When That Rough God Goes Riding (15 page)

Morrison and Berns had been fighting over the record, and everything else—
Blowin’ Your Mind!
advances eaten up by expenses, royalties deferred against returns, management contracts, publishing contracts, production contracts—when Berns dropped dead of a heart attack at the end of 1967. There were people who thought Morrison had yelled him to death. There were threats from people who knew how to make good on them,
¹⁰
and there was the demand from Berns’s widow that Morrison produce the thirty-six new
songs he had owed Berns’s publishing company, and that he now owed her.

Thus one day in 1968, not long before he began recording
Astral Weeks
, in order to escape his contracts with Berns and retrieve the freedom to record again on his own terms,
¹¹
Morrison sat down with his guitar and Lewis Merenstein and taped thirty-one numbers, seemingly in approximately the thirty-five minutes it takes to play them: “Twist and Shake,” “Shake and Roll,” “Stomp and Scream,” “Scream and Holler,” and “Jump and Thump,” five variations on Berns’s Isley Brothers hit “Twist and Shout”; “Hang On Groovy,” a flip of the bird to Berns’s hit “Hang On Sloopy” with the McCoys; the likes of “Just Ball,” “Ringworm,” “Blow in Your Nose,” “Nose in Your Blow,” “You Say France and I Whistle,” “I Want a Danish,” and “The Big Royalty Check.” But there are two performances that don’t parody themselves. One is “Goodbye George,” if only for the stately “Like a Rolling Stone” chords that open it. “Goodbye, George,” Morrison sings soulfully. “Here comes—” The song seems about to turn into a farewell to Berns himself—until “Here comes” is followed not by “the night” but “number forty-five, in Argentina.”

But with the next cut, “Dum Dum George,” the melody of “Madame George” as it would emerge on
Astral Weeks
is instantly and completely in place. This and the real song begin in the same mood, with the same count—even if
Morrison is dismissing Lewis Merenstein’s entreaties before either had the chance to make anything more of them than this. “This is the story of Dum Dum George,” Morrison says as the theme continues. “Who came up to Boston, one sunny afternoon”—and there is that “Madame George” minor-key drop. “He drove up from New York City ... and he was freaky. And he wanted to record me. And I said, ‘George, you’re dumb.’ And he said, ‘I know. Why do you think I make so much money? I want to do ... a record ... that’ll make number one.’ Dumb dumb.” Ilene Berns listened to the tape and let the other five compositions Morrison owed her slide.

It’s spooky to hear the song find its voice ahead of the moment when that voice would take shape. “That’s what we got on tape,” Morrison said in 2009 of the
Astral Weeks
sessions that followed. “Another performance might have been totally different. That was that performance, on those days.” That sense of accident and serendipity takes over. “Madame George” as one can hear it today sounds most of all unlikely, not something that could be traced to anything in the singer’s immediate circumstances, his past, his idols (though Lead Belly’s “Alabama Bound” is here too, as it is all over Morrison’s music). The possibility that the throwaway one minute and twenty-seven seconds of “Madame George” that Morrison recorded before encountering musicians with whom he would make
Astral Weeks
might be all there was hits home in the same way that one might worry that the day would come when one would put on “Madame George”—or any song one thought was as rich as life itself—and it would turn up dead.

For me there is always a sense of worry when I put the album on again. Will it sound as true, will it sound as good as before, will there come a time when I will be listening to the end of “Madame George” and suddenly it’s already there, I’ve heard it, it has nothing left to tell me—and that has never happened. It has never worn out. It’s never given itself up.

Is that because it has no ending? When I think idly about
Astral Weeks
, walking down the street, something in the air or in the carriage of the person next to me reminding me of a turn of phrase or a pause somewhere on the album, it doesn’t end with “Slim Slow Slider,” the last song of the eight that comprise it. It ends with “Madame George,” which is only the fifth song—and that is because of what happens after Richard Davis hits that note that, for him, has said all the song had left to say.

The scene has been set, and all the players have wandered into it. In George’s apartment, with the frayed damask cushions and the heavy drapes making the air close, the boys watch as George changes the LPs and 78s on the box, handling each so carefully, thumbs never touching the grooves, strange records by Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker that speak a different language, they watch as George turns her Ouija board, they watch her smoke, they watch when in panic she thinks the police are near and rushes to throw her dope out the window—“down into the street below.” Even when the boys are doing all these things themselves—playing with the Ouija board, speaking the secret jazz language, which in this place is their language, the language they speak to each other as if “Kokomo” or “I Cover the Waterfront” are clues to real life and a code to keep the square world at bay,
smoking dope, gathering it up to toss it away—they feel as if they’re watching.

