The Smiths' Meat Is Murder (Thirty Three and a Third series) [Paperback]

Joe Pernice (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2003 | Series: 33 1/3

A Catholic high school near Boston in 1985. A time of suicides, gymnasium humiliations, smoking for beginners, asthma attacks, and incendiary teenage infatuations. Infatuations with a girl (Allison), with a band (The Smiths) and with an album, Meat is Murder, that was so raw, so vivid and so melodic that you could cling to it like a lifeboat in a storm.<br/><br/>Excerpt<br/>One morning as I was jogging my way past the bronze plaque commemorating the deaths of one student and one motorcyclist, my necktie flapping like a windsock, Ray floored the brake pedal of his Dodge as he closed in on me. Fifty mile an hour traffic came to a screeching, nearly murderous halt behind him. He leaned over and rolled down the passenger side window in one fluid motion. He dispensed with formalities while I marveled at the audacity of his driving and, tossing something at me, winked and said, "Here. I'm going to kill myself." He pegged the gas, leaving a surprisingly good patch of rubber for such a shitty car. In the gutter, sugared with sand put down during the winter's last snow, I saw written in red felt ink on masking tape stuck to a smoky-clear cassette: "Smiths: Meat.">

Editorial Reviews

Review

"my personal favorite of the batch has to be Joe Pernice’s autobiographic-fiction fantasia on The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder. Stirring, evocative reading, and like the other two books, it made me want to seek out and hear the music again. —Michael Layne Heath, Tangents

"Meat is Murder is a page-scorcher, especially when you see Pernice's own experiences practically oozing from the text." —Filter magazine "Effectively captures the crushing blows and dizzying triumphs of adolescence, particularly the sense of urgency involved in matters of young love." —The Berlin Daily Sun "Pernice captures the essence of the anglophile UK indie lovers that exist in little groups all over North America...Pernice's novella captures [the] feelings of the despair of possibility, of rushing out to meet the world and the world rushing in to meet you, and the price of that meeting. As sound tracked by the Smiths." —Drowned in Sound "The novella by the leader of the lush, sad-eyed indie-pop band the Pernice Brothers is full of mordant wit and real heartache. And his fictional (though heavily autobiographical) tale of a tortured Massachusetts high school student who finds solace by listening to Morissey is a dead-on depiction of what it feels like when pop music articulates your pain with an elegance you could never hope to muster…[H]is tale of a lonesome boy, a Walkman, and Meat is Murder does a brilliant job of capturing how, in a world that doesn't care, listening to your favorite album can save your life." —The Philadelphia Inquirer "With his astute perceptions and graceful language, the guy [Pernice] can write circles around most of the popular novelists today, and then whack them in the head later on with his melody." —Nighttimes.com "Local singer/songwriter and now first-time novelist Joe Pernice seems to have near total emotional recall, in the same way a great athlete possesses top-notch muscle memory. The result is that the bulk of his creative output proves to be as viscerally convincing as it is deeply felt…His emotionally precise imagery can be bluntly, chillingly personal…His well-developed sense of character, plot and pacing shows that he has serious promise as a novelist." —Weekly Dig "His (Pernice's) perceptive, poetic ear for unpicking the workings of troubled inner lives is exceptional." —Uncut

“Joe Pernice’s take on the Smiths’ Meat is Murder might be the best in the series thus far…Part Dazed and Confused and part Virgin Suicides, the book is a funny, elegiac rumination on the pains and perils of adolescence—and the anodyne that certain albums can be to an outsider being smothered by dullness and angst…By fashioning his criticism as fiction, Pernice comes closest to evoking the transporting and restorative effect a song can have.” -–The Boston Phoenix, 7/8/04 (Mike Miliard )

"Meat is Murder is as droll as any of his songs, as its asthmatic narrator recounts his days in a Catholic high school outside Boston in 1985 and how his life was changed by the discovery of the Smith's third album-on cassette, of course. His descriptions of friends are priceless and sweet…" -Kathleen Wilson,The Stranger, November 19, 2003

"The story never reaches a true resolution, but that's part of the pleasure of it…Pernice takes pains to capture a teenage voice, although the language refrains from self-pity…the dramatic uncertainty of the language holds together the narrative." —The Columbia Spectator"However autobiographical this story might be, it's never predictable or less than heartfelt. The narrator's classmates are sketched fondly, his teachers with a little healthy malice and the music with great affection." —Newsday"An essential purchase for any fan of good new rock-write in general - a slim, confessional novella equal to anything written by Nick Hornby. " —Bandoppler Magazine"It is beautifully written." — The Times (London)"Continuum… knew what they were doing when they asked songwriter Joe Pernice to pay homage to the Smith's Meat is Murder." —Austin American-Statesman"Fans of Pernice's lyrical work in the Pernice Brothers and Scud Mountain Boys will find the same qualities of his lyrical wordplay used here, equal parts bitter and sweet…Pernice excels at evoking the feeling that almost any listener of underground music first has when encountering it, of stumbling onto a vein of something previously unknown, but far more immediate than anything that's come before." -Tobias Carroll, Earlash, 01/21/04 "…Pernice writes about the album the only way a true teenager would-clumsily, overflowing with enthusiasm and praise, and beautifully… the novella is a wonderfully brief, swift read that nevertheless is as powerful as the greatest of EPs." -Andrew Unterberger, Stylus magazine, 1/1/3/04

