yasipedia #2: RIP Lewis Largent, The Cure Part 2, and more
A lot to get into this week babe…I am between menty Bs long enough to put pen to paper (figuratively) and deliver this gorgeous newsletter to you.
Here’s what I’ve been fucking with this week:
-Hether Fortune’s beautiful op-ed in Creem Magazine about a topic that has gone unexamined for far too long: why most Tom Waits fans are so annoying.
-been re-listening to Ioanna Gika’s brilliant 2019 album Thalassa a lot
-sauerkraut
-this face oil by Agent Nateur (I am going to force you to learn about my skincare routine whether you like it or not babe)
-the return of Tedward Lasso (SHUT UP LET ME HAVE THIS HATERS)
Onto the rest…
So if you’ve listened to even four minutes of any single episode of the podcast you probably know that I, native fail daughter of Torrance, CA, was raised suckling on two cultural teats: (the world famous) KROQ and (Rob Dydrek’s own) MTV. So I’m taking the recent loss of Lewis Largent, who passed away last weekend, pretty hard. Largent started his career out at my beloved KROQ as an intern and eventually became the musical director there in 1989. After he shaped my impressionable young mind via the radio airwaves for a while he went over to MTV in 1992 as VP of music programming and more importantly host of 120 Minutes.
For three years this man tossed around his luscious locks while asking probing and mostly not so probing questions of all of the stars in my sky. Here are some of my favorite Louie Large 120 minz clips:
This is PRE why don’t you Slide, PRE I won’t tell em your name PRE Nicolas Cage capturing our hearts and minds as an angel named Seth in the Wim Wenders Wings of Desire remake that spawned the biggest song of their career GOO GOO DOLLS bitch. They’re in that awkward transition between punk band and beloved adult contemporary slapper core, here promoting Superstar Carwash (which has several bangers including “Fallin Down”) and serving motherfucking LEWKS (mostly Johnny Rez giving sexy farmer calendar month of June). Lewis introduces them as “NOT from Seattle” if that gives you an idea of the era.
This is the most teeth-grindingly awkward interview, it’s like a Fellini film of discomfort where Bob is cracking jokes while Malk weaponizes silence and shoulder shrugs. It’s actually insane to think this was on television for this long but Largent is so sweet and goofy you can’t help rooting for him to just get the fuck through it.
William showed up in his Ikea monkey coat serving absolute haunted Victorian doll face and spewing a litany of complaints while Largent, kind, good natured, laughs at Corgy’s clunky, thinly-veiled bitterness masked as “jokes.” An all timer.
Including this bc it’s fucking Jawbox but also because Large asks the hardest hitting question of the 90s - why did you leave Dischord for a major? *whispers* Sell-out.
Kennedy kills Lewis Largent & says Dave Kendall went to Reading & never came back
The title is pretty self-explanatory here.
Anyway, there’s so many more (Lewis gets his nose pierced at Lollapalooza and cries, Lewis declares J. Mascis a god, this insane story about how Lewis introduced Kennedy to Trent Reznor at a PJ Harvey show and she did an Ethel Merman impression and they became best friends!! also just PJ Harvey!!!) so just do yourself a favor and cozy up with YouTube and spend some time honoring and remembering an absolute legend.
On to The Cure part 2…
BANDSPLAIN: THE CURE PART 2
In this week’s episode shit got real babe. We left Bob in the midst of a full menty b.
The NME asks
So how do you feel, Robert?
RS: "Happy, but really very muddled. I don't think it'll last – I just think I'm going through a mid-life crisis.
"I've grown to care a lot more about a lot of things. General concerns, social things, I suppose. It comes with getting old.
This man at 25 years old said my back hurts and I am hurtling towards certain death.
Mental breakdown or not, it’s time to start one of the most iconic and enjoyable feuds of all time - Robert Smith vs Steven Patricia Morrissey.
It all starts in the July 1984 issue of THE FACE in which the following Q and A takes place:
“If I put you in a room with Robert Smith, Mark E. Smith, and a loaded Smith & Wesson, who would bite the bullet first?”
Morrissey :“I’d line them up so that one bullet would penetrate them simultaneously… Robert Smith is a whingebag. It’s rather curious that he began wearing beads at the emergence of the Smiths and had been photographed with flowers. I expect he’s quite supportive of what we do, but I’ve never liked the Cure… not even ‘The Caterpillar.’”
Some stuff might have gone down in between but the next documented incidence of sad man on sad man violence I found was a year and change later:
This magazine from Holland called OOR decides to stir the mfing pot:
Ah! The Smiths, the legendary row between the bands… I decide to provoke Robert for a bit and say ‘But Morrissey is the same as you are…both tortured artists!
RS: No! Morrissey is sick!! Once, one of the British music magazines asked him who he’d kill first if he were in a room with me and Mark E. Smith. He replied that if he’d only have one bullet he’d line us up and kill us both. He hates because we had this public row once. In those situations it always gets kind of macho, even if you don’t want it to be…. It’s hard to swallow your pride in public. So ever since we have been throwing mud in interviews. I’m sure that, in the end it will turn into something good, though.
