(Click through for a larger version.)

Notes:

1. There are also various “best ofs,” which largely repackage the singles.
2. The Complete box set (2011) contains all of the studio albums, plus the live album Rank, plus Hatful of Hollow, The World Won’t Listen and Louder Than Bombs. Which is basically what you need to have just about everything (minus the oddities we covered in Part 5, as well as some random edited versions of some of the songs).

Greetings once again! Since we’re doing this, we may as well be thorough. There are a bunch of Smiths songs (and versions of Smiths songs) that were never included on any of their official records (The Smiths; Hatful of Hollow; Meat Is Murder; The Queen Is Dead; Strangeways, Here We Come; Louder Than Bombs; Singles). Today I thought we could listen to them, see if any are worth our attention…

1. “Accept Yourself” (Troy Tate version)

The Smiths first tried to record their first album with Troy Tate. Unhappy with his production, they scrapped the session pretty quickly.

2. “Half A Person” (John Peel 12/17/86)

One of the four songs from this 1986 session (the Smiths’s fourth appearance on John Peel), “Is It Really So Strange?”, ended up on Louder Than Bombs. (The other two, which are both great, are below.) As for this song, I adore it, and will take any version I can get!

Those curious can see a complete list of the Smiths’s Peel and Jensen sessions here. This 1986 appearance is one of my favorites.

3. “How Soon Is Now?” (John Peel 8/9/84)

This is from the band’s third Peel Session, recorded in 1984. It doesn’t seem to be up at YouTube, however. (The other three are below.)

So instead:

4. “How Soon Is Now” (alternate edit)

This is an alternate mix of the song that would go on to appear on numerous Smiths records. The first two minutes are the same, but then things get substantially different.

5. “How Soon Is Now?” (shorter version)

This one’s a bit of a cheat—an edit of the most overplayed Smiths song:

It’s also the last time it will appear on this list, I promise!

What makes it worth looking at is the accompanying music video. (In fact, it’s the first version of the song I heard. And it occurs to me that a whole post on Smiths videos would be worthwhile…) Anyway, this is a pretty seamless edit. You can listen to it when you don’t have time for the full length version!

6. “I Keep Mine Hidden”

The song, which was included as a B-side on the “Girlfriend in a Coma” single (1987), is particularly notorious:

The last song ever recorded as a proper group, Morrissey must have infuriated Marr by doing a music-hall light-hearted song exactly when Marr wanted to move into different musical territory. Indeed, if a song was responsible for the break-up of The Smiths, this was it.

In it you can hear a preview of a large chunk of Morrissey’s solo career.

7. “I Want a Boy for My Birthday”

I apologize for the poor audio, but this one is very rare. It’s a cover of a song by the Cookies:

The Smiths used to play it in their early live shows, then dropped it from their sets.

8. “Jeane”

A very early Smiths song, recorded by Troy Tate. Morrissey convinced his barefoot idol Sandie Shaw to sing it, resulting in her hit version:

Shaw also recorded covers of “I Don’t Owe You Anything”:

…and “Hand in Glove”:

And while we’re here, we might as well look at this:

Too bad it cuts out before the song.

9. “London” (John Peel 12/17/86)

Never one of my favorite Smiths songs, although I somewhat prefer this take to the album version, due to the wilder guitar work.

10. “Marie’s The Name”

This pseudo-cover of the classic Presley tune—

—is also an alternate version of “Rusholme Ruffians” (from Meat Is Murder). It can be heard on the live album Rank (1988).

11. “Nowhere Fast” (John Peel 8/9/84)

A rather tight version of a perennially overlooked song, and rather fun. Morrissey really belts it out in the second half!

12. “Rusholme Ruffians” (John Peel 8/9/84)

From the same session as the above track, and possessing a lot of the same energy. A nice take.

13. “Sweet And Tender Hooligan” (John Peel 12/17/86)

A fine version of the song.

14. “The Draize Train”

A rare Smiths instrumental! It was a B-side to “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others,” which was released as a single in Germany:

It also appeared on Rank:

15. “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” (Troy Tate version)

The other Smiths song recorded by Troy Tate.

16. “This Charming Man” (François Kevorkian “New York” remix)

A dance-club remix that got shelved after Morrissey objected, but not before a few copies made it out there.

17. “What Do You See In Him?”

