When That Rough God Goes Riding Read online

  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.

  Ralph J. Gleason, “Rhythm: A Young Irishman Haunted by Dreams,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1 March 1970.

  “My father was listening”: interview with Dave Marsh, “Kick Out the Jams” (Sirius XM Radio, 8 March 2009).

  “The only time”: Jonathan Cott, “Van Morrison: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, 30 November 1978, 52.

  Mario Savio’s oratory can be heard on Is Freedom Academic? A Documentary of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley (KPFA-Pacifica Radio, LP, 1965). See also Robert Cohen, Freedom’s Orator (New York: Oxford, 2009).

  The Heart and Soul of Bert Berns (UMVD, 2002). Includes Berns’s productions of “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” and “Cry to Me” by Solomon Burke, “Cry Baby” by Garnett Mimms, “Piece of My Heart” by Erma Franklin, and “Twist and Shout” and “I Don’t Want to Go On Without You” by the Isley Brothers. The Bert Berns Story Volume 1: Twist and Shout 1960–1964 (Ace, 2008) features an end-of-the-journey-to-theend-of-the-night composite photo of Solomon Burke and Berns facing the abyss in the studio while Little Esther Phillips, in a gleaming white dress, looks on; it includes “A Little Bit of Soap” by the Jarmels, the obscure “If I Didn’t Have a Dime (to Pay the Jukebox)” by Gene Pitney, “Gypsy” by Ben E. King, “Look Away” by Garnett Mimms, “Mojo Hannah” by Little Esther Phillips, “Killer Joe” by the Rocky Fellas, and “Here Comes the Night” by Lulu. Sloopy II Music Presents the Songs of Bert Russell Berns (B00, no date, but going for $399 on eBay) collects forty-four tracks on two CDs, including “Here Comes the Night” by both Them and (in his unhinged PinUps version) David Bowie, “Are You Lonely for Me Baby” by both Freddie Scott and Otis Redding & Carla Thomas, “Baby Come On Home” by Solomon Burke and Led Zeppelin, “Cry Baby” by Garnett Mimms and Janis Joplin, “Goodbye Baby (Baby Goodbye)” by Solomon Burke and Janis Joplin, “I Want Candy” by the Strangeloves and Bow Wow Wow, “Piece of My Heart” by Erma Franklin and Janis Joplin, and “Tell Him” and “Run Mascara Run” by the Exciters.

  Van Morrison, Blowin’ Your Mind! (Bang, 1967).

  ———Astral Weeks (Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, 1968).

  PART ONE

  A GRIMY CINDERELLA IN A PURPLE STAGE SUIT

  MYSTIC EYES. 1965

  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.

  When lyrics appear in the song—as the Them guitarist Billy Harrison once put it so perfectly, when Morrison begins to “throw words at it”—you notice for the first time that there haven’t been any. Suddenly what was chaos, unformed, threatening, thrilling, a giant, gaping mouth—is now a story. There’s a singer and he’s going to tell you about something, something about walking down by the old graveyard and looking into the eyes of the dead. But then that breaks up, too. “Eyes,” he says again and again, the word fraying with each repetition, slipping the “mystic” that stands at its head, except when it doesn’t. Morrison seems to turn away from the word, from words altogether, as if only fools actually believe that phonemes can signify, that a word is what it names, that there’s any chance of understanding anything at all. The moment doesn’t have the force, the desire—the termite instinct, as the critic Manny Farber unearthed it, of “doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it”—of the first rampage of the music, which is like the harshest instrumental passage of Howlin’ Wolf’s 1951 “How Many More Years” turning into its own monster and turning against its own song. But the moment has its own humanity, which everywhere else is abstract: that halfsecond when the particular person singing the song’s words gives up on words, in frustration, in disgust, in triumph, fully entering the music as himself and nobody else, throwing a single “eyes” against the wall with the knowledge that neither it nor any other words will ever catch a half of what he means. You’re caught up in an irresolvable adventure that is taking place as you listen, in the notion that you can drop someone into the middle of a story and then jerk him or her out of it as if it were nothing more than a few minutes on the ra
dio, now a bad dream you’re certain is yours alone.

