When That Rough God Goes Riding (4 page)

The sense
of a search is alive in this fugitive recording, even if the recording itself never comes to life. Sometimes Morrison’s failures stick faster than the successes of countless other honorable singers.

It’s a rehearsal, or a warm-up for what the people present are actually there to do. Someone snaps strings on an old guitar. Someone else plays the kind of war-movie harmonica notes that the comedian Robert Klein describes as being played in every Civil War picture, “around the campfire,” before the next massacre: “Boy?” “Yes, sir?” “Ever been in a battle before?” “No, sir—but I’m aimin’ to.” “Better stop playin’ that goddamn harmonica!” A piano keeps time.

“John Brown body lie molding in a grave,” Morrison begins, as if not quite remembering the words, and in a voice so creaky you’re not immediately sure it’s his. The piece comes through as a lost song, an air that hasn’t been sung
for generations, that’s survived in the common imagination only in bare fragments: “Glory, glory, hallelujah, his truth go marching on.” Morrison tries to pump it as a drummer bashes cymbals—“Yeah! Mmm-hmm. I like it. Oh! Look out! Brand new thang!”—but the exclamations sound like vocal exercises.

Then the song sucks him back. He’s singing as someone panning for gold, finding nothing but sand, running his hands through the water. He crouches there, waiting for the song to give itself up, to surrender its secrets. But an unidentified violinist—probably not Toni Marcus, the violinist who will appear with Morrison on his
Into the Music
four years later, but I like to think so, so I’ll pretend it’s her—has been there all along, following Morrison’s slow footsteps, looking for a theme—and finally, you might hear, she’s had enough. This song is not a secret to her, and she begins to sing it, on her strings, with more blood, loss, and an embrace of a right cause than Morrison can, or will. It’s all in the high notes, with an urgency that says she’s hearing hidden strains in the song no one has heard before—but as she begins to light up the sky the song as it was composed always reached for, the sky comes down to earth, and for a last moment Morrison steps up to claim the song as if he knew it all along.

“If he
had much stage presence it’d be hard to take,” a friend said after seeing Van Morrison perform this song, not long after its release on
Moondance
, in 1970, Morrison’s first album after
Astral Weeks
. He’d stand still on stage to sing it, needing only “Now the caravan, is on its way,” the first line, to bring him into the setting of the song—a hillside in the country, you could imagine, a line of wood-covered vans or trailers, filled with gypsies or their would-be middle-class inheritors, whoever it might have been with the destiny or the choice to live on the road getting a moment in history through the way the song pushed out of it. You might feel the Impressions’ “Gypsy Woman” behind Morrison’s song—a long way behind it, dubious, Curtis Mayfield wondering if any song that mentioned gypsies could really summon up the campfires that in his song really did seem to flicker in the listener’s eye. Morrison would point his
head down with his eyes closed, as if he were trying to answer Mayfield’s doubt. “Turn up your radio,” he’d whisper the first time the line appeared in the song; the second time it would be a plea, desperate and enthralled, and now there was an answer. It was on the radio. You just had to turn it up, so you didn’t miss it. It’s easy to miss something on the radio; you turn your head, say “Did you hear that” or “Listen to this,” and it’s gone, and the DJ isn’t going to understand when you call to ask what it was whoever the singer was did right before the instrumental break. “Turn it up”—but not too much, not so the curls in the singer’s voice on the radio are flattened with volume and the soul is gone: “That’s enough!” Morrison would always shout, just when the perfect level was reached, like someone who has to be touched just this way. Do it right, and it’s heaven; squeeze a little too hard, move your hand an inch in the wrong direction, and love turns to ashes. All of that is happening in “Caravan,” in the instant.

By the time Morrison recorded his first live album,
“
...
It’s Too Late to Stop Now...”
from 1974, the song had become a rave-up, almost a set-closer—a crowd favorite—but that night it couldn’t find its voice. Curtis Mayfield turned his head. The tempo was too fast—the oldest musician’s trick in the oldest book to spark false excitement in a familiar number. Then it stopped, to insist on drama; you could see the levers and pulleys. The music is ornamented, filigreed, the song buried in so many layers of orchestration that the choruses, the heart of the song—“TURN IT UP! TURN IT UP!”—never did more than shout. Morrison
took time to introduce the band, then seemed to drift off, murmuring “Now for the best, later for the garbage,” as if talking to himself, and it might have been the most true and least forced moment in the performance.

Two years later, at the Last Waltz, the Band’s Thanksgiving night farewell concert at Winterland in San Francisco, with the bill heavy with guest stars, the show, which produced a certain streak of tedium that lifted only for two or three numbers at a time, had come nearly to a halt. After a few mountain turns of a runaway train—the Band playing inside out for “Mystery Train” with Paul Butterfield, for “Who Do You Love” with their old mentor, the 1950s rockabilly flash Ronnie Hawkins, and then, titanically, almost seven minutes of “Mannish Boy” led by Muddy Waters—the show lost its breath. Waters was followed by Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Diamond; the sense of I’ll-never-forget-this-night the crowd had brought with them and the Band itself had insisted on (an unheardof ticket price, a full Thanksgiving dinner, curtains from the opera house, chandeliers flown in from Los Angeles) began to disappear, replaced by mere stargazing. People in the audience began to speculate about who else might show up. One fan predicted that Buddy Holly would appear precisely at midnight. Another person claimed to have seen Murry Wilson—the then recently deceased father of three-fifths of the Beach Boys—backstage. Someone yelled out for “Free Bird.”

