When That Rough God Goes Riding (10 page)

As a soul man Morrison had been a lyric poet; he could suggest Yeats. In 1980, on
Common One
, he began to insist on the connection, which meant the songs didn’t remotely suggest it. With two of the six numbers passing by at more than fifteen minutes—by far the longest pieces he’d ever released—Morrison had time to claim his roots; he pretty much had time to research them, write up his findings, publish them in a book, and watch it go out of print. Instead he name dropped. “Yeats and Lady Gregory corresponded, corresponded, corresponded”—his familiar obsessive repetition no longer changing the shape of the words, making them
speak in new tongues, but telling you Yeats and Lady Gregory wrote a lot of letters. “James Joyce wrote streams of consciousness books.” “Did you ever hear about Wordsworth and Coleridge? Did you ever hear about William Blake?”

Since as a lyric poet, or even a lyric poetaster, Morrison was a soul man, this shouldn’t have mattered. In 1974, on the hypnotizing “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River,” Morrison was searching for the Veedon Fleece—what he named the album the song came from—and no one has ever figured out what that was.
⁵
The Veedon Fleece seemed to float above the churning music, which soon enough—a lift from an acoustic guitar, a piano thinking it over even as the boat is untied, drums on the offbeat, a flute as second mind, strings as a single rhythm instrument—was that river itself. There was a feeling caught in
Once Upon a Time in the West
, not even the movie, merely the title; suspense rose like a cloud. “The real soul people, the real soul people,” Morrison chanted, pointing toward “the west coast,” though he didn’t say of what; as he summoned William Blake and the Eternals they were a band, just as the Sisters of Mercy he called for would become one, and together they sought the Veedon Fleece, but now the bridge was underwater, every shape shifting as you
tried to see your way to the bottom. The nearly nine minutes of the song went by like wind.

On
Common One
, as on so many of the albums to follow, the singing was so characterless and the sax-and-trumpet ensemble playing so faceless that the mention of a famous name became an event, something to hang on to—as it would be for so long for someone with nothing to say and an infinite commitment to getting it across. The tedium was almost heroic in its refusal to quit.

Near the end of “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River,” the music loosens to the point that it begins to break up, its elements separating. The song isn’t falling apart—each part is moving off as a song in itself. You don’t know where the song is. Strings shake, giving off the long horn of a storm warning, a yarragh if anything is. But for all Morrison returned to this river between 1980 and 1996 it could have had corpses floating on it. Even from a bridge you wouldn’t want to look.

“Do you
hear that? That’s a prayer,” Jonathan Cott said to me as we listened to the second cut on Van Morrison’s 1974
Veedon Fleece
. The first song, “Fair Play for You,” a harmlessly slow reverie, was no preparation.

What Cott was talking about was the piano piece that opens “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights.” It seemed to begin and end the song—to be utterly complete in itself—before Morrison sang his first word. I’m not sure what I heard that day—I remember saying
Yes, yes
, as if Cott had unlocked the song, and so fully it didn’t matter whatever “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights” meant. What I hear now is a long series of earned wishes, the plea—if it’s a prayer, it’s the Platters’—of someone who knows what he or she wants, knows what he or she deserves, has little or no expectation of getting any of it, and who is absolutely at peace with such a life, or such an ending. The knowledge is
enough. I don’t hear a door anymore; I hear a pool that you dive into simply by listening.

There’s no need to come up. I didn’t catch the words that day, or for years to come. It didn’t occur to me that the song needed them—or maybe it was that even as Morrison sang the words, the song itself forgot them.

As Morrison slides back and forth along the planes of the melody, as if he were a drop of mercury and someone were tilting a hand mirror now up, now down, he slides past the literal story he’s telling—a crime story, as it turns out—into a tale of thought, dream, desire, where the claims of each shift in primacy. Passion rises and his voice fills up, and you are in the moment, but when Morrison lets his voice fade, as if he can hardly bear to listen to himself, because the thought he’s trying to bring into view is so elusive the act of listening will break it, there is the feeling of someone looking back at himself from a future that has itself already passed. This is a greater kind of slowness. Whatever movement the music makes, it also pulls against itself:
not yet
.

It was hundreds of listenings to this song later, decades after listening to it with Cott, that, driving in a car, the radio on, I heard the story the song was carrying—I can’t say,
about
. With a speaker a few inches from your face, words come across like traffic reports: out of the Druidic forest of the music comes a killer. Other killers track him from Ireland to a bar in San Francisco. He faces them down and kills them all. Dirty Harry straight off the boat.

The pool is always there, though. What happens in those first seconds with the piano, then in the way Morrison
high-steps across an arc in the melody that has only just appeared to carry the listener across the first line, “Linden Arden stole the highlights”—if that was his crime, what kind of crime is that? When you kill someone, do you not simply put out their lights but take them?—returns the song at any time from its words to its music, the words remaining only as a signifier that a particular person is singing the song.

It’s the quieting of the music that’s uncanny. With Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway”—the kind of deep blues, constructed with an art so realized it conceals itself, that’s one source of “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights”—there’s nothing you can do to quiet it. The more you turn the volume down, the more the irreducible loudness of the song, its nightmare desolation and fright, creeps forward. But with “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights,” the louder you try to make it, the more it recedes, until it reaches as far as it will go toward silence, making you lean into it.

When the Miracles’ “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage” appeared in 1967, it radiated a sublimity that made everything that surrounded it on the radio sound faintly obscene. This song can do the same to whatever you happened to be doing with your life before you heard it, for the first time or the thousandth. Whether that is art ennobling life or corrupting it I don’t know.

