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Johnny Marr’s Stolen Guitar Returned 10 Years Later…
[Via Spinner]
Ten years ago, after a Johnny Marr and the Healers gig at the Scala in King’s Cross, London, Stephen White, then 28, found himself backstage with the opportunity to gank Marr’s 1964 cherry red Gibson SG guitar… so he did. White, who said it was a “spur of the moment decision” and was disgusted with himself for not returning it, recently got busted when he took his prize to a guitar shop on the famed Tin Pan Alley street in London’s West End for repairs. A savvy individual tipped off officials and the game was up.
Marr is on tour with the Cribs right now, and holds no ill will towards White, who received 200 days of community service as his sentence.
Let’s watch a video with Johnny Marr after the jump, where he describes falling in love with the guitar.
Johnny Marr Composing Original Score to Film
[via Clash]
Even thoughhe joined Modest Mouse that one time and everyone knew it was frankly too good to be true and ended up being entirely weird, Johnny Marr is still the coolest in our book. Rumors have been abounding of a Smiths reunion, which is simply frustrating, but some substantial, good news about Marr comes in the form of a film score.
According to his official website, Marr is composing the score for The Big Bang, a neo-noir film about a LA-based private dick on the search for a burlesque performer who no one has ever seen. The movie is to star Antonio Banderas, Delroy Lindo, Sam Elliot, William Fitchner, and Snopp Dogg. read more
Morrissey
Morrissey
Years of Refusal
(Lost Highway, 2009)
More has probably been written about Morrissey’s public persona than his music. While the two are inextricably enmeshed, there is just something uniquely fascinating about an ambiguously sexual, unabashedly British, gladiola-loving 49-year-old (!) loner. He remains a paradox. His lyrics let us know he’s painfully alone, while his boastful croon let’s us know he’s confident—awesomely, arrogantly confident.
At this point in his career, it’s easy to accuse him of self-parody. Anytime a dude who is almost as old as my dad sings about how “nobody wants my love”, like he does on the lead single “I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris”, I become a little incredulous.
But let’s not play the authenticity card here. That would detract from the real issue at hand: Relevance. As long as there are 16-year-old kids alone in their bedrooms lamenting their lack of a prom date, Pretty in Pink style, as long as there are shy collegiate girls in cardigans studying their weekends away in library basements, as long as there is someone out there feeling remotely inadequate, this guy will be relevant. Morrissey’s career endures because our personal lives do not.
His recent millennial career resurgence continues with Years of Refusal. His vocal prowess is stronger than it’s ever been, and his backing musicians sound less and less like a Smiths tribute band and are coming into something of their own as well. This translates to an even higher, and more paradoxical, level of confidence. For the most part, the album is composed of tight bursts of catchy rock songs with the lyrical quips we’ve come to rely on for over the past 20 years. And chances are, fans will fall for these battle cries of confident loner-ism all over again.
Years has got him dizzied up in a fiery black cloud. The rampage of “Something Is Squeezing My Skull” and the spaghetti Western pizzazz of “When I Last Spoke to Carol” suggest Morrissey-the-persona is beyond pissed per usual at the trappings of his loner status. For “there is no love in modern life, it’s amazing I’ve made it this far” he dramatically declares. There’s no doubt that tried and true fans will eat this shit up.
But before you know it, three tracks later, what do you know, surprise, surprise (that’s sarcasm folks), Moz is reveling in his self-imposed exile, throwing his arms around Paris with flamboyant aplomb. For only “stone and steel accept [his] love.” Later, on the album closer, he tauntingly sings, “I’m okay by myself / And I don’t need you or your morality to save me.” But whom he’s taunting remains unclear. The joke, however, is probably on all of us. After all, Morrissey has made a career invoking our insecurities, while simultaneously relying on that audience to elevate his existence to living sainthood. With an artist and audience so inextricably linked, no one is okay alone. So he’s not stopping now. He won’t. He can’t. Not when all we need is him.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Tags: Morrissey, Years of Refusal, Lost Highway Records, The Smiths
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Revenge of the Earworm
In the tiki, tiki, tiki, tiki tiki room, in the tiki, tiki tiki tiki tiki room… That, I’m sorry to say, is what’s going through my head nonstop as I begin to write this week’s Riot Gear!. The song, as played by the sadistic DJ in my head, never makes it to a verse or bridge. All I get is that horribly catchy chorus in a four-second loop over and over and over until it stirs a strong desire for violence against the little animatronic birds and flowers who infected me. I suppose you can guess where I spent my winter vacation…
These infectious sonic ditties leaping across our synapses and threatening our sanity are commonly called earworms. They are inevitable, and, at least for me, not even an iPod loaded with hours of ’70s punk rock can kill it. Sure, listening to music contrary to the offending snippet can suppress the offending noise, but they cannot destroy it. Once the external influence stops, the earworms return. I have a whole jukebox of earworms in heavy rotation in my head. The pieces range from excerpts from great songs I’ve heard and played over the years to sugary jingles I would have been better off never hearing in the first place.
