When That Rough God Goes Riding (2 page)

In 1966 Morrison abandoned the last remnant of Them—its name—and put himself altogether under the wing of the legendary New York record man Bert Berns, renowned for writing or producing Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me,” Erma Franklin’s “Piece of My Heart,” Garnett Mimms’s “Cry Baby,” and the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” not to mention “Here Comes the Night.” In 1967 they made the single “Brown-Eyed Girl,” after which Berns, working from sometimes unfinished recordings, rushed out a dark, cracked-blues album called
Blowin’ Your Mind!
(the phrase was already as out-of-date as the soupy psychedelic jacket); the signature number was the nearly ten-minute “T. B. Sheets,” which was exactly what it was about. Who wanted to listen to an endless cynical number about a woman dying of tuberculosis, closer to a bilious stand-up routine than a song, when the air was filled with “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”?

The bright, bouncy “Brown-Eyed Girl” was Morrison’s least convincing recording and his first top-ten hit single—and, except for “Domino” in 1970, so far his last. Though “Brown-Eyed Girl” has stayed on the radio ever since, at the
time Morrison himself was quickly forgotten; he had both trivialized himself and blown himself up. His career was all but destroyed. When Nik Cohn’s
Pop from the Beginning
, the first good rock ’n’ roll history, appeared in 1969, even when a revised edition came out in 1973, neither Them nor Morrison were even mentioned.

Consumed by resentment over the swindle of stardom, fame, records, money, debt, and oblivion, caught in a trap of performing and publishing contracts after Berns’s death at the end of 1967, Morrison found himself in Boston, where late-night DJs soon got used to a character with an incomprehensible Irish accent drunkenly pestering them for John Lee Hooker music. One night Morrison was booed off the stage when Peter Wolf, then the leader of a local band called the Hallucinations, brought him out of the audience to front their version of “Gloria.” “Don’t you know who this is?” Wolf shouted at the hissing crowd. “This man
wrote the song
!” But they didn’t know. In 1967, when you said Morrison you meant the Doors, who, one could have read at the time, were at work on “their new masterpiece”:
their
version of “Gloria.”

Morrison returned to Belfast, apparently a burnt-out victim of the pop wars. There he wrote a set of songs about childhood, initiation, sex, and death, which finally took form as
Astral Weeks
. It was as serious an album as could be imagined, but it soared like an old Drifters 45, “When My Little Girl Is Smiling” or “I Count the Tears.” From there Morrison’s music opened onto the road it has followed since: a road bordered by meadows alive with the promise of mystical deliverance and revelation on one side, forests
of shrieking haunts and beckoning specters on the other, and rocks, baubles, traps, and snares down the middle. With his wife, he moved to the musicians’ pastoral bohemia of Woodstock, then to the San Francisco Bay Area, celebrated a domestic paradise, and pledged to walk down Broadway in his hot pants. Then his paradise fell to pieces, and his music shot back and forth between false promises and affirmations too hard-won to deny, from upstate New York to Marin County under a Belfast cloud, idyll and civil war, inspiration and boredom, the platitudes of a New Age seeker and the bad news of someone convinced that no one is listening, down ten, twenty, thirty, forty years, by now almost half a century, to find a man now brooding in his present-day redoubt in Bath, dreamy site of Roman spas, John Wood’s eighteenth-century Druidic power spot Bath Circus, and Morrison’s own Exile Productions. “The only thing that matters is whether you’ve got it or not,” he once said. “The only thing that counts is whether you’re still around. I’m still around.” Yes, and so what? As a physical fact, Morrison may have the richest and most expressive voice pop music has produced since Elvis Presley, and with a sense of himself as an artist that Elvis was always denied. But what is that voice for?

 

Van Morrison’s
music as I hear it holds a story—a story made of fragments. There is in his music from the very first a kind of quest: for the moment when the magic word, riff, note, or chord is found and everything is transformed. At any time a listener might think that he or she has felt it, even glimpsed it, a realm beyond ordinary expression, reaching
out as if to close your hand around such a moment, to grab for its air, then opening your fist to find a butterfly in it—but Morrison’s sense of what that magic moment is must be more contingent. For him this quest is about the deepening of a style, the continuing task of constructing musical situations in which his voice can rise to its own form.

“When I was very young,” the late Ralph J. Gleason wrote in 1970 in a review of Morrison’s album
Moondance
, “I saw a film version of the life of John McCormack, the Irish tenor, playing himself. In it he explained to his accompanist that the element necessary to mark the important voice off from the other good ones was very specific. ‘You have to have,’ he said, ‘the yarragh in your voice’ ”—and to get the yarragh, for Morrison, you may need a sense of the song as a thing in itself, with its own brain, heart, lungs, tongue, and ears. Its own desires, fears, will, and even ideas: “The question might really be,” as he once said, “is the song singing you?” His music can be heard as an attempt to surrender to the yarragh, or to make it surrender to him; to find the music it wants; to bury it; to dig it out of the ground. The yarragh is his version of the art that has touched him: of blues and jazz, for that matter of Yeats and Lead Belly, the voice that strikes a note so exalted you can’t believe a mere human being is responsible for it, a note so unfinished and unsatisfied you can understand why the eternal seems to be riding on its back.

