightly trepidatious which is, of course, utterly ludicrous. I told Ellen (who wasn't as hardcore a fan way back when as I was) that Moz was like somebody you'd had a particularly intense emotional relationship with a long time ago without sex, so going back and seeing him live would perhaps be an oddly masochistic act; there are certain Smiths songs that hold so much personal meaning for me that I can't listen to them, or can't do so without the attendant teenage emotions they raised coming to the painful cringe-making fore, albeit in time-muted washed-out power-ebbed form. I wondered idly if there would be young males dangerously flinging themselves from the balcony in life-and-limb-risking fashion just to touch his hand, as there had been the first time I saw him in, ummm…musta been the late 80s/very early 90s in Glasgow, can't remember now it was so long ago. Indeed, I wondered if there would even be a balcony!

Alright, I didn't, just being silly, I made that bit up, I'll get on with it.

So Ellen drove us downtown to the Aragon Ballroom, with me as ever musing in parochial Scottish style about how bloody far apart everything is in America and how you really have to drive everywhere to get anywhere. I'd been down to the Aragon once before with Ellen, in November 2004, but it was a washout: Nicholas Arson from The Hives was meant to put us on the guest list to see them play with Franz Ferdinand and Snow Patrol (whom I fucking despise, whining-faced cunts that they are) but forgot, and so we drove down, wasted $20 on parking…only to wander out dejected a few moments later cursing amnesiac Swedish punk guitarists (and let's face it, who hasn't done that in their life, eh?) and life in general (ditto).

But this time we were more in luck. Ellen had printed the tickets out online, and though I was dubious that a piece of monochrome paper would gain us access, it was scanned with an electronic gun…beeped and buzzed and admitted…and in we went. First time I had ever seen a paper ticket for a gig, and it certainly made me feel my age (as many things do - hell, as everything does - these days). Oh well. Time and tide and ticket material wait for no man, a truism with as much truth to it now as when it was first minted and printed.

We went into the foyer, with me noticing in abject disgust that they only sold Miller Lite 'beer' (in the loosest sense of the word), a vile substance I regard to be like drinking horse piss. And don't ask me how I know what horse piss tastes like, just go with the urinary simile, alright? And it was $6 a throw too, roughly four quid, and I told Ellen that if I wanted to drink piss from a cup I would just piss in it myself and drink it, save myself the money. Wouldn't be the first time. Shit, anybody who has ever been to the Glasgow Barrowlands and consumed their takes-forever-to-get-to-the-bar-to-get-served, overpriced watered-down plastic-cup pish at a gig knows what I mean I'm sure.

Course, I still bought a beer anyway, I needed one, can't go to a gig without one, but ONLY one, and yes, I lowered my standards, and I'm not proud of that, so let's just quickly move on, shall we?

We went upstairs, with Ellen coordinating us finding Sharon with her husband Jim by mobile phone. I mused that the place, which indeed had a balcony (I needn't have worried) to cater to pathetic lovelorn potentially suicidal jumpers, looked like a Turkish brothel. You'd have to see the place (and Turkish brothels) to know what I mean. Apparently it has a lot of history to it, but it looked like a cheapo dump to me. Plus the acoustics were pretty bad - when the support act came on we could barely hear them. Which was really a blessing in disguise, cos they were bloody terrible, a Kate Bush-with-her-tit-in-a-mangle screaming woman with a keyboard and a guy with a drumset. So the crap acoustics were actually a mercy, with that act at least. I don't know what they were called, and don't care - I could go and research it, but don't want to give them any publicity at all, simple as that, because if they get bigger you too might be forced one day to sit through them. And you would never forgive me. Trust me.

Sharon and her husband arrived a bit after us and, after the support band finished, we chatted for a bit. I had never met either of them, but they seemed very nice, cool, amiable people.

“Did you have part of your youth scarred by this man too?” ('this man' being, of course, the singer we were here to see)(and hear)(cos it would be pointless just looking at a singer after all) I asked the blonde Sharon to which she cheerfully smiled and answered “Yep, yep.” She agreed with me too that seeing him these days seemed like an act of willful masochism. But we were still here anyway, I thought to myself ruefully (cos you can't think to anybody else unless you're telepathic) and what did that say about us?

