When That Rough God Goes Riding (18 page)

“Behind the Ritual” takes seven minutes to end the album—to inhale it like smoke and make it disappear. It starts with Morrison strumming a ukulele and the drummer moving slowly from a woodblock to traps. The words are slurred, or maybe it’s that the old man singing them is singing them as clearly as he can, testing his tongue against his pursed lips, like someone whose fingers are so webbed with arthritis he has to draw words instead of writing them. Morrison lifts his saxophone, and gets the lucidity he can’t find on his own.

It all burns off like fog. He’s taken you into an alley, the same alley, he seems to be saying, where Uncle John met Long Tall Sally, but also a place where boys just into their teens once gathered to do all the things the stolid singer in “Don’t Go to Nightclubs Anymore” says he doesn’t do, doesn’t want, doesn’t need: drinking, smoking, bragging about girls they haven’t touched and the snappers they’re going to give them, talking jive, saying
fuck
and
shit
when someone mentions church. Now that stolidity—the granite face on the front of the album that has “Behind the Ritual” on it—has been replaced by desire, and desire bleeds all
over the music. “Given the courage, we live by moments of interference between past and present, moments in which time comes back into phase with itself,” the historian Roger Shattuck wrote in 1958. “It is the only meaning of history. We search the past not for other creatures but for our own lost selves.”

It is the deepest nostalgia, where some things you did, some things you saw, and some things you heard about replace any sense of life as it is, its true burdens, struggles, paradox, failures, betrayals. You can argue against the idea, but you can’t argue against music if it moves you, you can only listen or change the station or turn off the radio and say you don’t do that sort of thing anymore. But you can also get the feeling, as Morrison leads his old self back into the alley, sits down with the boys, drinks their wine, offers them his, whispering, because what they do is secret, not the act so much as the warmth of friendship and of the forbidden that the act leaves in the air like perfume, that
this
is the mystic, this is the astral plane, nothing given by God or located in another dimension, but memory, true or false.

It’s true if the singer can make it true. Morrison circles the words like faces that are slipping their names, bits of tunes that won’t let you sing them. He circles the people he finds in the alley in the same way, talking them into being. What he’s summoning is all in the past, but you can sense that the drama has yet to play itself out. It’s an adventure, and no one knows, no one could understand. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” says one of the boys out of
Henry V
, and Morrison answers him out of
Julius Caesar
: “How many
ages hence / Shall our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown?”

The theme takes shape in steps. There is drinking in the alley, there’s making time with Sally, there’s dancing drunk in the alley, there’s making up rhymes in the alley, there’s turning and spinning in the night, verse after verse, each one a slight variation, a tiny step past the one before it. From the old man sharing a secret there’s another man, perhaps no less old but stronger, less afraid of himself, singing as if hoping someone outside of the alley will hear him, or to make certain the buildings rising up from the alley hear him and never forget. But he also wants to explain. It’s all one quest: behind the ritual, he says, you find the spiritual.

“Behind the ritual” now become the key words on which all other words turn, around which all the rhythms of the song will shape themselves. And as always in Van Morrison’s highest moments, the words come loose from their own song and remake it, leading the singer down their own path. “The only time I actually work with words is when I’m writing a song. After it’s written, I release the words”—and now the words circle the song and choose the words they want to marry. At one point, as if to free the words from their own bodies, to divest them of any chance to signify, to let the word begin again in sound and find its own way out, Morrison throws away them all—
—but it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work because it isn’t needed. By now the words themselves are rituals. The words are already free, and immediately as they regain their form they cast their spell again:
Getting hiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh, behind the ritual, so high—behind the ritual
.

Behaaaaaand the ritual
, the singer twisting the word, making it gnarled and threatening—behind the ritual, the singer wanted to tell you, is the spiritual, but now the ritual, gathering every Saturday night in the alley with a bottle of sweet wine, is the spiritual, and the spiritual, that state of grace, is this tawdry ritual. The words begin to come apart, away from the transcendent, from that sense that there is always something unknown, a revelation that will leave you changed, behind the holiest rituals: isn’t that what the church is for? No, it’s life and what you want from it between the time you wake and the time you sleep.

The song pulls the singer farther and farther away from the truths it’s rightfully his duty to tell you, the lessons you can learn from his mistakes, the peace of mind that is his and can be yours. But the voice is so expressive, so contained within itself and capable of going anywhere: “this music,” the director and one-time rock critic Wim Wenders wrote about Morrison in 1970, “gives you a feeling and a notion of what films could be like:
perception
that doesn’t always jump blindly at meanings and assertions, but rather lets your senses extend further and further.”

You never do get out of the alley with this song. You never get back to the rest of the album, or for that matter to the rest of Morrison’s career. It could stop right here. But over the course of that career one might have said the same thing a dozen times.

My thanks
go to Dave Marsh, William, Paula, and Erik Bernstein, Jon Landau, Jonathan Cott, Ben Schafer of Da Capo, Clinton Heylin, the indefatigable Toby Gleason, Danielle Madeira of Another Planet, Joel Selvin, Josh Gleason, John Elrod, Lynda Myles, Marc Smirnoff, Devin McKinney, Scott Foundas, David Patton, and the gracious and forthcoming Michael Sigman; to Jann Wenner at
Rolling Stone
, Marvin Garson and the late Sandy Darlington at the San Francisco
Express-Times
, the late Lester Bangs and the late Barry Kramer at
Creem
, Jon Carroll, Bill Broyles, and Nancy Duckworth at
New West
, David Frankel at
Artforum
, Bill Wyman at
Salon
, Graham Fuller at
Interview
, Alice O’Keefe at the
New Statesman
, and Jeffrey M. Perl of
Common Knowledge
; and to Emily, Cecily, Steve Perry, and Jenny, for the night at the Avalon Ballroom where this book first took shape.