It did in fact turn into something good Bob - lots of entertainment and enjoyment for people like me.
In April 1986 according to the book A Visual Documentary Robert said the following (the publication is not attributed):
Robert: “If I ever read an interview with Morrissey - if I ever did, I don’t think I’ve read one because he’s such a boring bastard - but if he’s going to say ‘Life is cak’ then, you think, ‘Kill yourself or I will,’ because it’s literally the same for everyone….Things are generally absurd and pretty awful most of the time, but I’m in a better situation than anyone I know so it seems two-faced of me to walk around moaning. Everyone in any room I’m ever in is going to die the same as I am so there’s no point bleating about it.”
Then in a 1987 SPIN Magazine profile, Robert delivered the following gorgeous bits of shade:
“I’ve always been horribly overconfident in anything I’ve done, almost to the point of arrogance,” he’d admitted earlier. “I’ve always been naturally quiet, but even when I was starting and I was quite shy, I was always very arrogant with regards to what I was doing. But quietly arrogant, not an Ian McCulloch sort of arrogant or a Morrissey arrogant.”
Also in 1987 No1 Magazine asks him about The Smiths, to which Bob replies:
"Cynicism is perfected by The Smiths who I hate. Morrissey makes me want to go out and get a steak."
In an interview with NME around the 1989 release of Disintegration (I couldn’t find it but allegedly) Morrissey described the (perfect!!) record as “absolutely vile” and added: “The Cure: a new dimension to the word ‘crap’.”
To which Bob responded in a Q Magazine interview:
“He’s a precious, miserable bastard. He’s all the things people think I am. Morrissey sings the same song every time he opens his mouth. At least I’ve got two songs, ‘The Love Cats’ and ‘Faith.’ If only people knew how easy it is to be in groups like the Smiths…”
And he followed this up with a choice quote in The Times that same year:
"It goes back to things like Morrissey not eating meat. I was a vegetarian for three years, but I didn't feel a need to champion it as a cause. If people despise us as much as I despise Morrissey, and I say Greenpeace is wonderful, they're likely to firebomb the Rainbow Warrior."
And just in case there was literally any question left to how he REALLY feels, here’s what Robert said to SKY Magazine June 1989:
"I hate The Smiths and everything they've ever done. There's a self-importance about The Smiths that The Cure have never had, and Morrissey is precious, effete, glib, out-of-touch and a million other vile things that I can't be bothered to list. He makes me squirm."
But the weird hand movements and facial expressions Smith pulls in videos do bear a resemblance to Morrissey's idiosyncratic body language.
"That's just me acting for the camera. I can't act and I'm not comfortable inside my own body, so I'm hardly going to be a very graceful person, but I'm not twee like Morrissey. Everybody he associates with, like the Pet Shop Boys, has this supercilious, patronising clever-clever attitude, working with people like Sandie Shaw and Dusty Springfield who were complete bollocks the first time out. How can you be taken seriously when you get involved with the kind of haggard old has-beens who sit on TV game shows talking shit about shit? The Cure stay out of the way; if you don't like us you can ignore us. I'd never make a religion out of the fact that I don't sleep with everyone I meet. Most of the people I meet don't want to sleep with me anyway."
Then everyone seemed to mind their own business and get on with their lives until 2019 when Morrissey did an interview with his nephew “Sam” for his own website which was mostly about how he’s not racist, per se but also included this bit about the beef:
sam:
Finally, any small regrets?
M:
Oh, I never make my regrets small … if I can help it. Oh. Umm. Robert Smith. I said some terrible things about him 35 years ago … but I didn’t mean them … I was just being very Grange Hill. It’s great when you can blame everything on Tourette’s syndrome. [laughs]
sam:
but you’ve never met him?
M:
Oddly, I was in a pub near Buckingham Palace perhaps ten years ago … and there he was … staring over confrontationally. I take no moral responsibility for whatever I said in 1983 … after all … who does?
Bob responded in NME that same year:
“It was slightly odd as I haven’t really had it at the forefront of my consciousness over the last 20 or 30 years. I don’t know. Even at the time I never quite understood what the problem was. It’s far from important now.”
Robert was like full Don Draper meme I don’t think about you all babe. He said bitch I do not care I am booked and BUSY being inducted into the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame which *checks notes* oh you aren’t in huh?
Also ending this with my maybe all time favorite Robert Smith interview moment from that hall of fame red carpet:
And that concludes the chronology of the Bob and Moz feud timeline.
Listen to Bandsplain The Cure Part 2 HERE and the accompanying playlist HERE
ALSO I should tell you that I, a known voice in the film community, am presenting a screening of the absolutely incredible 1989 Depeche Mode 101 documentary at Brain Dead in Los Angeles on 3/30. Patrik Sandberg and I will be doing a gorgeous little intro before the film whether you like it or not so get your tickets while you still can.
Also did you buy a Robert and Mary zine yet? It’s VERY cute.
Next week…routine bites hard and ambitions ARE low…we check in with my mental health…I’ll tell you about the lip oil that has changed my life…and more.