Best not to think about such things.

I made some small talk with Jim, about how crap the beer was. He told me he'd seen Moz much more recently than I had and was wondering, as the madman Mancunian whined on, “if nothing ever got any better” in the singer's life. Then again, this being Morrissey…probably not. We were sitting a couple of rows back from the edge of the balcony, with me getting vague flashbacks to my last Moz balcony seat. Only these seats were much more shitty than my Glasgow ones, because they weren't set on an incline and thus you couldn't really see over the heads of the people in front of you.

I wasn't for having this and told Ellen I wanted to go downstairs and take my chances with the crowd on the ballroom floor to see if we could get a better view. Excitement building in me cos I didn't want to miss a minute of it, supposedly-sneered-at-and-long-since-outgrown youthful feelings bubbling up in me joyfully at the thought of seeing my old hero live (however 'live' you could consider Moz to be) again, and I was really glad we'd come. Ellen said she'd come with me and we'd come back up and see Jim and Sharon later after it.

On the way out we bumped into another workmate of Ellen's, a music-head called Al and his wife Diane, and he told us a funny story about seeing The Smiths live in the 80s on a beach area in Florida where the few elderly security guards were completely unprepared for the onslaught of adoring youngsters the band invoked and provoked, clearly being used to dealing with octogenarian bridge players and not young sweet and tender hooligans. After the tale Ellen and I went downstairs and threaded our way sorry excuse me sorry thanks sorry that way Ellen over there looks awright through the crowd to try and find a place to stand where everybody wasn't over seven feet tall (I'm not too tall and neither is Ellen) and in our way, finding a relatively decent spot a few yards from, and to the left of, the stage next to a pillar.

I looked around at the audience, noting wistfully a throng of guys my age who reminded me of my pals in Falkirk I would have gone to see Moz with, most notably my old longest-serving pal (over 20 years - would have gotten out quicker if he'd committed murder!) Andrew Gardner. Just drawing random. perhaps inaccurate, fan correlations between the Yanks and the Scots. The crowd was mostly a fairly old one, obviously there to relive their youth like Ellen and I, with a few curious youngsters, a thankful dearth of Moz-circa-1983 glasses-wearing clones, an odd sprinkling of Latinos (as Moz, bizarrely, has this ethnic group as part of his audience, apparently attracted to his ululating and quiff and Catholic angst) and other unquantifiable assorted misfits and winos and weirdos.

We stood and waited for a few minutes, watching a frankly bizarre selection of clips of old television shows from the 1970s (ie from Moz's youth - New York Dolls backstage footage, strange European non-English songs and Eurovision song contest numbers all put in an obligatory rote non-sequitur appearance), wondering what the hell we were being subjected to…knowing all the while it was just the weird eccentric entertainment-contents of Steven Patrick Morrissey's anachronistic mind…

...and all of a sudden he was right there on the stage in front of us his adoring excited cheering crowd, none more adoring or excited or cheering louder than me, damn right! He was dressed in a deep red shirt, a tie and a pair of black dress trousers, still a suave old bugger after all these melting-like-snow elapsed-since-teen-fandom years. “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” he smirked theatrically…and kicked off straight into 'Panic'. The crowd roared in good-choice approval and ecstatically sang along as one transported stolen-heart entity, in the entranced by the songs of our youth zone, the heartbreak-oh-no-go zone, the show-zone, the ozone, the o-zone, and Morrissey yelped and writhed and yanked at his tie like a noose fit to hang an 80s disk jockey spinning songs that say nothing to me about my life and we were all lost in music and a battering tsunami storm of awakened drowning memories and attendant overwhelming emotions and gyrating motions and…

…some lanky guys bounded up and bounced in front of us and we couldn't see!

Bastirts!

As 'Panic' finished we decided we'd be just as well off scooting back upstairs to watch Moz from the balcony, and made our way back up there as he kicked off into the Stone Roses' 'Waterfall'-alike opening riff of 'First of The Gang to Die,' with me surprised that I had actually heard two songs I knew already. Good familiarity ratio - all I would need would be another two or three to supercede the number I thought I would know and get my money's worth.

Fuck it. I had had my money's worth already. I had just seen a genius perform an amazing song I had loved when I was young from a band I had never seen, and it was absolutely fucking brilliant.

