Read Smiths' Meat is Murder for Free Online Page A

parents’ old top-loading single speaker cassette player from the late 60s. So Ray would give me tapes of albums he thought were important. Tapes, but no cases, and rarely any writing on them. A band name and album title at best, and always abbreviated. It was his trademark. “Clash: Rope,” “U2: Oct,” “Costello: Aim.” I’d break his balls and say it was his way of making me earn it, meaning I’d have to do the legwork to learn more about an album or band. Maybe it was.
    Of the few store-bought cassette tapes I owned, at least half of them fell into the category of birthday present or Christmas present. Album art, liner notes and the simple pleasure of “reading” an album while it played would remain for the most part unknown to me until I got a decent job. Until then I’d rifle through the stacks of albums at Ray’s house or take the bus to Musicland in Quincy and scribble down song titles and credits.
    On the rare occasion, I’d splurge for a month-old
NME
or
Melody Maker.
Which was fitting because in many ways I was always a good distance behind. Plus, it was 1985, and information oozed. The internet as we know it was probably being drawn up on a napkin somewhere.
    I’d make my own J-cards with Union Jacks and pictures of bands with London Bridge or Big Ben floating in the background. I drew Hitler moustaches on assortedReagans and Bushes. I was so green and into it, I wrote “Anarchy in the USA” on a Sex Pistols tape, and for weeks secretly thought I had coined a new phrase.
    We (meaning Ray and I, with emphasis on the I) felt like we lived in the middle of nowhere, a place where a comeback radio single could make Yes or Deep Purple kings of the airwaves again. An overwhelming majority of the kids I grew up with were weaned off their mothers onto classic Styx and Stones rock blocks. Did the small group of us who liked “faggot” British music feel like we were any better than them? Of course we did. Amen to that, brother. The following exchange illustrates the nearly religious and potentially violent musical loyalty of some of my peers:
    “I think The Smiths are a much better band than Kansas.”
    “You better not say that up at the park on a Friday night, or you’ll get your fuckin’ ass kicked. What are you, a fag?”
    No, I was not a fag, and thankfully “the park” was not one of my usual haunts.
    Getting our hands on a new Smiths’ record (and issued on a major label no less—another victory) reassured us that there was a lot more out there than the cock rock our older brothers tried to score to. Sure, we were trying to score too, but we were younger, and TheSmiths were new. Youth beats tradition, like rock beats scissors, or paper covers rock.
    If suicide, AIDS or the bomb didn’t get us, we’d outlive our elders and cash in on the benefits (and misfortunes) of having a greater amount of history to learn from. It gave some of us a perspective that made the rock titans of yesteryear look, well, dumb. And whether it was true or not, Morrissey sang like he was as miserable, terrified and as poorly designed as the rest of us. He captured it perfectly. We figured any teenage kid living through those Reagan years who said The Smiths were too miserable for them was either a liar, an imbecile, or so thoroughly fucked up, they had no idea just how miserable they were.
    Every once in a while, Ray would get his hands on an imported British bootleg, or a ten-inch maxi-single or an EP. They were—figuratively and literally—foreign to me. And much more exciting than the domestic store-bought releases. Even for an active record buyer like Ray, it was hard back then to know exactly where a recording fell in a particular band’s discography, or how huge the gaps in ones’ collection were. Since I had mostly tapes Ray made for me, I was almost completely in the dark. My “collection” was made up of gaps.
    * * *
    “This is the complete new album, right?” I asked later that morning before