Autobiography (43 page)

The writer who conducted the interview fires very stressed emails to my manager explaining how
‘this piece has nothing to do with me,’
and
‘it has been taken out of my hands,’
and
‘I just don’t understand that magazine anymore,’
added to his
‘Morrissey was so charming during the interview.’
However, the editor is stung. When I realize I have no choice but to legally challenge the
NME
, its editor tactlessly writes to the Love Music Hate Racism headquarters in London, and he warns them,
‘If you support Morrissey in this dispute you can forget about any support from the
NME
.’
It is a fascinating explosion of frantic egotism. However, I fight the
NME
for over four years (quite naturally, even though all could have been resolved within one afternoon since the original interview recording was freely available to both legal teams). For me, there seemed to be nothing to debate, since we could all listen to the original interview – which began and ended on affably good-natured terms – and then we could read the final printed piece, the editor’s damning fantasy bearing no relation whatsoever to the truth of the meeting. It was a stitch-up so severe, with the editor’s misdeed so manifestly grave, that a court loss could kill off the
NME
for good, since its fortunes had slumped. In the event, the
NME
ultimately apologized for the piece, although it would cost me several hundred thousand pounds for them to say what they could have said four years previously. I was satisfied with the apology, and I had never sought damages.
I’ve been stabbed in the back|so many, many times|I don’t have any skin|but that’s just the way it goes
.

Up here in Spokane on May 6th we are in bear-baiting country, which grants me dutiful attack. I suggest we hunt the hunters, and the crowd roar approval. By Friday we are in Omaha, America’s bosom, city of sawdust and mockingbird houses. Daytime streets are dry and wide and always empty, but the audience at the Orpheum belies Nebraska’s poverty of spirit as parents hold their small children up to the stage to be kissed or hugged by a baffled singer. The art of song lights the touch-paper in a way that nothing else can. The audience is confused, though, when I sing David Bowie’s
Drive-in
Saturday
, because evidently they don’t know what it is. It is the only moment when I lose the crowd. By Wednesday I put on my little suit and sing to the Indianapolis joyous. The Murat Theater, once again, seems full of parents with their small children. The kids wear homemade Morrissey t-shirts and are so deep within the gnashing jaws of the front rows that my concern distracts me. Children effect a dramatic passionate mimic at my every move – so solemn and heavenwards, yet unborn even at the time of
Southpaw Grammar
– they go the way of their parents. There is so much meaning to success in Indianapolis or Nebraska because they are the parts of middle America where most fear to tread. If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere. The Kansas City Uptown Theater the following Wednesday is over-stuffed at 2,200, and everyone lets go with so much love that nothing I could say or do could fail to hit the right tone. On Saturday in Austin 5,000 witness such an appalling sound-system that I croak and twinge myself into further despair. A woodland setting, my agitation becomes tiresome and the night fails everyone. The audience are for the most part a robust and forgiving bunch of crunchies; crested hens with their daisies in army black, it is an exciting and perfect swarm of double-barreled broads. The sound at San Diego a week later is so abysmal that I give up halfway through the set – because there really is no point. We have sold 10,000 tickets but there is nothing I can do. Everyone looks to me for bravery, but at this open-air bayside concert the winds are so strong that the sound blows west as we direct our efforts south. It is unbearable and very embarrassing.

At Riverside Auditorium three days later Jesus is in his heaven and all is restored. A sky-scraping image of my face drapes the front of the building, and what good is it all without love?

‘Why, after all these years, are you so surprised?’
asks Mikey,
‘why do you still question the love?’
I wave the question away, the heart stuck in an ice-cold morning of 1970. I am impossible. Inside the hall it is Osmondmania, but thankfully with the wasted corpse of Morrissey in place of the oily Osmonds. The madness makes local television news, with a reporter’s shrug that is so familiar to me now for it tells us what is happening with a look and a tone that suggests it ought not to happen, as if vibrations of Satan follow wherever I go.

By Friday we play the Hollywood Bowl, and Mikey presents a personal guest list long enough to encircle the city, and I reject it since the eye-crossing cost of it is ultimately subtracted from my pension fund. Mikey sulks at the rejection and this creates backstage tension. Filmed as we walk on, we all look uncharacteristically unhappy. Mikey and I will not look at each other, and consequently the concert lacks form, although new-found drummer Matt Walker magnificently takes us all to a new standard, and this disciplined ship is suddenly the best military band in America.

