When That Rough God Goes Riding (8 page)

Here Morrison is a bandleader, not a singer. Really his role is as a conductor, but he appears more as a pathfinder,
issuing directions under his breath, his mission to lead everyone out of the forest and into the light, except that sometimes the light in the forest is too much to turn away from, and so as a pathfinder he tries to get the band lost. Thus after stolidly announcing the title as acoustic guitar, bass, and piano slowly open the theme, a mandolin behind them hinting at a story that for the time being will be untold, Morrison lets his lips murmur, and you can think he’s building up to words to sing. He isn’t. There’s a sigh:
Yeah
. They have all night.

“Only rarely onstage do bands achieve reality,” David Thomas, the leader of Pere Ubu, the Cleveland band that in 1975 set out to find what, it seemed to them, no one else was looking for, once said. “Mostly it’s in rehearsals, in lost moments.” As with the Beatles in 1969, chasing all over the room for songs that were running from them like mice as they tried to make the album that would appear as
Let It Be
, seizing for a moment on Buddy Holly—after all, hadn’t they named themselves for his Crickets? It’s a mess, one stumble after another, and then John Lennon finds “Maybe Baby.” “We used to do it,” he says pathetically, as if there’s no chance they could do it now. George Harrison follows, and there’s an explosion of longing and loss, and now one song is another, there are no borders, they’re rolling in the meadows of melody, no difference at all between “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “Crying, Waiting, Hoping”—and then Lennon moves into “Mailman Bring Me No More Blues” and the rhythm is fixed, the others lock in behind him, the progression is firm, the words are clear, and all the life is gone. It’s like Dana Wynter turning her face to Kevin
McCarthy at the end of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
just after she’s gone over to the other side.

The reality that the Beatles found for a few unshaped, indelible seconds is what Morrison sustains for eighteen minutes. As he says softly every time the piece seems about to run away from itself, “Take it ... take it slow,” he could be shaking hands with Morton Feldman, the composer complaining that no matter how quietly anyone tried to play his music it was still “too fuckin’ loud and too fuckin’ fast.” Here Morrison is at once composer and audience. As the composer he knows what he wants, but as the audience he knows that when the composer knows where he or she wants to go but the musicians don’t, anything can happen, and what might happen can go beyond anyone’s intentions. So at the center of his circle of musicians, Morrison waits. At times the band is as bent on finality as the Rolling Stones in their 1966 “Going Home,” an ordinary three-minute song that turned into eleven minutes that were never repeated; then Morrison takes them to the point where the idea of an ending makes no sense. “Get some horn,” Morrison might say, making the three words into a song in itself, and then from a saxophone comes a sound so warm you regret the fact that it will go away even as you grasp for it.

“You got it,” Morrison says. Everywhere, pieces of music are hiding within the foreground sound, stepping out at any time. The drift of the music, a sort of nineteenth-century campfire lullaby, a crew looking for the headwaters of the Ohio but for a night allowing the music to let them believe they’ve already found it, is so complete that when in a flat,
dumbly unmusical voice Morrison announces that “John will play a taste of mandolin” (
The kitchen will close in ten minutes
) it sounds like a joke on the credulousness of the musicians themselves:
Can you believe it? They thought I was serious!
But John Platania takes up the cue, quietly ringing out a calm, head-down progression over drums, bass, a bare piano, a spectral saxophone, as Morrison mutters and hums—and then, perhaps two minutes in, he hits what is almost a discord and the notes lift in volume. “
Ahhhhh!
” Morrison responds, involuntarily, as pure reflex, feeling the music in his stomach, the yarragh as pure pleasure.

There’s a way everything he did before this moment was to reach the point where as a musician who is also a listener, he would find that sound, and everything he has done since an attempt to find it again.

It’s the
way he affirms “I’m gonna put on my hot pants” as if he’s trying to twist himself into them. But were they pink?

It’s an
affront, this performance—to the song if not the songwriter. And where does someone get the nerve to take on a song like this?

In 1966, on Bob Dylan’s
Blonde on Blonde
, the arrangement was a web, a cocoon for the singer. The more he filled in the story, the hazier it became. The touch was soft, the music sweet. By the end, it didn’t matter if knowledge won out over regret. The final “I / Just can’t fit” was a sad wave goodbye. It was a great make-out song.

By 1971, when Van Morrison and his Caledonia Soul Orchestra went into Wally Heider’s Pacific High Studios in San Francisco to play a show for a live broadcast on KSAN, the Bay Area’s leading independent contemporary music station, he was a hometown star. The year before, having flown in for a show from his home in Woodstock, he’d spent a day driving from San Francisco to Marin County to
Berkeley and back to San Francisco; the radio was on and he was all over it. Just as “Gloria” dominated the AM airwaves in the Bay Area in 1965—the next year the local Top 40 station KFRC held a poll to determine the three hundred greatest records of all time (the previous fifteen years), and “Gloria” was in the top ten along with the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” and two versions of “Louie Louie”—by 1970 Morrison, an indistinct name almost everywhere else, probably got more airplay on KSAN than anyone else. “Madame George.” “Brown-Eyed Girl.” “T. B. Sheets.” “Here Comes the Night.” Practically everything from the 1970
Moondance
, except for the TV-commercial jazz of the title song: “Come Running,” “Caravan,” “Crazy Love,” “Into the Mystic,” “Brand New Day,” “Glad Tidings.” All in an afternoon. You could almost see the lightbulb going on over Morrison’s head.