There is the long section when all the boys turn their back on her and walk away—into adulthood, responsibility, idleness, dope-dealing, addiction, wealth, respectability, renown, and, never, what she already represents, with the makeup caking on her eyes, the sweat rotting the foundation, the wig slipping, her speech slurring, the laughter too loud, the need in the way she waves you goodbye (“Hey love, you forgot your glove”) too obvious: death. The singer has to get all the way away, taking a train out of the city, maybe even leaving the country, the pennies he throws out of the window onto the bridges below at once a way of pretending he’s still a little boy and an echo of George’s dope falling to the street, all one long fall. Here are the great passages of repetition, where you cannot imagine the song can end.
Dry your eye dry your eye dry your eye dry your eye dry your eye dry your eye dry your eye
and on thirteen times, more, as if it’s all been a breath being drawn, a pause to launch the more bitter, withdrawing, fleeing
And the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves the glove
, all with the burr of a trumpet coming down like an execution, the blade of the guillotine raised and dropped again and again long after the head has been passed from hand to hand in the crowd. And this is only prelude to what Morrison will do with the word “goodbye,” what he will do murmuring, singing ooos and woos as if he’s found them on the copy of “Earth Angel” that one day a DJ forgot to take off the turntable, a record that played on after the DJ
was fired and after the station shut down, a signal in the ether sustained by its own power.

One day in 2000 I walked into the Portland Art Museum to find the Dick Slessig (as in dyslexic) Combo—Carl Bronson, bass, Mark Lightcap, guitar, Steve Goodfriend, drums—half an hour into a performance of what would turn into ninety minutes before I realized that the nearly abstract, circular pattern they were offering as the meaning of life—it was all they were playing, anyway—was from George McCrae’s 1974 Miami disco hit “Rock Your Baby.” Or rather the pattern wasn’t from the tune, it was the tune, the thing itself. Variation was never McCrae’s point (the big moment in “Rock Your Baby,” the equivalent of the guitar solo, is when he barely whispers “Come on”); finding the perfect, selfrenewing riff was. “I could listen to that forever,” I said to Bronson when he and the others finally stepped down for a break. “We’d play it forever if we were physically capable,” he said.

They were also playing “Madame George.” When Morrison dives into the words, the syllables, that will seem to divest him of flesh, leaving only a word, the word repeating until it has remade a body of flesh to hold it, until it can walk like a man, the feeling is that the singer has lived this out many times before, the word always evading him, until the day when it happened that certain people came together in the right place at the right time and the body was, for the ten minutes it took to play the song, found.

The ending, as it begins again with Davis’s moral exit, is so long, so drawn out, so dramatic and scary, I get chills thinking about it, let alone listening to it. As the train pulls
off, it seems a whole body of memory is dropping away, has been cut off to drift away on the sea. In the trick your mind plays on you, the drama “Madame George” enacts might be the end of the record because nothing could follow it. That’s the end of the story—and yet because of the way that ending is so drawn out, each repeating word or syllable doubling back on itself, the song doesn’t ever really end, and in fact the ending is false. As you listen you hear that no one present, not the singer, the producer, the musicians, not even Richard Davis can actually make the song stop, and so as you listen, and reach the end, and there is a pause before the next song, “Madame George” seems to be still playing. When you merely let the song play in your mind, catching perhaps for the first time that at the very end the boy remembers that it was Madame George herself who put him on the train, telling him, so flatly, as if she herself has to return him to whatever life it is he’ll lead, “This is the train,” him crying out to her, long after the train last left the city behind, then telling himself to say goodbye,
say goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye, say goodbye, get on the train
, but always commanding himself to say it, saying it always to himself, never to Madame George, and because he cannot say the words out loud, she can’t hear them, so he has to keep saying it, and in that way too the song doesn’t end. Is it any wonder that people try to fix something so unfixed, so free of its own body as the Dick Slessig Combo’s version of “Rock Your Baby” is free of “Rock Your Baby,” that people have tried for more than forty years to contain it, to say exactly what it is, who it is, and what it isn’t—which is to say whatever it
might be to whoever might hear it? “I can remember to the day when I stopped teaching Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
,” John Irving said in 1979. “I loved that little part called ‘Time Passes.’ . . . It’s the difference between a novel of manners and a novel of
weight
, a novel of some kind of history, where it says, ‘Hey look, “time changes.”’”

“They felt they had been
taken in
,” Irving had said. But that’s what art does—that’s how it takes you somewhere else. And the phrase has its meanings. To be taken in means to be accepted into the brotherhood, the secret society, where all recognize the same signs. It means to be bereft, helpless, and then to be received off the street into a place where you will be cared for. It means to be fooled. And that is the bedrock meaning, the speech “Madame George”
speaks: if you don’t make the song happen to the person who knows nothing, who has never heard of your characters and has no reason to care about them, no matter how real they might be, the song didn’t happen. And if you do make it happen, it did.