An Interview with Johnny Marr

Johnny Marr is just getting started.

Sure, it’s been more than three decades since the British guitarist first ventured into immortality with The Smiths, his six-string virtuosity complementing Morrissey's often esoteric lyricism. And, sure, he’s played in a handful of other bands in the more than quarter century since the Smiths broke up, from The The to Electronic to Modest Mouse to The Cribs. And, okay, he’s appeared on even more albums by even more bands, including those of Talking Heads and Oasis and too many others to mention.

These days, however, Marr is immersed in a musical pursuit all his own.

Barely a year after the release of his critically hailed solo debut, The Messenger, Marr now forges ahead with ever-evolving artistry and imagination on his latest, Playland. As he suggests in the following conversation, this is only the beginning.

Were there elements or distinctions about Playland that you sought to be different than ones on The Messenger?

I kind of felt instinctively that we were going to go in a little more of a stronger kind of direction musically. The drums were going to be louder and… I wouldn’t say bombastic, but I just knew that [from] the way we were playing live it was going to be a little harder sounding — along the same lines, but harder.

Starting the album with “Back in the Box” is a dramatic way to get into things. That song’s got a real kick.

Once I got that song written I thought it’d be a good opener because, as you say, it’s got a kick. Also, the song is really in praise of euphoria and feeling good — a sort-of-ecstatic stage, shall we say. I researched, actually, things like schizophrenia. I came across a couple of reports on schizophrenic episodes and that gave me a couple of phrases, like “walk on the wind” and “breaking me out from the inside and the outside,” that kind of thing. The song is really a celebration of those moments in life when maybe you just want to punch the air. I thought that was a good balance, really, and a good way to start off a record. I think when music does that it’s the greatest thing.

It’s an exuberant way to start the album.

Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. Exactly, yeah.

“Dynamo” really draws in the listener, particularly when it reaches the chorus: There’s a melodic lift, so to speak, that elevates the song to another level.

Good. That’s nice to hear. “Lift” is a good word because the song is a love song, essentially. It could be about anything, and I happened to conceive it about the love of a building. But it was important to me that it felt like someone could sing it to a person who they love — romantic love, family love, anything really. So, I like that you used the word “lift” because that was the feeling I was trying to evoke. The music really led to concepts of the song.

Sometimes I’ll have the concepts first, like “Easy Money.” I knew I was going to write about that subject and I went then into a suitable kind of musical background for it. Well, in the case of “Dynamo,” I had the tune, had all the melody, and I wanted the words to match that atmosphere of what was going on there.

“Easy Money” was a tricky one because I felt that if I was going to write about the outside world and about society I was going to have to mention money in some way, but it’s been done so many times in music, it could be a little bit hackneyed. Also, I didn’t want it to come across as a complaint or a downer. I wanted to almost lampoon — if that’s the right word — our relationship to money and how we view it. So I then went on a search to try to write something really upbeat and catchy.

The phonetic way you sing the word “money” in that one gives it a rather striking rhythm. 

Funnily enough, when I think about those things in my approach to singing sometimes I’ve not really managed to find a better term for the approach than “rock ‘n’ roll.” Over the years the term “rock ‘n’ roll” has taken all kinds of associations and meanings.... Regardless of how long it’s been around, [though], rock ‘n’ roll — whether it’s Eddie Cochran or the Buzzcocks, or early Lou Reed or Ray Davies — is the thing that influences my singing, really. If my singing comes across as rock ‘n’ roll singing then I’m more than happy with that because it seems to be somewhat of a dying art.... I like singing that’s got a rhythm to it. Joey Ramone really knew how to do that. Even if you’re not necessarily singing words then the attitude and the sound of it can be really catchy. I really like that approach.

Yeah, that’s the way “Easy Money” comes off. Whereas, say, The O'Jays sang the word “money” on “For the Love of Money” in a more fluent style, the way you sing it comes off as cadenced and cut-up. 

Yeah, interesting. You can have a lot of fun with that stuff. On that song the record was literally recorded on the back lounge of the bus, except for drums of course. I went in the studio to make the record and I just could never beat what I’d done on the bus, the guitars and the vocals. All the singing is what I did at two-thirty in the morning on the way to El Paso. I had to keep getting the bus driver to stop so I didn’t get the sound of the bus on the vocal track. It’s got that enthusiasm of when you just write something and it’s all new and you think it’s the greatest thing.

