Autobiography (24 page)

Of
Kill Uncle
Chas confirms:
‘You’ve lost it, but you’ll re-find it.’
I seem to be eternally cased in by friends who give me bad news
because they care.
Yet Chas introduces me to Boz Boorer, a known face on the British rockabilly scene, and Boz collects guitarist Alain Whyte, who works for Camden Council, Spencer Cobrin, who has a drum kit somewhere and who helps his father out in the family antique shop, and Gary Day, who plays bass and lives with his father in Neasden. They all know each other and they manage a certain harmony together, although Alain nurses an aversion to Boz that creates frequent difficulties. Generally, it works, and all four are essential to me after the session-musician embalming fluid of
Kill Uncle.

Neatly typed letters from Nigel Thomas arrive, and he is certain that he knows the managerial way. He has the Nigel Patrick touch of British raffish elegance, being six parts Etienne Dumont champagne, the rest a checkered career in rock management (which is not the management of rocks, as such). Nigel is ten years my senior, yet he seems much more than that having lived fully and well as an intellectualist whose mind, in the words of Camus, ‘watches itself’. He walks with mastermind determination and has no time for non-thinkers. He is always Brioni besuited, and he has no plans to lower his style. Jason King tobacco follows him everywhere, and
‘Morrissey must live in Paris!’
becomes his catchphrase, and I feel disinclined to argue. Minutes later I am in Paris, where Nigel drags me through a host of rentable high-ceiling mansion-flats overlooking everything worth overlooking. It is only a question of the lift of an eyebrow, and Nigel presents to me a precision and colossus of knowledge with not a hint of amateur trifler. I am on my way.
But where to?

Alain Whyte is introduced to me as a street-sweeper from Camden, which may or may not be a joke – I never could tell. He looks a bit like ‘Kookie’ actor Edd Byrnes from
77 Sunset Strip
, and he talks in a similarly bonkers 1950s backslang, which may or may not be a speech impediment. The jargon is baffling until he hits on something riotously funny – which, thankfully, is often. I like him. He is a skilfull style-guide and always looks spiffed up. The four musicians are instantly on a $1,000 per show payroll, and although Spencer and Gary complain ceaselessly (by nature), Boz and Alain are ready to launch and fire. However, none of us are prepared for the American concerts throughout the
Kill Uncle
and
Your Arsenal
tours of 1991/92, when enormity explodes as
Your Arsenal
enters the Billboard 100 at number 21. The outbreak of hysteria in every American city is so incredible that memory almost files it as improbable. I am forever trapped in a car on which young people lie across the hood; roads persistently blocked by a thousand Morrissey lookalikes; hotel security guards positioned outside my hotel room night and day, as entire floors are cordoned off to prevent fanatical do-or-die enthusiasts stopping at nothing to get to me. I am secretly bundled out of venues via underground passageways, and each day repeats itself with scenes of unthinkable madness.

‘Ohh, it’s just like James Brown
...
’
says Gail Colson, a tone of regret in her voice.

‘You have made alternative music mainstream,’
says the President of Sire Records,
‘and you have done it without the help of MTV – which is incredible.’

Yes, I thought, and I’ve also done it without the help of Sire Records.

Airports have extra security on alert as check-in areas are swamped with ‘Mozophiles’; Madison Square Garden sells out in a flurry of panic. The actor Tom Hanks comes backstage to say hello, but I don’t know who he is and neither does anyone around me. He stands before me yet doesn’t complete a sentence. The singer Ricki Lee Jones comes backstage, and I flutter out a few compliments – one of which strikes a sore note and she leaves the room in an inexplicable huff. Humans are certainly oddities. I am introduced to
‘the most famous football player in America – who loves you.’

‘Does he have a name?’
I ask, but suddenly this jockstrap hunk of studhorse has me in a crushed manful hug, into which I disappear like a pressed flower. Where, I wonder, am I?

‘Oh, I think Morrissey summed it all up perfectly when he said
...
’
and at this point prime-time television’s Denis Leary bursts into mock tears – which is of course the punchline, and the loud audience laughter indicates understanding.

‘So, my niece told me all about Morrissey,’
says comic genius Roseanne Barr on morning TV.

