When That Rough God Goes Riding (6 page)

Bob Beamon’s name is little mentioned today. For twentythree years, jumpers edged closer to his record, inch by inch; mathematically, it was finally broken by Michael Powell in 1991, but in the way that his act has never been matched, even in imagination it was never really surpassed. In 1968, almost everything became part of history even before people realized what had happened, and for the rest of their lives, they and
others, many not born at the time, would argue over what they had done. But what Bob Beamon did was in a queer and ineradicable way outside of history, where it remains—and in that sense, in a way different from all the banners raised in 1968, it is an image of freedom against which there can be no argument at all.

As I hear it now, and as I think I heard it then,
Astral Weeks
, recorded in three days in September and October 1968 in New York City, and released on the Warner Bros.–Seven Arts label in November, caught the same spirit. In historical terms it didn’t make sense. It didn’t, in the smallminded way art and politics are so often linked, reflect the great events of the day, any more than Dylan’s
John Wesley Harding
,
Astral Weeks
’ true kin, did.
John Wesley Harding
might have been a testament that, as Jon Landau put it in 1968, “Dylan has felt the war,” but in its quiet, its lack of hurry, its insistence on setting its own pace, its refusal even to acknowledge that the person whose name was on the album cover had ever done anything before, it like
Astral Weeks
refused to speak the language of the time, and in the way that the time has been rewritten into a single rotting cliché of VIETNAM STUDENT RIOTS LBJ LSD SEXUAL REVOLUTION BLACK POWER NIXON neither
John Wesley Harding
nor
Astral Weeks
can be translated back into that language. “It did come out at a time when a lot of things a lot of people cared about passionately were beginning to disintegrate, and when the self-destructive undertow that always accompanied the great sixties party had an awful lot of ankles in its maw and was pulling straight
down,” Lester Bangs wrote in 1978 about
Astral Weeks
. “So, as timeless as it finally is, perhaps
Astral Weeks
was also the product of an era.” But it wasn’t any yearning for the strife and revelations of another time that accounted for the fact that a few years ago, in a class I was teaching, four students out of sixteen, none of them older than twenty-one, named it as the album they most loved. How did it reach these people, just in the sense of from here to there, of roundabout? How did it enter their lives, music that was made well before they were born and yet spoke a common language? The record spoke to these people then; as far as they cared it was made for them, they understood its language as soon as they heard it. No one had to translate it for them, no one had to contextualize it, no one had to offer them any lectures about the music or the politics of the late sixties or the career of Van Morrison.

If
Astral Weeks
caught the spirit of Bob Beamon’s event, then it also partook of it. As I understand history, Bob Beamon’s jump would not have happened as it did if the skies had been different that day in Mexico City, if he had received a call from his wife that morning, or a different call than he did, or if that day’s paper that morning had carried a different story, and the same must have been true when the producer Lewis Merenstein brought Van Morrison into a studio with a few New York City jazzmen: the bassist Richard Davis, the drummer Connie Kay, the guitarist Jay Berliner, the percussionist and vibraphonist Warren Smith, Jr., and the flautist and soprano saxophonist John Payne. The music that resulted wasn’t jazz. It wasn’t blues. It wasn’t rock ’n’ roll in
any ordinary or hyphenated manner, but it fit perfectly on the radio in between Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” or Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” It was closer to folk music, and closer to “Barbara Allen” or the Irish ballad “Raglan Road” than “We Shall Overcome” or even “Goodnight Irene.”

