Johnny Marr (25 page)

T
he Modest Mouse project that Marr had become involved in unfolded gradually, and ushered in a period of work for Johnny that lasted the better part of five years. He became one of the hardest-working guys in the music business, which – given his status and the profile his work to date afforded him – was something he certainly didn’t need to do. But Johnny Marr’s work ethic, the nature of the relationships he builds with those around him, and his enthusiasm and love for great guitar music are second to none. Invited by writer/guitarist Isaac Brock to come over to look at ideas prior to Modest Mouse commencing work on their next album, Marr was interested, intrigued, liked him, and told Brock to give him ten days. “A week seemed too formal,” he told one interviewer with a laugh – a ten-day air ticket was the cheapest travel option for him. In the end he lost money on the deal – he never took the return flight.

Modest Mouse, formed in Issaquah, Washington in 1992, were already on Marr’s radar before his joining. There was, indeed, already something of The Smiths about them. Named after a line in a Virginia Woolf story “The Mark on the Wall”, in which Woolf describes quiet, ordinary souls who “dislike to hear their own praises,” there was an echo of “The Smiths” as a band name, the making of something remarkable from something so mundane-sounding. Part-Pixies, part-Talking Heads, they were – like The Smiths – hardly a mundane band.

After the departure of guitarist Dann Gallucci in 2004, founder Isaac Brock sought Marr out on a whim. “I knew it was a demented notion,” Brock told
The Guardian
in 2007. But there was an instinctive feeling that Johnny was the right choice. Brock’s “people” contacted Johnny’s “people”. Initially Marr thought it was likely they’d want him as producer, something at the time he would not have been interested in. He told Atlanta’s 99X that given the choice, he would rather have been making his own record at this point than producing someone else’s. But Brock offered straight off the opportunity to come and write their upcoming album
We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
, and it was the sound of the band, the potential for an interesting gig, that attracted Johnny, unfazed by Isaac’s colourful past. “I like working with people who aren’t run of the mill,” said Marr. “It’s good to shake things up a little – that’s what rock music needs.”

Marr was equally excited at the creative potential the union offered. “We don’t know each other, but we’re going to have fun trying,” he told music critic Dave Simpson. On the first night Johnny arrived, he and Brock set up opposite one another and simply started to play, that part-jousting, part-testing-out process
of finding where your jigsaw pieces fit into those of the other player. “[Isaac] drank lots of weird concoctions,” said Johnny, “and he’s got this weird kind of mask on, and I’m thinking – right, so this is how you write songs!” The chemistry was immediately evident. A riff that had been lying around for a while with no great purpose found its way onto a 1963 Fender Jaguar that was lying in the guitar rack. As Marr played it, Brock immediately started improvising lyrics. Johnny was impressed at the speed of creativity, and – jet lagged – awoke the following morning at 4am, unsure of quite what had happened, the writing process was so fast and so productive.

The product was ‘Dashboard’, the lead single off the album that grew out of these sessions. It went on to be a top five hit in the US alternative rock charts, and was backed with ‘King Rat’, a track that attracted the attention of Hollywood actor Heath Ledger, slated to produce a video for the song prior to his untimely death in January 2008. Early on in the process, Brock spoke to
Rolling Stone
. It was evident from the start that Johnny was going to be integral to the band’s new album, and beyond. “It all came together… a really good fit,” he said. “Which I think actually surprised all of us.” Johnny was impressed by the openness of the band. After a couple of days he found himself struck not only by the creativity, but the apparent commerciality of what was happening and the sense of having no direction or agenda. Playing the beaten-up old Jaguar, he described the process as “like little fires starting all over the room.” In no time at all he was committed wholesale. “It was too damn strange to quit,” he explained.

The commitment was three-fold. First was the personal relationship with Brock and with the other band members. From
this a relationship with the music was born that felt right from day one. The third commitment was to realise that this was a project that would require moving the family Marr out to Oregon. When he and Angie got together in their teens, he was already a musician. There would always be a van to pack, a long drive ahead, and a couple of gigs before he’d be back home. She’d been on this road with him for a long time. So over to Portland, where Brock had himself moved from Washington, they relocated.

