When That Rough God Goes Riding (13 page)

With “Full Force Gale” everything is tougher from the first beat, and Marcus is on top of the music from the start. It takes Morrison time to catch up with the song—it seems to know things he doesn’t. There’s a light guitar solo, shadowed by Marcus’s violin, and then she picks up the pace and for an instant, before Morrison returns, the tune finds a hardness, again a feeling of conviction, that was missing. But there’s a way that even as the beat seems harder and urgency greater, the song drags against itself. It’s a void in the music that took over entirely when in 1996 Morrison re-recorded the song as if its message were being delivered by a procession of defeated—or not very interested—old men shuffling down the street in heavy overcoats: “Like a full force gale. I was lifted up again. I was lifted up again. By the Lord.”

The Rockin’ Side is really rocking with “Stepping Out Queen.” It’s pleasant enough as Morrison sings it, but even he
seems to know how it will double in size when he turns it over to Marcus; it’s there in the sense of announcement when he simply says, “Alright.” The word carries a colon: what opens up is a labyrinth, and within seconds you can’t find your feet. You can’t tell where the music’s coming from, whether it’s one piece or four, whether it’s a human being playing or a Hindu god with eight hands. Marcus’s violin dives for the song, and her viola counters the rush with an elegance you want to pause with. The violin presses its demands, but all along there’s been a screech in the background, and now as it rises little notes like birds flutter around it, to cage it, failing as the sound goes into the territory first broken by John Cale’s viola in “Heroin”—which now is also the sound of a woman getting dressed.

Here it’s clearly Morrison opening the doors of his songs to another musician, giving her the spotlight until he has to take it back. But on the Dreamy Side that changes.

“And the Healing Has Begun” is one of Morrison’s signature songs—but at its heart it is his, a book of desires he can embrace without shame, because he has passed it on to someone else. It begins with confidence, a lack of fear. With a bend toward the past that would turn up such riches nearly thirty years later with “Behind the Ritual,” the singer promises that he and the woman he’s singing to will go back to the avenue they once knew and that once knew them. They’ll get out those
Oldies But Goodies
albums; they’ll “sing a song from way back when.” This is a man walking down the street with wings on his feet, who can’t wait, who’s consumed by the vision in front of him: her red dress. She’s got to wear it. But then for a long passage the song all but breaks off, and for what seems like minutes Toni Marcus allows Morrison to
do almost nothing, to get lost in his own song, to wander away from it, certain it will be there when he gets back. For chorus after chorus she’s the first voice of the song, pushing it with her violin into a realm of pure freedom, where anything can be said but nothing needs to be. “Alright,” Morrison says. “Yeah.” “Whoo”—and Marcus presses on, all but sawing her arm off. Morrison comes back stronger, inspired, ready to reclaim the song. “That backstreet rock ’n’ roll,” he says, “that’s where it comes from, man,” with
it
morally enormous, everything he or you might ever care about—and the honesty in the way he says it is overwhelming, a truth he finally feels free to let loose in the air. Marcus is merely accompaniment. Then she seems captured by the song, and she shoots out ahead of the singer, and he calls a halt. “Wait a minute, baby—listen, listen, listen, listen”—and he’s not talking to her, and he’s not talking to the woman who’s going to put on the red dress.

There’s a woman on the street. He stops her. He starts chatting her up, inveigling himself into her apartment. It’s “Gloria” in reverse, and with the insistence of that opening “Gloria” riff—someone running down the street and banging on every door he passes—replaced by a man talking, hesitating, and less to seduce her than to seduce himself. For everything has to be exactly right: she has to move behind the door. “Ah, move on up this, ah, letter box here.” He wants to play a Muddy Waters record he’s found in her apartment. “Come on in for some of this backstreet jelly roll,” he says, as if bowing back to Muddy, and with that the woman disappears. His tone is all low vowels, as if he’s talking to himself, as if this is all happening in his head. Marcus
has been there all along, simply repeating the theme of the song, and when Morrison again rises up with a celebratory chant, the first woman back again in her red dress, it’s the one-night stand back there in the song that stays.

Merely as a story, “It’s All in the Game” is in the all-time top ten. It began as a violin piece by one John G. Dawes, born in 1865 in Ohio, a financier and amateur musician who one day in 1911 stumbled on what he called “Melody in A Major”: “It’s just a tune that I got in my head, so I set it down.” A friend got it published; it stayed alive, even as Dawes went on to a career as a civic activist, forming an alliance to fight the growing influence of the Ku Klux Klan in Ohio, Michigan, and the Midwest, in 1925 sharing the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to revive the German economy after the First World War, then serving as vice president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge from 1925 to 1929.

In 1951 a journeyman songwriter named Carl Sigman decided to take a crack at what he knew as “The Dawes Melody”; with words, with a narrower range, he heard a hit. Working with Mac Goldman of Warner Bros. Music, which owned Dawes’s composition, Sigman brought in his word sheet the day Dawes died. “Your lyric must have killed him,” Goldman said.

The song went first to Tommy Edwards, a nightclub crooner. His recording went to #18—an almost meaningless success. In those days very few records were released with a chance at certified national popularity—most country or rhythm and blues records were excluded in advance. Almost anything
backed by a major label—Edwards was on RCA—made the top twenty, at least for a week, after which it would be covered by a dozen other people. In those days, there weren’t that many songs respectable enough for the likes of Dinah Shore, or even Louis Armstrong, both of whom immediately cut their own “It’s All in the Game.” Edwards’s version was paltry: waltz time, Rimsky-Korzakov strings that seem to come from another room, they have so little to do with the song. Edwards seems to be rehearsing—there’s that much heart in his delivery. Within his smooth tone, he doesn’t seem to know or care what the song might say, and it dies a third of the way in.

