Autobiography (38 page)

The obvious is usually impossible to spot. In the final event, Keane outsold
Quarry
by just a few thousand, but if both albums had been given seven equal days of sales,
Quarry
would have been certain to be number 1. There’s always something there to remind me. Keane, astonishingly, send apologetic well wishes, saying that they were hoping
Quarry
would be number 1. In the event,
Quarry
does very well, and hits platinum sales, and it is the only album of the year to spawn four Top 10 singles in England. The fourth of these singles is
I have forgiven Jesus
, which amusingly sits at number 10 during Christmas week, but thrives unmentioned by rock watchdogs. As radio vomits out its usual patchwork of puke-inducing Christmas songs,
I have forgiven Jesus
is heard only once – on the Steve Wright Show. I am ready to drive a nail through my head with frustration. In the US the Walmart outlet will not accept
You
Are the Quarry
because I am holding a gun on the cover shot. Since Walmart surprisingly account for an enormous percentage of sales, a cut-down version of the
CD
photograph is pressed where only my bewildered face is shown, which isn’t attractive in the least. Although this pressing is designed for Walmart only, it somehow seeps into the entire market and still survives today as the iTunes official artwork for
You Are the Quarry.
Sigh times five thousand.

The album enters at 11 in the US, and I can’t help but notice how Walmart are stocking the new
DVD
by Brad Pitt on which he is holding a gun.
Sigh.
No rap on the knuckles for Brad.

In Korea,
You Are the Quarry
is presented in an entirely different sleeve using a gun-less photo; naturally my verbal flight falls on deaf ears.

I have proudly convinced Sanctuary to release a James Maker single on the Attack label, and
Born that way
is the astounding result – a song sung with a brilliantly elevated delivery, and I shiver at the richness. This is the voice of someone who does not intend to be elbowed offstage – a carnally realized nicotine fit, with a message to deliver, and in its first week it registers at number 92 in the
UK
Top 200.
Born that way
is an eternal absolute, sitting next to Patti Smith’s
Because the n
ight
as the triumph of the gift that nobody knew they wanted. Where had it been all these cruel, cruel years? And why did it make us wait? A previously unheard Jobriath single also honors a release on Attack, and it lodges at number 101 on the
UK
chart, which is surely the very first time any Jobriath composition had registered on any sales chart, and I am delighted. Of course, 101 is nowhere in the almighty’s great schemes for civilization, but we must take into account how diametrically different a Jobriath disc is in relation to the easy, standard pap of pop.

As we begin the
You Are the Quarry
tour in 2004 we say goodbye to Alain, who shuts the door upon himself – taking himself off the road amid fears that he is suffering from exhaustion, which certainly seems to be true. Backstage at the final Alain show in Dublin, he takes me aside and whispers:
‘
I know who is planning your downfall. It is not me.’
I stand back and I let chance stirrings take their lead, but as Alain departs we are contractually bound to find an immediate replacement, and we eventually settle with the steely and stylish Jesse Tobias. We had all felt great concern for Alain, but, always knowing too much, I await personal criticism for Alain’s departure – having had no part in it. Assuredly, criticism whistles through the poplar trees soon enough with accusatory emails from Alain, and my only surprise is that I’m surprised. By such gestures I now live, as if whatever you bestow has no value unless the flow is endless, and as soon as your life-giving generosity retires, you are human filth. That’s just the way it goes. Having rescued Alain from the mad-death of his mind-crushing job at Camden Council, he would now cross continents rather than say a hello to me. When both Nancy Sinatra and Marianne Faithfull cover songs written by Alain and I, he has nothing to say, as if it had always been his due, and as if it could so easily have happened with any other co-writer from East Finchley.

‘Where were the New York Dolls from?’
asks Alain, as he trails away. I’m so confused by the question that I can’t utter any sound by way of reply.

