Morrissey's Fickle Ways

I first saw Morrissey and The Smiths at the Royal Oak Music Theatre in 1985. I drove down to the show with Steve Herzog and Christine Lezar from Flint. I almost experienced Morrissey again on Saturday in Oakland. Alas, the show was cancelled, as they often are these days. At least I got to write a non-review of the non-event:

There was wild speculation about the true reason for the cancellation. Morrissey endured a fate worse than sex with Madonna while playing Coachella on Friday -- the smell of grilling meats from the concession stands drifted across the stage during his set. It prompted the middle-aged vegetarian to announce "I can smell burning flesh and I hope to God it's human." Apparently after discovering that human sacrifices are only enacted at Burning Man, Morrissey walked off the stage in mid-lyric during "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others." Meat is murder, after all. "The smell of burning animals is making me sick. I just couldn't bear it," he explained when he returned to finish a lackluster show plagued by sound problems.

Hey, fair enough. A really bad smell that violates your personal and artistic integrity could render someone "Still Ill" the next day. (I, too, can skillfully weave Smiths song titles into my writing.) And Morrissey fans are a forgiving lot, as evidenced by their willingness to part with $85 to experience one of their hero's notoriously short concerts. (Disclosure: I've seen The Smiths/Morrissey ten times dating back to 1985, and I own every Smiths 12" ever released on Rough Trade.) But it's a bit hard to take when the man who put the "M" in Manchester showed up Saturday night at DNA Lounge to catch a show by Kristeen Young -- a former warm-up act who got the boot from his 2007 tour after she jokingly mentioned Morrissey and oral sex in the same sentence on stage.

For the full article go here.

Morrissey photo courtesy of Christopher Victorio via sfweekly.com

Morrissey's Sick...Again

It seems Flint is not destined to be graced by the presence of Morrissey, former lead singer of the influential eighties band The Smiths. The Mancunian cancelled tonight's concert at Whiting Auditorium. This cancellation comes after he was a no-show at the original date in the fall. So that makes the score Morrissey 2 — Flint 0. Don't feel too bad. El Moz bails on a lot of shows. He's a delicate flower.

As I wrote in SF Weekly in 2009, after yet another canceled show that I had planned to attend, Morrissey fans are used to this sort of thing:

It's the third Bay Area performance that Morrissey has canceled over the years. Fans arriving at his Golden Gate Park gig in 2004 were greeted by a burly usher shouting "The Morrissey's sick. No Morrissey today," which isn't a Smiths lyric but should have been.

This time the excuse was simply "illness." Well, you can't say he didn't warn you.

So, no more apologies
no more apologies
I'm too tired
I'm too sick and tired
and I'm feeling very sick and ill today
  — What Difference Does It Make?/The Smiths 

UPDATE: It appears it was the illness of two band members, not Mozzer, that led to the cancellation. All is forgiven!

Morrissey to Perform in Flint

This seems like a mistake, but Morrissey has scheduled a concert at Flint's Whiting Auditorium on Friday, October 26.

Can Flint handle Morrissey? Can Morrissey handle Flint?

Morrissey Lands in Hospital After Canceling Flint Concert

I know Flint can be a stressful place, but is it really this bad? Billboard reports:

Morrissey has been diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer after being hospitalized in Royal Oak, Mich. last week. According to a rep for the singer, the 53-year-old is expected to make a full recovery, but has rescheduled six upcoming tour dates due to the ailment.

Here We Go Again: Morrissey at Flint's Capitol Theater on November 20th (Allegedly)

 Morrissey Versus Flint

Morrissey as popular as Roger Smith in Flint

Oh Morrissey, so much to answer for. Another cold, another cancelled tour. The former leader of The Smiths has now bailed on three straight gigs at Flint's Whiting Auditorium, despite claiming "I am determined to play Flint if it kills me." As this defaced poster illustrates, fans in The Vehicle City were not pleased.

Morrissey in Flint: "And all those lies / Written lies, twisted lies / Well, they weren't lies / They weren't lies / They weren't lies"

Flint, Meet Morrissey

Friday, October 26 at Whiting Auditorium.

A man walked upon it

Everyone was talking about the moon. A man had walked upon it, but I hardly noticed.

     — Patti Smith, Just Kids

And the year 2000 won't change anyone here
As each fabled promise flies so fast
You'll swear it was never there

      — Morrissey, Reader Meet Author

Flint, Meet Dublin

In describing Dublin in the fifties, an unlikely source captures Catholic life in Flint in the seventies:

"Dublin Catholics are spiritual but not saintly, faithful but not strict, godly but not exact. Devout and good, they are also loosely at large with a blunt and sincere grasp of what the human frame requires."   

—Autobiography by Morrissey

Less-than-total recall

As Morrissey once said, "The past is a strange place."

And it can be a tricky, unreliable place, as well. Flint Expatriates tends to traffic in memory and nostalgia, which means you should probably bring a healthy dose of skepticism with you when you read it.

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert points out in his book Stumbling on Happiness that we don't store intact memories of complete events. We rack up little snippets and piece them back together, as needed:

"Remembering an experience feels a lot like opening a drawer and retrieving a story that was filed away on the day it was written, but...that feeling is one of our brain's most sophisticated illusions. Memory is not a dutiful scribe that keeps a complete transcript of our experiences, but a sophisticated editor that clips and saves key elements of an experience and then uses these elements to rewrite the story each time we ask to reread it."

And editors, as we all know, make mistakes. In his new memoir, The Night of the Gun, New York Times media writer David Carr details how the mistakes magnify when you add drugs and alcohol — two staples of Flint. Watch this video of Carr recounting one emblematic night and the slippery nature of memory.