Merenstein had received a call from Warner Bros.:
We’ve signed Van Morrison, go up to Boston, see what he’s got.
Pretty much all anybody knew, and all anybody wanted, was “Brown-Eyed Girl,” from
Blowin’ Your Mind!
which my friend Barry Franklin described at the time as “two minutes and twenty-six seconds of ‘Sweet Pea’ and thirty-two minutes of ‘T. B. Sheets.’” (“Is the B. in ‘T. B. Sheets,’” he asked, “the same B. which appeared in ‘Johnny B. Goode’?”) Morrison played Merenstein his song “Astral Weeks”: “thirty seconds into it,” Merenstein told Hank Shteamer in 2009, “my whole being was vibrating.” And the moment could not have been any different, Merenstein said, not the call going to Tom Wilson, the producer of “Like a Rolling Stone,” who was standing nearby when the phone rang, not Connie Kay catching Napoleon’s cold: “Something as timeless as forty years had to happen because it had to happen. I had to be the one to do it. Not that producer, not that producer, regardless of their accomplishments. It had to be Richard, not that bass player. I don’t want to sound existential, but there was Van, and that was it; there was no band ... there were no arrangements ... the direction was him singing and playing—that was where I followed. That’s why it came out the way it did. If I would’ve gone somewhere else, it wouldn’t have come out the way it did. So there obviously was a direction from somewhere in the sky.” “This is not an exaggeration, this is
not just trying to be poetic,” Brooks Arthur, the recording engineer for
Astral Weeks
, said in 2009. “A cloud came along, and it was called the Van Morrison sessions. We all hopped upon that cloud, and the cloud took us away for a while, and we made this album, and we landed when it was done.”

They recorded live, Morrison saying nothing to the musicians in terms of banter or instruction, and saying everything in the cues of his chords, hesitations, lunges, silences, and in those moments when he loosed himself from words and floated on his own air. But that’s too simple. When you listen, you hear the musicians talking to each other; more than that, you hear them hearing each other.

In the first notes of “Sweet Thing,” Morrison opens the tune with his acoustic guitar; as soon as a listener has something to grab onto, Richard Davis restates Morrison’s theme, with the barest increase in force that makes all the difference. Davis was born in Chicago; he was a veteran of sessions with Eric Dolphy and Roland Kirk. This day it’s as if Davis is sweeping into the song to dance Morrison even farther into it—into
Astral Weeks
’ great swirl. Someone other than Morrison is now leading the listener into the bower of the song, a hillside where you can tumble down like Jim and little Sabine in
Jules and Jim
; that gives Morrison the freedom to forget the shape of the song, what it needs, what it wants, and trust himself. He’ll sing the song; someone else will play it.

After the sessions were finished, Merenstein, with Morrison and the conductor Larry Fallon consulting, overdubbed strings and horn parts. Sometimes the songs are unimaginable without them, and the added sounds so layered into the
original instruments as to be part of them, as on “Sweet Thing”; sometimes they’re gratuitous, especially the strings on “Cyprus Avenue” and the gypsy violin on “Madame George,” but after forty years they tune themselves out. When the music is at its most contingent—when Merenstein’s argument about how the record might never have happened at all becomes an awareness that the fate of a song, whether or not it will achieve the finality you in fact know it will, rests on the way Richard Davis steps out of a rest and whether or not Morrison will know what Davis has just done and what he himself can now do to live up to it—it’s scary, because the inevitability of the music is also its unlikeliness. Early on, there’s a rupture in “Sweet Thing” when Morrison hollers—a long, happy
hoyyyyyyyy
, the singer shot out of the cannon of his own breath—and the scene the sound makes is so complete, the musicians around Morrison filling in the “gardens all wet with rain” he’s already described, that you realize no one has to go back to the song at all. Near the end of “Madame George”—almost two minutes from its actual end, but at the end of the song as a written piece, a story told in lines and verses, one after the other—there’s a pause, and then, at seven minutes thirtyfour seconds, a single thick, weighted bass note from Davis that is as final a sound as any song could hold without dropping dead on the spot. The story is over, the note says; everything that is going to happen has happened; everyone has been left behind; everyone is dead, and all that remains is looking back. Morrison goes on, drawing a seemingly endless loop of loss, regret, reverie, and escape around himself—as he does so, you are actually hearing him change from a
child into a creature who may not yet be a man but who is not a child, who may no longer even be human, rather a figment of his own false memories—but Davis is finished. Every note he plays after that last one is sweeping up, closing the windows, locking the door. At this point the song is as much his as Morrison’s; both have their own ideas about what it’s for, what it’s about, who Madame George is, and why anyone should care: why in their different ways they are going to make you care. At its highest pitch, the album has become a collaboration between Morrison and Davis, or a kind of conspiracy, one that takes advantage of the producer and the other musicians but excludes them from the real conversation—excludes them, but somehow not the listener. In the blues term for the shadow self that knows what the self refuses to know, here Davis is Morrison’s second mind; there Morrison is Davis’s. You are listening in, but you can never be sure you heard what you thought you heard.