“Ain’t No Way” (Franklin)

Akbar, Haji

“Alabama Bound” (Lead Belly)

“Alabamy Bound” (Morrison)

“All Along the Watchtower” (Dylan)

Allison, Mose

“Almost Independence Day” (Morrison)

American Primitive II—Pre-War Revenants
(Mattie May Thomas et al.)

“Anarchy in the UK” (Sex Pistols)

“And the Healing Has Begun” (Morrison)

Animals

Arlen, Harold

Armstrong, Louis

Arnold, Eddy

Arthur, Brooks

Astral Weeks
(Morrison)

“Astral Weeks” (Morrison)

Austin, Gene

Autry, Gene

Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco, Calif.

Avalon Sunset
(Morrison)

“Baby Please Don’t Go” (Hopkins)

“Baby Please Don’t Go” (Them)

Baer, Dov

“Ballerina” (Morrison)

Band

Bangs, Lester

Barber, Chris

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic,”

Beach Boys

Beam on, Bob

Beatles

Beautiful Vision
(Morrison)

Beefheart, Captain

“Behind the Ritual” (Morrison)

Belfast
Telegraph

Berliner, Jay

Berns, Bert

Berry, Chuck

“Beside You” (Morrison)

“Big Mac from Macamere” (Thomas)

Biomass

Blair, Tony

Blake, William

Bland, Bobby

Bledsoe, Jules

Blonde on Blonde
(Dylan)

“Blowin’ in the Wind” (Cooke)

Blowin’ Your Mind!
(Morrison)

“Blue Monday” (Domino)

Blue Velvet
(Lynch)

Blues Breakers

Bogart, Humphrey

Boggs, Dock

Bowie, David

“Brand New Day” (Morrison)

Breakfast on Pluto
(Jordan)

“Bright Side of the Road” (Morrison)

“Bring It On Home to Me” (Cooke)

Bronson, Carl

Brown, James

“Brown-Eyed Girl” (Morrison)

Burdon, Eric

Burke, Solomon

“Burning Ground” (Morrison)

Butterfield, Paul

Byrds

Cagney, James

Cale, John

Caledonia Soul Express

“Caledonia Soul Music” (Morrison)

Caledonia Soul Orchestra

Callaghan, James

Camelot

“Can’t Help Falling in Love” (Presley)

Cantwell, Robert

“Caravan” (Morrison)

Carlos, John

Chandler, Raymond

Charles, Bobby

Charles, Ray

Chieftains

Chronic City
(Lethem)

Clapton, Eric

Clark, Petula

Clark, T. J.

Cocks, Jay

Cohn, Nik

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Collingwood, R. G.

Collins, Edwyn

Collis, John

“Come Running” (Morrison)

The Commitments
(Doyle)

The Commitments
(Parker)

Common One
(Morrison)

“Coney Island” (Morrison/Neeson)

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
(De Quincey)

Conlon, Gerry

Control
(Corbijn)

Cooke, Sam

Coolidge, Calvin

Corbijn, Anton

Corregidora
(Jones)

Cott, Jonathan

“Crazy Jane on God” (Yeats/Morrison)

“Crazy Love” (Morrison)

Crickets

Cromwell, Oliver

“Cry Baby” (Mimms)

The Crying Game
(Jordan)

“Cry to Me” (Burke)

Curtis, Ian

“Cyprus Avenue” (Morrison)

“Dangerous Blues” (Thomas)

Dann, Kevin

Das, Andrew

Davis, Richard

Davis, Tim

Dawes, John G.

Days Like This
(Morrison)

De Quincey, Thomas

“Dead or Alive” (Guthrie)

DeShannon, Jackie

Diamond, Neil

Dick Slessig Combo

Diddley, Bo

Dietrich, Marlene

Difford, Chris

Dire Straits

Dolphy, Eric

“Domino” (Morrison)

Domino, Fats

Donegan, Lonnie

“Don’t Go to Nightclubs Anymore” (Morrison)

Doors

“Downtown” (Clark)

Doyle, Roddy

Drifters

Dulfer, Candy

Dylan, Bob

Edwards, Harry

“Eight Days a Week” (Beatles)

Ellis, Pee Wee

Enlightenment
(Morrison)

Epstein, Brian

“Fair Play for You” (Morrison)

Faithfull, Marianne

Fallon, Larry

Fame, Georgie

Farber, Manny

Feldman, Morton

Figgis, Mike

Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Calif.

Fleetwood Mac

Fontana, Wayne, and the Mindbenders

Franklin, Aretha

Franklin, Barry

Franklin, Erma

Freddie and the Dreamers

Free Speech Movement

“Friday’s Child” (Them/Stansfield/ Morrison)

“Full Force Gale” (Morrison)

Gaitskill, Mary

Gang of Four

Garcia, Jerry

Georgia
(Grossbard)

Gershwin, Ira and George

“Glad Tidings” (Morrison)

Gleason, Josh

Gleason, Ralph J.

“Gloria” (Them)

“Going Home” (Rolling Stones)

Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet

Goldman, Mac

Goldsboro, Bobby

Good As I Been to You
(Dylan)

Goodfriend, Steve

Grateful Dead

The Great Gatsby
(Fitzgerald)

Greek Theatre, Berkeley, Calif.

Green, Leo

Green, Peter

Guthrie, Woody

“Gypsy Woman” (Impressions)

Hallucinations

Halpert, Herbert

Harper’s
magazine