When That Rough God Goes Riding (12 page)

The deep grounding of
The Healing Game
makes me think of the original Fleetwood Mac, the finest flowering of British blues, formed by Peter Green in 1967. As a blues guitarist, Green, who had earlier replaced Eric Clapton in John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, had by 1970 been and gone from
places—places in the heart, places in the blues—Clapton would never get to. Compared to Them, Fleetwood Mac was a purist band, in quest of the spirit of the Mississippi blues of the 1920s and ’30s—though while Them was purist in its own way, in its refusal of the slightest suggestion of levity or even peace of mind, Fleetwood Mac made room for the most raucous rockabilly humor and mercilessly funny parodies of the British blues scene. It was a band of many parts—but while he remained Green was always its center. He played an occult blues, a fantasy blues, where in his most lucid songs and performances—in “Man of the World,” “Long Grey Mare,” “Albatross,” “Trying So Hard to Forget,” “Love That Burns,” his guitar playing alone on “Something Inside of Me”—every element was slowed down and emotions appeared only to decay.

As a singer, he sang in his own voice. There was never any doubt that he was white and English—and, maybe, little doubt that he was Jewish. The remorse in his voice, you could think, wasn’t for the love he’d lost or the life that failed him—the predicament that, sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, the blues was invented to affirm. It was a sorrow over his conviction that as a white Englishman the blues would always be out of his reach. It was that conviction, though, that sense of displacement, that made his blues ring so true: a conviction that in Green’s highest moments gave the lie to itself. Over all the years I’ve listened to his “Love That Burns,” trying to keep up with the tragedy it enacts, waiting for the closing guitar part that comes when words have taken the singer as far as they can, but not far enough, forcing him to leave words behind and
plead with his bare hands, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to play it twice in a row. It is just too strong.

Morrison came from a similar place, with the same belief in the blues as a kind of curse one puts on oneself, but for a long desert in his career he fled from it, his voice hollowing out along with the placid, reassuring world his music described. Sometimes he fell back before his masters and performed merely as a product of his influences, coming to life the most when he sang with John Lee Hooker; he reached his dead end, with album after album, when he seemed most of all influenced by himself. His music was all self-reference, until solipsism ruled and awarded its crown: the solipsist is always king of his own kingdom, and who willingly gives up a crown? All of that is left behind on
The Healing Game
; as a singer of confidence and pride, Morrison sometimes goes almost as far into the dark as Green did.

Morrison dominates each song on
The Healing Game
—but the word song seems much too small. Like the rough god he sings about, Morrison is astride each incident in the music, each pause in a greater story, but often the most revealing moments—the moments that reveal the shape of a world, a point of view, an argument about life—are at the margins. It might be Pee Wee Ellis’s twisting saxophone, or the backing vocals of Katie Kissoon, or the side-singing of Georgie Fame, but each of them brings a certain realism to the setting. Morrison is the philosopher, the man of knowledge and experience; the others are the street he walks on. Ellis’s work is too individualistic to rest as mere accompaniment—from the first minutes of
The Healing Game
, his baritone sax and Leo Green’s tenor are part of a loose, casual interplay with
Morrison and the other singers, a conversation of asides and pointed fingers. He can make you forget you’re listening to a self-evident, self-presenting master, and Morrison, often mumbling, sometimes stepping back from his own lines, as if to question himself, gives Ellis his room. Kissoon and Fame are slight singers, ordinary in every respect; they sing and talk like passers-by, like stand-ins for listeners. In the furious “Burning Ground,” which is about getting rid of a body, it’s clear who’ll be doing the dirty work—Morrison wouldn’t give up the pleasure to anyone else. Sounding as gleeful as the Kray Twins—the London gangsters who, with a plan to blackmail Brian Epstein over his homosexuality, supposedly once tried to take over management of the Beatles—Morrison orchestrates the action and gets the kicks. The listener gets to watch.

“I’m not going to fake it, like Johnny Ray,” Morrison declaims in the middle of the otherwise unbroken, insistently measured “Sometimes We Cry.” It’s a cruel dismissal of a once-groundbreaking singer who died miserable and forgotten, just seven years before Morrison put another nail in his coffin—but there’s such strength in Morrison’s tone it can make you wonder what the cruelty is about.

