The Smiths - The Headmaster Ritual

Male Smiths fans, on the overwhelming majority, didn’t have a fantastic time in high school. We might have dated a pretty girl or two, we may have even played a varsity sport, but something didn’t click. This experience, probably one of the two or three galvanizing passages in our lives, divides us in two again. One: those who know Morrissey is gorgeously over-the-top and enjoy themselves down in the currents of melodrama. Two: those lost guys who still hang on ever lifting word and follow Morrissey like a human Mecca.

If you’re in the first group like me, there is always one moment when you see the Smiths as they are: one of the two or three fleetingly witty and unforgettable band in rock. Not so much as scripture. And there’s always the song that pushes you there. For me it was “Headmaster’s Ritual.”

I was living alone for the first time, before the junior year of college, and after three years of boarding school and two years of college, I was finally in my own room. I slept in a bed that no one else really saw. I felt older then too, like being a teenager wasn’t important anymore and I could finally calm down. I was actually living like a semi-adult; I cleaned my own house. Food went bad and I had to throw it out.

But anyway, I’m going to tell you that guitarist Johnny Marr was the technical core of the band, but come on, everyone knows that. Here, and maybe on “How Soon Is Now?” or “This Charming Man,” Marr and Morrissey actually hear each other. Marr dips his guitar low, using the pedals exquisitely, moving around Morrissey’s endless croon, mixing sly and fragile like lightening moving through clouds. The lyrics are joyously maudlin in a pre-emo, school-room confessional sense that disappeared after Nirvana. Give up education / as a big mistake,” Morrissey cries out, and for one second everyone is in sixth grade again, teeth too large, hair still childish. Details—“Sir thwacks you on the knees / Knees you in the groin / Elbow in the face / Bruises bigger than dinner plates”—all fade in and out of the sweet murmurs and Marr’s sickle of a guitar.

An adult response, the very same one I got that summer, was that I could put the two pieces of the equation together: my own experiences at a old New England boarding school and a moody, if not more than a little pathos-heavy rock song about school and fill in the own gaps at my choosing. And those gaps must be filled; you’ve simply got to reconcile yourself with the past—joy, heartbreak, other essential cruxes and whatnot—if you want any hope for a future. The Smiths became like a tough-love therapist: they know what you’re talking about, but mostly they keep pointing out each one of your own dwindling little neuroses.

Morrissey builds so much steam during his haunting, easy rhymes that without Marr’s guitar whipping around Morrissey the song would run away from itself. The two work together to pound you into self-actualization (Morrissey is the cognitive therapy and Marr is the Zoloft?). So talking about it holding up isn’t even an issue; the song’s biggest fight is in itself. The guitar chemist and the diarist go at it for your own sake. It’s the most maudlin a song in the catalogue of a band that’s best known for making fun of people being maudlin. It doesn’t even fit in on Meat Is Murder.

You start looking at the history of the Smiths and you realize: it isn’t gospel. It’s drunkenly majestic music, and sometimes over the top. Death Knell. Boom. End of life with the Smiths? See, now you actually now know how to listen to the Smiths with a smile on your face. You finally realize how much damn tongue Morrissey is jabbing into his cheek. You can wash your windows, go to bed and not desperately claw at a high school yearbook like it’s another wounded animal.

Each time it gets me. The song ends with Morrissey running away, and if you really get it, he’s not running away from school, he’s running away from himself. It’s good to find distance from the past; even if you have to sing your way out.

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