In 1968, Morrison married a Bay Area native who called herself Janet Planet and moved with her from Cambridge to Woodstock—as she would say later, to meet Bob Dylan. Morrison, she said, considered him his only peer. Now Morrison had a home in Marin County. Nationally his albums were charting in the high twenties or low thirties; here he was number one. He could do no wrong.

That night in San Francisco, with an audience in the studio, he sang Woody Guthrie’s “Dead or Alive.” He sang “Hound Dog” and Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me” and Fats Domino’s “Blue Monday” along with songs from
Moondance
and the new
Tupelo Honey
. He sang “Friday’s Child,” an all but unknown song he’d recorded with Them. All in all it was a happy night, which made the perversity of Morrison’s “Just Like a Woman” that much more stark.

With Dylan’s original the music is like a wheel. With every break between chorus and verse the song returns to its beginning, and a feeling of calm settles over the traumas the people in the song have already left behind. It’s not just a great make-out song: at the end, when the singer imagines himself and his old lover meeting again, at some party where nobody knows what they once were to each other, it’s a seduction song. “You break just like a little girl.” Oh! No one understands me like you do!

All of that is stripped away when Morrison starts in on the tune. He takes the first lines flatly, simply, as if he has too much respect for the words to sing them. The backing—guitar, piano, light drums—is perfunctory, until it’s stiff, its stiffness soon enough turning hackneyed, with Morrison using the instruments as one to smash down after each word of the chorus:

There are melodramatic touches, as in almost any TV drama or bad movie where any important phrase is paused and repeated—
No matter what happens, I’ll be there for you—I’ll be there for you
, except that here it’s “Queen Mary, she’s, she’s my friend,” or “It was your, your world”—all but semaphore flags to alert the audience that something terribly important is being said, to drive home the actor’s
or the singer’s sincerity, to the point that any phrase that might smell of portentousness is guaranteed to perfume the room.

Is it all a setup, a man casing a joint in respectable clothes because tomorrow he’s going to rob it blind? That’s a question the performance refuses to answer; you have to answer it yourself. As Morrison moves into the second verse
he seems even more stolid than before. He could be giving a speech. The band is still merely following along, the piano perhaps slightly brighter than before. But then the pianist adds a triplet, and the music exerts the smallest pull on the singer. You might not even notice—but unconsciously, your memory registers the moment. There’s a shift—
—and there’s a lilt in the last phase, an opening to
and as you feel Morrison draw a breath you feel the band rush forward to draw it for him—
—the “stay” shredding in his mouth as the words are blown out of their own song by a scream that is somehow more controlled, more melodic, than anything before, the melody now armed with passion behind it or the fright it creates
and you feel that nothing could rise higher than this fire until the next word does, and the next word is “I,” five times, not repeated but each exploding syllable modulated into the next until it is all one unholy word, a plea the singer is addressing to himself. What just happened? Is there anybody left alive?

And then, in the most perverse gesture of all, Morrison produces the next lines, again flatly, as if he could care less. He ornaments a phrase with that TV-script repetition that mocks you for buying the phony emotion behind the delivery in the first place
and so floridly that when he finishes with a curt
there really is a period after the word.

And then he does it all again. You want to say you won’t be fooled this time, but you are. After the song is blown
apart for the second time, you want him to say he meant every ache, every cut, but he doesn’t.

He does get out of the song in a way that humanizes what he’s done, that puts the singer in the song, for the first time one of its characters, not its assassin: “You were weird, and I was weird, too.” You play the song again, trying to make it happen as your own heart has played it.

Ever since
Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing,” his first record and a worldwide hit, Mark Knopfler has had a touch. Usually it’s the ability to find a doomy, fatalistic melody and let it send a man who gives off the feeling of someone who never stops looking over his shoulder down the street. When it works—on “Romeo and Juliet” and “Wild West End” on Dire Straits’ 1980
Making Movies
, or the single “What It Is,” from
Sailing to Philadelphia
—you could be walking in the footsteps of Michael Caine’s Jack Carter.

Anyone who bought
Sailing for Philadelphia
hoping for more of what he or she was hearing on the radio was not going to be happy. It was a famous-names showcase, and the first thing that caught your ear was James Taylor on the title song, in his wounded-puppy “You’ve Got a Friend” mode. Elsewhere there were the Christian pop singers Chris
Rodriquez and Tim Davis, the Americana duo Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford of the once-wonderful British pop group Squeeze.

The first four songs on the album were so bland you could forget you were listening to it. The first verse of “The Last Laugh,” crooned by Knopfler, was no different. And then, one minute into the song, there was Van Morrison.

A single word—the “learned” in “Games you thought you’d learned”—is enough to take you off the record, into a country whose only maps are in Morrison’s pockets. This is a place made of regret, where the deepest impulse is to return to the scene of the crime, so everything can be made right. If you can’t do that, can’t you sing a song that the person you wounded might hear, and wouldn’t that be almost as good? But what if the wrong was done to you, by someone who likely hasn’t thought of you since? If that person heard you, coming out of a radio they didn’t turn off because they like Mark Knopfler, would anything happen in their heart?