When That Rough God Goes Riding (16 page)

On the
album of the same name, released in 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday in Derry, there was no escaping the immediacy of the song. Saint Dominic’s Preview—was it a mass held for those who wouldn’t see the next year? A special invitation-only pre-sale sale to empty Northern Ireland of everything it ever was before and was now ? For all that the phrase explained itself it might as well have been the Veedon Fleece, and that probably would have been in one of the sale bins if you knew how to look.

The cover of
Saint Dominic’s Preview
featured a theatrical shot of Morrison sitting on what might have been church steps, holding a battered guitar. Save for an oddly dandyish kerchief around his neck his clothes were worn, with even a gaping hole in one pant leg, a street singer playing for coins and truth, his head slightly lifted toward the sky, his face sad but thoughtful, you could even say wistful, philosophical, his
eyes gazing into the future, into the past:
Will this war never end?
You could buy a photocopied broadside called “The Troubles” off him for a dollar.

Even though Van Morrison has never written or sung a song with the phrase in it—no blues song, not even the cabaret blues “Trouble in Mind,” planting the probably nineteenth-century southern verse “Sun gonna shine in my back door some day, wind gonna rise up, blow my blues away” in a twentieth-century New York penthouse—the portrait was as corny as it was contrived, and more fake. Morrison had worked for years to say nothing about the Troubles. The Sex Pistols might use the letters “IRA” in “Anarchy in the UK” like a bomb, but the acronym had never passed Morrison’s lips in public, and for all one knows never will. In
In The Name of the Father
, Daniel Day-Lewis’s Gerry Conlon is an out-of-control prankster IRA hangeron in Belfast sent to London by his father because the IRA will kill him for his unreliability, then falsely imprisoned for an IRA London bombing. He has a poster on the wall of his cell to keep him alive, to affirm his innocence and his defiance: Johnny Rotten, not Van Morrison.

Whatever the intentions behind it, the cover of
Saint Dominic’s Preview
worked as a setup, convicting the album’s title song of falsity and bad faith—a song that in fact would name Belfast, and with a bitter regret weighting the word with all of its history, which is to say all of its killings—in advance. But the song was written and recorded before the cover was made, and it had fixed the game in advance: there was no false face it could not erase.

The song was stirring. It was exhilarating. The singer’s commitment to his every word passed over to the listener even if the listener had never wasted a thought on Northern Ireland; there was a sense of engaging with the world on your own terms. As the scene shifted from Belfast to San Francisco to New York, shifted in phrases that barely made more narrative than a single word, as the story went from people being shot down in one street to people looking away from others as they walked down another to a rock ’n’ roll singer at a party to promote his new album, what could have been felt as a slide from the profound to the trivial remained a story that stayed on its feet, that surrendered not a single measure of moral right from one side of the story to the other. When the song ended, you could feel you’d been around the world.

The specificity of the bare nod to Belfast went off like a gun. If, as more than one person has written, the title of Seamus Heaney’s 1975 poem “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” summed up both the aesthetic and the everyday life of avoidance in Northern Ireland in that time, when the cause writing your name on a bullet could as well be that of your presumed fellows as of your fated enemies, if not chance itself, could Morrison’s work up to this moment have been a version of that poem itself, with “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” boiled down, in the manner of a song, to nothing more than its phrase, sung over and over in endless variation? “Is there a link between that attitude, which Morrison seems to embody,” a friend wrote, “and the yarragh? Can’t we understand aspects of the yarragh as being at once a safe place beyond language”—when the wrong words could get
you killed, or, with you safe at home in Marin County or New York or England, get someone who sang your song in the wrong place at the wrong time killed—“and an attempt to stretch for the sublime when the world, and Belfast is a world whether you’re there in the flesh or not, is crowding you very tightly, and even a gut cry, a howl beyond words, is an embrace of the failure of language, a celebration of the faith that some things not only should not but can’t be spoken of or even named?”