This is an early version of “Wonderful Woman” (see #9). I’m not aware of any better recordings of it; it can be found only on the bootleg “The Butterfly Collector” (a recording of an early live show).

18. “What’s The World?”

Morrissey pretends not to know who the song is by—

—but it’s a James cover:

19. “William, It Was Really Nothing” (John Peel 8/9/84)

Obviously much faster than the studio version.

20. “Wonderful Woman”

Another very early Smiths song that the band chose not to release. I happen to rather like this one.

21. “Work Is a Four Letter Word”

The other B-side on “Girlfriend in a Coma,” this is a Cilla Black cover—

—and further pushed Johnny Marr to quit, breaking up the band.

Conclusion

OK, so that was less productive than our other delvings, but weirder, right? And we ended up with “Jeane” and “The Draize Train” and “Wonderful Woman” (the last of which is a pretty decent find), plus the Sandie Shaw tracks, plus the John Peel stuff (especially that 86 session), as well as—depending on your taste—”I Keep Mine Hidden,” a few covers, and a host of curios. (If nothing else, you can impress your friends at your next party with that club remix of “This Charming Man.”)

In my final post in this series, I’ll throw up a chart showing where each and every Smiths song can be found. Until then—

HATFUL OF HOLLOW (1984)

…which is admittedly getting somewhat obscure. Many of the songs on this compilation can in fact be found on Louder Than Bombs. But the versions I’ll point out here are not the studio recordings, but hail instead from from two John Peel sessions (31 May 1983 and 21 September 1983) and two David Jensen sessions (4 July 1983 and 5 September 1983), which makes this one also worth having…

Track 1. “Hand in Glove” (single version)

This is the original single release, with the fade-in intro and tinny vocals. It was later remixed for the Smiths—

I prefer the latter, but it’s nifty to have the earlier version.

Track 2. “What Difference Does It Make?” (Peel 5/18/83)

This was also released on the Peel Sessions EP (which also includes track 6, “Handsome Devil,” and track 15, “Reel Around the Fountain,” as well as one song not included here, “Miserable Lie.”) It’s substantially different from the Smiths version (which is also on Singles):

(That’s a lip-synced version, obviously.) Personally, I prefer the rawer Peel version.

Track 3. “These Things Take Time” (Jensen 6/26/83)

This song was the B-side for “What Difference Does It Make?”, and that version ended up on Louder:

Hatful is the only place where you can hear the Jensen version:

The differences here are less obvious than with “Difference,” but they’re there, once again mainly in the song’s low end.

Track 4. “This Charming Man” (Peel 9/14/83)

Oddly, this one’s lighter and more upbeat than the album version, which always sounded slightly lead-footed to me:

Bonus Smiths trivia: the very charming lyric “a jumped up pantry boy / who never knew his place” is a quote from the charming-in-its-own-way Sleuth.

Track 6. “Handsome Devil” (Peel 5/18/83)

If you want to get your hands / on this song’s mammary glands / Hatful‘s the only place to get it (besides the Peel Sessions EP)—which alone justifies owning the whole album.

Track 8. “Still Ill” (Peel 9/14/83)

One of my all-time favorite Smiths songs (featuring some of Morrissey’s greatest lyrics), I have never been able to understand why this song appeared only on Smiths and Hatful. The two versions are wildly different. The Hatful version—

—features a harmonica, and is slower than the Smiths cut—which, mysteriously, isn’t up at YouTube, but sounds more like this:

—and which, truth be told, I prefer. Still, it’s nice to have Hatful‘s take on it.

Track 11. “You’ve Got Everything Now” (Jensen 6/26/83)

This was never one of my favorite Smiths songs, and the Hatful version—

—is weaker than the Smiths version, IMO:

It plods, and Morrissey’s vocals sound more strained.

Track 12. “Accept Yourself” (Jensen 8/25/83)

A very minor song (it plays like a weaker retread of “These Things Take Time”) that only ever appeared on Hatful.

Track 14. “Back to the Old House” (Peel 9/14/83)

A wonderful little song, the better-known version is the one included on Louder than Bombs:

The Hatful version—

—is entirely acoustic, and entirely different.