‘Oh, I LOVE Morrissey!’
says Ricki Lake on her noon
TV
show, and the Johnny Carson Show is overthrown by Mozophiles who scream and shout their way through my first-ever appearance on US television, whilst main guest Bill Cosby mentions my name thirty times during his interview in order to elicit Beatlemania screams from the audience.
How can all of this possibly be?

Two nights at the Hollywood Bowl sell out in a finger-click – breaking the Beatles’ long-held record for speed. Wherever I walk, I am filmed by people I do not know – discreetly, or otherwise. I am locked inside every hotel I enter, leaving only to sign arms, legs, backs, necks – any physical part in need of a tattoo. It is T.
Rexstacy gone mad – a Beatlemania that dare not speak its name. My face yellows with the news that Elizabeth Taylor – one of the greatest monuments of our age – will attend the Hollywood Bowl show. Has she confused me for someone else?

At Pauley Pavilion at
UCLA
– with only the varsity students acting as venue security – we are confidently assured by the know-all Fire Marshal,
‘Look, we’ve had the Doors here. I am telling you that nothing will go wrong.’
The crowd of 11,500 unreservedly makes its way onto the stage and the show is stopped mid-riot. My face lights up breaking-news television reports for the next 24 hours.

I am leg-ironed in my villa at the Sunset Marquis and I watch it all unfold on the nightly news. I watch in disbelief as the
UCLA
is surrounded by police in their hundreds; the midnight streets are blocked by fire trucks that criss-cross and block Sunset Boulevard – all security officials shouting loudly as if a major building were about to fall. A mad axeman on the loose would cause less alarm. As if behind glass, I watch in amazement:
‘The riot ensued when Morrissey instructed the crowd to “come party”,’
says a reliable newshound to the on-the-spot camera, and the very idea of me ever sinking so low as to use the expression ‘come party’ makes me spray tonight’s toddy across the television screen. In fact, the riot broke as I had been singing Y
ou’re the one for me, fatty
– hardly an Altamont rallying call to the social underbelly.

Three days later, at Santa Monica Civic on November 4th, a sold-out 4,250 people are on the streets awaiting sight of my car as it inches towards the venue with no idea of how to get inside. I am thunderstruck by the hundreds of police cars closing off each street that has access to the venue.
Fire trucks are in full force even though there is no sign or likelihood of fire, yet their dazzling lights whirl at full speed as cool air rolls off the darkened beach front. The streets blaze with police and Mozophiles, who circle and clank in a confused fascination at something stirring – as if awaiting a public declaration to rouse the throng into civil action. Many were the young girls dressed in black; Hispanic boys elegantly be-quiffed, with chains dangling from the back pockets of their Big E’s. I had never witnessed anything like this in my life – either for myself, or for others.
What do they think is about to occur?

Bundled into the venue, I momentarily pass by a special room set aside for press reporters, and I see one very stately black man in an impressive suit speaking directly to a news camera.

‘Morrissey conveys all the worst elements of homosexuality and bestiality,’
and I wonder if he could possibly mean me. It is not enough, I note, to represent homosexuality fused with bestiality, but indeed I apparently convey
all the very worst
elements of both.

Certainly, this is already out of control. The concert itself is a storm of good intentions wildly received, and it is evident that it is only the media who are out for trouble. Once it becomes clear that I am neither Alice Cooper nor the Sex Pistols, the media backs off in search of gore elsewhere. How can we have a debauched rock report that is minus either sex or drugs? What exactly is being written about? A skinny singer who does not indulge in either sex or drugs? What badness therefore lurks?

I meet David Bowie for breakfast at a discreet restaurant at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. Both standing at the buffet with our empty plates, David hovers over what are horrifically called ‘cold cuts’. I nestle up beside him.

‘
David, you’re not actually going to eat that stuff, are you?’

Rumbled, he snaps:
‘Oh, you must be HELL to live with.’

‘Yes, I am,’
I say proudly, as David changes course and sidles off towards the fruit salad, and another soul is saved from the burning fires of self-imposed eternal damnation.

