I am human and I need to be loved

The best way to quickly adjust to daylight savings time is to spend the weekend with a toddler. They have more than enough energy to make anyone start going to bed at 9pm and getting up at 6am, even with the "spring forward" time change!

I spent last weekend in Washington visiting friends and their almost-two year old daughter, and little kids are a bunch of fun, but kind of wore me out. I had a few hours at SeaTac airport before my flight home, so I picked up the latest issue of Uncut, which had a special feature on the 30 best Smiths songs, which I listened to while playing their Singles compilation on my new iPod.

My friend Sue had a blog entry while I was away showing her chagrin hearing the Pixies' "Velouria" blasting from a UC frat row window because the Pixies were her college band. Usually when I walk by the frat houses, they're playing either Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, or Led Zeppelin, so I'm impressed that they're gaining some semblance of modernity, and Sue must be a lot younger than me, because I was a couple of years out of college when Bossanova came out!

Last month I said that the Police were my high-school band, so I was trying to think of a band that would qualify as my college band (of my college years were 1983-1987). I think that was the high tide of so-called "college" rock, and the two bands most emblematic of that era were R.E.M. and the Smiths. Coincidentally, the testimonial on Uncut's #1 Smiths song "How Soon Is Now?" was by Peter Buck of R.E.M. In his writeup, Buck talks about how he and Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr shared the same influences, and how he hasn't ever heard "How Soon" on the radio.

Which is strange, because it was played literally all the time on SF's Live 105 between 1985-1990. I always suspected their DJ's would keep the 12-inch singles of "How Soon Is Now?" and New Order's "Blue Monday" on standby in the "bathroom break" pile, for those times when a 7-11 burrito washed down with a double Big Gulp necessitated a long song, because one of those songs was played at least every four hours.

I liked the Smiths before I moved to the Bay Area, but kind of got burned out by all the radio play and their fans, but I've come to appreciate their music a lot more with the passing time.
Many of the song contributors to the Uncut article (James Mercer, Ben Gibbard, Ryan Adams) talked about how Morrissey's songs helped them through their adolescent years, which was exactly the thing that turned me off them way back when. It's not that hard to imagine James, Ben, or Ryan as tortured Smithsteens back in the 80s.

Someone on a mailing list I'm on once said that he tried to steer clear of anyone over the age of 14 who took the Smiths seriously. This sounded kind of harsh and unfair to me, until I realized that he wasn't talking about taking them seriously as a band, but taking Morrissey's lyrics as saying something to me about my life. Hearing the words now, especially offset by the jaunty jangly guitars, it's quite obvious that he was taking the piss. Those lines about ten ton trucks and double decker buses are just too over-the-top angsty to be taken seriously by anyone old enough to drive. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't take them seriously as songs. Morrissey wasn't joking -- he was just being dramatically ironic.