‘I always wanted to live in Bakersfield,’
says Boz as we pull into a pile of dust.

‘But there’s nothing here,’
says Jesse.

‘Precisely,’
says Boz.

A 2,800 sell-out in hazy
Hud
country brings on a clatter of audience scraps, but I am not at all concerned, and in fact I find it to be quite funny. If people want to fight, then let them. Who’s to say they shouldn’t? I’m not St Francis of Assisi. By the 25th we are in New York at the ice-cold chamber of David Letterman’s television set. David always has the studio at Icelandic temperatures because he apparently sweats a great deal. Fish-eyed, we endure. The shuddering genius of Kristeen Young is with us to alarm David with her spirit-of-the-sea backing vocals, plus a few mid-ocean arm movements as we play
That’s how people grow up
. Kristeen wears her self-made ‘bubble’ dress that is a sirenesque bubble-wrap of
Star Trek
in collision with
The Jetsons
. Kristeen is miffed when the same creation appears on Lady Gaga two years later.

In Birmingham, Alabama
, I rush myself to a dentist for the first time in 20 years. I insist upon codeine mixed with heroin and gin in order to settle my nerves, but this simple request is denied. The molar masher is a delightful woman who cures my fear of dental bashers, and my childhood memories of being savaged at a Stretford Road Clinic by a Third Reich dogcatcher had set off an endless mental bleep, and only now, in Birmingham, Alabama, did gentle kindness show me how. I would never again fear dentistry, and my visit makes the front page of the local newspapers the next day. How very odd. If only those hawks at Stretford Road Clinic knew – but surely they are all toast by now?

I walk onstage at Chastain Park in Atlanta and I am confused by the audience. In fact, I do not know who or what or where I am. The audience appears to be all families sitting at tables, ploughing into their homemade hampers of Jesus knows what. Evidently this is what happens at Chastain Park – everyone brings their lunch of skyscraper wedges with a sprinkle of rabbit neck and eagle shit. What a very strange sight it all is. I can’t help wondering how much sow belly gets crunched each time I launch into another crowd-killer. Why am I here
? ‘Well,’
manager Merck tells me,
‘it’s the salt pork American underbelly, and if you can crack it here then
...
you’ve cracked it.’

Cracked what? The chili-dog fraternity? The po-boy submarine grinders’ club? Get me out! I launch a box of Cheez-Its into the audience shouting,
‘You’ve brought your lunch – here’s mine,’
which, as ever, just wasn’t funny.

By September 20th we are in Tijuana, minus our marbles. The show is nuthouse insane, with plaster peeling onto the heads of a joy-popping crowd. Leaving the venue, we are driven by a local driver for a four-minute skip over the US border. Twenty minutes later we are on a darkened highway, and it naturally falls to me to speak up.

‘The border was four minutes away, why are we still driving twenty minutes later?’

Sitting next to me, the tour manager says softly,
‘Yes, I’ve noticed that.’
My personal security (who is from El Salvador) sits up front next to the driver and begins to tough it out, demanding an explanation. The driver shrugs and is sweating badly. He makes a sudden and dramatic swerve from the freeway exit and continues into highland darkness.

‘STOP THIS CAR!’
I shout, and bang my fists on the back of the driver’s seat. My security orders a stop, and I jump out as the car drives on. Kidnapping in Mexico is almost an expected eventuality for anyone crossing the border with an entertainer’s visa. Insignificant as I am, tonight’s snatch was I, organized by those who obviously didn’t realize that my market value wouldn’t raise enough money to feed a family of five rug-rats. I sit on the ground in the dark, a disused gas station tipping over behind me. As far as the eye can squint, there is nothing.

‘You realize that was a kidnapping attempt?’
I say, looking up at my tour manager.

‘Yes, that’s what I thought,’
he says as if ordering a Spanish omelette.

I hold my head in my hands, shrouded in darkness and miles from the nearest asylum. Two hours later we finally reach our destination – which had originally been four minutes away. All heads hang. All questions unanswered. Who was the driver? No one knows. Where were we going? No one knows.

