When That Rough God Goes Riding (17 page)

It’s no secret that when one reaches his or her forties, maybe fifties, almost certainly his or her sixties and seventies, the world as it presents itself in advertisements, talk, technology, dress, movies, music, money, and perhaps most of all manners, the way in which people walk down the street, the way they say hello or goodbye or don’t bother to do either, becomes an affront to one’s entire existence. One may reach a point, as the historian Robert Cantwell puts it
so gracefully, when one’s “life begins to go into the past”—that, or your whole fucking frame of reference.

Morrison has sung about the parasites in song after song, from his whole string of demos in 1968 to “The Great Deception” in 1973, across the last twenty-five years in the likes of “New Biography” (someone’s written another book about him), “A Town Called Paradise” (“copy cats stole” his words, songs, melodies), the self-explanatory “Big Time Operators” and “They Sold Me Out,” and the no-one-listens-anyway anthem “Why Must I Always Explain,” which is a good song. But he has sung far more powerfully about escape, about running from the modern world, vanishing from it as if you were never there. On
Hymns to the Silence
, a twenty-one song set illustrated with photographs of grubby Belfast streets released in 1991, the theme was as ever-present as Lead Belly on
The Skiffle Sessions
—or rather it was Lead Belly, Lead Belly changed from flesh to idea. “I’m Not Feeling It Anymore,” with “Have to get back,” sung with bitter acceptance, as if there’s nothing left to feel; “On Hyndford Street,” with “Take me back, take me way, way, way back” the opening for an entire catalogue of a teenager’s discovery of the world, reading “Mr. Jelly Roll” and “Mezz Mezrow’s ‘Really the Blues,’” and “‘Dharma Bums’ by Jack Kerouac / Over and over again.” But none of that is really any preparation for Morrison’s nine minutes and eleven seconds of “Take Me Back.” Wait, wait, you could be forgiven for asking, didn’t we already hear that?

Morrison opens with a few seconds of harmonica so wistful you might be tempted to shut the song off right there, but the pace is too slow, already too distant—the music is not
giving itself away. The harmonica continues to push, as if through fog. There’s a sense of defeat. “Well, I remember,” the singer says. “When life made more sense.” Morrison will sing variations on this line (“Take me back, take me back, take me back, take me way, way, way back, way back, to when, when I understood”) across the length of the song, and it’s more painful every time. The singer has been forced to make this confession: to admit that the world no longer has a place for him, a place he may not deserve. He has made a wasteland, alluring, even beautiful, and dead; that is where the yarragh is in this song.

He drops down into a whisper, only a hint of piano and guitar behind him, and the music, now in a realm the modern world can’t enter, a place of almost silence, ends without a marker, a note to tell you it has ended; it merely isn’t there anymore. And it’s as if you’ve fallen asleep for less than a second; nothing close to nine minutes seems to have passed.

But that was only the song’s first life, and not its real life. That comes five years later, in the movie
Georgia
.

Released in 1995, the film pits Jennifer Jason Leigh’s notalent junkie punk singer Sadie against Mare Winningham’s Georgia, Sadie’s sister and a folk singer all but worshipped by her legions of fans. Georgia’s voice—which is also that of Winningham, who has made her own albums—is all mellifluousness to Sadie’s—Leigh’s—horrid cracks and discords. The heart of the picture comes at a big AIDS benefit. Winningham appears to sing “Mercy,” an uplifting ballad; her simple, modest “Hello” to the crowd brings a torrent of applause.
“Mercy will you follow me,” she sings, and the audience knows the answer: how could it resist? Then comes Sadie with nine drunken minutes of Morrison’s “Take Me Back”—weirdly, exactly nine minutes and eleven seconds of “Take Me Back.” Her seizing of the stage for an endless, norange, flat, mindless assault on the defenseless song is presented in the film not as music but as a psychotic breakdown. It’s meant to be as excruciating for the audience in the movie theater as for the people in the movie’s concert hall; plainly, Sadie will keep singing until she or the song drops dead. Ultimately her sister appears on the stage like a fairy godmother, softly strumming her guitar, easing the madwoman off the stage.

Watching this car crash, you can’t tell if this is the actor Leigh singing as Sadie or simply Leigh doing the best she can, and it doesn’t matter. Sadie has nothing to bring to the song but the death wish that Morrison’s song as he wrote it contains, something which, as Morrison recorded the song, is smothered by artistry, by a voice that cannot hide either the imagination inside of it or the command behind it. Leigh has nothing to bring to the song but will: no lift, no tone, no tricks. In Jonathan Lethem’s phrase, she’s an animal wandering through a karaoke machine, tangled in the gears and wires. All she can do is turn a concert hall into the street behind it where a junkie like her shows you her teeth as she asks for change, and then if you stop tries to tell you the story of her life. But she sings with the same upand-down, back-and-forth refusal of time that women have always brought to songs, specifically work songs—and
as the late musicologist Wilfred Mellers wrote of such music,
¹²
“Through repetition it carries the singers beyond the body’s thrall. It at once affirms and transcends the physical, inducing a state of trance, even ecstasis, when the women begin to yell a magical ‘music of the vowels,’ which is beyond literate sequence and consequence.”