David quietly tells me, ‘
You know, I’ve had so much sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive,’
and I loudly tell him,
‘You know, I’ve had SO LITTLE sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive.’

1992 would bring a Grammy nomination for
Your Arsenal
, and the phenomenon of the prize system enters my life for the first time. The document from Grammy headquarters quite naturally misspells my name, and I sniff a lack of serious intent. At Sire-Reprise, Howie Klein forewarns me:
‘You won’t win the Grammy,’
and full of dare-devil I ask,
‘How do you know?’
and Howie says,
‘Because they whisper the winner beforehand, and they haven’t whispered
to us, so you won’t win.’

Indeed I do not win. After all, what music mogul living in Brentwood splendor would vote for a scruffbag like me? The award goes to Tom Waits who, twenty years later, passes a message to me saying that I’m welcome to have the Grammy if I still want it.

A fax message splutters through to the Sunset Marquis (where I now live) from Chrissie Hynde, on Air Studios London paper:

25
th
Tuesday
Johnny Thunders,
Mr Genzale,
died in New Orleans on Tuesday.
Chrissie

Ahead is Madison Square Garden, which has sold all of its 22,000 tickets. I discreetly ask if David Johansen would open the night, but my live agent tells me,
‘David said no because he plans to headline Madison Square himself shortly’
– an event which, as far as I know, has yet to happen. As an alternative, I ask around to see if anyone can track down Jobriath, who has entirely fallen off the human map.

‘Are you saying you’d like him to do those old songs in makeup, and so forth?’
asks my agent, Marsha Vallasic.

‘
Yes!’
I reply in a half-giggle of excitement. A few days later my agent tells me that Jobriath won’t be available.
‘Why not?’
I ask, indignantly hard-pressed to think of whatever else he might be distracted by.

‘Because he’s dead, that’s why not,’
my agent says. In fact, Jobriath has already spent ten years in his grave. Such were the moods of the 80s and 90s music press that Jobriath’s death would not be considered worth mentioning, and even I, as a dedicated listener, had no idea that ill-health had snuffed him out. Jobriath had gone alongside Klaus Nomi in an ‘
AIDS
related’ illness that usually quite specifically means
AIDS
.

Meanwhile, somehow alive, I am New York’s ‘hottest ticket’, as a stinky and steamy July brings me to the Garden’s vast and lavish dressing rooms. I sit by a grand piano awaiting the evening’s call-time, and I ponder on how the band aren’t really as good as they ought to be, but nonetheless the march of time takes control and I am overwhelmed with all of the understanding of rags-to-riches monologues. I am afforded all of the luxuries and attention and private bathrooms where Elvis Presley had soaked before me, and as I lower myself onto the very toilet where Elvis had no doubt whistled away the call of nature, I wonder how all of this could possibly be, yet at the same time I am confused by its naturalness and its
right
to be. From Stretford stress – with those miserable miscreants running the Jobcenter
...
those richer-than-thou troglodytes ordering files from me in the Inland Revenue cellar – and now, here I am, the glamor and clamor of Madison Square Garden, where people much older than me call me ‘Sir’, and where the Smiths are
tellingly
...
nowhere in sight. Teams of young people slip and slide through New York streets with my face on their t-shirts, and the proper and elitist Garden staff welcome me with a congenial half-bow. It is exactly like a Broadway born-in-a-trunk music hall tale where the rail tracks whiz across the screen indicating a speedy ride up life’s ladder. Now there were no Smiths, and all of the Smiths’ live crew had also gone. The name on the ticket is now mine, but with the continuing absence of Sire Records I couldn’t point to anything that had eased the journey. The long corridors lead me to the stage, where the roar of 22,000 people makes the skin on my face shiver and peel back. The only way I can cope with the drama is to pretend I am elsewhere. It is a night to remember, and the final reply to a lengthy question.

Michael Stipe slips a note under my hotel door:
‘
You were very funny last night. New York gasped. MS/SM.’

At The Forum in Los Angeles a royal David Bowie walks onstage to join me for the encore; he is stately against my last-gasp exhaustion. The 12-year-old within me – unable to leave for school unless I’d soothed my sickness with at least one spin of
Starman
– bathes in the moment with disbelief. But there it is.