How comfortable are you as a lyricist? Obviously you’re most known and respected as a guitarist, but you’re writing all these songs now. How comfortable are you in that role?

I’m comfortable because, without being overconfident or too cocky, when I do something that I think is right, I think it’s pretty good and I’m kind of proud of it. I always want to get better, of course, and I’m still that way on the guitar. If you don’t think that way, then… Hubris isn’t such a great thing. So I do want to get better, but some songs I’ve written, like “Psychic Beginner,” which is a B-side, and “New Town Velocity,” “Upstarts,” and “Speak Out, Reach Out”… Let’s put it this way. I wouldn’t want anyone else to replace the lyrics no matter who they were.

You still regard the guitar as a challenge?

Yeah, absolutely. Because I started playing as a little kid and it’s been in my life for as long as I can remember and part of my family, I have an almost mystical appreciation of it, but at the same time a healthy opinion that it is a machine. On the one hand, like most guitar freaks I could fetishize guitars and guitar culture. And that’s a really nice thing to do. But I also enjoy that it’s a machine. There’s just something really cool about that. It just makes it an all-encompassing, awesome thing.

I remember reading over the years [about] some guitar players who feel that they kind of plateau out as they work. That might be okay for them, but that’s not okay for me because there’s still a real matter of discovery. If I felt that I’d gotten to everywhere that I could get on the instrument I’d either be kind of depressed or I would stop what I’m doing and go back to school and just study it. I just kind of made a pact with myself when I was nine, ten, eleven, that it was my greatest companion and it was my doorway out of not just my social situation but out of these regular three dimensions. It’s kind of complicated to describe. My relationship with the guitar is sometimes otherworldly. I talk about that in the song “25 Hours” — “this door really goes somewhere.” That’s kind of what I’m talking about, my relationship with the guitar, with art and pop culture. Guitar is my vehicle for that.

So there’s always something to learn.

I try to think about the guitar along the spectrum of James Williamson, who was in The Stooges during the Raw Power era, on the one hand to John McLaughlin and his solo record, My Goal’s Beyond. I like all the spectrum in between, and that might be — and is — Richard Lloyd [of Television], John McGeoch from Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nile Rodgers. To me these people are magicians and artists. What James was doing on Raw Power was just pure attitude and magic. He could say so much in one little — one big — riff, but yet John McLaughlin shows you that you could spend your lifetime literally on Devotion. And I really love that. I love that. It’s as great as Cézanne or Magritte or any of the master painters as far as I’m concerned… Picasso. It takes the same dedication, that’s for sure, the same imagination.

I interviewed James Williamson a few years back, actually. In discussing The Stooges’ legend and influence, he suggested that the band essentially created its own musical vocabulary, which subsequent bands later picked up on and assimilated into their sounds. The same could be said for you and your music, too. When a song you’ve played on comes on the radio, it’s distinctive; people know it’s you playing.

Well, that’s a real privilege. I understand what he’s saying. What James has come up with there is absolutely right and really, in a way, gets back to this idea of why I like sometimes to remember that it’s a machine because then it’s all about what the artist — the creative person — does with that machine. The guitar doesn’t necessarily lead you.

Someone like Lou Reed, what he was doing with the early Velvets on those records — with the feedback — his lead playing was just so unique, particularly for the times. What you’re hearing there is the person. You’re hearing the person and their approach. And [your] limitations are actually what make you great. Again, it’s about the creativity of a person, and I think that’s absolutely right.

In my case, when people ask me about specifically how I could come up with my style I point them to some landmarks like James or Nile Rodgers or the Patti Smith Group, those kind of things. But really what you’re doing is you’re trying to play your own feelings and you’re trying to hear yourself and you’re trying to recognize yourself in the sound that comes out, particularly if you’ve spent a lot of time playing on your own, which I did in my bedroom. You use the building blocks of your heroes. You want to hear how you feel coming out of the speaker. Some people don’t really approach it like that. They just want to hear the sound of other people coming out of the speaker. That’s the difference between people who are artists and… I know that I could spend — if I wanted to — a couple of days sat down learning Lydian scales and playing like super-fast-lightning raid that would sound very impressive. It’s the sonic equivalent of a race car driver driving around and around and around and around at high speed. But that wouldn’t be expressing my being and expressing my attitude and who I am. So, that has always been bullshit to me.

