DB's Song of the Day (day 246): "RUBBER RING" (1985) The Smiths

All the “back to school” biz is making me recall college days and the return to classes in September. And that time—for me, the late 80s—takes me to The Smiths, who, with a few other bands—like the Mekons and The Cure—more or less presided over those days. I had a tape of Louder Than Bombs and played it quite a bit driving to school (I commuted). And one semester, earlier, my second year, I was “between cars” when the white Honda finally died, its mileage astronomical. During that time, I got a ride with a fellow student who got me to listen to The Smiths more seriously, all because she heard on the radio often “There is a Light that Never Goes Out.”  So that was the fall of 1986.

In thanks for the rides, I made Karen several tapes culled from my collection, including today’s song which I can remember her commenting on approvingly—“you’re older now and you’re a clever swine”—so I’ll dedicate today’s post to her, wherever she may be. From one clever swine to another.

She had an interesting—very 80s—approach to hair and couture and was in love with the hair of Robert Smith of The Cure. So maybe I should’ve dedicated a Cure song to her, but today’s song has the feel I want. Morrissey, in his usual somewhat arch but somewhat sincere fashion, takes stock of “the songs that made you cry / And the songs that saved your life.”  And even gives us the perspective of the song as it plays: “I’m here with the cause / I’m holding the torch / In the corner of your room, can you hear me?” It sounds so plaintive. And that bit about “when you lay in awe on your bedroom floor.” That recreates for me the experience of discovering a lot of the songs I’ve been posting about, and it also captures that sense of the songs “so easily outgrown,” that “Rubber Ring” is about.

Which is brilliant, in its way. To write a song about the songs that one loved then forgot, the songs that “changed your life,” but then your life changed again. I must confess though, for all my willingness to make my life take its cues from the music I listen to—the “soundtrack of a life” thing—that I don’t know that I get so goosey about it as the song does. And that’s because, I think, the songs of my past aren’t trapped in the past. I’m always ready to strike up a new relation to them, as with most people I’ve ever met, regardless of whether I knew them well or not.

Which is a way of saying that music is a living thing, almost. It changes as we change. True, it doesn’t age the way people do—all you have to do is watch a performer sing a song he first sang 20 years ago to see that—but it’s not frozen either. The recording is preserved and endures and sounds “just like” when you first heard it, empirically. But that’s the part that all this talk on this blog is meant to gainsay. No song sounds “just like” when you first heard it and every subsequent listening is different. Sometimes I just want to talk about the song; sometimes I want to talk about hearing the song, getting to know it. Sometimes, in a way, I’m talking about leaving the song where it remains.

Hearing “my voice in your head” as Morrissey sings that is on the money. Because even as I hear him singing that I’m hearing his voice in my head from previous times I heard him sing that and times I heard the line in my head when the song wasn’t playing. And I do think of him kindly for that. And of Karen, and of the white Honda, and of the gray Honda, and of Robert Smith and a time—“you make me feel like I am fun again”—called college.

Everybody’s clever nowadays

DB's Song of the Day (day 142): "EVERYDAY IS LIKE SUNDAY" (1988) Morrissey

The Mighty Moz is on tour again, supporting his new album. Dude is 55 today, so. Here’s a song that suits perfectly this drab, morosely-colored day in New Haven. It’s from 1988 and is rather blithe (as only Morrissey can be) about “Armageddon.” Ah, to be alive then was darkly clouded but to be young then was certain shits. Morrissey made it a bit better for those compelled to be disaffected while cheekily arch about it. I don’t think there’s a single song by Morrissey or The Smiths, the band he fronted from 1984-1987, that doesn’t provoke a wry smile while I’m listening to it.

“Everyday is Like Sunday” is no exception. I first heard this when my daughter burned me a disc of one of Morrissey’s “best of” albums. I had pretty much ignored the solo Moz—and, so, you know, judge me how you wish. It’s just that much of what I loved about The Smiths wasn’t just Morrissey’s canny lyrics and fey self-projections, but rather the guitar sound created and maintained against all comers by Johnny Marr. And once they split as such things go, Morrissey became more popular than ever but, it seemed to me, by willfully courting a kind of slavish adulation that made him like the white Brit boy Indie answer to Madonna or Prince—everything he did was cause for comment and hysteria. I tried to live my slow crawl of the Eighties into the Nineties while avoiding all such worthies, except to the extent that they were inescapable.

Fitting then that my kid—after all, I’m Morrissey’s age—should be the one to put me on to solo Moz. And this song is one that leapt right out of the collection and inspired a carefully gradated sense of depressing circumstances meeting captious fun. Here we have Moz trudging in the wet sand of a seaside town “they forgot to close down.” We think we’re in some kind of grim working-class holiday spot that just can’t cut it any longer. But he presses on, as the strings give the song an immense lift, almost like the sun streaking the gray on your bank holiday late afternoon to make the day not a total wash, singing coyly, “Armageddon, come Armageddon.” So now we’re not in a seaside town hitting an economic slump, we’re in a seaside town that should’ve been evacuated as during the Blitz, except what they’re waiting for is a nuclear holocaust.

Cheery, idn’t it?  And that great refrain keeps bringing us back to the song’s predominant mood, which is gray, flecked with gold; grim, with a ribbing: “Every day is like Sunday / Every day is silent and grey.” Enough to say that sometimes that is simply the mood (like today) and this song helps one exult in an inner drizzle.

Hide on the promenade / Etch a postcard: / “How I dearly wish I was not here” / In this seaside town / That they forgot to bomb

With those lines we get the trenchant aspects of this song. In other words, this place is godawful and should be (have been) bombed. It’s not so much a “fear of nuclear holocaust” song as it is a “this place deserves a violent end that will obliterate it all at once, and me too, please God.” Come, come, come, nuclear bomb. Morrissey is the king of the despairing aside on the self-styled miseries of the fop or dandy or poisonous poseur who can’t bear another moment in the tragically insufferable scenes in which he finds himself. Such is his main gift to the world of song. And this song manages to manifest all that but with a hummable awareness of how rich it is to face death in such banal surroundings. “A strange dust lands on your hands / And on your face.” He keeps repeating the latter line to underscore, I think, what we really stand to lose. As if Roger Daltrey were to shout “We’re all faces!” instead of “They’re all wasted!” We’re faces facing the end. “Don’t cry / Don’t raise your eyes.”

And still that refrain rides one of Morrissey’s best melodies and the lift is undeniable so that the song (if you ignore the words) seems to be celebrating the Sabbath, the day of rest. Sorry it’s not sunny (it might never be sunny again) but at least we’re not at work. Let us go to our graves with a song in our hearts.

Share some grease tea with me.