News of Johnny’s joining started to leak out in the summer of 2006. Brock told
Rolling Stone
that Marr had committed to the album and to touring after it was released. Both recognised the great fit in him joining the band formally. “You get tight with the band members as friends,” Johnny told Doug Bleggi. “And then you make [it] work together.” The relationship with Brock in particular mirrored those with his previous collaborators. He and Morrissey were a partnership of equals, but – in the same way that The Beatles started off as John Lennon’s band – it was Johnny who knocked on Morrissey’s door first. With Matt Johnson and Bernard Sumner too, even writing with the likes of Billy Bragg or Beth Orton on specific projects, Johnny is no sideman. “It was really shoulder to shoulder and loud,” he said of the writing process with Brock: a collaboration of equals, not a hired hand.

Recording began at Sweet Tea Studios in Oxford, Mississippi, birthplace of the previous Modest Mouse album, and with the same midwife to help the birthing process, producer Dennis Herring.
Good News For People Who Love Bad News
had been highly praised by critics, and successful in the charts too, reaching the top twenty on the Billboard album charts. Nominated for a Grammy, ‘Float On’ had been a big hit single too. Bringing in an
untried (in the context of the band) guitarist might have been risky, but the resulting album,
We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank,
surpassed its predecessor and was Modest Mouse’s most successful outing to date.

The album, the band’s fifth, remained very much a Modest Mouse album, rather than a “Johnny Marr and…” piece. It mixed Marr’s funky and edgy contribution with Brock’s uncompromisingly indie sensibility, at times a nerve-wracked David Byrne, sometimes a growling Tom Waits. Critical response was uniformly good, if not ecstatic. For
Spin
it was “pissed-off and recklessly optimistic… a road-trip sing-along album not for vacationers, but for escapees.” The BBC called it “wonderfully mangled and yet massively accomplished.” For Marr it was “joyous.”

The album kicked off with ‘March Into The Sea’, dissonant and railing drunkenly between loud and abrasive and tinkle-bell quietness, the sea-shanty feel establishes the initial premise of a maritime piece. The neatly packaged ‘Dashboard’ springs like a near cousin of the previous hit, ‘Float On’, Johnny’s funky lead-rhythm beefed up and muscular, with string and brass washes across the track. ‘Fire It Up’, for
Rolling Stone
“the stoner anthem for 2007,” is slower, a track led by staccato rhythms and a clean vocal from Brock, while Shins vocalist James Mercer takes a turn on ‘Florida’, a funky track teetering on the brink of chaos, as it stops and starts, whistles and jangles along to Mercer’s catchy backing vocals. Cricket-clicking Latin American rhythms carry the delightful, acoustic ‘Missed The Boat’, a regretful, quieter moment amongst the album’s soaring confusions, again featuring Mercer. The spirits of
Swordfishtrombones,
Marc Ribot and Tom Waits at his most unbridled fuel ‘Fly Trapped In A Jar’. Packed
with Marr and Brock’s guitars, ‘Spitting Venom’, at nearly nine minutes, starts on offbeat acoustic strumming and builds into a prog-gothic-indie-psychedelia-military piece of mighty proportions. ‘Little Motel’, on the other hand, starts small and stays there, with Johnny’s Jaguar teasing out pretty phrases, Brock’s vocals more restrained and personal.

The album is an intriguing listen, a ragbag of familiar sounds and phrases half-remembered from somewhere else. It’s like looking at the school photos of someone you don’t know: the photos are so similar to your own, but all the faces are different. The recurrent but lightly touched in theme of the sea gives a shape to the piece, and as a result,
We Were Dead
… sounds both exhilaratingly new and reassuringly familiar. Exciting and fresh, we don’t know what’s around the next corner but the journey feels worthwhile. It’s easy to see why Johnny fell in love with it.

In the meantime, one of pop’s untimely tragedies led to another project for the tireless Marr. The tragedy of drummer Paul Hester’s suicide in 2005 led to his former bandmate Neil Finn calling on their Crowded House colleagues to reform. The album that was intended to be a solo release for Finn in fact became the new Crowded House album. Initially Finn plus friends and session players, the various members of Crowded House came together, and Johnny was invited to contribute, which he did on two songs. ‘Even A Child’ is a lovely acoustic/electric piece, notable not only for being another Neil Finn/Johnny Marr co-write, but also for featuring Marr’s daughter Sonny on backing vocals alongside
her old man. They’ve joined Crowded House live, notably at Manchester’s Apollo in 2010, to join them on the track. ‘Don’t Stop Now’, penned solely by Finn and again featuring Johnny as a guest, was chosen as the album’s lead single, released in June 2007. The album was a top three success in the UK, as well as a top fifty hit in the US and Canada.

