johnny ended up trying to manage the smiths - all the reports from all sides seem to suggest this - but it isnt because he wanted to. it was because someone had to - and morrissey kept firing them/making their position untenable. johnny doesnt come across as someone who is difficult. theres a recent morrissey interview on youtube where he says he went through 3 managers in a year. the interviewer asks him if he's easy to manage to which morrissey replies smugly 'no.' im not sure if it is arrogance or mental instability.. maybe a bit of both.. but i doubt that johnny is equally culpable in this issues surrounding the business arrangements/disintegration of the smiths. he had just had enough. it's only the past few years that his side came out, and morrisseys erratic behavior became all the more obvious. i think johnny did well keeping it together for so long... i dont think he was a saint - or that andy/mike contributed equally... though i don't think they were 'lawn mower parts' either... that is rude, disrespectful and shows someone out of touch with reality. especially when he calls his current band 'exceptional' ... if i was being uncharitable i would say they are exceptional not for musical reasons, but because they fulfill an aging queen's fantasies appearing half naked on stage. it's a bit sad he had become this though. or left himself open to this.
Generally I agree with you, except on one important point: Johnny knew Mike and Andy didn't have fair deals and didn't step forward and make sure things were sorted out. He was the founder, manager, and half of the band's creative engine. He had it in his power to act and he didn't.
As I wrote, that doesn't mean he was a money-grubbing back-stabber. I'm convinced Johnny is a good guy who was, at the time, simply overwhelmed by circumstances. He was 19, he'd just formed a band, and he simply wanted to write and play his music. Suddenly he had to negotiate contracts and make everyone happy, and I think he probably walked away from certain problems when he had the chance. He did what he had to do so that the problems would go away for the short-term, even when he knew they'd resurface. That's human nature. It was Andy and Mike's failure when they avoided the obvious conflict and didn't refuse to go on without a proper deal. That's human nature, too. I'm sure all of us here would have done the same.
So that brings us back to Morrissey. Some of his actions do seem shady, but ultimately everything he did in those years can easily be placed in the same category as the actions of the others. Like them, he was young, inexperienced, and overwhelmed. Like Johnny, he preferred to write and make music rather than play business manager.
The salient difference in their personalities came out later, in the court case. They reacted very differently. I guess that part's open to debate and maybe the Johnny/white hat, Morrissey/black hat dichotomy works, at least in the eyes of some people. But my point here is that nobody was blameless in the demise of The Smiths, and if we're going to be lenient in our judgment toward Marr for a certain set of reasons, I don't see why those same reasons don't apply to Morrissey as well.
