Johnny Marr Read Online Free PDF Page B

changes and the strategy of arrangement are really important to me.”
    He picked up from everywhere and everybody. Johnny found he learned more, and enjoyed the life more, if he hung out with the older boys from around Wythenshaw. He stored every lick and chord that he could find. Johnny’s wealth of musical knowledge gradually became immense, a trait that he has continued to display over the years since. His enthusiasm for music, his ability to remember everything he hears and maybe one day use it somewhere in his own music, is legendary. Smiths soundman Grant Showbiz remembers visiting Johnny at home many, many times over the years, and testifies to the fact that music was always there. “Whenever I went to Johnny’s house,” recalls Grant, “which was an awful lot of the time in those days, Radio One was on absolutely permanently. And I can remember it being the same ten years later.” Showbiz can only think of one other musician with the same kind of all-inclusive referencing, and the same enthusiasm to share the process of listening to music with anybody. “Peter Buck (of REM) has an absolutely encyclopaedic knowledge of music, and so has Johnny. And he’ll just say, ‘This B-side by The Dells – listen to the middle eight, listen to what the organ’s doing’ or whatever it is. And suddenly, it’s eight hours later!” Such was the process of assimilating a myriad of musical influences for the young Johnny, as it remains today for the adult; hang out, listen to music, talk about music, play music.
    Future Cult hero Billy Duffy was one of the older kids who showed Johnny new chords. Marr remembers how “I met guys who were only thirteen or fourteen, but took themselves soseriously as musicians, they were already legends in their own minds.” As well as picking up guitar tips, Johnny was also open to the record collections of everyone he met. In addition to the bluesy rock of Rory Gallagher, Johnny breathed in the soulful West Coast folk of Neil Young, the articulate British picking of Martin Carthy, Davey Graham and Bert Jansch (to whom Johnny was introduced by Duffy). Along with Richard Thompson and Fairport Convention, Johnny also fell for Thin Lizzy, the pristine manufactured pop of Motown and the romantic, Byrds-influenced guitar jangling of Tom Petty. Like his friends, Johnny soon came to consider himself a musician, not just a music fan.
    “When I got into Nils Lofgren,” Johnny explained to Martin Roach in The Right To Imagination And Madness , “there was no turning back.” Increasingly, and throughout his teenage years, Johnny was to be seen around the streets of Wythenshaw with a guitar case and a bagful of attitude and confidence. “It was just to let everybody know that my whole identity was as a guitar player,” he continued. “I was very cocky…” Besotted by New York New Wave, intrigued by the old waves of acoustic British folk, Johnny’s boundless enthusiasm made up for his inescapable youth. “I could pick like Bert Jansch, but I wanted to look like Ivan Kral from the Patti Smith Group,” he said.
    At the same time, Johnny began to realise that there was only so far that he could get by playing other people’s riffs. He needed people to play with and he needed to write. Maher was starting to write songs for himself, and he needed people around him off whom he could bounce ideas and share the playing more formally. “As soon as I could string a few chords together, I started putting them down on a cassette recorder,” Johnny recalls. What was important to him wasthe guitar. The idea of being the next Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton was anathema to him: Johnny Maher never wanted to be a guitar hero. For Johnny it was always the guitar and the songs that were important. As it gradually dawned on him that he needed some kind of context in which to play and write, so he needed a band to play with.
    The names of Johnny Marr’s first bands have gone into the legend of pre-Smiths history.