El Primero del Gang

I was never a huge Smiths fan—I remember my high school friend Dennis Prieto lending me a cassette of Hatful of Hollow and it not quite taking. Somewhere along the line I heard and fell hard for the extremely catchy Bo Diddley shuffle "Rusholme Ruffians," with its startling banshee yodel belying its narrator's indifference to the slights he'd suffered. And over the years I came to appreciate the jangle of Johnny Marr's guitars and the impeccable drollery of Morrissey's lyrics and delivery, and the way that unique marriage could produce a kind of brittle beauty as well as the occasional bop.

I've had a similar hit-or-miss track record with Morrissey's solo work, which has kept up a high standard without quite becoming a favorite. But I do have a special place in my heart for "First of the Gang to Die," and it has a lot to do with the fact that it's a souvenir of the Brit's time in L.A., which coincided roughly with mine. (I lived there from 1989 to 2005, he from 1995 to 2003; I can boast precisely one Moz sighting, at a screening of a film in which he was featured.) Though it opens with a radio announcer's voice declaiming somewhat cryptically, "Los Angeles, you are too hot," there are other clear markers in the lyrics I don't think I've seen others pick up on. References to "the reservoirs" (almost certainly the Silver Lake reservoir) and a "home for the blind" (pretty clearly the Braille Institute on Vermont and Marathon) place this in the part of the Silver Lake neighborhood that in the mid-'90s still had pockets of Latinx gang activity. I lived in Echo Park, just east of there, where gunshots and helicopters were not uncommon night sounds in that decade, and I know the winding streets on either side of Sunset and Fountain/Hyperion as well as I've known any neighborhood in my life. Moz gives precious few other identifying details apart from the name of the fallen soldier who is the song's titular martyr, Hector, but for me these are all enough to place me outside Café Tropical or El Siete Mares on a hot Sunday afternoon circa 1993.

The song has an incisive guitar chop and singing lead, both of which can probably be credited to co-writer Alain Whyte, and a simple but somewhat counterintuitive chord progression in the verses: B, G#m, D#m, F#, or I-vi-iii-V. This has a kind of inverted or mirror-image feel, with the B going to its relative minor in a familiar way, but then jumping to a minor iii chord that is in turn the relative minor of the V. By contrast the chords in the chorus—another major-minor sandwich, but in a much more standard form, I-iii-ii-V—arrive like a kind of relief, like the song is settling into a groove, which it eventually does in an unhurried fadeout.

The lyrics are a fascinating mix of romanticism and violence, fey condescension, and gimlet-eyed detachment. The verses all begin with the formulation "You have never been in love until..." and these conditions follow a steep descent from beatific to horrific: "Until you've seen the stars reflect in the reservoirs," "Until you've seen the dawn rise behind the home for the blind," and finally, "Until you've seen the sunlight thrown over smashed human bone." That suddenly graphic image pokes out of the song like—well, like a bone through flesh. But by that point we're acclimated to a climate of threat, as we've already heard the pre-chorus ("We are the pretty petty thieves/And you are standing on our street") and the singalong litany of the chorus:

Where Hector was
The first of the gang with a gun in his hand
The first to do time
The first of the gang to die
Oh my

The feeling here is of a proudly defiant memorial to a fallen comrade, within a marked territory. The song's coup de grâce is its final lyric, over the chorus chords:

And he stole from the rich and the poor
And the not very rich and the very poor
And he stole all hearts away

The simultaneous de-romanticizing and idealization Morrissey pulls off in just those three lines is reminiscent of Brecht's "Moritat von Mackie Messer," a.k.a. "Mack the Knife": This is an ode to unrepentant bastard who was nevertheless beloved, because those are exactly the kinds of folks we reward with our attention and our affection in this upside-down world. As the song closes with ascending and increasingly ecstatic vocalizations of "away," it's clear that the song's narrator is among the smitten.

Is the narrator Morrissey himself? A few lyrics—"bullet in his gullet," "lost lad," "under the sod," even "pretty, petty thieves"—are much closer to a Brit's diction than that of an ostensible L.A. gangster. This can either be seen as a gesture of fellow feeling, Morrissey identifying with young Latinx gang kids because he sees them as kin to Manchester toughs of his own youth, or as the fond but fetishizing gaze of a middle-aged white dude—or maybe a little of both.

In this context it's worth noting two data points: that Morrissey has personally stooped to ugly anti-immigrant politics in recent years, and that he has a large and durable Mexican-American following. My wife and I particularly enjoyed, for instance, a "Mexico Loves Morrisssey" concert at BAM some years ago, and Mexrrissey's rendition of "First of the Gang to Die" was a particular highlight.

Untangling this seeming knot of transatlantic contradictions may be above my pay grade; I recommend these fine essays on the intense ambivalence many Latinx fans have toward latter-day Moz (one fan compares him to the drunk uncle they wish to but can't shut up). But if there were a poet laureate of mixed feelings, it would be Morrissey, and while in much of his work that ambivalence finds expression in a kind of easily caricatured mopey melancholy, in "First of the Gang to Die" his equivocation is positively exultant, shining as brightly and ironically as the Hollywood sign. Indeed I like to think that Los Angeles, a place where even sadness is sun-kissed, has something to do with the song's brilliance.