  Them, “Mystic Eyes” (Parrot, US, Decca, UK, 1965). Included on Them (Parrot, 1965) and The Angry Young Them (Decca, 1965). Collected on The Story of Them Featuring Van Morrison (Polydor, 1998).

  TUPELO HONEY. 1971

  Florida Tupelo Honey is one of the rarest honeys with an exquisite buttery flavor and light color. Tupelo trees thrive along the rivers and creeks of the Florida panhandle and have delicate fragrant blossoms that can produce wonderful tupelo honey crops.

  The Florida Tupelo flower is very delicate and blooms for only a very short time every year. Our beekeepers go through great lengths to keep our Florida tupelo honey pure by taking all the honey boxes off the hives and putting on clean empty beeswax combs right as the first tupelo flowers bloom. After about two weeks of bloom, we go out and take the honey boxes off the hives and spin it out to get the rare tupelo honey.

  The Tupelo blossoms have very delicate little pistols that secrete the nectar. A strong wind or hard rain can rip the blossoms from the trees.

  The blossoming period generally starts about the 20th of April every year and lasts about 3 weeks.

  The honeybees are very eager to visit the blossoms, as the nectar can be quite abundant in good years.

  Tupelo trees thrive in the river and creek bottoms where it is very wet.

  —Sleeping Bear Farms, Beulah, Mississippi, 2009

  Tupelo Honey was Van Morrison’s gorgeous Woodstock album. It featured tinted photos of Morrison, his wife, and horses, including one of Morrison dressed like a country squire, all woodsy splendor. At the time, the record was like propaganda for the notion of leaving the strife of the previous decade behind and starting a new life, free of care. One of the songs was even called “Starting a New Life.” There was “Old, Old Woodstock,” “When That Evening Sun Goes Down,” “You’re My Woman,” “I Wanna Roo You” (“Scottish Derivative,” read the parenthetical subtitle, not that you needed a translation), “Moonshine Whiskey.” Like “Wild Night,” the single that leaped onto the radio in a flash and lost its luster almost as quickly, constant airplay making its celebration of kids out on the street feel tinsel cheap, a record anybody could have made and hundreds of people already had, the songs were cartoons. Today they make me think of the “War Free Edition” of the New York Times people buy in Jonathan Lethem’s novel Chronic City. They make me think even more of something Dominique Robertson, then Robbie Robertson’s wife, said to me when not long after Tupelo Honey appeared I went to Woodstock to talk to Robertson about the Band. I was seduced by the bucolic ease of this little corner of upstate New York, a world apart, but she wasn’t. “Look at all this,” she said, her hand waving toward the window opening onto the mountains, the forests, the sun. “It’s everything people ought to want, and I hate it.” “‘This country life is killin’ me,’” she sang, making up a song likely no one else in town would have thought of in that moment in history. “There’s nothing here but dope, music, and beauty. If you’re a woman, and you don’t make music and you don’t use dope, there’s nothing here at all.”

  Maybe you could have heard that leaking through the cracks of Morrison’s songs; a place where even the chirping of the birds seemed to bless your love was too good to be true. But the most gorgeous number on the album was the title song, and it was too good not to be true.

  At almost seven unfolding minutes, it was a kind of odyssey. The constant invocation of “Tupelo honey” couldn’t not invoke Elvis Presley; he too was smiling over the song’s golden couple, as if they were living out all the best hopes of “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” It began with the most reassuring organ sound, gently picked notes on a guitar, a vocal that caressed the first verse, then ached through the chorus. You could miss the scrambled imagery of freed slaves and Camelot, “the road to freedom” and “knights in armor bent on chivalry”; you could catch it and feel part of a drama whose beginnings were lost in time and that would never end. “She’s an angel,” Morrison sang. “She’s an angel,” repeated the male voices behind him, the big, friendly sound of men who are jealous only of the fact that they’re not as deserving as the singer has proven himself to be.

  Morrison’s voice grew bigger as the song went on, his singing more expansive, words turning into gestures, his arms spread wide, a finger pointing to the sky. “Yes she is,” he almost whispered back at the chorus, as if answering himself in his own mind. “Yes she is!” he’d say elsewhere, banishing all doubt. The music went forward in steady steps, the knights sure in their mission, King Arthur with Excalibur in his hands.

