Cover stars, ready to explore the stratosphere.
I love Morrissey’s design sense when he isn’t putting records on his dick. Entirely responsible for the Smiths’ LP and single covers, and still heavily involved now that the world is slicker, he has played violins, hefted guns and babies, burped and lain on railroad tracks for Art. He is also the world champion in pairs publicity shots. There is a poster of him, Marr and some daffodils which still strikes me as dangerous (not because it’s “homoerotic,” whatever that means, but because it’s a professionals’ marriage portrait), and the 2006 image of Kristeen Young displayed on his shoulders in saddle shoes is an lovably queasy evocation of Lolita, let down only by the camera’s catching everyone’s faces at a slightly inopportune moment.
But this post is primarily about those Smiths sleeves -vintage advertisements, film stills and newspaper photographs- and particularly the odd moment that recurs whenever you see something that clearly fits among them – like the image of Wiley Post in an early pressure suit (below), which I found on Boing Boing the other day. The strange business (a camera?) at crotch level, the wrapped and protected body, the caption, the sense that the context has died with the years – it could fit between “Hand In Glove” (Jim French photo of bare-assed fellow) and “This Charming Man” (Jean Marais as a Narcissus-like Orpheus, asleep by a mirroring pond – an image Young briefly glances toward in her gorgeous sleeve for Music For Strippers, Hookers and the Odd On-Looker).
The Smiths’ visuals were incredibly important in teaching me to recognize the melancholy of low camp. I know that many of them come from “high” sources, but the fact that they mix art films with Seventies soap operas is itself as camp as camp can get. It’s about the sadness of things that lack context; you can find out the source of the still, and quite often the reference is interesting, but the initial strike is all about the total isolation of the image.
Johnny Marr sings “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want”
I don’t think I understand Johnny Marr’s accent anymore. He’s not trying to sound American, but he seems to have lost several of his vowels in an offscreen accident and replaced them with Isaac Brock’s spares.
Anyway, this is exciting contrast for the nerdy. Morrissey’s made some changes over the years, but Marr does a massive edit – turning the famous mandolin outro into a bridge, losing the repetition/no repetition tension which originally supported the two verses, and shifting the chords until they comment on the original more than reproduce it. They’ve both tweaked the song to their modern needs, and in the process, they’ve diverged completely from what they wrote together.
Marr is the only guitarist I know who plays in English. He uses chords like words; the progressions are like elegant, well-written sentences spoken in a strong voice. I could even edge out further, and say that the core sense in his Smiths songs is an ecstatic admonishment (the one he uses for Modest Mouse is more of an abstract anxious tentative joy) – though that’s no universal, and obviously I wouldn’t go so far as to say you can turn this stuff directly into words or even that directly into named emotion. I’m not trying to claim him for the word-people so much as say that, somehow, he’s one instrumentalist word-people think we understand.
Maybe it has something to do with his synesthesia – I read an interview with Marr once where he explains (without using the word) that he has a mental cross-wiring that gives him a sort of internal Windows Media visualizer. He “sees” sounds. The Smiths look like “a circular stained-glass window;” Bob Dylan’s voice is “definitely an organic sandy wood color.” It’s a trait we share (along with Vladimir Nabokov, and -thank you, Wikipedia- Patrick Stump…) – so I know what he means, though to me Dylan sounds more of a lager brown. Anyway, perhaps this blurring of the senses relates to the verbal or visual qualities that make his playing so legible to people who, like me, aren’t native speakers of non-vocal music.