When Morrison performed the song on television twenty-four years later, the context was no longer clear. In 1972, the description of life in the Bay Area that Morrison offered in “Saint Dominic’s Preview”—a utopia of sun, sloth, and solipsism, where nothing was more important than a refusal, in his words, to feel anybody else’s pain, where the best struggled to get outside their empty shells, and failed—was so acute it wrote the script for a movie that wouldn’t be shot for six years. Asked in 2000 why in 1978 he’d chosen to remake Don Siegel’s 1956
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, and why he’d set it not in the film’s original California Valley town but in San Francisco, Phil Kaufman, the director, didn’t hesitate for a second: “I was living in San Francisco, it was the beginning of the New Age movement, and all I saw were pods.” But in 1996 that was all a long time ago—even if the British torture of IRA militants, IRA bombs in London and UDA bombs in Belfast, each side executing not only the enemy but its own suspects, informers, collaborators, unreliables, anyone unlucky enough to have joined the right side at the wrong time, went on. For that matter, it had been awhile since a record
company had put on a big bash for Van Morrison. The song had to make its own stage and raise its own curtain.

In 1996, the piece begins with a guitarist picking out a modal theme, a minor key that quickly loses itself in all that it might say: this could be the beginning of anything, a train song, a cowboy ballad, “Little Maggie.” When Morrison begins to sing, about cleaning windows in Belfast, about Edith Piaf, a violin comes in, and the territory opens up—to San Francisco, then immediately across the country, in the old folk phrase “A long way to Buffalo,” then across the ocean to Belfast again, and without your noticing the journey has turned strange, and the stakes have been raised. You can’t tell when it was that Morrison began to push, when his voice lowered, when he began to play with the harsh vowels of his own gruff tone, when a hint of violence crept in—so that when he caught the history of a country as he pushed down with “Hoping that Joyce, don’t blow the hoist,” you realize you know exactly what he was talking about, even if time and place were now unfixed, even if you couldn’t have explained “don’t blow the hoist” to save your life.

The song went on, with horns, another guitar, maybe a mandolin, backing singers coming across with a quiet sympathy. The story went on. And yet, by the end—when the singer went from the record company party to an interview with a rock critic to another party in a fancy apartment on Fifty-Second Street—the shift in the song that in 1972 was lost in a mass finale, everyone playing at top volume, now came to the fore. After everything—after murder, after indifference, after flattery, after a no to all of it—everyone in the
song turned to their windows, shocked, as perhaps they never were before, to see that the streets were now filled with people, people neither killing each other nor avoiding each other but marching as one, shouting for freedom, in the moment celebrating the truth that they already had it. Morrison looked out his window, surprised, confirmed, but most of all happy. “Can I get a witness!” he said, as if the words were no less a folk theme, part of the collective imagination, the common memory of anyone who might have already passed through the song, as Lead Belly testifying that “They was driving the women, just like the men” or Frank Hutchison promising “I won’t be dead, just won’t be here no more” when you came looking for him and he wasn’t there.

The music
strides into its field like fate, and there are no obstacles: at the start, at the end of each phrase, the ping of a triangle marks the next step in the flight. It’s the strangest thing—in this song, which I’ve never been able to play only once, that tiny moment can become the axis on which the whole piece turns. At first there’s only Morrison’s strum and Richard Davis’s bass; as the arrangement takes full shape, as strings come in to take the measure that that ping once did, the chiming sound disappears. It’s easy to forget—there’s no triangle-player’s wing in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But when the song starts again, there it is, signaling a simplicity that the singer will soon leave behind. You can always recover it—you can even drag the song back and wait for the sound over and over again. You can’t tell if the singer would even want to. Moving fast, he may have already forgotten the place in the song you don’t want to leave.

After two and a half minutes, Davis seems to want to shut the song down. His bass makes a clacking sound, as if to put the brakes on the rhythm as everyone else rushes ahead; the brakes don’t hold.
My my, my my, my mmm-my my, my my my
, Morrison muses; he takes a breath, and in one of the highest points in a song made of high points—“And I will run my merry way and jump the hedges first,” is the first line; the image is so thrilling you never lose sight of it as the song moves on, and the singer never does stop jumping—he shifts into a higher gear. He finds an image that is as adult as the first is childlike, carrying specters the grown man cannot gainsay, an image that is less abandoned, more determined, but as much a sign of freedom, saying “And I will raise my hand up into the nighttime sky”—
—and like the sound of the triangle, which is the song itself pausing for an instant to draw a breath, the moment of suspension is everything.

