Free Smiths' Meat is Murder by Joe Pernice

out the tricky coda of the song and blasted through it at least ten times.
    I had a great tolerance for repetition when it came to playing bass. It bordered on addiction. I could play the same part for hours on end, and did, many, many times. A lot of musicians I know are the same way. We love to hear ourselves play and play and play to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. It drove mymother berserk, and she hated The Smiths which made it that much worse.
    “Not those Smiths again,” she’d moan. She always called them Those Smiths. Whenever she talked about something distasteful (or in some cases with affection), she replaced the definite article with a demonstrative adjective. A reformed, innovative grammarian. Those Smiths, that Joyce, this Kiley, and so on. I once caught her singing the chorus to ‘How Soon is Now’, and when I pointed it out to her, she was irritated with me for getting it stuck in her head. Her diction swung well into the camp of the inventive. But she was much too caring and understanding to do me in with an endless loop of Anne Murray’s ‘Snowbird’ or a Jim Nabors medley. She could have, very easily.
    The day I figured out the walking bass part to ‘Rusholme Ruffians’, I played it non-stop from three in the afternoon to six at night. My mother, God bless her, tried everything short of clocking me with a cast iron pan to get me to come sit down for dinner. No reaction from me except ba-boom, boom, boom, boom, ba-boom, boom, boom, boom. Finally, she got wise. Instead of even trying to talk to me like a human being, she just turned the tuning pegs on the bass so that the notes went especially sour. It was a good gag, and I’ve used it on more than one bassist.
    So, on the morning I called Allison, I was torturing my immediate family with the coda of ‘What She Said’ when my mother stuck her head in my room without knocking. I guess since she heard me playing bass, she figured there was no feasible way I could be jerking off. (I was progressing as a player, but was not that good. Besides, partaking in both activities simultaneously was a magic trick that could only be executed properly by hair metal musicians, and in public.) She startled me a little, and I stopped playing before she spoke.
    “There’s a phone call for you,” she said, secretary-smooth, handing me the hallway extension with her hand covering the mouthpiece. Then she added in a whisper, “I think it’s a young lady.”
    I was so nervous I moved to the door still wearing my bass. In two steps I ran out of slack in the cable so that it went taught and dragged the boom box-serving-as-amplifier off my desk and crashing onto the floor. The Smiths were still blaring full-blast from the tape recorder. In a flash of genius I figured Allison would think I was extra cool if she heard The Smiths screaming over the phone. Morrissey had just begun the second verse of ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ when I grabbed the phone from my mother, physically shoved her out into the hallway, and slammed the door shut. This was the real deal, and I would need absolute privacy,concentration and intensity to come across as suave to Allison.
    “Hello,” I said with a slight interrogative inflection, barely able to hear my own voice over the music. I stuck my middle finger in my other ear. There was a short pause, then a soft, high-pitched voice piped up:
    “Um, hi… um, I can’t hear you over the music.”
    “Sorry. Hang on a second.” I reached over and pressed the stop button. The last snare hit echoed around the plaster walled room and died like applause choked off by the house lights. “Allison? Hey, sorry about that. I was just practicing playing bass to
Meat is Murder.”
    “That’s okay,” her tired, telephonic voice squeaked. “But this isn’t Allison.”
    “It isn’t? Then who is it?”
    “It’s Paul.”
    “Who the fuck is Paul?” I figured it was a prank call, and I was a little irritated that this