Morrison will take hold of the yarragh, or get close to it, raise its specter even as he falls back before it, for the moment defeated, with horns, volume, quiet, melody and rhythm and the abandonment of both, in the twist of a phrase or the
dissolution of words into syllables and syllables into preverbal grunts and moans. He will pursue it perhaps most of all in repetition, railing or sailing the same sound ten, twenty, thirty times until it has taken his song where he wants it to go or failed to crack the wall around it. The yarragh is not, it seems, something Morrison can get at will, or that in any given year or even decade he is even looking for; the endless stream of dull and tired albums through the 1980s and ’90s, carrying titles like warning labels—
Beautiful Vision
;
Poetic Champions Compose
;
Avalon Sunset
;
No Guru, No Method
,
No Teacher
;
Inarticulate Speech of the Heart
;
A Sense of Wonder
;
Enlighten ment
—attest to that. So do a string of records where Morrison seems to attempt to reduce whatever might be elusive, undefinable, and sui generis in his music to parts that can never recombine into a whole, as he recorded jazz and jump blues with his sometime accompanist Georgie Fame, country with Linda Gail Lewis, Jerry Lee’s sister, traditional Irish songs with the Chieftains, and, most touchingly, even skiffle with Lonnie Donegan himself, back in Belfast, two old men standing up to the crowd to sing “Midnight Special,” not so far from where, once, one of them named a band after it. Those are episodes in a career. It’s the fragments of music as broken and then remade by the yarragh that this book is looking for. “The only time I actually work with words,” Morrison said in 1978, “is when I’m writing a song. After it’s written, I release the words; and every time I’m singing, I’m singing syllables. I’m singing signs and phrases.”

The quest for the yarragh—for moments of disruption, when effects can seem to have no cause, when the sense of an unrepeatable event is present, when what is taking place in a
song seems to go beyond the limits of respectable speech—is also a performer’s quest to evade and escape the expectations of his audience. It’s a struggle to avoid being made irrelevant and redundant, a creature tied as if by chains to his hits of forty, thirty, twenty years earlier, even to the song that hit last month—forbidden, by the laws of the pop mind and the pop market, from ever saying anything he hasn’t said before. The result is a distrust of the audience, coming out, on any given night, in anger, insult, drunkenness, disdain directed at the singer’s own songs as much as toward whatever crowd might be present. From the time of his first hits Morrison has, in a way, set himself against any possible audience: he does his work in public, but with his back turned, sometimes literally so—and it might go back to those nights in the Maritime Hotel in 1964. “Out of nowhere, these kids began showing up,” Morrison said in 1970, and I remember the way his eyes sparkled in a set, stolid face as he talked: “Sometimes, when it all worked, something would happen, and the audience and musicians would be as one.” That was because no one knew what might happen—and no one knew what was supposed to happen. Before a song is recorded, there is no right way; afterward, especially in the pop glare, audiences know what to expect and expect what they know.

Van Morrison, then, is a bad-tempered, self-contradictory individual whose work is about freedom. How do you get it? What do you do with it? How do you find it when it disappears—and what is it? Is the yarragh the means to freedom, or is it, when you can find it, the thing itself? When Morrison reaches the moments of upheaval, reversal, revelation, and mirror-breaking that are this book’s subject—in his
music and, sometimes, in what other people have done with his music, finding, as Neil Jordan would do with Morrison’s music in his film
Breakfast on Pluto
, a yarragh behind the yarragh, or dramatizing it as Morrison might not—all of those questions are thrown into relief.

It becomes plain that any summing up of Morrison’s work would be a fraud. That is what makes his failures interesting and his successes incomplete; it’s what allows the most valuable instances of his music to exist less in relation to other instances in his career in any historical sense than in a kind of continual present. It’s that territory I will try to map.

It came
barreling out of car radio speakers like a flood on a black night. Surrounded by some of the best and most tuneful pop music ever made—the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around,” Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” the Supremes’ “Stop! In the Name of Love,” Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” the Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week,” the Miracles’ “The Tracks of My Tears,” Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You too Long (to Stop Now),” the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!”—even up against Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ “Wooly Bully”; even up against Them’s own “Gloria” or “Here Comes the Night”—this made no sense. You couldn’t see through it, you couldn’t see into it. What was happening?

It starts in the middle, as if you’ve switched stations halfway through some other song without realizing it. It’s moving so fast you feel as if you’ll never catch up. The band—guitar,
drums, bass, an organ hovering in the background—can’t catch up with the harmonica that’s leading the charge, Little Walter as a nightrider; suddenly they do, and then they take a step ahead. You realize that the last thing you want is for the harmonica—high, implacable, uncaring, a body without a mind, it seems to be its own force, not some mere instrument played by some particular person who has to get up in the morning and go to sleep at night—to lose this race. It doesn’t; it cuts in front of the stampeding combo, playing a swirling pattern that focuses the band. There’s a call and response, a joining of forces, no longer one against the others, but a whole against a part, and the part is whoever’s listening. You’re the target. You’re about to be left behind, to the wasteland this flood will leave in its wake.