The cover story from today's weekly Chicago Reader (May 12)  is 'The Pope Who Found Jesus,' an almost 13 page article which details the rise of the Smoking Popes, and how "Josh Caterer traded life in the spotlight for a spot in the choir." (The article is not available on the site ChiReader.com) Here is some of the text related to Morrissey:

In late October the Popes drove to Tucson to begin a five-week tour opening for Morrissey. The melancholy Mancunian hadn't released an album in two years, but he commanded a hysterical cult following, and he'd taken a shine to the Popes, praising an advance copy of Destination Failure during an interview on KROQ that summer. Josh had really wanted the tour: they'd be exposed to an older audience than the high school and college kids who usually turned out to see them, and they'd be playing large rooms, with crowds ranging from a thousand to nearly six thousand people.

But for once everyone was excited to be hitting the road, even though the drives were more brutal than before. With Daily in tow they now had seven people, so Josh bought a Taurus station wagon from Daily's father, a Ford dealer; Josh and Eli had quit smoking cigarettes too, so they and Daily rode in the wagon while the smokers took the van, pulling the gear behind them in a trailer. Morrissey's outfit had three tour buses: one for the band, one for the road crew, and one for the star. "We'd play a show and they'd hop on the bus and fall asleep and their bus driver would drive all night," Daily recalls. "But we'd have to stay up all night and follow the bus. We went from, like, the LA area to Salt Lake City the next day-that kind of thing, where it was like 800-mile drives. Trying to chase that bus all over the United States was really hard."

Morrissey chatted with Josh a few times and said hello to the band once, but he was extremely guarded when he was around at all. Usually his bus would pull up to the venue 15 minutes before his set, and he'd disappear again as soon as the show was over. "There was some weird, weird mayhem that went on at a lot of those shows," says Daily. "People throwing themselves up on the stage and grabbing his clothes and stuff, like he was Elvis." Sometimes they'd play in theaters, and the Popes would have to put their set across while the Morrissey fans were milling around and finding their seats, but other times they'd play to standing crowds and get a great reception.

The tour would bolster their career more than any other event; when Mike reviewed the SoundScan figures for the new album he found that sales were strongest in towns where they'd opened for Morrissey, and about 80 percent of the band's current E-mail list are people who discovered them on that tour. It would have been the perfect opportunity for Capitol to get behind the record and help them break through on the radio, but no one at the label was paying attention.

Related links

• KROQ Interview (7-6-97, part 4)
• Smoking Popes breakup (Feb. 19, 1999)