The best I can do to control my earworm problem is to layer another earworm on top of the existing one. Sometimes this is done without my permission by DJ Cerebral Cortex, other times it is done intentionally by that tiny part of gray matter I have control over. So, now, three paragraphs into my column I still have that horrible Tiki song bouncing around, but it has now become a rhythm track for modern music, on the radio, another day and another show, from Be Bop Deluxe’s “Modern Music.” This line alternates with the Jim Carroll Band’s all the people who have died, died, they were all my friends…, which is played against the opening riff to Rush’s “Bastille Day”, which is followed by the Smiths hang the DJ, hang the DJ, which has become a background vocal for the Killers’ are we human, or are we dancer—down in Jun-gle-land! by the Boss.
Shit Disturbers Extraordinaire: Black Kids vs. Morrissey
Last fall, an uncontrolled frenzy swept over the internet. No, there wasn’t some sort of debilitating pornbot virus on the loose. Folks were just losing their shit for Jacksonville, Florida quintet Black Kids. Not long after a breakout performance at Athens Popfest, the group released their debut EP Wizard of Ahhhs for free on MySpace. No matter that it contains only four songs. Folks heaped superlatives on it. Pitchfork gave it an 8.4 and proclaimed, “Black Kids make catchy, tightly executed songs that put a memorable stamp on pop’s classic themes.”
Next—overcome with irrational indie-rock exuberance—a number of major labels entered into a bidding war for the band’s US services, with Columbia winning out and releasing Partie Traumatic earlier this year. The album contains all of the Wizard of Ahhhs tracks, as well as six more in roughly the same vein; that is, electro-styled synth and guitar-driven tunes that you can dance to. But while songs like “Listen to Your Body Tonight” and “Look at Me (When I Rock Wichoo)” are undoubtedly DJ-friendly, the best tracks, “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You” and “Hit the Heartbrakes”, pull the rug out from under pop preconceptions via unexpected plot twists and uncomfortable themes like gender ambiguity and incest.
Hmmm… accessible songs that work both as rock and club tracks, full of confusing, even shocking, lyrics… sound like anyone you know? Oh yeah, Morrissey. Not surprisingly, Black Kids frontman (and principal songwriter) Reggie Youngblood acknowledges a debt to Moz’s “funny, but heartbreaking” songwriting style. The band’s drummer Kevin Snow said in an interview with MTV Liverpool Music Week 2008, “I think that we also have a similar twisted approach to writing a song. The ability to make something that’s perhaps a little subversive lyrically.”
The Smiths: Meat Is Murder
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
* * *
A note from the author: “If you think of the 33 1/3 series of books as a kind of extended family (please, go with me for a second on this one), then my book is the black sheep: It’s fiction.” – Joe Pernice
The Year Of The Smiths
Originally published in The Virgin Yearbook, 1984
Gay men paved pop’s way this year. With Boy George’s wardrobe fully open, all the closet cases came spilling forth: Burns and the Bronskis, Frankie and NRG. The subtlest victory was Morrissey’s—his the least fairy-tale, the least gaudily exhibitionist. Maybe it’s because he conjured a ghost from all our pasts: The outsider, the Weird One, the pariah you put at full-back so you didn’t catch his leprosy.
When Morrissey refused to play “festive faggot,” he was appealing to something fundamentally more lonely in us. He was making the outsider a star.
Morrissey Grants Classic Song to Help Tortured Rabbits
by: Howard Wyman
[Via TwentyFourBit} The Moz is at it again, doing everything he can to help the most helpless among us. His latest gesture comes in the form of granting one of his earliest and best loved solo singles, “Every Day is Like Sunday,” to score a video by international animal welfare organization Four Paws. The video is a cute little cartoon message that seeks to raise awareness of the suffering of rabbits in factory farms, which is pretty nightmarish, and which is scarcely described in the cute cartoon itself. The reality (which Four Paws has documented in other videos and research) is that, while battery cages for chickens have been banned in many countries (and a couple US states), the same practice in rabbit meat factories has gone ignored. As a result, 900 million cute little furry creatures are house so tightly together that they develop bone disorders, hurt themselves by chewing on the cages, occasionally turn to cannibalism and are driven otherwise insane by life under such circumstances. To top it off, their feces accumulate in mounds just beneath the cages, creating an atmosphere of gaseous, acidic ammonia that causes their eyes to swell and bleed. Mm, mm!
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by: Howard Wyman
published: February 25, 2010
in column: The Smoke-Filled Room, What Goes On
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