Track 15. “Reel Around the Fountain” (Peel 5/18/83)

Another of my all-time favorites, this ended up only on Smiths and Hatful (well, plus the Peel Sessions EP). The two versions are extremely different. Here’s the one on Hatful:

And here’s the one on The Smiths:

I probably prefer…both of them.

The Rest

Tracks 5, 7, 9, 13, and 16 are all studio versions, and as such were included variously on Singles and Louder. And track 10, “This Night Has Opened My Eyes,” is from the second Peel session, and ended up on Louder.

All in all, I’d argue Hatful is worth owning for tracks 2, 4, 8, 14, 15, and especially track 6 (“Handsome Devil”). The novelty of tracks 1, 3, 11, and 12 are just gravy.

Well. I hope this trek through the Smiths’s back catalog helps you get through your exams… Cheers!

Here’s some footage of them performing at the Whistler, so you can pretend you were there, too (the sound was better yesterday, though):

This Friday, 16 December, Requited will celebrate the upcoming release of its sixth issue at Enemy in Wicker Park. In addition to a few readings, Guest Editor Ryan T. Dunn will curate a series of multi-media / performative works focusing on language as sound.

• Friday, December 16th 8pm–11pm
• (please note that the live performances will begin at 8pm sharp)
• Enemy, 1550 N. Milwaukee Fl 3, Chicago
• Suggested donation is $7 at the door.
• Some snacks (“light winter fare”) will be provided.
• RSVP on Facebook, or just show up!

The night’s program is listed after the jump…

From Ryan:

Sound & Language—Performance: Work will consider the psychological and phenomenological aspects of the reception and manifestation of sound as a linguistic act, as a revisitable document, as an intangible moment on breath and a long distance transmittable gesture. It will ponder the history of the textual document and its relationship with the relatively young sonic document and encompass methods of transmission and reception, the notable and the mundane, the intentional and unintentional, public and private, seen and heard.

The Performers:

Reed Esslinger is currently finishing up an MFA at the University of Michigan and has been making performative sculptural installations dealing with communication, interpretation, translation and other themes that are broadly enveloped in language. “Enter Here” is a performance depicting tension, (or cooperation), in the literal “see-sawing” back and forth of graphite threads drawn through the membrane of language. The back and forth nature of performance alludes to dialog, a process of reaching mutual understanding. Communication becomes a means of entering each other.

Peter J. Woods Blurring the line between absurdist theatre and harsh noise, Peter J Woods presents works that deal with the brand of existential dread and uncertainty unique to our current society.  In “What I’m Going to Say Is This Is What I’m Going to Say,” Woods stages a tediously prepared failure in communication that speaks to both how we interact and why our interactions inevitably fail.

Edward Breitweiser is a Chicago-based artist, musician, and writer. Typically, his work does or does not involve the use of computers. “Converging Interstices”  Or, “Delmar” and the Immortality of Influence is an ongoing catalog of history-in-the-making. This catalog takes the form of relationships between documents, experiences, artifacts, and personal narratives.

Katrina Schaag is a Madison-based performance artist who makes text-, movement-, video-, and installation-based works. Her interests include performativity, artifice, presence, absence, plasticity, queer masochism, and Deleuzian becomings. The landscape cracks and I sink into a nameless current – What can I salvage? – I imagine you swimming in a clear blue lake – If only I could move past this is a lecture on biology and plasticity as disrupted by the unconstrained murmuring of the field beneath. The field enacts only itself, and the landscape is still cracking, even in the midst of all the rampant flowering.

Ángel Faraldo (Spain, 1980) is a composer, sound artist, improviser and digital instrument designer currently based in The Netherlands. His works usually maximize minimal means to generate threshold conditions. “La memoria y el olvido” (2011) is an instrument/installation based on a textwork by Dutch artist Tanja Smit. It explores the expressive capabilities of a text as a map, which can be freely navigated creating new orderings and meanings, and at times surpassing language itself to become pure sonic gesture.

Ryan T Dunn is a curator and media and performance artist working with communication and perception. He is heavily concerned with extra-institutional context specificity and the ways in which direct action transcends and traverses the moment in which it originates through mediation, whether that be through document or memory.

In addition to that, there will be reading-performances by Daniel Godston, Jennifer Karmin, and Big Other’s own Tim Jones-Yelvington.

Hope to see you there!

