Sloth

A dreaded sunny day,
So I’ll meet you at the cemetary gates,
Keats and Yeats are on your side.

Was there any band in the 80s more divisive than The Smiths? You were either a die-hard crazy fanboy/girl, or you completely despised them. There wasn’t any such thing as somebody who “sort of” liked The Smiths. You were either in or out.

Most of the people I knew were out. My hardcore friends thought they sounded gay and affected (which they did), and my metal friends thought Morrissey was a girl. The new-wavers didn’t like the guitars, and the rockers didn’t like the guitars either. Truly, a band of misfits.

For what it’s worth, I always thought The Smiths were totally misunderstood by my Canadian teenage peers. Clearly, this was a band with it’s tongue firmly in cheek with a sense of melodrama pitched somewhere between “Leader Of The Pack” and Douglas Sirk. The mistake most people made was taking a lyric like “If a double deck bus crashes into us / To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die” at face value. Morrissey, more than any human being alive, seemed to remember the heightened emotional state of being a teenager with startling clarity. Like New Order, The Smiths seemed to create records that were as much artifacts as they were music – in those heady days before the internet made everybody an expert on everything, figuring out that the cover of “This Charming Man” is a still from Jean Cocteau’s Orphee was a discovery on par with translating the Rosetta Stone by accident. While everybody else in my school was freaking out over Steve Vai, I was busy sitting at home trying to strum along to Johnny Marr’s “Cemetery Gates”:

So we go inside and gravely read the stones
All those people, all those lives, where are they now?

Anyway, while the cult of Morrissey was smallish even in my CFNY-lovin’ high school, it wasn’t entirely absent. So when the news came that The Smiths were playing Kingswood, a bunch of us bought tickets as soon as we were able to. That summer of 1986 was a pretty crazy one for Kingswood, as we had already seen The Cure (which is another story) and Depeche Mode that same year, but neither of them was in the same rarefied league as The Smiths. Even in Welland, rumours of The Smiths crazy antics had filtered to us, so we had no idea what to expect.

“I heard they don’t play ‘How Soon Is Now?’ live.”

“FUCK OFF, they HAVE to play that. That’s like Skynryd not playing ‘Freebird’.”

“Yeah, well I heard Morrissey’s going deaf!“

“Shut up!”

With loves and hates and passions just like mine
They were born, and then they lived, and then they died.

So off we went to Kingswood in the middle of summer, July 31st 1986, like a carload of penitents on their way to Mecca. For those who have never been, Kingswood was the outdoor theatre at Canada’s Wonderland – great place to see a show. Capacity was about 15000, but in front of the stage it was all theatre-style seating covered by a huge fiberglass tent. Those were expensive, naturally, so I never sat there. We sat in “the grass” – literally a huge grassed section along a hill outside of the covered seat area. The cheap seats, basically. It was sort of a disgusting way to see a show, because if it rained the day of the concert (or, like happened on a couple of occasions, during the concert) then you were sitting your ass in mud. On the plus side, once you got into the concert grounds there was precious little security up in the grass, which made the smoking and drinking of various controlled and/or illegal substances much, much easier.

The day of the Smiths, it rained. A lot. Going to Kingswood meant paying for a ticket into Canada’s Wonderland as well, so we went up for the day. Now, I don’t ride rollercoasters because they make me sick and, quite frankly, I’m a huge pussy. So I stood around for most of the day in the rain waiting for my friends to be finished with their rides. If it were anybody else but The Smiths, that would have been depressing. For a Smiths show, though, the rain it fit like a hand in glove.

You say: “ere thrice the sun hath done salutation to the dawn”
And you claim these words as your own
But I’m well-read, have heard them said
A hundred times (maybe less, maybe more)

I gather my friends and join the line-up outside of the theatre. Grass seats were general admission – the earlier you get there, the closer you get to the stage. We realize that the other side of the fence that we were lining up on must be really near the stage, because we start to hear a soundcheck.

Somebody in the line-up behind us goes: “Dudes, I think that’s ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’.”

“No way,” I say. “It’s ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’.”

“Nuh-uh, ‘Heaven Knows’.”

“Nope. ‘Some Girls’.”

“HEAVEN KNOWS!”

“SOME GIRLS!”

At which point, my friends start singing along to the soundcheck: “As Anthony said to Cleopatra as he opened a case of ale, so I say: SOME GIRLS ARE BIGGER THAN OTHERS! SOME GIRLS ARE BIGGER THAN OTHERS! SOME GIRLS MOTHERS ARE BIGGER THAN OTHER GIRLS MOTHERS!“

“Oh,” says the guy. “I guess it is.”

There’s always someone, somewhere, with a big nose who knows
And who trips you up and laughs when you fall.

We get into the grass. It’s still raining, so the grass is just wet-slicked mud with a couple of green bits every now and then. We resign ourselves to standing for the next four hours. Luckily, the age-old trick of hiding vodka inside a bottle of saline solution still worked, so we start passing the squeeze bottle around to catch a buzz before the opening act, who was Phranc. You probably don’t remember Phranc. She was sort of a Michelle Shocked / Ani Defranco type – a clearly lesbian folksinger playing pointedly political songs with an acoustic guitar. Nobody in the grass paid the slightest bit of attention to her, as we stood there in the rain excitedly discussing what song they were going to open with.

Finally, Phranc was done. We were now minutes away from The Smiths. And I swear to God this happened: Just as the band hit the stage (opening with ‘The Queen Is Dead’, natch) the rain suddenly stopped, just like that. We looked at each other, amazed: can Morrissey control the weather?

A dreaded sunny day,
so let’s go where we’re happy,
so I meet you at the cemetry gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side,
but you lose because Wilde is on mine.

The next hour and a bit were pure, blissed out music geek heaven. The Smiths played through the bulk of The Queen Is Dead album, premiered two new songs (“Ask” and “Panic”) which was the first time they had ever been heard in Canada, and ran through about a dozen classic singles. Johnny Marr was helped out by Craig Gannon from Aztec Camera on stage. Our throats are raw, half from rain and half from singing along to every single word of every single song. There’s no better experience you will ever have than seeing your favourite band live when you’re sixteen. The Smiths leave after the first set and we start the inevitable chant for an encore. They come back, and Johnny picks up the electric. Suddenly, two indelible keening notes pierce the air, drenched in echo and delay.

It’s “How Soon Is Now”.

The audience goes mental. The first four rows rush the stage in a religious frenzy, just to be more part of the song. Morrissey and the band continue playing, surrounded by teenaged worshippers. Nobody interferes with the band. They just gather around them, happy to bask in the music. Time, for a moment, stops. And then the bouncers put a quick end to it, corralling crying fans off the stage like sheep.

The band finishes the song, but the moment is over and we all know it. We leave the stadium, wondering what the hell just happened. We kept pretty silent until we got back to the car, then we all looked at each other and I said: “So… who wants to see New Order next week?”