Live: Morrissey at the Shrine Auditorium

Morrissey has a sense of humor about himself and the endless drama and disappointments of life, but he's serious about it too. At the Shrine Auditorium on Saturday, he was forever bending and swaying to the emotions of the moment, at times outraged, obsessed, bored, hopeful or simply resigned to the limits of human happiness.

During “Ouija Board, Ouija Board,” he stepped back into the shadows, tilting his head in a posture of strength and resignation to a life of romantic disillusion. Of his unreleased new songs, the most immediate was “Action Is My Middle Name,” a typically obsessive plea for love, demanding, “I can't waste time anymore! . . . La-la-la-la-la!” in a tone blending vulnerability and toughness.

The 75-minute performance in the big concert hall often had the sweaty atmosphere of a much smaller room. 

Morrissey, the former frontman of the Smiths, still prefers to rock, and his five-man band performed with real force and sharp edges, layering songs with a fitting intensity of feeling.

Live: Morrissey at the Gibson Amphitheatre

The English singer shows no signs of his difficult year.

 

 To go by the lyrics of the dozens of extravagantly unhappy songs he's written since he founded the Smiths a quarter of a century ago, the English singer known simply as Morrissey doesn't really experience anything but rough years.

Yet 2009 has been difficult by even his miserable standards. In October he collapsed onstage during a show in Swindon, England, after apparently suffering from breathing troubles. Three weeks later, he was bonked in the head by a bottle at Liverpool's Echo Arena and left the stage after singing two songs. Then, last week, he canceled a gig in Indio, saying he'd damaged his voice the previous night performing in Las Vegas.

So you could've forgiven the guy for taking it easy Thursday night at the Gibson Amphitheatre, where he and his five-man band played the next-to-last show on a brief West Coast tour in support of "Swords," a new collection of B-sides from Morrissey's last four solo albums. Perhaps he might have sung while sitting upon an enormous throne, Loretta Lynn-style, or broken the set into chunks to allow for regular backstage refreshment.

But no, Morrissey strode onstage a few minutes after his scheduled 9:15 start time and launched into a spirited rendition of "This Charming Man," one of the Smiths' earliest singles and a perfect distillation of the singer's faux-pathetic worldview. "Welcome to hell," he deadpanned over the crowd's deafening applause when the song was over, and it was clear our old friend was feeling fine.

Well, not fine, exactly. In "Black Cloud" -- from Morrissey's other 2009 release, February's "Years of Refusal" -- he lamented, "There is nothing I can do to make you mine." And later, at the end of "When Last I Spoke to Carol," he described the death of a friend with these reassuring words: "She had faded to something I always knew / To the rescue nobody ever comes."

Still, there was a kind of well-worn comfort in Morrissey's melancholy that extended from his total confidence in what he does. As the Gibson's house lights went up following his 80-minute set, Frank Sinatra's "My Way" poured out of the speakers, and if many of Morrissey's young fans assumed the choice was ironic -- you know, post-punk icon lampooning the self-satisfied excess of the old-fashioned elite -- Thursday's concert illustrated just how much the two master stylists have in common: an off-hand physicality, an impatience with small minds, stage banter that can come across like excerpts from some private dialogue.

Stylistic dexterity too. Though Morrissey's still-handsome voice unified everything he performed, the music jumped from chiming folk-pop in "Why Don't You Find Out for Yourself" to noisy hard rock in "I'm OK by Myself" to blocky late-'80s funk in a terrific version of the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" that concluded with drummer Matt Walker taking a whack at an outsized gong.

Following the first of those three tunes, Morrissey handed his microphone into the audience for comments from the crowd. "I want you, I need you, I love you, Morrissey," proclaimed one woman with a flash of lyricism her idol might have envied.

"It will pass," he replied.

-- Mikael Wood

Photo: Morrissey, who canceled a show in Indio last week saying he had damaged his voice performing the night before, did a mostly spirited 80-minute set. Credit: Bret Hartman / For the Times

Coachella: Morrissey and the Smiths’ influence is apparent

The festival lineup is full of bands they’ve influenced. Morrissey will perform Friday.

For a gathering that’s mostly about new music, this weekend’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival will see performances from many key figures from rock history. Paul McCartney still stands as a symbol of the glories of ’60s rock, Leonard Cohen is the elusive and legendary god of singer-songwriters and shoe-gaze outfit My Bloody Valentine is among the most influential guitar bands of the last three decades.

Sometime Los Angeles resident Morrissey, who is due to perform in the desert Friday, fits squarely in their company. His legacy stands as one of the key inspirations of the alternative-rock and do-it-yourself movements that came out of, and transcended, the 1980s. In so many ways, the English icon patented the template for modern indie rock, first as the frontman for seminal mope-pop band the Smiths and then during his ongoing, though sometimes creatively uneven, solo career.

Morrissey’s contributions are particularly striking when glancing through the Coachella lineup. Many of the younger bands on the bill would not be there -- or at least, would not sound the same -- were it not for him.

"They were my whole introduction to a world of smart, literate, coy people," said Mikel Jollet, whose L.A.-based band the Airborne Toxic Event also will play the festival Friday, referring to the Smiths.

Jollet sees the band’s influence as "enormous," marking "entire subgenres," and in truth, he’s right. Almost any British band that picked up a guitar in the ’80s and banished synthesizers from its sound was marked by the Smiths, a quartet that favored street clothes to haute couture and played ringing, hook-rich songs sung by the always eccentric and outspoken vocalist.

The ’90s Britpop movement -- the way groups including Blur and Oasis and Pulp placed emphasis on a specifically English lineage -- grew from the Smiths, and bands that upend traditional notions about gender and sexuality -- Suede, Antony and the Johnsons, Bloc Party, Of Montreal, the Magnetic Fields -- come from the same place.

"Their sound founded the indie movement," said Wendy Fonarow, an anthropologist and author of "Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music." "The values they represented keep getting reproduced."