I just want to state for the record that I had that pretty banner image up at my personal blog before John put it up at the top of the page here, and so my comment at said blog, that “This is a dead zon(e),” should not be read as any kind of comment about Big Other. Which is a living zon(e).

Frank O’Hara used to play that same background music when he read.

Instead, I want to address two distinctions that Tim points to: “style vs. content” and “surface vs. depth”—although I’ll admit upfront that neither one is one I’m enamored with. As Tim himself notes toward the end of his post, faces are communicative—indeed, they can communicate (and mis-communicate, and conceal) quite a lot. And as I’ve said in so many different places, style is content, and surface is depth; there is no distinction in my book (or in my books). I used to believe that citing Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style was enough to undo those false dichotomies, but I am no longer as optimistic as I once was in my youth, so I’ll try saying more.

Let’s begin by assuming that there actually is a difference between surface and depth. Can we name a purely superficial painting, one that’s entirely surface? How about an Yves Klein monochrome? After all, it’s just blue paint applied to a canvas:

Yves Klein, "IKB 191" (1962).

Although some of them have pebbles and sponges stuck to them as well:

Yves Klein, "Archisponge (RE 11)" (1960). Note that this image is a different color blue than the one above. I thought about trying to fix that, but why bother pretending that either one of these JPEGs is truly International Klein Blue? You'll just have to go see a real one for yourself, to get the effect.

Might we agree that it would be harder to get more “surfacey” than this? (If you have a better suggestion, by all means, let me know in the comments.) But what do we have here, really?

So just blue paint applied to a canvas, but is any Klein paintings superficial? That is to say, is a Klein painting slight, or obvious, or shallow, or not profound, or not thorough? Because those are the accusations, right, lurking behind that charge “superficial,” right?

Of course Klein wasn’t those things; he was instead a mystic who believed that his paintings expressed something very deep, something transcendent, something far beyond daily experience (which for him was the superficial). He was trying, in his work, to suffuse ordinary matter with a divine ethereality that would dissolve it and its viewer’s corporeality; the idea was that, if you stared at one of his paintings long enough, you would—I dunno, dissolve or something; it gets kinda murky. But I do know that Klein wanted, above all else, to achieve what he called “dematerialization”:

This dream-like state of static trance was probably experienced by humans in the biblical Eden. Human beings of the future, integrated in total space, participating in the life of the universe, will probably find themselves in a dynamic state like a waking dream, with an acutely lucid perception of tangible and visible nature. They will have achieved complete physical well-being on terrestrial earth. Liberated from a false conception of their inner, psychological life, they will live in a state of absolute harmony with invisible, insensible nature; or, in other words, with life itself, which has become concrete by a reversal of roles, that is, by means of rendering psychological nature abstract. (Klein, “Conférence à la Sorbonne” (aka “The Evolution of Art Towards Immateriality”), 3 June 1959, quoted in Weitemeier 40–1)

And even if you don’t believe in any of that, part of the appeal of Klein’s work is how electrifying the blue is, and how captivating and engrossing these deceptively simple paintings are:

The pure blue pigment, applied without modulation and without a trace of personal touch—apart from the barely visible wavy texture produced by the roller—raised the factor of color in art to an absolute level. It was also significant that at this point Klein began to concentrate on upright formats, with slightly rounded corners and an extension of the painted surface around the stretcher edges that further distinguished these works from traditional panel paintings with their clearly defined boundaries. In addition, the artist deliberately mounted the canvases not on the wall, but up to twenty centimeters in front of it. Seemingly detached from the architectural stability of the room, the images created an impression of weightlessness and spatial indeterminacy. The viewer felt drawn into the depths of a blue that appeared to transmute the material substance of the painting support into an incorporeal quality, tranquil, serene. [...] Nowhere could the eye find a fixed point or center of interest; the distinction between the beholder, or subject of vision, and its object began to blur. This, Klein believed, would lead to a state of heightened sensibility. (19)

Klein of course chose that particular (synthetic) blue very carefully; he spent at least one year working to develop it with a chemist, perfecting it, then patenting it as International Klein Blue. So these initially very simple, “very surfacey” paintings are, in fact, deceptively deep.

But let’s continue thinking along these lines: what is, according to this logic, a deep painting? Well, how about this one?

Grant Wood, "American Gothic" (1930).

