I have a theory. Ok, so after Johnny came back from his holiday in Los Angeles, things went sour. From what I've read, Morrissey booked a session around the same time Johnny was going on a holiday. I honestly think Morrissey did this on purpose, so Marr had to choose between work or his life and he chose the latter, so obviously Moz was really upset by this. I honestly think that's why he picked that Celia Black song to cover and he renamed it work is a four letter word lmao
Oh for sure. I'm not sure that's even a theory, I think that's just fact. There's a lot of stuff that happened at the same time in May/June 1987. Johnny got stressed out because Strangeways was just recorded and Moz was acting like a huge bitch about the Sheila music video, he went to California with Angie, worked with Talking Heads, came back. The music press had randomly decided to make a smear piece saying he quit the Smiths. Moz threw a huge fit, Johnny then quit for real. Moz tried to then replace Johnny with some rando, things crumbled. It was a real mess. Though I find it incredible all of it happened so quickly when Moz and Johnny were fine for the most part during Strangeways except for a few spats. There was the whole drama over Moz bringing in a manager from America, then getting jealous about how much time the manager was spending with Johnny, and then demanding Johnny to fire him because of that jealousy, but that was a pretty standard part of Johnny's life in the band. Moz had done that numerous times before, so. But then all of a sudden Moz decided to burn it everything to the ground because Johnny wouldn't bend to his every whim (like the extra studio time you mentioned, booked right after Stangeways, not wanting to fire the manager, ect.). Can you imagine if Moz just calmed down for 5 seconds and let Johnny just be a guitarist instead of his personal caretaker?