We reached our old seats again and said hiya to Jim and Sharon and settled in for the rest of the gig. The acoustics weren't great, as I said, and the view wasn't either…but it ultimately didn't really matter. We just thought it was a brilliant, joyful experience…as did Morrissey, which was the somewhat bizarre thing. He was clearly having a great time being his usual kitsch camp bitch waspy self, poncing about and pouncing across and pounding the stage, pulling the kind of gay-looking effete Moz-moves that his music instantly evokes in me and that would get you killed in any pub in my old homo-hating home town of Falkirk, the kind of shit that just makes you fucking want to…limp-wristedly swish about in a fucking cape or something.

If you know what I mean.

Didn't think so.

Unless you're a hetero fan of the man's bisex-baiting music, that is.

And even then maybe not.

Let's just move along before it gets any messier.

Move along, nothing to see here, nothing to see…

…unlike on the stage, that is. I had never seen Morrissey so happy in my life, and was actually really, really glad that he finally appears to be actually enjoying his life, as sacrilegious a concept as this may actually be to some of his more depressive hardcore fans. I had heard that on his newest album, 'Ringleader of The Tormentors' (which I still haven't heard, to be perfectly honest) that he had discovered sex and happiness and was more at ease in his flesh-teased uneasy skin, and thought that was just fine by me. After all, it's the man's life we're talking about, not just some abstract star-art object, and wishing he had stayed entombed in the decaying amber of his past unhappiness would have been like asking him to sacrifice his life and happiness to my/our youthful memories, cannibalism of the most direct and horrible and vindictive sort.

And it also wouldn't have meant that I would have had anything to measure my own current happiness with ma wee doll against. Because in a way that's what this whole thing ultimately was about: measuring the years and tears and fears and seeing how far away I had moved from them and, indeed, the man who once seemed to be so badly cast in the black-and-white movie of his own (half) life had come too. See Steven? Life isn't so bad! We all moved on moved up got older got happier got healthier got wiser got laid on a regular basis stopped wearing black so much! Who'd have thought such an impossible thing possible during the old seemingly impassible youthful era-years of torment-torrents and strange self-hating masochistic emotional self-torture?

Amazing what a blowjob will sort out, as I half-jokingly said to Jim earlier on in the evening.

And yes, I'm making light of this now, because I'm older and my view of life is more balanced and, hell, youthful depression is funny as hell to me now. I knew that nonsense intimately so I can satirize it all I want; why not? The old melodramatic pain only exists to be laughed at in cold hard adult-grown light, after all, no matter how insane it may have seemed or been at the time. When I hear angst-laden noir-clad emo bands now I just find them utterly overblown and hilarious. I also find them pathetic and somewhat troubling too, because it seems like there is so much cynicism in the music industry these days and teenage depression is just another market to exploit for these vicious amoral mainstream record labels with shite like Coldplay or Evanescence or My Chemical Romance or Dashboard Confessional or any other amount of talentless would-be 'deep' introspective pseudo-insecure spoiled narcissistic bands of the type that seem to clog up more and more of the airwaves these dead-music days.

Okay. I know what I just said: my teen angst is better than the youth of today's teen angst (nyah nyah nyah!). That sounds hilarious and old and jaded and cynical, I am acutely aware of that, but I reckon the youth of today are being done a disservice by the formulaic sonic pish being pumped at them morning noon and night to pick on and exacerbate their fears and worries and insecurities for a quick sick buck by the music (sp)industry. You just can't compare a literate, poignant, verbally caustic, effete, poetic, ironic, angry, idiosyncratic, despairing, hilarious, erudite, intellectual, and just flat out excellent wordsmith like Morrissey to a muppet like Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day, whose tedious 'American Idiot' teen angst 'epic' album (kid comes from broken home, leaves said home, falls under the spell of punk, loses punk, goes home again - hooray!) was regarded as the 'voice of a generation.' But the one funny thing in all this is the fact that…

…Morrissey helped inspire a lot of this sonic puddle-shallow sludge.

Oh the irony.