 

There is
death all over the music—an acceptance of death. Save for one couplet, the last words on the album are a farewell, in the form of a closing door: “I know you’re dying—and I know, you know it too.” Davis rattles the door in its frame. But usually death is not so close. It’s something you see in someone’s face, maybe years off, but already looming. You freeze up—or you realize you have no time to waste. You begin asking what it is you really want. In the title song the singer asks to be born again—“There you go,” he says to himself in the mirror, or to the person who he expects will save him, “talking to Hudie Ledbetter.” Lead Belly died in 1949, almost twenty years before, only four years after the
person singing was born, but he’s here now, and he’ll answer you if you know how to ask. And for a moment you do. “Would you, kiss my eyes”—what a surrender of body and soul are in those lines! It’s an opening into what Lester Bangs called the “mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work.” It’s an acceptance both of death and of anything else that might happen, like the magical appearance of a long-dead avatar to tell you that, yes, you are his true heir, you are the child he never had. And magic, as the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood wrote in 1937,

Which is a way of saying, with unusual repetitions kin to those that in Morrison’s music always signify freedom, a love of words, and a lack of fear for what they might say (“the emotion evoked is an emotion evoked”), that to be born again might be understood as magic, magic as everyday life: what you do to preserve the emotional current that drives everyday life. And that current may be, in the art historian T. J. Clark’s phrase, the sight of death—a sight that, when one is as attuned to contingency as the singer on
Astral Weeks
is, you see everywhere.

When Lewis Merenstein says the album “had to happen because it had to happen,” that “if I would’ve gone somewhere else,” not to Boston that day, the album “wouldn’t have come out the way it did,” or even taken any shape at all, he is situating the album as an event: a unique and timeless act or occurrence, like Bob Beamon’s jump, something that could not have been predicted and could never be repeated. But that is only half of it. In “Astral Weeks,” “Sweet Thing,” “Cyprus Avenue,” “Madame George,” “Ballerina,” and “Slim Slow Slider,” there are everywhere in the music itself tiny events that are just as contingent; that single
hoyyyyyyyy
may be only the most immediately thrilling. These events take place in the breaks and holes in the music. They change what could have been a spot of dead air into a moment of anticipation. They turn the singer’s claims into truth, the singer testing that truth with repetitions of a phrase until, now an incantation, not description, the phrase may have sloughed off all ordinary meaning and acquired one without intent or desire. It’s the nearly countless “goodbye”s at the end of “Madame George” no longer necessarily signifying “fare thee well” or “I must take my leave” or “I’ll never see you again” but “I’m returning,” “I could never leave,” “I will never forget you.”

It’s this sense of event within a song, a verse, a line, or even what might occur in the space between one word and another, that raises the cast of drama that hovers over the whole of the album. “I based the first fifteen minutes of
Taxi Driver
on
Astral Weeks
,” Martin Scorsese said in 1978, just after the first major screening of his film
The Last Waltz
, sitting on the floor in his living room in the Hollywood hills,
playing the album, hearing “Madame George” come up. “That’s the song,” he said—as in the moment Bernard Herrmann’s theme for
Taxi Driver
played from inside of “Madame George,” as “I Cover the Waterfront” played inside of that, and you could follow Travis Bickle, driving his hack from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. every night, talking to himself, “All the animals come out at night, whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal,” as he drives under the spray of a broken hydrant and wishes for a rain that would wash all the sin off the streets, as he tries to talk up the ticket seller in a porn theater, as he sees his dream girl, describing her in his diary in words that could have come from “Sweet Thing”: “She was wearing a white dress / She appeared like an angel / Out of this filthy mess.”
³
It’s all foreshadowing, as on
Astral Weeks
almost everything is memory, but the sense of tension is the same. Accompanying every shout of exaltation on
Astral Weeks
, every breath of comfort, there is a murmur of jeopardy and danger that makes you afraid for the people in the songs—afraid for Madame George, afraid for the singer who leaves her behind as if she’s already dead, afraid that the singer so transformed by his self-raised specter of rebirth may not make it as far as, on the first track on
Astral Weeks
, its title song, he actually does. It’s this that over the years has led so many people to take the album as a kind of talisman, to recognize
others by their affection for it, to say “I’m going to my grave with this record, I will never forget it.”