When That Rough God Goes Riding (7 page)

 

“To this
day it gives me pain to hear it,” Merenstein said in 2009 of the record he produced, then pulling away from what he’d just said: “Pain is the wrong word—I’m so moved by it.” But pain is exactly the right word: the pain, the fear, of knowing that to acknowledge that the music exists at all is to acknowledge that, because it might not have, it doesn’t.

What lessons can it teach, what last words might it leave on anyone’s lips? What does it say, where did it come from? In 2009, as Van Morrison was setting out to re-create
Astral Weeks
on stages around the world, with charts indicating every half-note, every caesura, every skipped beat, so that Jay Berliner and Richard Davis (who finally bowed out) could replay their parts exactly as they had more than forty years before, I was asked these questions, and I realized I didn’t care. What happens on
Astral Weeks
beggars those questions. It was forty-six minutes in which possibilities of the medium—of rock ’n’ roll, of pop music, of what you might call music that could be played on the radio as if it were both timeless and news—were realized, when you went out to the limits of what this form could do. You went past them: you showed everybody else that the limits they had accepted on invention, expression, honesty, daring, were false. You said it to musicians and you said it to people who weren’t musicians: there’s more to life than you thought. Life can be lived more deeply—with a greater sense of fear and horror and desire than you ever imagined.

That’s what I heard at the time, and that’s what I hear now. There is a difference. I no longer altogether trust the sort of explanations that along with other people I used to pursue so passionately—not, of course, philistine, literal explanations, of course not, but imaginative, contextualizing explanations that made both a work and its setting richer for the introduction of the one to the other. I’ve played
Astral Weeks
more than I’ve played any other record I own; I wouldn’t tell you why even if I knew. In the face of work that became part of my life a long time ago and remains inseparable from it, whether it’s
The Great Gatsby
or
Astral Weeks
, what I value most is how inexplicable any great work really is.

In 1972
, Van Morrison closed each side of what might be his richest album,
St. Dominic’s Preview
, with a song over ten minutes long.

One was “Almost Independence Day.” Notes from Morrison’s acoustic guitar twisted into a harsh minor key, then seemed to raise a flag as a skiff pushed off; a synthesizer made the sound of a tugboat pushing through fog, and kept it constant. As it went on, it seemed as if the song itself more than the singer was gazing out over San Francisco Bay to watch the fireworks; as that happened, the Fourth of July receded, and what was left was an unsettled, unclaimed, unfounded land where the event that settled it, named it, found it, had yet to take place.

The other long song was if anything stronger. “Listen to the Lion” was made as a field for the yarragh, an expanse over which, as a thing in itself, it could go wherever it might want to go, disappearing and reappearing at any time—but more than that “Listen to the Lion” was a song about the yarragh.

Writing about Morrison in 1978, Jonathan Cott quoted Yeats on the ancient Celts, living “in a world where anything might flow and change, and become any other thing ... The hare that ran by among the dew might have sat up on his haunches when the first man was made, and the poor bunch of rushes under their feet might have been a goddess laughing among the stars; and with but a little magic, a little waving of the hands, a little murmuring of the lips, they too could become a hare or a bunch of rushes, and know immortal love and immortal hatred.” With that little murmuring of the lips becoming a torrent of wind off a lake, after what appears to be a conventional song, though a particularly pious one (“I shall search my very soul ... for the lion”), for one minute after another Morrison cries, moans, pleads, shouts, hollers, whispers, until finally he breaks with language and speaks in tongues, growling and rumbling. The feeling is that whoever it is that is singing has not simply abandoned language, but has returned himself to a time before language, and is now groping toward it. The organs of speech have not yet been fixed in the mouth and the throat, because there is no speech. Speech might come from the chest, the stomach, the bowels—and there, in a transporting minute, is where the singer seems to find it, guttural sounds
now swirling and spinning around the singer in bodies of their own. “They too could become a hare”—now Morrison has loosed the lion inside himself.

As he sings, a chorus behind him urges him on, resolutely, as if they understand the mission that the singer, caught in his trance, only senses. “Listen to the lion,” they chant, drawing out the last word—but what is strange is that in the chorus, among three male voices, you hear Morrison himself, singing at himself.

