"The whispering may hurt you, but the printed word may kill you."
"I'm lost," Morrissey doesn't say over the phone 15 minutes after he's due to arrive at Siberia Bar in New York City. "I can't find the place. I don't see any lightbulb that ... oh, there it is. I'm here now."
The words themselves are straightforward enough, but not coming from one of the most idolized figures in music; they must inevitably be dissected for deeper meaning. Is he in fact not alluding to feeling alone and uncertain about his post-Smiths existence? That he has been unable to find substantial inspiration since leaving the comfortable success of, say, '94's Vauxhall and I? That with his latest solo effort, May's You Are the Quarry, he feels he has finally arrived? Whatever the exact nature of that symbolic destination may (not) be, even Moz himself may never know. But in the meantime, this discreet, Meatpacking District fave of Jimmy Fallon and Regis Philbin is one place he has (or hasn't) found.
Steven Patrick Morrissey doesn't stride through the black door, pass by the decorative Harley and dusty Addams Family pinball machine and fold himself onto an adjacent cushion on the sunken couch. Under the red light, his Internet-Explorer blue eyes don't look purple, and the graying temples of his famous pomp don't appear pink. Noting the rosy ambiance, he doesn't kid, "Still got that sunburn, I see," referring to the last time he didn't see the LV Weekly. (Morrissey kicked off his first U.S. tour in two years at the Joint in April, and he absolutely did not spend an afternoon having pints and promoting the gig and the new album, not to mention the ultimately ill-fated Lollapalooza Tour, at his beloved Cat and Fiddle, a Sunset Boulevard pub near the LA home he has owned for six years.)
Tonight, he will play the first of two Radio City Music Hall shows, soon coming full circle by returning to the Joint to cap off the tour before hitting a few U.K. arena dates, followed by, well ... ?
"That's a good question," the former Miserablist might reply—but we'll never know for sure. "I've been putting the finishing touches on an autobiography for the past few months, but after that, I'm not sure what the new year will hold."
He could pause and seem to drift back through his beginnings in Manchester, a splintered creative alliance with Johnny Marr, years without a solo record deal, and the constant burden of displacement from the world around him. Yet Saint Morrissey has made more than a proverbial mark on the world. Not only did he father the modern vegetarian movement with "Meat Is Murder," but he has directly affected a wide variety of musicians over the past few decades, including such current up-and-comers as the Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, Northstar and Pretty Girls Make Graves.
"I think he's more influential than anybody realizes," says My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way. "There are so many bands, from the hardest of hard-core punk bands to pop bands, that are influenced by his lyrics. Morrissey is inspiring as somebody who was able to use these really tongue-in cheek, really dark lyrics in a pop way and get away with it. If it wasn't for him, I probably wouldn't be in a band."
Morrissey would likely smile when hearing the compliment, but it would be a guarded type of smile. It still isn't easy for him to believe this stuff, even though he's certainly heard it before. He's heard it all before.
"You've said, that in regards to the press, in the same way you don't take the negative stuff seriously, you don't take the positive stuff seriously," the Weekly would push on if this conversation ever took place, which it never did. "And that the negative press really doesn't hurt you after all this time, yet you moved to the U.S. from Dublin partly because of the ongoing deluge of negative press. You broke a self-imposed exile by opening yourself to major outlets to promote Quarry's release, which has been critically hailed as a return to form, yet you seemed to deliver the same sound-bites over and over again in those outlets. Was this a deliberate attempt to get specific and significant messages into the collective conscience, or an involuntary response to repetitive and unimaginative questioning? Yet, since all possible questions are essentially rewordings of previously asked questions—therefore the only way one could even hope to give the impression of originality would be to present recycled questions in a new way—how can a journalist who wants to stand out from that recycling crowd appear significant to you, especially when they're still required to get sound-bites on the same old 'newsworthy' talking points anyway?"
"Aw, Weekly, you'll always be significant to me," Morrissey very well might say, administering a rib-cracking hug. Then he just might rise and head back past the pinball machine, past the Harley and out the black door. And with that, Morrissey is (or isn't) gone, leaving me, as he has many of his fans, more attuned and equipped to handle whatever emotional problems I may or may not posses.