Louder Than Bombs

38 years ago this week, I was two months away from graduating college. I had straightened out my grades and I was in love with someone very special, wise and wonderful beyond her 19 years. I was feeling marginally better than I believed possible, since being hobbled by the crippling pain of Crohn’s Disease following surgery the summer after high school. Bark had grown thick around my optimistic core, but it was still intact and firing inside my emaciated frame. I no longer had a show on WJRH-FM, the radio station at Lafayette College that on a good day could reach Phillipsburg to the east and the outskirts of Allentown to the west, but I sometimes covered for my roommate Chris Trecker on Thursdays from 8:00pm to midnight. Probably my second-to-last session at the microphone I spotted a stack of new records that had not yet been cataloged and filed. Channeling Lester the Nightfly in the dungeonlike basement of Hogg Hall, puffing on a joint instead of a cigarette, I greeted the Lehigh Valley and student listeners – all 60 or 70 of them – and dropped the needle onto XTC’s sardonic and infectious “That’s Really Super, Supergirl.” Turning back to the new releases, with three minutes to spare, the orange spine of a double album near the middle of the pile caught my eye.  

The Smiths had released a collection of B-sides, prior releases and random orphans entitled “Louder Than Bombs,” and I placed side one on the other turntable and queued it up.  I cross-faded into Johnny Marr’s vibrant chord punches introducing “Is It Really So Strange,” and decided to let the side play through.  Four sides and 72 minutes later I had a better appreciation for the band than before. There was an updated take of “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want,” a gorgeous instrumental version of which had so magically carried the iconic art museum scene in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” A couple of the tracks, sure – they were earlier B-sides for a reason. But tracks like “Panic,” “William It Was Really Nothing,” and “Hand In Glove” resonated on that first listen and still do today. “Stretch Out And Wait,” with its haunting, heartbreaking A-minor chord fadeout, is an absolute gem. I had played much of “The Queen Is Dead” on air and on regular rotation in my apartment for a while and was already a Smiths fan.  Discovering “Louder” was the vehicle for a serendipitous deeper dive. For me, Johnny Marr resides in the pantheon of the most innovative and gifted guitarists, alongside Page, Beck, Knopfler, Clapton, and others.  

1987 was nearly a decade before Google.  I used a word processor to type my college papers and just that year a few dozen computers and pin-dot printers arrived on campus so the non-engineering students could prepare papers and save them onto those large floppy discs. A rare few nerds had a PC of their own – my roommate Trecker among them. Apart from MTV and music magazines there wasn’t a wellspring of knowledge about Morrisey and Marr and the rest of the band. The music spoke for itself, and college radio fans like my friends and me were content to decipher what this or that lyric might have insinuated over beers and the occasional argument about whether it sounded better on vinyl or CD – that new format that was certain to redefine the music world (and render cover art, liner notes and printed lyrics so impossibly small that they became almost an afterthought). There were no song trivia websites where people disparaged each other’s comments or reviled ideas put forth about what the artist meant by their lyrics. The Smiths eschewed music videos and only produced a few in the face of withering pressure from their label.  We were free to interpret the way songs registered or what lyrics meant in our own unique ways. In more analog times, sometimes a song was just a song.  

The Smiths broke up acrimoniously later that same year, leading to barbed promises never to reunite, lawsuits and an eventual #34 ranking on the Rolling Stone “Biggest, messiest band breakups in music history” list. The brightest and bluest stars burn out the fastest.