The Warfield, San Francisco, CA
The Boy RacerThis was an excellent show, perhaps one of the best of the "Maladjusted" tour. Morrissey was in excellent mood, very energetic and playful. He was quite talkative and made many funny changes in his lyrics. The crowd was also very responsive and energetic, security had a difficult time keeping it contained. A few fans still managed to get on stage despite that.
Satan Rejected My Soul
Billy Budd
Alma Matters
Dagenham Dave
Sunny
Nobody Loves Us
Ambitious Outsiders
Reader Meet Author
Hold On To Your Friends
Now My Heart Is Full
Paint A Vulgar Picture
Speedway
/Shoplifters Of The World Unite
Because this was the second night in a row at the same venue, the setlist was significantly scrambled. "Dagenham Dave", "Satan Rejected My Soul", "Ambitious Outsiders" and "Nobody Loves Us", which had all been off the setlist for some time, were reinstated. But most importantly, this gig saw the live introduction of "Hold On To Your Friends", performed for the first time on this tour, and therefore for the first time in North America. To make place for these, standard intro "Maladjusted", the highly sexual "Wide To Receive", "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get", "Roy's Keen" and "The Teachers Are Afraid Of The Pupils" were dropped. They would all be played again at one point or another later in the tour.
Along with the setlist changes, "The Boy Racer" was the newly appointed set opener, followed by two more high-energy numbers "Satan Rejected My Soul" and "Billy Budd", which set the pace of the evening. In "Satan Rejected My Soul", Morrissey made many playful lyric changes. He sang "he's seen my mush around, he knows heaven's never gonna be my home", "I must find somewhere else nice! to go" and "I'm really sly". Also, along with the "pull me in" and "haul me in" lines, he also sang "take me in" and "suck me in". After the song he thanked the audience: "Thank you for buying two tickets... I know I'm not that popular really...". Then in "Billy Budd", a line was changed to "Now it's twenty years on".
Someone in the audience was holding a sign saying "Morrissey 1 - Joyce 0", making a reference to a recent incident in Cleveland. When Morrissey saw the sign which seemingly had a typo, he told the fan "You don't spell it that way... you spelt it wrong". In the following number, "Dagenham Dave", Morrissey changed a line to "everybody loves him, I can't think why". After the song he warned "Don't get too sweaty... it's not very nice". Then after "Sunny", to a fan shouting "Steven!", he replied "That's not my name". Later he would mock other fans by saying "What?" and by imitating their voices.
In "Nobody Loves Us", Morrissey changed a line to "how rich we'd be if we didn't think things could improve", which is how that line was originally written before things was changed to life. At the very end of the song, he also sang "I'm useless and shiftless and job-less but all yours". The band had a few technical difficulties with the tape machine for the strings at the very beginning of "Ambitious Outsiders". On the first try Morrissey said "It's not funny", and repeated it on the second try. On the third, which was successful, he said "It's becoming funny".
"Paint A Vulgar Picture" was wittily introduced with "We'd now like to do a song which was made reasonably famous by... the Grateful Dead". During that number someone threw some water at Morrissey. At first he was caught by surprise, but then he asked for more. Morrissey didn't get to sing his usual live change "MTV, MTV, MTV, oh kiss their arses" because he was distracted by a fan on stage. However he made other live changes, and rarely heard ones. He sang "Please those bloody Belgians" instead of the usual live change "Please depressing Belgians", as well as "I just haven't earned it yet, baby" and "what makes most people feel happy still leads me headlong into harm". At the end of the song, Morrissey poked fun at himself (consciously or not!) by dancing the way he did in the Smiths days.
"The Queen Is Dead" was heard soundchecked. It would be played only once, two or three weeks later in Claremont on the second leg of this tour.
A rather good audience recording of the full set is circulated on bootlegs on cds and on the internet. The recording captured quite well the interaction between Morrissey and his audience.
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