Morrison was next—the last guest before the very last, Bob Dylan—and he turned the night around. “I always go
by what gets the most house,” said Dr. John, himself one of the first Last Waltz guests, flat on his own “Such a Night,” a haunt on “Liza Jane” with the New Orleans singer Bobby Charles. “To me, Van Morrison got the most house, of anything. I was checkin’ the gig,” he said in his crawly voice, the gutter growl of a man who hasn’t been impressed by anything since 1957, “and it was like, the whole gig, it got house. ’Cause mostly, you know, it’s like famous people ... But nuttin’ was like that. Nuttin’ got that much house. That was way above anything else. That was a hard act to follow.”

At the rehearsal the night before, where Martin Scorsese, who was filming the concert, or rather directing it—with every song plotted, every shot blocked, lighting designed to vary what would appear on a screen—“Caravan” was already a showstopper, and there wasn’t even a show. Morrison stepped right into it, the Band playing easily behind him, staying out of his way, Allen Toussaint’s horn section working from arrangements that were fixed in meter but still had room in them. “Now the caravan is on its way,” Morrison sang, not a word rushed, no melodramatic pause, simply the first line of an old story everybody knows. You say “Once upon a time,” not “Once—upon a time,” unless you’re full of yourself, or you don’t trust the audience. Morrison may not trust his audience, but this night there wasn’t one.

 

At the
show itself you could imagine that the song grew bigger than it ever had before. Again and again there is an increase in pressure, then release. You are constantly aware of the back of the throat. Nothing is abstract, nothing is
taken for granted. “Turn up your radio”: “radio” becomes “RAD-IO”—

—and suddenly it’s not a radio, it’s a Flash Gordon death ray. The horn section locks into a pattern,
dah
da da
dah
, drawn out more every time,

Again and again, there’s a freer theme to highlight the hard count, and as the horn section pushed back, louder each time, Morrison matching it in volume, he began to kick his right leg into the air like a Rockette. He shot an arm up, a dynamo, the movements repeated, repeated, repeated, and shocking every time. Finally as he left the stage he was swaying from side to side, his body all vehemence, his face in the placid, self-circled expression of someone who hears nothing but the song playing in his head. All in all it signified that finally he had taken everything the song had to give, he had left nothing out, making you stare and ask, where did this person come from, why is he here? It was always a song that demanded to be made a testimony—
this is the last song I’m ever going to sing in my life
—and that’s what Morrison gave back. Edwyn Collins, the singer for the Glasgow band Orange Juice, once remembered his manager crying after a performance: “The big moments are never as good as you think they’re going to be.” This night they were—but before
any of this happened there was a rupture that broke the ground for the performance, and it had nothing to do with music.

 

“At rehearsal
, when we went over this,” Robbie Robertson said in commentary for the video release of
The Last Waltz
, “he came in and he had just flown in from somewhere. I guess he’d come right from the airport, and he was wearing a raincoat, maybe it had been raining, I don’t remember now, but he had on this Mickey Spillane–looking raincoat. And I thought, you know what? This detective thing, this Humphrey Bogart detective thing, is working for me. And I said to Van, ‘I like this, I like this Mike Hammer thing you got going here—you should wear this outfit tonight.’ And he said, ‘You think so? You really like it?’ ‘It works. It’s definitely working.’ And he said, ‘Oh, ok.’ And that night, when it came time for the show, as you can see, he felt more the need to dress for the occasion.”

As the dishes were being cleared from the Thanksgiving tables, I’d seen Morrison wandering the still mostly empty aisles in Winterland, dressed in his raincoat, scowling. He was thirty; he looked older, pudgy and losing his hair. It was surprising to see him appear onstage like a grimy Cinderella in a purple stage suit: a spangled bolero jacket, sausage pants with contrasting lacing up the crotch, a green top with a scoop neck that produced what could only be called cleavage.
God
, you thought—
where did he get this thing?
Who drugged him, knocked him out, dragged him into a costume store, and put this on him and said,
Well, here you are,
you look
great
, Van, you look just terrific!
It was as if he was daring the audience, or for that matter the Band, not to see past the ludicrousness of his costume (“I remember a couple of times becoming completely distracted and felt like I was in the audience,” Robertson said), not to see what he was doing, not to hear the music.

“Van always looked to me like a half-homicidal leprechaun who lived under the bridge,” the critic Jay Cocks likes to say. For a night he came out from under the bridge. Then he went back. It was stunning; no one remarked on the slime dripping from his elbows, the bits of dead rats on his shoes.

When Bob
Dylan first began performing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” the song that would close his album
Bringing It All Back Home
, released in the spring of 1965, no one had heard it before. It would come at the end of a concert, and it would be a shock—not for its melody, or its words, or its tinge of finality (in the summer of that year, at the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan would sing it as his farewell to those in the crowd who had booed him for appearing with a band), but for what Dylan was doing with his arms.

He would bend over his guitar, thrust his arms out from it akimbo, and begin to flap them up and down, as if he were a puppet and the strings were his own rhythm, and the rhythm in the song was big, loose, dramatic, and unsatisfied. No matter how hard Dylan pumped, there was something missing, and that seemed to be the point. Performing
solo for the last season before he began, first with pickup groups and then with the Arkansas-Canadian quintet the Hawks, to present his songs as he was hearing them in his head—hearing them, you can imagine, as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or the Animals might have done them, but not as well, he had to know, as he would—what the performance dramatized was the absence of the power the song itself wanted.

“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” cried out for a band. At the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco in 1966, the Grateful Dead were among the first to try, barely—Jerry Garcia’s lead guitar was still light with respect. It was still a folk song; for that matter it was less rock ’n’ roll than Dylan’s own recording, with Bruce Langhorne’s distant, milky electric guitar notes shadowing the themes Dylan was stating on his own strings.