This painting has been quite popular ever since Grant Wood painted it and entered it in a contest at the Art Institute of Chicago, for which he took third place and got $300. For one thing, people have spent more than eighty years debating what Klein intended. Was he satirizing Midwesterners? Or was he celebrating the simple steadfastness of Iowans during the Depression?

So there’s controversy here, but of course Klein caused controversy, too. So what’s different, really, between an Yves Klein monochrome and American Gothic? They’re both essentially paint applied to canvases primed stretched over wooden frames. Actually that’s not true: Klein painted on cotton stretched over plywood, and American Gothic was done on beaverboard. And of course these paintings use different kinds of paint: IKB (dry ultramarine pigment suspended in a synthetic polymer medium) vs. oil.

But despite that, I’d argue, the chief difference between these two works lies in the manner in which those respective paints have been applied. In the Klein, a single color is applied evenly. In the Wood, numerous colors are applied in a manner that creates the impression of something else—in other words, American Gothic, unlike the Klein, contains a pictorial illusion.

I want to stick with this term, “pictorial illusion,” and not get drawn into discussions of “representation” or “mimesis.” As Klein himself liked to argue, “I am the painter of space. Not an abstract painter, but on the contrary, a figurative and realistic painter” (32)—so let’s leave that out. But I think it’s clear that Klein’s paintings, while arguably mimetic, do not contain or attempt to project any images of anything. (You can say, however, that they project the illusion of ethereality or insubstantiability, which is why I added the qualifier “pictorial.”). To put it very simply: when you look at them, you don’t think you’re seeing people.

Now, that’s no simple thing. As we’ve already seen, American Gothic, being primarily based around being illusionistic, invites us to read it along those lines, which is a large reason why people have long been interested in the work (i.e., no one is really sure whether Wood was poking fun or proclaiming the pioneer spirit). Furthermore, American Gothic contains compositional aspects that Klein’s work doesn’t and can’t: notice, for instance, the way that the pitchfork’s shape is echoed in the Gothic window, as well as in the male farmer’s overalls and even in his face (something I’ve always thought pretty nifty).

But let’s pause now and look where, at least according to this line of thinking, we’ve ended up. We’re not debating surface vs. depth, because we’ve agreed (I hope) that both of these paintings are pretty deep. Rather, we’re debating pictorial illusion vs. abstraction. (And I do think this shift holds. Just imagine for a second someone criticizing one Klein painting for being more superficial than another. It doesn’t work, right? How can one abstract painting be more superficial than another?)

So here we are, at illusion vs. abstraction. This debate is ultimately also, I’d argue, our old friend “realism vs. style,” gussied up in other clothes—and that’s a debate that I do know something about.

Here’s what I think is really going on. People who criticize artworks for being “just surface,” or “just style” are complaining about the fact that they can see the style. And that is because they are not being distracted by an illusion. In other words, when pictorial illusion is present and holds their attention, they are distracted fro seeing the style (because it’s conventional and therefore functionally invisible). Which means that they can focus instead on what they consider “content”: the picture, the story behind that picture, the characters, whathaveyou. In other words, when someone complains about surface or style, they are complaining that they would prefer that the style not interrupt or interfere with their enjoyment of the illusion.

Now, for fun, let’s try looking at this situation a different way. American Gothic is, we might argue, more superficial than a Klein. Because, despite Wood’s technical mastery, that’s not really a farmer and his wife daughter standing there. “Illusion,” we should remember, comes from a Latin word meaning “irony, mocking” (it shares a root with “ludicrous”); it means “something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality.” From this perspective, the picture might be considered the superficial, the surface, the materials comprising it the depth: the more convincing the pictorial sensibility is—the stronger its illusion—the harder it gets for us to see the forest for the trees, or what’s really “really there.”

Oil paint, on beaverboard.

Coda

To be sure, this is only one way of thinking about all of this. I don’t wish to deny that some artworks are more complex than others, which is another thing that people might mean when they call one artwork superficial, another deep. But I don’t consider that metaphorical distinction a good one to make even there; in general, I dislike metaphorical criticisms, not to mention metaphors in general—but that is, perhaps, an argument for another time. For now, however, I will say: when one artwork is more complex than another artwork, why don’t we simply say that, then try to articulate why it is more complex? In this case I would of course agree that “superficial” and “deep” might make a convenient enough shorthand, but it would be only the beginning of the conversation, not the end…