The night clouds as television news announce the disappearance of 23-year-old Denise Anette Huber, who had left her Newport Beach home on June 2nd 1991, by herself, to ‘attend Morrissey at the Los Angeles Forum’. Denise was never seen again, and a plea for information ran over and over and over on the California nightly news for several years until her nude body was found in 1994 in a freezer in Arizona. Reports were certain that, on driving home from the concert, Denise had stopped to assist someone in trouble, and had herself been bludgeoned to death in response to her act of kindness.

There are, of course, no
UK
press reviews of the incredible pandemonium at the
US
shows. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Let it be.

We head-butt our way through streets of bumper-to-bumper traffic in order to reach the University Hall in Las Vegas. The audience completely trashes the seated venue, and newspapers of the following morning report a savage riot with rows and rows of mangled and piled-up seats shown on the front pages. It is quite fantastic. We plough on to Chicago (The World), Detroit (Meadowbrook), Cincinnati (Riverbend), Cleveland (Nautica), Boston (Great Woods), and everyone is mystified at the sheer size of the crowds, as what seems like small continents of people swarm in. The parking areas alone seem to go on for miles. I struggle to realize how all of these people have come along to see me. Toronto’s Kingswood is a giant mass of screaming and swirling people – all very young, some demented, many hanging off the stage, others climbing across the heads of others in order to reach the lip of the stage, and I look into the audience at a mass of legs – not arms – in the air. The vision is an endless roll, roll, roll, of people being tipped off the stage, with coats, shoes, bags, posters all flying across the stage; highschool girls of long blonde hair projected ten feet into the air; tearaways in brothel creepers punch their way through in order to touch the tips of my fingers and yelp with joy. I laugh, I am horrified, I can’t believe it, I’m tearful, it’s dreadful, it’s beautiful, it’s dangerous, and all the young and vital reach to me – as I had never reached to anyone. By the time we reach Washington’s Merriweather, local security has been given the nod, and the fat yellow jackets stand three deep between the stage and the front row, so that I am, in effect, singing to security alone. I walk off frustrated, and I ask that their numbers be reduced, but they won’t budge.

‘Don’t let your ego hurt people,’
shouts one security guard as I pass, and the ugly turns uglier as one security guard grabs me around the neck, and as his throttle begins to burn into me I swing back my right fist which is then caught by Jim Connolly.

‘Don’t,’
he says,
‘that’s just what he wants – he’ll have you for assault.’

In the midst of all the chaos and violence, the band freezes. It is beyond them. At New Jersey’s Garden State I am told that the American national anthem is always played before the artist walks on. I find this absurd and slightly fascist, and although I can’t stop it from happening I follow it with an even louder blast of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s
My country ’tis of thy people you’re dying
anti-American detonation.

‘Is it having any effect?’
I ask a crew member from behind the iron curtain.

‘No. Everyone just looks confused.’

At the Shoreline Amphitheater in San Francisco so many people clamber onto the stage that I am immediately swallowed up in the rotating mass. I crawl offstage on my knees as if out of a rugby scrum, the night lost to sheer lunacy of stage-divers coming from every conceivable angle. The audience is suddenly a giant mass of piled-up flesh with death at their elbows. The house lights come on, go off, come on, go off, pitch darkness, everyone screams, the
PA
shuts down, amps are pushed over as everything on the stage is grabbed by souvenir hunters, and the looting goes on and on with no one able to control the crowd.

‘Where is Moz?!’
panics a crew member as I coil behind Alain’s amp-stack and belly-slide off the back of the stage. Even if seen, it could not be believed. Yet Sire do nothing, and say nothing.

In Chicago Alain sets fire to his guitar onstage; Gary smashes his bass into dust particles; Spencer kicks his kit over; and the police line up in a side-stage loop looking for someone to arrest. An enormous backdrop of a laughing Harvey Keitel blocks out the sky as police sirens
replace the music. It is all madness. From Sire, Howie Klein looks away. By now, the nightly intent of ticket-buyers is to mount the stage and then to rip my shirt off – I, who have nothing. On this first tour alone I go through 300 shirts. People grab everything and anything and run off with it, having managed the impossible climb over barriers and through security to arise onstage. It is mesmerizing to watch. By November 11th we reach Nassau Coliseum and we face our first blip; the arena is only half-sold. We had been on a roller-coaster since May, but now Howie Klein observes
, ‘Morrissey shows are too violent’
– and of course they are bound to be too
something –
no suggestion from Sire that we must capture all of this on film. Each night continues as a sinister and desperate torrent of Beatlemania bodies.