In Neil
Jordan’s 2005 film
Breakfast on Pluto
, the young transvestite Kitten, who was raised with the name Patrick Braden, has left her hometown in Ireland to find the mother who abandoned her at birth: “She went to London, the biggest city in the world,” Kitten says to anyone she meets, “and it swallowed her up.” But now Kitten has discovered where her mother lives. Flamboyant, shrieking, weepy, yet with the self-possession of someone with an infinite sense of irony, she sits in the dressing room of the Soho peep show where she works, surrounded by women from the club. She’s wearing a short blond curly wig and a demure suit, applying light makeup, speaking in a quiet, careful voice; a folded newspaper propped up against the mirror, with a laughing photo of Margaret Thatcher and the headline “VICTORY,” tells us the year is 1979. Then we see the movement of an escalator, with people emerging from a
tube station, and as Kitten’s face comes into view Van Morrison’s “Madame George,” from eleven years before the historical moment of the film, creeps almost imperceptibly onto the soundtrack. It sounded like an invocation loosed from time when it first appeared, and it does now.

 

Breakfast on Pluto
floats on a sea of music—a sea wide enough to make plain both the world in which Van Morrison has since the mid-1960s done his work, and how different and deep that work has been. A product of the ear as much as the eye, the film opens with “Sugar Baby Love,” a 1974 hit by the made-up group the Rubettes—a delirious producer’s fantasy of the Diamonds’ 1957 doo-wop parody “Little Darlin’,” which was so good it turned into the real thing, as this does. “Bop she-waddy,
bop
she-waddy,” goes the chorus behind the falsetto lead, which dives down on Kitten as she pushes a stroller on a London street while a construction worker hoots at her, as she invites him “and all the boys” back to her place as his face falls, as she begins to tell the baby in the pram the story of her life—and the movie ends the same way, with Kitten pushing the same stroller, the same baby, which by now we know is the child of her best friend, Charlie, and Charlie’s murdered boyfriend, Irwin, the song simultaneously homing in on Kitten like something out of
The Birds
and lifting her feet off the ground. It’s the most glorious, irresistible sound imaginable.

Yes, Cillian Murphy’s Kitten tells the baby, my mother left me on the doorstep of my father, the local priest, for whom she kept house. Yes, I grew up with a foster family,
but when I put on my foster mother’s dresses and lipstick, and when I wrote stories in school about my father Father Liam and my mother Eily Bergin and where could I get a sex change, I got in trouble, and I ran away. To join the circus, of course! And then I went to London—

In the circus, or rather with the band Billy Hatchett and the Mohawks, there’s Gavin Friday’s madman lead singer with his outrageously camped-up version of Johnny Preston’s 1960 Indian epic “Running Bear” (“Loved little White Dove,” the Big Bopper wrote before stepping onto the plane that would take him, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens to the Happy Hunting Ground), then Kitten onstage as a squaw to Hatchett’s chief for Sweet’s 1973 “Wig Wam Bam,” then Hatchett railing from the stage over “Thirteen dead in Derry” and the evil of British rule and Protestant barbarism in Northern Ireland. There’s one of Kitten’s favorite songs, Bobby Goldsboro’s 1968 “Honey,” playing on the radio, entering a scene like weather; there’s a generic version of Cole Porter’s “Why Am I So Gone (About That Gal?).” As Kitten arrives in London to search for her mother the film offers her Harry Nilsson’s 1971 “The Moonbeam Song”; sleeping in doorways, waiting in government offices, wandering the streets with her cardboard suitcase, she’s picked up by a man in a car, and it’s Bryan Ferry, with sallow, oily skin and a moustache like dirt, who plays Kitten Morris Albert’s sallow, oily 1975 “Feelings” on his cassette machine before shoving her head into his lap. She’s taken under the wing of a magician (“She came to London, the biggest city in the world,” she tells him almost before she tells him her name,
“and it swallowed her up”); for his act he hypnotizes Kitten to Dusty Springfield’s shimmering 1969 “The Windmills of Your Mind.” “I think I see your mother over there,” the magician crows, sending Kitten hurtling across nightclub floors to embrace laughing men with the insensate cry of “Mummy!” and then again, “No, over there—” In England to abort the baby she’s carrying, Charlie tracks down Kitten and drags her away from the magician, appalled at his cruelty; as they dance in a nightclub, a soldier hits on Kitten. You’ll be Bobby, she tells him, as “Honey” plays again; the club is blown up by an IRA bomb and as an Irish survivor, a man disguised as a woman, Kitten is arrested and tortured to the sounds of Buffalo Springfield’s 1967 “For What It’s Worth.” Released, she stares into a store window full of TV sets all playing the theme to the 1955
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing
, and the song swallows her as London does. One of the cops who beat her finds her turning tricks on the street, and takes her to the peep show emporium for honest work. A client demands she sing Patti Page’s 1953 “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”—the one song, it will turn out, that everyone in the film knows, as Kitten and Charlie and eventually Father Liam struggle continually over whether it’s “the one with the waggedy tail” or, as the client first screams at Kitten, “‘Waggley!’” When Father Liam—played by Liam Neeson, who years before had recorded a version of Van Morrison’s spoken-word piece “Coney Island”—appears in her booth, to tell her who her mother is and where she lives, “The Windmills of Your Mind” rises up once more. But it’s all prelude.