A minute later, Davis makes the same clacking sound again. This time he does take the reins of the music, and Morrison begins to drift away from the song. “Sweet thing,” he says, as he’s said throughout, but now that changes into “Sugar baby”—“Sugar baby, sugar baby,” a phrase from before the blues, a phrase that helped shape it, a face hiding inside all the songs Morrison grew up loving, a phrase that
now belongs to him as much as it ever belonged to Lead Belly or Dock Boggs.

Nostalgia pulls
down like quicksand, and it’s always had Van Morrison in its grip. He was twenty when he made “The Story of Them,” about the band’s days in Belfast at the Maritime Hotel, but the scene as he looked back was so perfect, the long-lost names and faces standing out so clearly through the haze of the intervening decades, or rather year, that he might have been eighty—even though, as he wrote and recorded the song, Them had yet to put out its second album. “Gotta walk away,” he sang, tailing off, as if leaving the past behind was the same as building a palace for it.

All through his working life Morrison has fixed touchstones, talismans, charms—as if, from the time he was a boy, he saw the future as a forest, a wilderness of tangles and snares, and so like Hansel scattered crumbs that he might find his way back to a true home, except that his crumbs
were old Ray Charles records. As the years have gone on he has turned ever more frequently to songs he treasured as a boy—not for lack of his own songs, or even for fun or out of affection, but as if to validate his own songs, anchor them, or test the truth of his songs against songs that, the feeling must be, can’t lie. Even as his musical heroes have appeared in his songs as characters—Ray Charles, Lead Belly, Jackie Wilson, Billie Holiday, Sonny Boy Williamson, Charlie Parker, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Mahalia Jackson, Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Lester Young, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jay McShann, John Lee Hooker, Jerry Lee Lewis, Muddy Waters—he has covered John Lee (the first Sonny Boy) Williamson’s “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” and “Take Your Hand Out of My Pocket” by Rice Miller, the second Sonny Boy Williamson, Bobby Bland’s “I’ll Take Care of You,” Waters’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me,” Charles’s “Lonesome Avenue,” “Georgia On My Mind,” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” but most often in a bland, passive way, as if to take nothing from them. And that is to say nothing of
How Long Has This Been Going On
, Morrison’s 1996 album with Georgie Fame, filled with compositions by the jump blues king Louis Jordan, King Pleasure and Lester Young, Mose Allison, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, and Ira and George Gershwin’s title song; from the same year,
Tell Me Something
, an entire album of Mose Allison numbers;
You Win Again
, his 2000 album with Lynda Gail Lewis, shooting back and forth between covers of records by Hank Williams, John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley, Smiley Lewis, and Jerry Lee Lewis; and, with
The Skiffle Sessions
, recorded at
Whitla Hall in Belfast in 1998, Morrison’s reunion in spirit and flesh with Lonnie Donegan, with Dr. John and longtime British jazzman Chris Barber along for the ride, Lead Belly everywhere: “Alabamy Bound,” “Frankie and Johnny,” “Good Morning Blues,” “Goodnight Irene,” “Midnight Special.”

Walking side by side in this never-ending stroll through the bowers of days when all was cool, when the sound of another voice, a young person’s first apprehension of art, could make it seem as if he and the world were one—when the terrors of childhood and the alienations of adolescence disappeared in that moment when you understood just how Ray Charles pressed down so hard on the chorus of “Lonely Avenue,” and why—is the alienation that will not disappear: the alienation from the world in which you have to live. It’s the cheats and liars and frauds and thieves and parasites and writers and suck-ups and managers and promoters and record companies and the people you called friends, all of them, but more than anything it’s the so-called modern world, throwing itself in your face every day, so proud of itself, so sure of itself, so sure and proud that it has left the past behind, and you with it, unless you’re ready to play a game you don’t remotely comprehend.