You mirror your influences until — as you progress — your own musical voice emerges.

Yeah. I was very lucky because I spent a lot of time really working on my guitar playing in my teens. My apprenticeship really started at fourteen. I left school at just fifteen to be in a band, and I was playing every night with all these different bands, different people, and being asked to join different bands. Even though people obviously know me from 1983 onwards in The Smiths, which is cool, what I was doing before that started the pattern that really was the course for the rest of my life, which was to collaborate, go to places where it was musically intriguing to me and where I was musically curious and I thought were going to make me be a better musician. That’s what happened when I played with The The, and that’s what happened when I played with Modest Mouse, but that pattern started for me when I was fourteen.

To what do you attribute your continued musical enthusiasm? There aren’t a lot of artists who over the long term sustain their creative curiosity and desire to continually try new things, but you’re one of them.

I just generally feel that I have no alternative because the idea of life without doing that really sucks. That’s the way I’ve been since being a child. The regular five senses, should we say, or just the way of perceiving life, it’s just not enough for me. So on one hand you could say that I’m trying to compensate for failing to deal with the world as it is, but I think most creative people are like that. It’s just what’s going on. Even though I’ve got a really good life and have been blessed with good relationships and all of that kind of stuff, it’s just not enough for me. It’s the pursuit of ideas — and in my case it’s musical ideas or ideas for doing a movie or projects — that really gives me my sense of purpose.

You must know this, of course, but you could live solely off the legacy of the music you made in the ‘80s, going around playing just those songs for people. You clearly have a different mindset, though, wanting to create new things and pursue new directions with your music.

I’ve got a couple of friends who are artists. One’s a sculptor and I’ve got a couple of friends who are painters. We live exactly the same way. [One of them] told me recently that each age he went through he just squeezed as much enthusiasm and use — and I think he used the word exploitation, although that’s not a word I would use — out of that particular period. And then it ceased to have any nutrition for him. I’ve been very fortunate that what I’ve done is there for prosperity whether it’s The Smiths records or the Talking Heads album or whoever, but … [y]ou just need to go forward. The idea of some guy sitting around with a bottle of wine late at night listening to the old records, there’s something mawkish about that to me.

There are plenty of artists, though, who come from bands with far less legacies than that of The Smiths who bankroll the rest of their lives solely on their past.

I guess I’ve got this subconscious goal of an array of different records to make in my life that I just don’t feel I’ve gotten to the end of yet. With each song I’m trying to write the coolest 45, whether it’s a chart record or not. Some come out different. Some come out weird. Some come out commercial, some don’t…. I found my medium really young, like my friend who works in acrylics found her medium. I love that culture. As you get older you realize what you’re doing better be art or else you studied too long thinking about something. When I put it in that context it’s just all about being an artist. I just happen to be a rock musician. Artists work ‘til the very last day they drop.

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Guitarist James Williamson Previews “Re-Licked” Stooges LP with Record Store Day Exclusive

Iggy and the Stooges achieved a sense of having come full circle with last year’s Ready to Die, their first album of new material since 1973’s Raw Power. For guitarist James Williamson, however, some unfinished business remained, namely with music he'd composed with Iggy Pop in the mid-seventies—songs that were intended to comprise the follow-up to Raw Power—which was neither properly produced nor officially released. 

“I think that body of work is very, very strong,” says Williamson, “and the only thing people have ever been able to hear are the bootlegs of us performing it live back in the day, but a lot of the songs were only partially developed.”

In a Record Store Day exclusive 7” vinyl release of “Open Up and Bleed”/“Gimme Some Skin,” Williamson teams up with Texas blues troubadour Carolyn Wonderland to preview Re-Licked (due this fall), which features a batch of lost Stooges classics (including “I Got a Right,” “She Creatures Of The Hollywood Hills,” and “Wild Love”) interpreted by a roster of vocalists that also includes Ariel Pink and Mark Lanegan, among others.

One artist not on the roster? Iggy Pop. “If we had done them with Iggy singing them there would be the comparison between the early Stooges and current Stooges,” says Williamson, “and we decided that was not a good idea.”

Recalling his ambition for “Open Up and Bleed,” Williamson says that he sought a vocalist in the vein of Janis Joplin. An old friend tipped him off to Wonderland by way of a YouTube video, which was incentive enough for Williamson to hop on a plane bound for Austin, Texas to behold the singer in the flesh. “I was just floored,” he says. “This girl has got the voice that Janis Joplin wished that she’d had. She’s phenomenal.”