Soon, the decade is already beginning to pass, and you let it pass.
The South Bank Show
re-emerges, expressing further interest in filming The Morrissey Story, and I agree, with the proviso that they can arrange a face-to-face with the fudge of Judge John Weeks, so that he can explain the reasoning behind his judgment for the world to hear. But he refuses. Without his obsequious starched clerks around him, he is nothing.

A UK-based record label ask me to compile a list of treasured recordings for their
Under the Influence
series of
CDs
. One track,
Saturday night special
by the Sundown Playboys, had only ever been issued in England on the Apple label, who are contacted for permission. Although the team at
Under the Influence
had written to Apple, a reply comes addressed not to them – but to me:

Morrissey:

No, you cannot have permission to use
Saturday night special
, and I won’t change my mind so do not ask again.

Neil Aspinall

Part of the reason why this is interesting is that I had not ever written to either Apple or Neil Aspinall, although I knew him to be a Beatles hanger-on from the 1960s. Meanwhile, the boys from
Under the Influence
have discovered the true owners of
Saturday night special
, who are delighted for me to use the track and who explain how Apple have no rights whatsoever to the recording. When Neil Aspinall dies in 2008, I think to myself,
W
ell, that’s what you get for being so nasty.

Time leaps on. Merck’s management motivation unleashes a torrent of touring that will run for several years. I leave the safe-cracking to Merck, and I rain as many releases onto the world as I possibly can. Despite the ghastly John Weeks, and his munchkin Michael, I now step into the most fruitful period of my life with a trio of full tilt, successful albums. All three are the recordings of my life, and never have I felt more pride, each adding love and ferocity in equal measure, and number 1 chart positions are logged here and there around the world. A
Greatest Hits
notches up another UK Top 10 as it glides in at number 5. Scandinavia erupts with a new and quite massive teenage audience – the crowd growing younger as the singer unfairly continues to resemble Jean Gabin after a good beating. The sentimental climax is 2004’s Meltdown Festival where I am asked to curate two weeks of events in or around the Royal Festival Hall, gathering all those who had won me at varying intervals. Sacha Distel agrees to be master of ceremonies, but eight weeks later he is dead. Buffy Sainte-Marie agrees to play, but then decides that she cannot leave her ailing mother. Danny la Rue agrees to be mistress of ceremonies, but then later steps away in apology because he fears he could never again look convincing in the dynamic frocks that dragged him to international fame.

Amid trumpets, I stand in my backyard at Sweetzer Avenue and I cautiously telephone David Johansen at his Woodstock hideaway, and I put the idea of a Dolls reunion to him in as cheerful a voice as I can muster. With David Johansen, it pays to be exact since his responses are famously unpredictable, and, like the Smiths, the Dolls divide had been every bit as complicated as a Hollywood divorce. I gulped my third Grey Goose and prattled on. I told David how the world had hung on for too long, and that it was now time for David to reunite with Sylvain Sylvain and Arthur Kane as the last surviving members of the New York Dolls.

‘Well, would YOU get back with YOUR old band?’
his teeth snapped. It really wasn’t necessary to muddy the waters with that topic. Three Dolls had already died, and the remaining three were by no mean ingénues, and the clock on the wall makes fun of us all. I went on about how the Dolls had exercised a wide influence, and that David was still in demand as a singer and social observer, and there was the slightly complicated matter of simply saying Yes instead of No.

‘Ummmm, I never thought of that,’
he says flatly, in his gruff R
é
my Martin voice.

‘You’ve never considered a reunion?’

‘It never once crossed my mind,’
he said.