  The song had opened with an odd four lines, an old saying that seemed to come out of nowhere and go back there. “You can take. All the tea in China. Put it in a big brown bag for me. Sail right round all the seven oceans. Drop it straight into the deep blue sea.” As Morrison smoothed the words, they struck a balance that gave the song as it moved on both its lightness and its weight—but finally there comes a point when all of this comes to a halt. Morrison has been all but kissing his words, lolling over them; then his clearwater tone breaks, and he takes a breath. The band drops back. “You can take,” Morrison says, “all the tea in Chiney”—and with “Chiney,” the vulgar word capsizing the ship, the scene shifts from the Woodstock hills and the open seas of the seven oceans to a Belfast wharf where an ugly old man is trying to sell you something you know you shouldn’t want, and someone else over there in the shadows is waiting for a chance to expose himself. “Drop it, smack dab, in the middle of the deep blue sea,” Morrison says, with the “smack dab” hit hard, the first word percussive, like a slap in the face, the “Drop it” instantly producing the image not of a bag of tea but of a gun, the singer daring anyone to stop him, to question him, and a smell of violence rises to the surface of the line.

  “Because—” he announces: because she’s as sweet as Tupelo honey, even if, for a second, the face that gets slapped by smack is hers. Literally, the words say that it doesn’t matter what the world is or what it throws at me: love conquers all. But as music, as words changing as they’re spoken, they say nothing clearly. “All the tea in Chiney,” then that “Because—” those words as they jump out of the song and bang up against each other make as true a yarragh, a breach, as any other. They can mean “Top of the world”—with James Cagney’s murderous, self-immolating “Ma!” right on top of that. They can be funny. They can be crafty, inveigling, secretive, illegal. They can say, as the song says elsewhere, “You can’t stop us.” They can say fuck it. But whatever they say, that so strangely confiding “Chiney,” a single word carrying a whole world of old movies up its sleeve, Charlie Chan prowling an opium den, Marlene Dietrich telling you “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily,” the peremptory, dismissively final “Drop it, smack dab, in the middle,” they all take what appeared to be the song away from itself. In the middle of “Tupelo Honey” you can feel the rumble of “Mystic Eyes.”

  The first time I heard the song, this passage was like a bump in the road, and I drove right over it. Ever since, it’s been the whole song, the part of the story that I wait for, like a punch line that no matter how many times you’ve heard it before never loses its sting.

  Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City (New York: Doubleday, 2009).

  Van Morrison, “Tupelo Honey,” on Tupelo Honey (Warner Bros., 1971).

  BABY PLEASE DON’T GO. 1965

  In 1965, Them’s “Baby Please Don’t Go”—usually cited as a rock ’n’ roll update of a song first recorded by the Mississippi blues singer Joe Williams—had the virtue of sounding as if it had emerged full-blown from Van Morrison’s forehead. After a twenty-five-second lead-in—knife-edge notes on a guitar, following footsteps from a bass, drums and organ kicking up noise, harmonica curving the rhythm—Morrison leaps into the song as if he hasn’t noticed the musical horde racing ahead, and as with “Mystic Eyes” in an instant the band is chasing him. There’s a desperation in his hurry that all but rewrites t
he song: he’s singing “Well, your man done gone,” but you can hear it as “Your mind done gone” and believe it.

  “It’s so frantic,” said my friend Phil Marsh, a guitarist in Berkeley in 1965, at a time when the country blues—the likes of Joe Williams’ Washboard Blues Singers’ 1935 original, a rickety, windblown number with fiddle and washboard that was like a shack, or Williams’s 1940 remake with John Lee Williamson, the first Sonny Boy, on harmonica, which was like a fishing skiff on a lake, rocking every time a man cast but still when he waited—was a religion: a religion of fatalism, in which there was no hurry. But Them’s “Baby Please Don’t Go” isn’t frantic. Just as you don’t see Morrison coming, you’re not ready when the music empties out. The band, at first onto the song like a flare shot in the air, begins to fragment. As the bassist pushes against the beat, poking it, the guitarist, the session player Jimmy Page or not, seems to be feeling his way into another song, flipping half-riffs, high, random, distracted metal shavings. Though the excitement of the music doesn’t flag for a second, silence—anticipation—seems in command. Something is going to happen. You don’t know what.