By 1958, Edwards was on the skids. Rock ’n’ roll had put his career in the toilet. Singers like Fats Domino and Little Richard and Chuck Berry and a nation’s worth of other people who couldn’t fit into Edwards’s tuxedo and wouldn’t deign to were writing their own songs and they owned the charts. So he gave in. He redid “It’s All in the Game” with a doo-wop arrangement: a doo-wop backing chorus, more importantly strolling doo-wop piano triplets, a light guitar, strings buried. But it was the vocal that this time made “It’s All in the Game” Carl Sigman’s biggest hit, Tommy Edwards’s biggest hit, a huge number one hit, and in the twists of American history, the one reason John G. Dawes is still spoken of: you argue, he turns his back, you wait, once in a while he won’t call, but it’s all in the game, that wonderful game we call love, and then he’s back, with a smile, flowers, in Sigman’s best and most unlikely line, “to caress your waiting fingertips”—and Edwards offers the tale in sadness, regret, as if he’s been through this many times and it’s too
late for him but he’s going to pass on what knowledge he’s gleaned to you.

It became a standard, done over the years by Bobby Bland, Jackie DeShannon, Elton John—and in 1964, in England, by Cliff Richard. When Van Morrison takes it up, he’s right back in the middle of “And the Healing Has Begun.” It’s barely a performance; it seems to resist taking any shape at all.

“Uhhh—yeah—
yeah
”—he’s feeling his way around the song. “Alright.” “Whoo. Yeah.” He’s arguing with the lyric, looking for something that moves him—and “Your future’s looking dim,” the song’s cheapest line, doesn’t. But then he finds a place for himself: “Once in a while he won’t call—but I heard you.” He breaks the song down, into spaces where he can touch what the man in the song is touching: “Just like that.” But when Morrison says, “And your heart will—
yeah
—fly away,” the last two words are so small, like fireflies, that in their lightness the song takes on an emotional weight it’s never had before, in all of its long life. And there’s a seductive curl he puts on those two words. The yarragh was just a sound back on that first number, in the growls of “Bright Side of the Road,” but now, with Morrison deepening the old song, it’s a whisper, and a spell. As with everyone who came before him, Morrison is the witness, the guide, the narrator, but like nobody else he steps into the song as its ghost lover.

In 1994
, for a Van Morrison tribute album that Morrison himself co-produced, the fine British soul singer Lisa Stansfield took up “Friday’s Child,” a song Morrison cut with Them in its last days, a recording that went unreleased at the time. It was a brave choice; the song defeated her. She hit all the right notes and made none of them stick. Backing singers repeated Stansfield’s “Don’t stop” in staccato, “Don’t! Stop!” as if for emphasis, but all they did was stop the music; when they repeated “Friday’s child, Friday’s child,” their plugin tone made whatever Stansfield had done that seemed real feel fake. The soul tricks Stansfield used—pauses meant to spark a sense of suspense that collapsed instantly into melodrama, moans, high murmurs to herself, as if to indicate an emotion too rich to communicate directly—came across as tricks. Nevertheless, there was something instructive, even interesting, about what Stansfield had done with the song:
you could catch the words. “Monday’s child is fair of face / Tuesday’s child is full of grace / Wednesday’s child is full of woe / Thursday’s child has far to go / Friday’s child is loving and giving”—in this song, heedlessly. Stansfield told the song’s story: a cautionary tale for someone who burns up the ground behind himself or herself, sleeps with anyone who gives them the eye, stays up all night drinking and doping, and trusts everyone who takes everything he can steal.

When Morrison sang it the song was its own wind; as its own wind it blew its own words away. With Them, Morrison was tentative; still, after a verse, the wind began to rise, and a passion far too great for any words to contain was on the horizon. It never got any closer, but it made you lean toward it emotionally, wanting to know what it knew, even if the words “You got something, they all want to know” (“You got something, they don’t want to know,” in Stansfield’s one fascinating moment) had already gone right past you. “You can’t stop now,” Morrison sang in 1966, for the first time unfurling a flag he would wave for years to come at the end of his shows, but it had nothing to fight against.

At Pacific High Studios in San Francisco five years later a performance is about to erupt that will make “Just Like a Woman” into a warm-up, even if, this night, “Friday’s Child” came first. There’s a fanfare on the piano, then a military drum roll before Morrison takes hold of the song. Because the song is yet to really begin you do hear the first words, but they are so big for a beginning, so full of a quest that could be taking place at any time and could go anywhere, the words sung with such fervor that a whole, huge
map of the world might appear before you as you hear them—
—the words don’t necessarily register. The verse proceeds, still nothing but piano and drums, but as if they’ve doubled themselves, the pressure increasing, the warning the song was written to be emerging in the shape of its own body, so that when a guitarist begins to count toward the looming chorus, and then backing singers dig down deep for what it will take to match Morrison’s own leaping incantations, they seem to have been there all along. What happens now, as a trombone plays off the bass drum to make a single instrument, a single crumbling wall, is frightening—this is a warning so strong it has rushed right by its subject, that person who was all so ready for the world he or she walked all the way, to take on the world as such. And you know you’re in for it.