Johnny Marr’s autobiography details a life guided by guitar, before and after The Smiths
Johnny Marr’s autobiography Set The Boy Free opens in the summer of 1968, with a 4-year-old Marr staring at a little wooden guitar in a shop window. In a life defined by the guitar, there’s no more fitting place to start the story than with the moment Marr came to possess his first instrument, transfixed beyond explanation. It’s an image that relies heavily on notions of fate and destiny, but as Marr chronicles his life in music, there’s no doubting that his drive and talent emerged at such an early age that he may well have been born to play the guitar.
“I have no idea if music is something that you’re born with or is bred into you, but the fascination I had with music was completely personal and natural,” Marr writes in the opening pages of Set The Boy Free, and though he doesn’t probe the question farther, there are telling anecdotes from his childhood that show the inescapable allure music held for the boy. From his early bands, to forming The Smiths (by knocking on Morrissey’s door), to the rise and fall of one of pop music’s most influential groups, to his decades afterwards pursing new sounds and new musical expression, Marr describes music as “another dimension, one that made more sense to me than the world I actually lived in.”
Marr certainly knows that any book he’d write would add to the mythology of The Smiths and draw in readers eager to comb through the details of those brief five years, but making a statement that underscores the breadth of his career, Set The Boy Free starts far earlier and stretches far later. Toward the end of the book, Marr writes about Aldous Huxley, “my absolute favorite writer and thinker,” and in a transparent parallel to Marr’s own career, discusses the unfairness that Huxley’s reputation rests on his earlier work. “It illustrates the reductive nature of fame and how you can become defined by something you did in your youth, despite work in later life that’s equally substantial.”
The richest passage of the book describes a long, solo songwriting weekend. Marr holed up in his flat and turned a riff he came up with in the back of the band’s van into a fast rush of an acoustic song. Then he turned to a melancholy waltz for the B-side and lastly composed a psychedelic, swampy blues song that was nothing like the other two. He put the three demos on a cassette and passed the tape to Morrissey, who worked on the lyrics for a few days and returned with “William, It Was Really Nothing,” “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want,” and “How Soon Is Now?”