The Dolls’ reputation had never faded, whereas the host of American bands who had mimicked them had all died of cash poisoning. I paced around the garden of Sweetzer Avenue holding the phone to my ear as if awaiting the owl-screech of a slapped newborn. David slowly drawled me a
‘Yes’
, and that June night when the Dolls walked onstage to a full
house at the Royal Festival Hall to an almost overdone roar of welcome from the crowd, a terrible case of neglect seemed set to be rectified. Johansen was back in the ring where he belonged, unbloodied, and Sylvain and Kane were almost embarrassed at their own joy at once again being Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson. On guitar, Steve Conte induced the proper spirit, and here was an edition of the New York Dolls that no one had thought possible. If not for heroin and slackened ambition, Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan would have been here, too, and, make no mistake, the New York Dolls in 2004 in their original line-up could have burst stadiums the world over. But the sordid actuality of fact is never quite that easy, and these new Dolls would never be freed from their kiboshed past. For now, though, the British press rushed to their side with posies and cigars, and after a variety of stop-start careers David Johansen was once again the captain of the ship – full steam ahead and blast the torpedoes. Could it be? Could it
really
be – now, in the future, when all’s well? The Dolls once again opened up to an opened-up world, and could finally talk big. The surgical-curtain-raiser of the Dolls playing together for the first time in thirty years was the high spot of Meltdown, especially since Johansen, Sylvain and Kane had bitterly bickered about one another over the years as only musicians do. But, a month after Meltdown, Arthur Kane is dead, and here is the Dolls’ tough luck that concludes each chapter of their career; the snakebite at the picnic. It could only be the New York Dolls – strangled by their own Karma beads, as if enough dues hadn’t already been paid. The two breathing members suddenly had every cause to sleep with the lights on. Menace had stalked the Dolls like pestilence since their first UK tour
, when drummer Billy died in a Kensington bath. Their story reads like Agatha Christie’s
And Then There Were None
,
with all the cards of fate that mother nature sends holding no aces.

Accidentally, the Dolls story has shaped itself into a disturbingly touching motion picture for modern Hollywood to sink its shifting dentures into – it’s all there: drowning, spectacle, adventure, and the gutter – a mutilated Ziegfeld Follies jacking up on Selma Avenue, starring Billy Crudup, Patrick Dempsey, Shawn Hatosy, Guillaume Canet and Andreas Wilson as, oh, you beautiful Dolls, you great big beautiful Dolls. But meanwhile, back at the Royal Festival Hall, their two nights of overdue glory throw them into the emotional black, and broke a spell for a time. Proudly, like a stage parent, I watched from the wings, moving through this strange hallucination and becoming an appendix to the Dolls story when I had once been too modest to live, and was now too screw loose to cry –
like they was my babies,
when once I had been theirs. It’s a bit like finding yourself Headmaster to the teachers of your past, and fittingly, if David and Sylvain were ever capable of showing some love and support my way,
they didn’t.

In their defense, it must have been oddly unpalatable for them to watch their most club-footed zealot achieve the chart success that had always eluded them.

And now that it’s over, what you gonna do?

For the release of a live Dolls
CD
/
DVD
from the Festival Hall, I glue together raw art for the front of each disc. I had found a photograph from the early 1960s of a female model with a freshly blown bubble passing her face. I tilt the picture sideways so that she looks as if possibly lying on the floor – a little tight and tipsy after four too many egg nogs during a night of Mickey Finished buffoonery on Hans Place. I love the final effect, and I whisk it off to David Johansen who
...
doesn’t
like it.

‘It’s too gay!’
he complains (
this
from a man who had spent his entire life impersonating Simone Signoret). The artwork is reluctantly accepted, but the back and inner designs are slapdash Bleecker Bob’s rock ’n roll, as if to redress the cloistered-nun aura of my front dabblings. I had first met David Johansen in New York during the summer of 1997. At that time, he was the only Doll I hadn’t met, and a mid-day coffee shop marked the spot – the way kindly arrowed by Danny Goldberg at Mercury Records. I was taken aback by David’s welcoming hug since he had never mentioned my name with fondness and for all I knew he couldn’t stand the sight of me. Indeed, as we talked away an hour, I found that David wasn’t entirely warm-blooded, and I seemed to irritate him with questions of what we had all now lived long enough to call the old days. Instead, David would break the thread with information about his current venture as Buster Poindexter.

‘Can you buy Poindexter CDs in London?’
he asked me.

‘Yes,’
I say, having never in my life seen a Buster Poindexter
CD
, but wanting David to feel wanted.