Barely alive, we make it to Waukegan for October 17th. The Genesee Theater is lit up like a giant roller-coaster, and someone remarks on a slayer serial-killer who had made Waukegan famous, and I am surprised there is only one. By Wednesday we are in Royal Oak at the Music Theater, and once again the crowd is hyper-charged. How exactly I came to represent a goulash of hardball punk force is a mystery, but Royal Oak plays out a gutsy night of bone-crushing peppiness. The following night in Merrillville at the Star Plaza is a Saturday atmosphere gathering the biggest frogs in the pond. The husky and hefty give whatever it takes, and again, as I pull away from the venue, Merrillville streets rain down Morrissey t-shirts and America IS the world, after all.

In January, six nights at the Roundhouse in London are attempted, but stuck in the stuckness of insufferable winter, my voice has gone as everyone around me coughs and splutters with a hot flash of the chills. In the midst of it all, I am expected to remain immune. Four songs in and I am dead meat. Done for, I walk off, and a harum-scarum crowd fast burn into a conniption fit. Who can calm them down? From the audience, up jump dapper television faces Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and David Walliams, each so certain that slick Wood Lane telly-patter would extinguish the madly nettled crowd. It did not work. With gears grinding, the audience turns on Jonathan and Russell like hounds at a foxhunt, and each wondered how or if they’d get offstage alive. Russell’s tap-dancing chatter stiffed with gasbag finesse, whilst Jonathan’s gassy gobbledygook boomeranged back in his face. He would later tell me that he had never faced such a hard-shelled audience – to which, of course, my chest swells with pride. The intervention of Jonathan, Russell and David touched me greatly and told me that I had friends. They saw a bad situation and tried to make it better. I am indebted. But it didn’t work.

Tellingly, this kill-crazy flare-up that gathered Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and David Walliams (three of the biggest names in British entertainment) onto a London stage in order to calm an audience ruckus, gathers no media attention whatsoever, and the Morrissey embargo rolls on. Had it been any other pop artist, the newspapers would blast their blast with excitable dribble. But what is the point of running a Morrissey story if neither
HEAVEN KNOWS HE’S MISERABLE N
OW
or
BIGMOUTH STRIKES AGAIN
have any relevance as headlines? There could never be such a story.

June flames with an appearance at Dublin’s Museum of Art. When a Dublin audience is in the right mood, anti-ballistic missiles can’t stop them.

By July 4th we headline at Hyde Park on a Friday of 25,000 strong. The actor Lior Ashkenazi flies over from Israel just to see the concert. Standing next to him backstage, it is difficult for me to shine, for some people are too in-spot to be matched, and Lior is such a person. Chrissie Hynde is there, achingly funny in great flux. I need only catch sight of her in the distance and the great knot of my heart is untied. Irony is Chrissie’s pattern, and though the word is rarely understood in its proper context, Chrissie manages to take people in so that she might ambush them with the truth. It is a play of the mind, or jeu d’esprit. She would pose nude on a ladder if it meant assisting the cause of animal rights – a hero in the modern sense, but not in the forgotten origin of the word (which, oddly, denotes neither virtue nor honor). Chrissie has been thrown in jails the world over for attempting to rescue animals from torture labs, but her unshakable conviction garnishes no humanitarian awards, and she stands her ground unappreciated with the grammarians of modern rock.

Arriving in Madrid I am cornered by Siouxsie, who is tonight’s opener. She wants to know why she has been dropped from next week’s bill in Tel Aviv. Being Siouxsie, she is ready to wrestle me to the ground and jab my eyes out for use as vestibule knickknacks. She had been listed as third on the bill to myself and the New York Dolls, but had been removed at the last minute because
‘she won’t stay in that hotel.’
What hotel, I have no idea, but I am told that she has pulled out and that the local promoter has filled her slot with someone unlikely to convulse. Siouxsie is on the warpath (well,
what else
), catsuit all a-wrinkle, having been booted off. I, too, am enraged since the third on the bill is now someone I’ve never heard of and who is, in the event, a roadhouse atrocity, yet who announces to the world that they were lovingly hand-picked ‘by Morrissey’ – I being forever the funmaking funster.
Oh, dear God.
Obviously someone paid cash to get this thumbs-down moose onto the Tel Aviv bill, and the story about Siouxsie refusing to come along unless her catsuit had its own en-suite was absolute tosh. The Tel Aviv day is further exacerbated when the old Dolls fail to turn up for their soundcheck. In fact, no one knows where they are, or if they’ll even arrive. With minutes to go, they stumble in, ready to flash groove Israel.