“Oh hell, I can’t live up to that,” says Wonderland with an unassuming chuckle, adding that she appreciated the opportunity to stray beyond her blues-drenched stomping grounds. “It’s neat to challenge [yourself] to do somebody else’s stuff, especially something so groovy.” 

Of course, like the rest of the songs on Re-Licked both “Open Up and Bleed” and “Gimme Some Skin” were written for Iggy Pop to perform in his inimitably virile way, a realization that Williamson suggests became all too apparent in working with Wonderland.

Thinking back to the “Gimme Some Skin” session in particular, Williamson says, “That lyric is like a total Iggy-throwaway lyric—‘Typhoid Mary, she’s got soul/Fucks all night on an old asshole...’—and here’s Carolyn Wonderland, and I’m asking her to sing this song. I told her right up front, ‘Hey, look, I don’t want to offend you with these lyrics,’ because I didn’t know her at all. 

“But shit,” adds Williamson, “she’s a Texas blues singer; she doesn’t care. It’s actually kind of a fun song. Anyway, she got on it—she brings it alive.”

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Download Singer/Songwriter Anna Rose's Cover of Iggy & The Stooges Classic 'Gimme Danger'

Artists who are primarily songwriters in their own right are often uniquely qualified to cover the music of other songwriters, as if their compositional knowledge in turn is manifested as interpretive insight. 

Such is what singer/songwriter Anna Rose achieved first a few years back with Arcade Fire’s “My Body is a Cage,” concentrating its latent, hectic energy down to an intense, primordial urge.

Now she conjures an aching, feral heat on a cover of the Iggy & the Stooges classic, “Gimme Danger,” drawing out the sense of foreboding underscored on the Raw Power original with piercing flashes of almost abstract, searing electric guitar.

With her latest album, Behold a Pale Horse, Anna Rose demonstrates a remarkable capacity to craft substantive, soulful songs which complement her resourcefulness as a vocalist. With “Gimme Danger,” she assimilates her voice to the song—and the result is just as stunning.

Download “Gimme Danger”:

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Iggy and the Stooges 'Burn' on Brand New Single

In gearing up for a much-hyped performance next week at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Iggy and the Stooges have revealed “Burn,” the high-voltage first single from their forthcoming new album, Ready To Die, slated for release on April 30th on Fat Possum Records.

Powered by a collisional barrage of guitarist James Williamson’s characteristically frenetic finger work and belligerent drumming from Scott Asheton, the song serves as a fitting preview for what is being billed as the follow-up—40 years later—of Raw Power. 



Related Reading:
An Interview with James Williamson

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An Interview with James Williamson of Iggy and The Stooges

Things are going pretty well these days for Iggy and the Stooges, who in addition to playing around the world to bigger audiences than ever were, this past March, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It's a far cry from their ’73/’74 tour in support of arguably their most incendiary album, Raw Power, after which they’d become just another in a long line of rock ’n’ roll casualties. Their demise wasn’t pretty, either. As well as whatever turmoil and demons plagued its members, the band’s already edgy live performances had in the end turned adversarial with the audience and, as documented on the Metallic K.O. bootleg, dangerous.

With an uncertain future, insufficient funds, and no record label willing to compensate in good faith for any such assurances, Stooges frontman and guitarist, Iggy Pop and James Williamson, respectively, collaborated on a batch of songs that came to be known as Kill City. Written in 1975 though not released until 1977—once Pop had established some success as a solo artist—the album was a hit among fans, but it suffered from a disappointing, muddled sound.

Newly reissued, Kill City has been remixed and remastered by Williamson and GRAMMY-winning engineer Ed Cherney to achieve the kind of sonic quality the album always merited.

“This mix has really reached the full potential of those songs,” Williamson affirms.

“I think it was a really good effort on our part,” he says, continuing, “especially considering the circumstances. We were all pretty desperate at that point and we did it on the shoestring, but the songs come through and they sound good. I’ve been told numerous times that that’s actually a lot of people’s favorite album that we ever did.”

When you recorded Kill City—it wasn’t meant to be a Stooges album because you guys had disintegrated by that point—what were your intentions for it? Did you want it to sound different than a Stooges record?