In Nashville the local police line up on the front of the stage! Behind them, I attempt to sing to their backs! But I can’t see through the line of porky-pig slime-buckets, whose jelly-assed cossacks block me from audience view. It is vaudevillian in its crackpot silliness. A very effeminate boy slips under the flatfoot mountain and whacks his face against the stage, and he is side-kicked away by our badged guardians.

‘Who does he thank he is? Elvis Presleh?’
says a Smokey the Bear Keystone Cop, as he gives me the glare of death.

‘We’ve nevah had anythung like thas be-fowah,’
says a police-
woman – confusingly standing between me and the drumkit.

The Nashville front row hosts a large gang of boys wearing heavy makeup, and as I am rolled into the backseat of a waiting car, a man in his late twenties stands with tear-stained face:
‘Just let me touch you – just once,’
and his sobs reach breaking-point. However, we all snap, exhausted and spent in a mayhem unmanned, and we cancel the final run of dates at Worcester, Albany, Williamsburg, Chapel Hill, Birmingham and Lakeland. It is sad, but the bough breaks. At
JFK
Airport, skinny Mozophiles are pouring through barriers and checkpoints, banging on glass as I hide in the airport lounge.

‘We’ll haffta take him through the back-way,’
say police, and I am whisked through fish-stenched kitchens. I am Fabian in 1960.

‘Would they believe this back in England?’
I ask Linder, agog with her camera.

‘They would never WANT to believe this back in England,’
she says.

And she is correct. The most extraordinary tours of my life are never made known back in England, and attempting to recount the details becomes almost pointless.

‘People in England have no idea,’
says Nigel Thomas of the American madness,
‘and unfortunately you are on a record label who are as slow as a dead donkey. They can’t even get
Everyday is like Sunday
to number 80, never mind number 1.’

Nigel quickly arranges for a studio session in New Orleans with the revered Allen Toussaint. Worn out, the band arrives at the studio where Allen will record the song
The thoughts of Jack the Ripper
,
a ludicrously lost gem in Nigel’s view, yet not the catchiest of titles. I slip into the studio and watch the band warm up. I say hello to Allen, who looks at me and then looks away. The band are rough to the point of bad – having been pushed around America like a debilitated Bay City Rollers, and Allen Toussaint looks concerned. I am now embarrassed by the sound coming through the speakers, of which Allen says to his engineer
‘What have I let myself in for?’
I overhear the comment and I catch the engineer’s reply to Allen, which is a silent
sssh
in my direction, as if to say to Allen,
‘Steady, he can hear you.’
Without fuss or calamity I rise and exit into the balmy air of New Orleans. Boz follows me.

‘So, what do you want me to do?’
he says.

‘El-vest has left the building,’
I say, not remotely funny. It isn’t a question of vanity or ego, but occasionally there is simply no point.

On returning to England I am told by Murray Chalmers at
EMI
that a certain journalist is now the editor of the
NME
.
This journalist is known to us because he has reviewed five albums by either the Smiths or Morrissey, writing with unabashed hatred, without an avenue of offensiveness left unexplored. However, the significance of his promotion to
NME
editor is that he has allegedly called a staff meeting at which he has passed the command that his staff writers must now ‘get Morrissey’, and that the plan was now underway to dislodge me as an
NME
staple.

Soon after, at a Finsbury Park concert, where the main writers from the
NME
are seated at the back of the park at the mixing desk, and one particularly irritating writer is suckling her newborn,
I begin to notice a flux of sharpened pound coins flying at me from sections of the crowd. It takes mission, I thought, to part with so many pound coins. What is happening? I am forced offstage mid-set, which doesn’t worry me greatly since I am not dish of the day, but the backstage view is that the coterie of trouble makers are an organized group.