Edition №2
Forty years ago this month, The Smiths released The Queen Is Dead. I have owned a copy of it, in one format or another, for most of the time since, and I still do not have the one that matters.
I found the band at 13, through Meat Is Murder. My mom drove me to Sound Warehouse for the cassette. When the Queen Is Dead tour came through Texas I went to see them at the Bronco Bowl in Dallas, a room in the back of a bowling alley, with a few of my waver friends. None of us could drive yet, so one parent dropped us off and another came back for us. I did not know it would be the band’s last tour. I am fairly sure none of us did.
What followed was the usual teenage version of devotion, and not an original one. Lyrics on my textbook covers. The Morrissey haircut. The fake thick-rimmed glasses and the cardigans, the whole copy of the look he wore through the Smiths years, minus the gladioli. I was one of a lot of kids doing exactly the same thing.
The copies have come and gone since. Cassettes and CDs lost in various moves, replaced, lost again. What I have now is three: a US Sheffield Lab Matrix vinyl, a Japan first-generation CD and an American CD I keep mostly out of habit. Not one of them is the copy the verdict points at.
That verdict lands somewhere specific. Forty years of licensee pressings, remasters and reissues have produced dozens of ways to own this record, and they are not equal. One of them holds the recording best, and it has look-alikes close enough to fool a careful buyer. The work is knowing which copy that is, and how to tell.
A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.
Great read. Thank you!