As this happens they truly are two different, separate persons. It’s more than, say, the conscious mind calling out to the subconscious; as the listener, you hear, you recognize, in a way that is tactile before it is anything else, two different bodies. “Listen to the lion,” commands the chorus, but the singer already is the lion.
Awwrgh
,
arrgh
,
ooo
,
ah
,
ooo
,
mmm
,
ungh
,
ooo
,
ungh
,
arrgh
,
ah
,
ah
, off his feet in the dance—and then, not in exhaustion but with the clarity of a sudden change in the light, the singer removes his animal head to lead a fleet of ships. “And we sailed,” he repeats five times, “away from Denmark, way up to Caledonia.”

Caledonia is not just a misspelling of “Caldonia,” a number-one race music hit for Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five in 1945 and a blues standard ever after—even if, purposefully misspelling the name, Morrison recorded a happily delirious version of the tune and put it out as a single in 1974, with his band credited as the Caledonia Soul Express: “CALDONIA! CALDONIA!” he shouted, as so many had before him, “
WHAT MAKES YOUR BIG HEAD SO HARD!
” No, Morrison will explain if you ask, as he
explained to Jonathan Cott, “Caledonia used to be Scotland. This funny thing happened a long time ago—a lot of people from Northern Ireland went over to Scotland to settle, and vice versa. They changed spaces ... So a lot of people from Northern Ireland are of Scottish descent. And my name suggests that I am.”
⁴
But, Morrison would sometimes say, there was more to it than that. In the early seventies, as he tried to find a name for what he did, settling for a time on “Caledonia soul music,” he came upon the notion that finally the blues came not from Africa but from Scotland. The true source of the blues was in the border ballads and folk songs, from “The Cuckoo” to “Barbara Allen,” from “She Moves through the Fair” to “Nottamun Town,” that, carried by settlers from Britain to the Appalachians, made up the oldest, deepest, and most persistent American music there is—“Real American Music,” as Emma Bell Miles, an educated, middle-class city lady turned mountain woman, wrote in 1904 in
Harper’s
. Thus, Morrison might whisper, in a song or in an interview, he was always an American, just as, his ancestors sailing from Scandinavia to Scotland, he
was fated to become Irish. That here came from there, that there are no separations, that all parts of himself and his music are one. Picking up the notion from Morrison, Mark Knopfler might have caught it best by throwing it away. There’s a Scottish piper and highland drums in his 2000 “What It Is,” a heartbreakingly hard-boiled history lesson—when he bends the line “The ghost of Dirty Dick is still in search of Little Nell” against a thief-in-the-night fiddle part, it breaks my heart, anyway—and buried in Knopfler’s muttering is “the Caledonian blues.” When in 1970, at the heart of
Moondance
, the album that brought Morrison an audience that would stay with him, he let the words “Ere the bonnie boat was won / As we sailed into the mystic” float the music, this might have been what he meant.

The most remarkable aspect of this crackpot theory is that it might be true. Certainly that is how the Virginia novelist Sharyn McCrumb sees it. “The first Appalachian journey,” she writes, citing the geologist Kevin Dann’s 1988 study
Traces on the Appalachians: A History of Serpentine in the Americas
, “was the one made by the mountains themselves.”

 

The proof of this can be found in a vein of a green mineral called serpentine which forms its own subterranean “Appalachian Trail” along America’s eastern mountains, stretching from north Georgia to the hills of Nova Scotia, where it seems to stop. This same vein of serpentine can be found in the mountains of western Ireland, where it again stretches into Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and the Orkneys, finally ending in the Arctic Circle. More than two hundred and fifty
million years ago the mountains of Appalachia and the mountains of Great Britain fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Continental drift pulled them apart, at the same time it formed the Atlantic Ocean.

The mountains’ family connection to Britain reinforced what I had felt about the migration patterns of the early settlers. People forced to leave a land they loved come to America. Hating the flat, crowded eastern seaboard, they head westward on the Wilderness Road until they reach the wall of mountains. They follow the valleys south-southwest down through Pennsylvania, and finally find a place where the ridges rise, where you can see vistas of mountains across the valley. The Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the Cornishmen—all those who had lives along the other end of the serpentine chain—to them this place must have looked right. Must have felt right. Like home.
And they were right back in the same mountains they had left behind in Britain.

 

“Caledonia Soul Music,” an eighteen-minute piece recorded in 1970, passed on to the FM station KSAN in San Francisco, played often, and never released, can contain all of that without distortion. With almost no words, it is all suggestion, and the music is so bottomless that any words one might bring to it from somewhere else can seem true, just as the right melody, the right voice, can make banal lyrics seem unbearably profound. It’s the most complete and in a way the most modest statement of Morrison’s music: as if there were, somewhere, a form to which all of his best work aspired, a form that could never be realized, except that this time it was.