Anyway. After that tangential ramblerant about the moribund state of emotional music (and emotions in general, but that's a whole other soapbox of mine)…back to the Moz gig, if you remember it. I didn't recognize a good few of the songs, as I thought I might, but the stuff I didn't know wasn't too bad and not nearly as plentiful in number as I had thought it would have been, I was pleasantly surprised that the singer seemed to veer much more towards the older end of his catalogue, which meant I got to hear great songs like 'Disappointed' (B-side of a 12” I owned from back in days of yore, whatever the fuck 'yore' is) and 'Everyday is Like Sunday' (I swore to Ellen that I would cry if I heard him play it, as I have been bizarrely and slightly disturbingly - to my wife that is - known to do if I catch the video on music telly, and I don't even know why, cos it wasn't one of my favourite songs from his early solo career; in the event I only misted up a bit) in the mix.

Moz was clearly having a ball, and kept telling the audience he loved us, and he wasn't lying. As Mark Simpson noted, the man clearly derives emotional and sexual sustenance from the unconditional (m)adulation of an adoring crowd, and tonight was to be no exception. He was funny as hell, asking us “Are you drunk enough to want to hear some more,” mocking himself for his gushing about playing the Aragon again (the only gig in America he played, and he said the venue now had a better brand of toilet paper), and saying a Moz Instant Classic Throwaway Line: “I've destroyed 46,000 lives along the way…and I really don't care.” You feel privileged to hear a Wildean wit just throwing a line like that out there, even if yours was one of the lives he didn't care about having affected. Fuck it, what's a little old dead-and-buried teen angst between friends?

Moz really came across as somebody you'd just love to hang out with and talk to, just to hear the mad beautiful shite he'd come away with, and I found myself falling in love with him all over again and enjoying it like crazy. I was so glad I'd come to this gig, and knew I hadn't made a mistake: the man was on better form than ever, and it was such a real treat to see him so happy after all the (partly self-inflicted) pain he had gone through in his tortured-sexuality-and-intellect life.

And hell, he even did another four Smiths songs: 'William, It Was Really Nothing' (a gorgeous song that is the best song ever for listening to on a rainy day cos of the lyrics and general musical tone), 'Girlfriend in a Coma,' 'How Soon is Now' and, as a closer, 'Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want' (which Ellen loved cos it's her fave Smiths songs). Which, along with 'Irish Blood, English Heart,' meant I knew eight songs, which wasn't too bad a tally at all. I sang along uproariously when I knew the words, totally enraptured. When I didn't know the words I cast a sideways glance at Ellen and Sharon a couple of times, wanting to get a measure of my own ecstasy on their happy faces. Sharon caught me looking once, and I stopped; I didn't want her to feel self-conscious or think I was doing it for any hidden agenda reason.

And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over, the lights were coming up and our interesting sonic drug was wearing off, as reflected in our slow-awakening stunned-mole ever-more-visible expressions. The night only cost $35 for a ticket, cheap at twice the price, and the audience knew we'd gotten more than our money's worth, even if the sweaty old bugger did eye-burningly take off his shirt at the end. We filed slowly down the stairs and out the door, with me noting that there were tee-shirts with Moz depicted as a priest on them. How utterly appropriate; the old Catholic who has inspired a million confused youthful confessions with his own naďve-cum-genius-cum-gutsy heartfelt lyrical self-abusive mournful musings finally forgives his saviour (because Catholics always go back to Jesus, no matter how far they think they have run away) and accepts his role as lonely-heart father (and mother) confessor forever. And then we were out into the car park into the car into traffic into the night and our hearts were cool and bruised and tender.

Before 'How Soon is Now' Morrissey's youthful band (who were sort of kept in the background so as not to steal any of the limelight from their ringleader tormentor mentor) did a poignant, beautiful version of 'Auld Lang Syne.' Don't worry Morrissey. As evidenced by this evening, auld sonic acquaintance will never be forgot. I would never want it to, and can't wait to see you again. Thank you for your music and courage and stupidity and genius and for the way it touched my life, and the lives of 45,999 others. As the old Scottish proverb goes: “Wha's like us? Damn few, and they're a' deid.”

Enough said.

“And when you're dancing and laughing and finally living
Hear my voice in your head and think of me kindly” - Rubber Ring.

Graham Rae is a Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk, now resident in the US. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 18 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.