You know you’re an Anglophile when your strongest association with the state of Indiana is Morrissey’s music video for “Suedehead.” In this video, Morrissey travels to James Dean’s hometown of Fairmont, IN, visits various Dean-related sites, and does a bunch of weird stuff that he possibly considers to be indicative of small town America. Or maybe it has something specific to do with James Dean. I really have no idea.
I’m actually here in Indiana this week for work, and I seriously considered traveling to Fairmont to see some of the sights featured in this video. (Talk about meta: visiting a place to pay homage to a famous person who visited that place to pay homage to another famous person.) I might have done too, it if my husband could have come with me. Sadly he couldn’t get away from work. But if we do ever get to travel to Indiana together, our short list of things to do in Fairmont includes:
Read a book in a really cold barn
Drive a tractor
Play the bongoes in a field with some cows
And carry a dog around
I was also delighted to find that Morrissey covered the making of this video briefly in his book, Autobiography. He mentions that he got permission from James Dean’s cousin to shoot it on the family’s property. Morrissey managed to get in a fight with the cousin before the day was out, and he and his crew got kicked off the farm. If you’ve read Morrissey’s book, you will realize that was not unexpected. Luckily for the world, enough footage had already been shot to make the masterpiece that is “Suedehead” a reality.