The Smiths on my birthday, and a Soviet recollection.

Yesterday was my birthday, and a whole slew of Facebook friends wished me a good one. For these greetings, I'm sincerely grateful.

Clint Ackerman set the tone by providing a song by The Smiths: "Heaven Know I'm Miserable Now, " and that was enough to send me diving into the back catalog. The video above obviously isn't the original of "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out," but it's a favored cover by Neil Finn and Friends, including Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr.

A weekend spent listening to The Smiths was a very good thing, and some of the 1980s memories dislodged are quite remarkably fresh, like the story of how I first heard of the band.

My 25th birthday dinner in 1985 was taken with Mark, an Australian, one of a couple dozen fellow travelers on a four-day tour of Leningrad USSR (not Moscow, as I previously misstated on Facebook). He'd decided that a birthday should be celebrated the right way, and so we bribed our way into a restaurant. In typical fashion, the food was an afterthought, and the main course was limitless vodka.

Before Mark ebbed away into some deep cups (how did we get back to the hotel?), he was telling about his adventures working his way across the Commonwealth, and time he spent bartending in the UK, where fashionable new music was on the rise. Trying to explain what The Smiths sound like without any of the music handy for listening is about as useful as it (doesn't) sound. But at least he tried, and in the years to come, I learned about The Smiths.

Thanks again to all my birthday well-wishers.