Chad Smith

Note: This isn’t exactly timely, but I’m over the pain enough now to post this. Yeah, that’s right. Fuck off.

I was in a friend’s van on the way back from a spring near DeLand years ago when I first heard The Smiths. After I got home that night I started downloading the band’s more popular numbers. Some time later a friend made me a mix CD of Smiths and Morrissey songs, and we wore it the hell out driving to and fro wherever we went in those days, testing the limits of the shitty factory speakers in my 1993 Chevrolet Cavalier. I’ve believed ever since.

I wouldn’t get to see the man in the flesh until 2007, when I went to two shows in three days. If there was a ranking of the best moments of my life, that second concert would be included in the top five, possibly top three. That night, the band debuted “I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris” and I got handshakes during two of my favorite Smiths songs, “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” a song that was rarely played on that tour.

But, as if to punish me for having too grand an experience, Moz has let me down time after time after time since.

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My favorite scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” has to be when the king comes upon peasants toiling in a field. Of course, British hilarity ensues:

King Arthur: I am your king.
Woman: Well I didn’t vote for you.
King: You don’t vote for kings.
Woman: Well how’d you become king then?
King: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.
Dennis: Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony…

And it goes on in that way.

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