"What is it about the Smiths that prompts otherwise sane men to take an 80s youth that heaven knows was miserable then and turn it into a memoir? This singer-songwriter pens a pleasant semi-autobio about how this witty band's least-witty moment saved him from Catholic school, Reaganism and playing the bass poorly…B" —Austin American-Statesman, 10/17/04

“…this short, unassuming novella of 102 small pages captures more of youth, with all its painful, mad obsessions and enthusiasms, and all its longueurs, than any number of much longer books. If you’ve ever been young and in love with a band, you have to read Meat is Murder.” –Bookslut, 3/9/05

mentioned in The Boston Herald

Mention in review of Joe Pernice's new book 'It feels so good when I stop.' Australia.tmcnet.com 2/8/09

From the Publisher

"Thirty Three and a Third" is a new series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years. The authors provide fresh, original perspectives – often through their access to and relationships with the key figures involved in the recording of these albums. By turns obsessive, passionate, creative, and informed, the books in this series demonstrate many different ways of writing about music: from documentary style treatments to in-depth musical and lyrical analysis and personal memoir. What binds the series together, and what brings it to life, is that all of the authors – musicians, broadcasters, scholars, and writers – are huge fans of the album they have chosen.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 110 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic; First Edition edition (October 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082641494X
• ISBN-13: 978-0826414946
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.5 x 7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #523,142 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 43 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Hard to describe, but a great little book October 2, 2003

By Johnny D. Goode

Format:Paperback

First off, let's state the obvious: This is not a work of music criticism. If you want to know about what The Smiths were doing when they recorded MIM, who was in the studio when, what Andy Rourke was drinking etc, then you need to look elsewhere. If on the other hand, you want to know (or be reminded of) what it was like to be a teenager when this extraordinary band were at the height of their powers, then this is a darn good place to start.

Pernice (and his publishers) claim that this book is a work of fiction. But, like the best fiction, there's a whole lot of truth in here. It's the story of a few months in the life of a Boston based teenager - we never know his name - in 1985, the year MIM came out. And the story is full of humor, sadness, death, bitterness, poignancy, all of that intense adolescent stuff. For such a short book (its only just more than a hundred pages long), there are some incredibly vivid characters, and scenes that I can't get out of my head.

Naturally, I read this book while blasting MIM on my headphones. It takes about 2 hours to read. Please, please, if you buy this book, read it like that. The whole experience is like a portal to another time, an era that is probably best forgotten. Thank God The Smiths were there to help me get through it. And thanks to Mr Pernice for bringing it all back.

19 of 23 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Same old suit since 1962 March 15, 2004

By M. Fantino VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

In the mid-1980's music collecting was a hard job. There was no internet, of course, and the radio couldn't be depended on and music television was lame. If you weren't into Billy Ocean or Billy Joel then you had no environment to lean on. Smiths fans in the U.S. all had this in common, we all had to search high and low for an obscure release here and there, and then quickly network with like-minded friends and swap. Joe Pernice captures and chronicles the plight and obsession we all made part of our lives back then. This book is highly entertaining for it's rich and accurate nostalgia for those days, which, in hindsight, were just better. I grew up on the west coast at the same time Joe Pernice was on the east coast and it's uncanny how similar his and my experiences with this band were. It leads me to believe that there was a universal, or at least national, desperation. Smiths-fans from Europe may not understand completely how rare The Smiths and bands like them were to us back then, and how hard (and in the end, sweet) it was to acquire one album or the next. I still count my 45RPM of Sandie Shaw with The Smiths as one of my most prized possessions. And I like how Mr. Pernice picked Meat Is Murder to focus on, perhaps because he was at the right age to attribute so many memories to it (though, he calls this little book a work of fiction - I don't believe him!). I recommend this book to Smiths fans who want to relive how exciting it was to be their fan back then, and I guarantee you will have Meat Is Murder on the turntable for as long as it takes you to read it, as well as it swimming through your head endlessly.

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars The World is Full of Crashing Bores... August 7, 2006

By You Tell Raphael

Format:Paperback

Although I agree with other reviewers who comment that the connection between this book and The Smiths' album is as thin as smoke, I was prepared to enjoy a well-written story just the same. Unfortunately, I finished this wisp of a memoir wishing I had purchased the Thirty-Three and a Third title about Love's "Forever Changes" instead. Although I appreciated Joe Pernice's occasionally clever metaphors, these were too few and far between, leaving us instead with the musings of the book's exasperated protagonist, a teenage male infatuated with girls, alcohol, and new wave music. Of course, even as ordinary a topic as that can inspire brilliant and funny writing. But it didn't here. At least not for me, as I found Pernice's protagonist niether interesting nor sympathetic. Worse, the book's exaggeration-as-a-primary-comedy-device (however accurate to the speech patterns of perhaps many, many average seventeen year-olds) is as unfunny as that Dave Barry essay. (You know, the one he's recycled for the past decade and a half about how computers are complex and children are expensive and men like watching sports and drinking beer?) The world is already full of crashing bores as it is. So why not save your time and money and listen to The Smiths' "Meat Is Murder" while reading John Kennedy Toole's deliciously dark "A Confederacy of Dunces" instead?