It was essentially a demo to get a record deal. Whether or not the Stooges played on the record is kind of hard to say at this point. I mean, yeah, the band had broken up, but we also had a history of reforming it too. It could’ve been a Stooges album. It’s really impossible to say now. We wanted to get a record deal and, in those days, that [was] kind of the fundamental thing. It was all about selling records then, not about playing live. So that’s what we were going about trying to do.

Songs like “I Got Nothin’” have harmonies and melodic nuances. What informed that?

In the tail end of the Stooges in that phase, we had introduced background vocals into the set. We became the Singing Stooges. [Laughs] Prior to that the only guy singing was Iggy. We had Scott Thurston, who has a good voice, on keyboards. And we got me, who doesn’t have a good voice but likes to look like he’s singing. So we were kind of singing that way towards the end. It was kind of natural to want to put harmonies on the demo. And we had some good singers that were playing. We had Thurston again, and I also brought in the Sales brothers, who were my buddies. They have really good voices and they did some harmonies too on some of them.

Are there any plans to reissue Metallic K.O.?

None. No. We’ve never talked about that. I mean, I don’t know what the point would be because it’s a live recording and I don’t know how much we could change it. I have mixed feelings about that record anyway. It really was a bootleg. What happens on that record with all the bottles breaking and everything, it seems kind of cool, but by the same token I feel a little bit responsible for the antics that went on after that because, along with Altamont and some other stuff that was pretty dark in those days, I think the whole subsequent attitude became kind of a little violent and unnecessary in my opinion because people thought it was cool what the Stooges did.

In your acceptance speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony you said, “I don’t know of any other band that would’ve had me.” What distinguishes the way you approach the guitar?

Well, I’m more or less self-taught. I did have a neighbor who I was fortunate enough to move next to the summer before eighth grade. And he taught me how to play bar chords and all the basic stuff that you need, but I very quickly realized that it was easier for me to write my own stuff than it was to learn how to play other guys’ stuff. Even though I did a fair amount of that too, from the very beginning I always wrote my own stuff. It didn’t sound like much back then, but it always had a certain characteristic. I liked to play lots of very fast chord changes and things like that, and just make a bunch of noise. That’s kind of how my style evolved.

When I first met Iggy, actually, I had my guitar with me and played him one of my songs. And I think that stuck with him. The trouble with it is that style, it works for me, but it’s difficult to work with a band, number one, if you have more than one guitar player, because there’s no air in there for someone else to come in and do something. It’s just me.

There’s no Keith Richards/Ronnie Wood sort of tapestry.

Right, exactly. There’s nowhere for anybody to do that. It’s also a little challenging for a singer because usually people give the singer some air too, and he’s got his place in there. But I don’t give any of that—in most songs. I’ve learned to be a little better. I mean, you can’t imagine me playing with Bob Seger, can you? It would just be… Well, they’d never hire me. [Laughs] And [it’s] the same with most bands. It was only the Stooges who saw the possibilities in that. I really have to hand it to Iggy because it was only Iggy who could make enough sense out of it to help me mold it into a song that he could actually sing and it had a structure.

In the past couple years there’s been a shift in perception of the band. What do you attribute that to? You’ve essentially grown into your legend.

It’s a really, really interesting thing and I can’t claim that I have all the answers, but I think a lot of it is that at the time when we were around, all of our stuff was ours. We created it; it came from within us. We liked it and we didn’t care whether anybody else did. There really was no sound like we had and there was no style like we had. I think the term’s been said before; there was no vocabulary for what the Stooges did at that point. But later on, people imitated us. So over the years their vocabulary was developed and people heard it enough that they became accustomed to the sound of it. And now all that stuff, Raw Power or Kill City or whatever, sounds contemporary to people because it reflects on all the other people who imitated us. I think that’s a lot of it.

The other part of it is we have credibility because we never sold out. Essentially we maintained ourselves in the way that we always were. We played our music the way we liked to play it. And I think what has happened is that the mainstream was not able to push us down and so they basically assimilated us. So now we’re part of the overall thing even though we’re kind of the most unusual people to be there.



— Iggy and the Stooges photo credit: Heather Harris

— James Williamson photo credit: Heather Harris

— Iggy Pop/James Williamson photo credit: Susan Carson

For more information, please visit the official Iggy and the Stooges website.

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