We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
was released in March 2007 to uniformly good reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. The inevitable tour kicked off soon afterwards, with Marr as integral a part of the touring band as he had been in the writing and recording of the album. Firm friends with the band now, and completing a process that had taken the best part of a year, it would, said Johnny, have been “a little bit like jumping ship,” to have not gone on the road as well. While his initial involvement had been to contribute to the writing, he felt compelled to play the parts live himself rather than leave it to someone else.

The tour opened in Mexico City, then Portland, and by June the band were playing Glastonbury in the UK. It incorporated the Royal Albert Hall in London and The Ritz in Manchester, the ballroom off Oxford Road where The Smiths had played their very first gig. Across Europe – Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria – the gigs were almost non-stop; through the US and Canada, Japan, back to Europe. The week of Glastonbury, they also played two gigs in Germany, two in Sweden, one in Denmark. With a few weeks off periodically, Marr stayed with the tour through to 2009, and it appears that Johnny enjoyed, if not
every
minute, pretty much all of it. But a 14-month tour is a major commitment, and all good things come to an end.

In LA during the course of the tour, Johnny dropped by to play
with one of his generation’s best guitar players, John Frusciante. The Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist had released nine solo albums to date, and while RHCP were on extended leave he took advantage of the time available to work on a new piece. Started late in 2006 and through to the spring of 2008, the album that became
The Empyrean
featured RHCP bassist Flea and long-time collaborator Josh Klinghoffer, who – upon Frusciante’s leaving the Chili Peppers in the summer of 2009 – would replace him in the band. Released in early 2009, it’s a poetical, lyrical album, filled with curious textures and rich, varied guitar parts. Johnny played on two tracks. He had one night to work on it, laying down multiple parts on multiple tracks, left to his own devices by Frusciante, who edited the parts down in the mix, leaving two major contributions from Johnny on the album. “I didn’t say anything to Johnny – I was just watching him,” explained John. “Watching him come up with stuff was really educational – I’ve learned so much from his playing.”

Marr’s two contributions were on the tracks ‘Enough Of Me’ and ‘Central’. The first of those is the outstanding track on the album, featuring a Robert Fripp-like solo from Frusciante that mixes atonal soloing with divine sustain and overdrive. But the first verse and chorus are all Marr, with Frusciante playing the second half of the track. On ‘Central’, using acoustic as well as electric guitar, he fiddled around with harmonics, spending several hours contributing texture and tone, which John then mixed into the final piece. When you have someone in the studio who understands your work, and has their own voice to contribute, “the best thing you can do is let them do what they do,” said Frusciante.

Marr was by this time using the elderly Fender Jag loaned to him by Isaac Brock almost exclusively. An instrument beloved of aficionados of the guitar, but mercurial, notoriously requiring patience, care and attention, the Fender Jaguar is a characterful beast. “It sounds like I am supposed to sound,” Johnny said. Many of his best-known tracks were cut on Rickenbacker 330s or 360s, or on Gibsons, either a vintage Les Paul or the ES-355 bought for him by Sire Records label boss Seymour Stein in 1984. Over dinner, in the process of wooing The Smiths to sign to Sire, Stein made the mistake of telling the story of how he had once taken Rolling Stone Brian Jones out to buy a guitar in New York. “If you take me to get a guitar, we’ll sign,” said Johnny in a moment of Manc-hustler inspiration. Stein was true to his word, and in the hotel that evening Marr wrote ‘Heaven Knows…’ and ‘Girl Afraid’. A good investment for Stein!

But from Modest Mouse onwards, although of course he still plays a range of instruments, Marr found the Jaguar met many of his needs, both as a live instrument and in the studio. It became a passion, both to play and to tinker with. Working with his guitar repairer and tech of many years Bill Puplett, they made endless changes to the Jaguar’s configuration, playing with different pickups, adjusting the setting of the tremolo arm, the bridge, adding a bulkier neck and saddles from a Fender Mustang. Frequent requests for parts or specific assistance were fired off to Fender, who must surely have wondered what on earth was going on. Like all the great American cars, the design of the Jaguar is iconic, but Johnny made subtle refinements to the body shape so that it sat more comfortably on the player’s hip or in his lap if playing seated. While making the guitar more relevant to his own needs on stage,
he also made the idiosyncratic Jag a more approachable instrument for the regular player who can’t spend half his life bent over a desk with a screwdriver in his hand. Fender were happy to provide parts and as much support as Johnny and crew required.