It was in the early 1950s that Ray, with an emotionalism that was shocking in its nakedness, set the stage for the rock’n’ roll performers, black and white, Bobby Bland no less than Elvis, James Brown no less than David Bowie, who would follow him. “Sometimes We Cry” isn’t casually titled—Ray’s “Cry” was number one in 1951 for eleven weeks; the flipside, also a huge hit, was “The Little White Cloud That Cried.” He was white, frail, with the energy of a dying man reaching out
to grab your neck. “He’d hunch into himself,” Nik Cohn wrote in 1969 in
Pop from the Beginning
,

Even if it began as a show, the tears coming every night like Pete Townshend smashing his guitar, soon enough the desperation Ray sparked in his audience blew back at him, and some nights, in the face of the crowd, he would truly break down. Then his moment passed. His career collapsed with arrests in men’s rooms and attempts to go straight, both musically and as a public figure. His obloquy wasn’t far from that of Peter Green, who at the height of Fleetwood Mac’s popularity walked away from the band into religious insanity, electroshock, institutionalization, years living on the streets or in the woods, returning finally with his guitar, his voice, and no spirit, no insight into the music he played, a once-handsome man covered in fat and matted hair. So how did Johnny Ray fake it? What was it that he held back? Was it that, exposed to everyone for who he really was, he tried to pretend he was just like everybody else—a pathetic surrender that was itself no less fake than his performance? Johnny Ray had an act, Morrison seemed to be saying, and
I don’t. He tried to pretend that he was just like everybody else; I never have and never will.

In the interstices of
The Healing Game
, in the spaces between the words as Morrison sings them and the notes as he hits them, you can believe it. The depth and mastery of the music Morrison left on that album is such that, for me anyway, it calls up only one real familiar.

Mattie May Thomas was a prisoner at the state penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi, when on 1 June 1939 the folklorist Herbert Halpert arrived to make recordings. Thomas and other women were gathered in a sewing room. “A made-up song, just about being in prison, alone,” Thomas said to introduce what she, or Halpert, titled “Workhouse Blues.” Was it made up? All the lines were commonplace, taken from the vast pool of floating verses from which people made their own songs. Thomas began around the time the blues took shape—“In the empty belly, black man, in the year nineteen hundred and nine, I was a little young hobo, all up and down the line”—and then leaped back to the brags, taunts, and japes that were circulating in Davy Crockett’s day, a lot of them out of his mouth, or put in it:

Whoever Mattie May Thomas was, she was not a folk singer, in any meaning of the term.
⁷
Coming out of white frontier settlements, the words were men’s words; simply by claiming what is not supposed to be hers, she takes title.
That is the folk process. But the voice is not. It’s plainly a professional voice, a nightclub singer’s, “the devil coming out of your own mouth”:
⁸
clear, strong, claiming its own demons, using folkloric words to affirm that the frights and triumphs they describe happened to her and no one else. Like Morrison, Thomas presses words like bricks, then flies over verses toward some unreachable shore of release.

Emotional release, for both, but for Thomas standing for true release, from prison, and that release symbolizing the shared slaves’ dream, shared as fable and prophecy, of flying back to Africa. For Morrison, his own dreams of a Viking’s voyage from Denmark to Caledonia and then a magic transport from the old world to the new and back again with ancient songs for a skyway. But if both voices are unique and capable of transcendence, Thomas not at all and Morrison at his fair best never jettison the ordinary, the inescapable, the squalid, the real. For both, it’s all in the refusal to be rushed. Ordinary life, after all, guarantees only death and oblivion. Morrison has faced oblivion; though she is almost certainly dead, somehow Mattie May Thomas escaped it, and Morrison may not. In their tone they both say the same thing. Death has waited all these years; it can wait another day.

It was
Morrison’s last album before his long swan dive into the pool of contemplation, and it raises a question that all the moments of freedom musicians have contributed to Morrison’s own pursuit of freedom—Richard Davis’s bass on
Astral Weeks
, Jef Labes’s piano on “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights,” John Platania’s mandolin on “Caledonia Soul Music”—only hint at: is the greatest creative freedom in making a field where others can find it?

This album had Van Morrison’s name on it, but it belonged to Toni Marcus, credited on violin, viola, stroviola, and mandolin. Today as Talia Toni Marcus she leads her own jam band; she has fourteen MySpace friends. On
Into the Music
, as it moved out across its fifty minutes, it was an open question whether Morrison was granting freedom to her or if she was granting it to him.

It’s a strange album for 1979. Like the old
Oldies But Goodies
albums, it has a “Rockin’ Side” and a “Dreamy Side,” and one of the songs on the Dreamy Side is a song that actually appeared on the Dreamy Side of an
Oldies But Goodies
album. The first two numbers—“Bright Side of the Road” and “Full Force Gale”—are the most immediately arresting; they fade against what follows. Both have quick rhythms and dashing melodies. On “Bright Side of the Road,” near the end, Morrison begins to growl the lines, making himself into a bear, and Marcus swoops over him and then digs into the song. She adds a fervor, a seriousness, that Morrison is dancing away from; he picks up on it, and for a second his words are on the verge of breaking up entirely. Then it’s back to a clean wrap-up: you want more.