What a remarkable thing to say: beyond consequence. But once the idea is there, you can hear Leigh travel beyond consequence—or rather, when the consequences of her performance arrive, they seem false, perhaps because Leigh’s Sadie has touched the ecstasy Mellers calls down. Railing her takemebacks like someone hammering a single nail so many times she’s now hammering through the wood, there are moments when the words come loose from themselves, and the singer is loosed from meaning, from purpose, from having to justify her existence to anyone at all—for seconds as the song grinds on, she is free. The song cracks open; a horde of beetles swarms out of it, and behind them all the naked, tortured men and women out of
The Garden of Earthly Delights
. Then Winningham’s Georgia finally gets her sister to finish the song, to shut up. There’s the barest ripple of clapping, no more than a sign of relief. Leigh—Sadie—immediately falls back into her crazy-pathetic persona, but in a way you don’t want to believe, as if she’s ashamed of
what she’s done. “Thank you!” she says, her words smeared. “God bless! You’re the real goods! Keep drinkin’—around the edges—I love you. I love you, Georgia,” she says, sounding as if she’s begging forgiveness for burning Georgia’s doll collection in the fireplace when they were kids—and with the mere mention of Georgia’s name there’s lots of applause.

For nine minutes and eleven seconds, though, in a trance of terrible singing, Leigh has taken you right out of her notvery-good movie. While you were out, you were somewhere oddly quiet—a place that with “Take Me Back” Van Morrison marked on a map and Sadie the punk found.

At a concert
where Morrison has played his way through all of
Astral Weeks
, surrounded by a four-person string section with a lead violinist, two drummers, guitarist Jay Berliner from the original sessions in 1968, an electric guitarist, a bass player alternating between bass guitar and bass fiddle, keyboard player (piano, organ, harpsichord), two female backup singers, a one-man horn section, a woman on acoustic guitar and steel guitar, with Morrison himself moving between alto sax, piano, acoustic guitar, harmonica—he finishes “Madame George,” the last song of
Astral Weeks
as he will present it tonight, and floats into fragments of “Listen to the Lion,” that long, speaking-in-tongues song from 1972. “All ... my ... love ... comes tum-bling down,” he chants. Suddenly it seems to be absolutely clear, the most obvious thing in the world, that from its first notes to its last
Astral Weeks
is nothing
more than a version of Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour”: “Not a song, but an epic,” Jon Landau wrote in as good a line as music writing has left behind. Nothing more, and perhaps nothing less. I thought of the film of Roddy Doyle’s novel
The Commitments
, the story of a teenage Dublin soul band, taking their stand in the late 1980s, when nobody knows and nobody cares, but the Commitments will make them care. (Morrison himself was solicited for the role of Joey “The Lips” Fagan, an old trumpeter the kids bring in to have someone to look up to, some link to a past they can create but not remember.)
¹³
Now it’s the night of their big show, Wilson Pickett himself is in town, they do everything they can to get him to come to their show, to bless them with his presence, to give them a face to look into that they will never forget as surely as Wilson Pickett will forget theirs. The show ends; he isn’t there. But it was a great show. The boys and girls in the Commitments justified their existence—their existence on earth, not merely their momentary existence as a soul band. And as they scatter, as they raise their glasses, the film finds Mr. Pickett—no actor, the man himself. His own show is done; tells his limo driver to take him to this other
show, this band, what are they called? Of course he’d sung “In the Midnight Hour” that night. Where else would Van Morrison have first heard
Astral Weeks
?

The thought passed in an instant as Morrison sang “And my love comes tumbling down” one more time, now no distance at all between that and Pickett’s deliberate, unstoppable pledge:

It was the sort of reverie that comes at those times in a show when in the audience you feel as if you are seeing all around the event as it happens, the past not past at all, more voices than those on the stage singing the song. Then Morrison raised his harmonica, as if to ornament his words, and flew like his own missile into “Mystic Eyes.” It was shocking, blood in the sylvan glade, the headless horseman in the Kentucky Derby riding the wrong way, and it lasted only long enough for it to be uncertain if it had happened at all.

“Don’t need
no juice to unwind,” Van Morrison says in “Don’t Go to Nightclubs Anymore,” early on on
Keep It Simple
, his last album of new songs to be released as I write. Then he says the same thing in different ways three more times.
Go ahead, knock this bottle off my shoulder!
But the only song on
Keep It Simple
that makes its own time and place is anything but simple.

“Behind the Ritual”—you could make up a picture of Morrison as Michelangelo’s Adam holding out his hand to God’s, with the opposite of Adam’s cool gaze on his face, and get away with using it for the cover of a third of all the albums he’s ever made. The religious yearning in his music that first surfaced explicitly in “Astral Weeks” has been a constant ever since, like references to backstreet jelly roll or gardens all wet with rain. It can be as airborne as it is on “Full Force Gale” in 1979—when Morrison says, “I’ve been
lifted up again / By the Lord,” Toni Marcus’s fiddle can make it feel as if you’ve been lifted high enough to at least glimpse what the singer is seeing—or as entombed as it is all over
Avalon Sunset
ten years later, an album that leads off with a duet with the 1950s British rock ’n’ roll pioneer and noted evangelical Cliff Richard. It smothered Morrison’s voice for nearly two decades. But here it’s never clear what the ritual is or what it promises.