#321 (of 365) "Suedehead" Morrissey

The summer of 1989 was a seminal time for my musical interests. I had just graduated high school and was heading to college and purchased a cassette (this was pre-CD) of The Cure's latest album Disintegration. At that time (pre-Internet), almost all of my musical knowledge came from the radio or MTV. The "radio" a was 97.5 WPST ("Princeton and Philadelphia")--side note: many, many years later, I bought a house in South Brunswick just a few miles up Route 1 from where WPST was headquartered... oh, how many days and nights were spent in high school listening to that station. Anyway, they had started playing a lot more "alternative" music along with their collection of pop and rock and I found myself liking it all. I wasn't brand new to The Cure--1987's "Just Like Heaven" was one of my favorite songs of that year. But I had never bought an "alternative" record before Disintegration, after high school. And then, after listening to it, I never bought a non-alternative record ever again. Pretty much everything I knew of pop music was blown out of the water by the music and lyrics and torturous honesty of that one record. My next cassette purchase was The Replacements "Don't Tell a Soul" and then I went away to college, where I got exposed in a major way to college radio and the alternative music collections of my new friends and I never went back to whatever crap I listened to as a kid. 

That summer, MTV had a nightly "Post-Modern MTV" show, which was basically "alternative" music videos for half an hour, a supplement to its underground Sunday night masterpiece "120 Minutes". I watched all of it, all the time, and I remember that this song - "Suedehead" was in heavy rotation. I didn't know Morrissey. I didn't know his history in the Smiths. I didn't know anything, really, growing up in a barely suburban (mostly rural) town in southern New Jersey near Philly. But I liked "Suedehead" and I liked it a lot. When I got to college, one of my roommates had quite a great collection of cassettes, including both Smiths high-points Meat is Murder and The Queen is Dead. Later that year, I was studying in his room because my roommate had guests over (we had a "suite" with 3 separate bedrooms, 6 total occupants). I remember it was Valentine's Day, ironically, and I put on Meat is Murder, almost entirely because I knew (by then) that Morrissey was the leader singer of The Smiths and I really like "Suedehead". My world would change that day and I'd spend the rest of the summer non-stop listening to those two albums and then much of the next decade obsessed with both The Smiths and Morrissey.

Given Morrissey's recent descent into MAGA-dom and his inability to ever make up with Johnny Marr (and at this point, I think it's obvious it's Morrissey to blame), I definitely can't say I'm a fan of his anymore. But I have to admit that "Suedehead" is still a great song. Morrissey solo has four songs on this countdown, all in the latter half, an impressive feat in any case.

"Suedehead" - Morrissey // Viva Hate (1988)