How I Learned to Stop Hating and Love the Lads from Manchester

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the first singles by The Smiths, who I've come to declare the greatest English band of the 1980s (R.E.M. and Talking Heads would tie for the American award) and with Steely Dan, my 2 favorite acts of all time.

It also marks the 20th year of my discovery of the band. Now, do the math here: the band only existed for 5 years, at the outside. That's right, I never listened to them while they were current, a mistake I've made up for by listening to them exclusively for weeks at a time over the last 15 years. Which causes the wife grief to no end.

It's not that I didn't try to like them while they were "alive". OK, I spent the first two years hating on them, calling them and their ilk the "aaaahhh" bands - buncha morose mother(crockers) if I'd ever heard any.

But, in 1986, I came across "There is a Light That Never Goes Out" on WLIR, or WDRE (it was both, more than once, I think) and liked it. Now, there were two girls that worked at the same Dunkin' Donuts that I did and I'm gonna etch them into history right here: Anne Marie Tynan and Alicia Montero. They loved, or should I say, lived, what was in the 1980s called "college rock": Echo and the Bunnymen, the Cure, U2 (yes, Virginia, there was a time when Pope Bono wasn't in every issue of Time and Newsweek), Psychedelic Furs, the Jesus and Mary Chain and our lads from Manchester, the Smiths. At this point, the Smiths had eclipsed U2 in their minds because, to them, U2 had gotten away from them - they weren't theirs and theirs alone anymore.

In Almost Famous, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, playing rock critic Lester Bangs, nails the love for music with one line: "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool." And that was these two, who I think fondly of from time to time. They are the older sistrrs to the girl in that Pixies doc.

Knowing that, I asked them, "Hey, what's that song about the double-decker bus and the 10-ton truck?" As God is my witness, they looked at me with the straightest face and said they had no idea.

But, they had to know. How couldn't they know? Of course they knew. But they weren't going to let Joe Springsteen Fan with his cracked, faded Asia shirt in to their little world. No way is this guy, who's a little older, with a little more money going to get our ticket to the show. Not when we've put our lunch money together for two weeks to buy an import 12" of "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore", with its four live tracks from the Oxford Apollo, 3/18/85. Fuck him; let him work harder.

And I let it slide.

Until 1988, when I went over to my friend Joey's house. His younger sister had had a party the night before, and when I came downstairs, he says to me, almost incredulously, "You gotta hear this; someone left this in the cassette player last night." And out of the speakers came the chiming opening chords to "Ask".

Who is this, I asked. Cassette cover in my hand - "Louder than Bombs", a stateside singles/B-side compilation designed to catch us stupid Americans up on what we could have been listening to instead of Baltimora, Corey Hart and the Power Station for the last 3 years.

And we listened. And we got it. And we realized that maybe, just maybe there was a little too much Journey, a few Kenny Loggins songs too many in our lives.

So Anne Marie and Alicia, if you're out there, I figured it out for myself. If all worked out well, your kids are listening to A Place to Bury Strangers and looking crosseyed at the squares who think the Strokes are still cutting edge.

Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ, indeed.