by Greil Marcus
The song went on, with horns, another guitar, maybe a mandolin, backing singers coming across with a quiet sympathy. The story went on. And yet, by the end—when the singer went from the record company party to an interview with a rock critic to another party in a fancy apartment on Fifty-Second Street—the shift in the song that in 1972 was lost in a mass finale, everyone playing at top volume, now came to the fore. After everything—after murder, after indifference, after flattery, after a no to all of it—everyone in the song turned to their windows, shocked, as perhaps they never were before, to see that the streets were now filled with people, people neither killing each other nor avoiding each other but marching as one, shouting for freedom, in the moment celebrating the truth that they already had it. Morrison looked out his window, surprised, confirmed, but most of all happy. “Can I get a witness!” he said, as if the words were no less a folk theme, part of the collective imagination, the common memory of anyone who might have already passed through the song, as Lead Belly testifying that “They was driving the women, just like the men” or Frank Hutchison promising “I won’t be dead, just won’t be here no more” when you came looking for him and he wasn’t there.
Saint Dominic’s Preview (Warner Bros., 1972).
“Saint Dominic’s Preview” (1996) included on SULT—Spirit of the Music (Bottom Line/Koch, 1997) and on Catalog Strays 1965-2000 (Wild Card bootleg).
SWEET THING. 1968
The music strides into its field like fate, and there are no obstacles: at the start, at the end of each phrase, the ping of a triangle marks the next step in the flight. It’s the strangest thing—in this song, which I’ve never been able to play only once, that tiny moment can become the axis on which the whole piece turns. At first there’s only Morrison’s strum and Richard Davis’s bass; as the arrangement takes full shape, as strings come in to take the measure that that ping once did, the chiming sound disappears. It’s easy to forget—there’s no triangle-player’s wing in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But when the song starts again, there it is, signaling a simplicity that the singer will soon leave behind. You can always recover it—you can even drag the song back and wait for the sound over and over again. You can’t tell if the singer would even want to. Moving fast, he may have already forgotten the place in the song you don’t want to leave.
After two and a half minutes, Davis seems to want to shut the song down. His bass makes a clacking sound, as if to put the brakes on the rhythm as everyone else rushes ahead; the brakes don’t hold. My my, my my, my mmm-my my, my my my, Morrison muses; he takes a breath, and in one of the highest points in a song made of high points—“And I will run my merry way and jump the hedges first,” is the first line; the image is so thrilling you never lose sight of it as the song moves on, and the singer never does stop jumping—he shifts into a higher gear. He finds an image that is as adult as the first is childlike, carrying specters the grown man cannot gainsay, an image that is less abandoned, more determined, but as much a sign of freedom, saying “And I will raise my hand up into the nighttime sky”—And I will raise my hand up into the nighttime ...
skyyyyyyyyyy
—and like the sound of the triangle, which is the song itself pausing for an instant to draw a breath, the moment of suspension is everything.
A minute later, Davis makes the same clacking sound again. This time he does take the reins of the music, and Morrison begins to drift away from the song. “Sweet thing,” he says, as he’s said throughout, but now that changes into “Sugar baby”—“Sugar baby, sugar baby,” a phrase from before the blues, a phrase that helped shape it, a face hiding inside all the songs Morrison grew up loving, a phrase that now belongs to him as much as it ever belonged to Lead Belly or Dock Boggs.
Van Morrison, “Sweet Thing,” Astral Weeks (Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, 1968).
TAKE ME BACK. 1991. JENNIFER JASON LEIGH, 1995
Nostalgia pulls down like quicksand, and it’s always had Van Morrison in its grip. He was twenty when he made “The Story of Them,” about the band’s days in Belfast at the Maritime Hotel, but the scene as he looked back was so perfect, the long-lost names and faces standing out so clearly through the haze of the intervening decades, or rather year, that he might have been eighty—even though, as he wrote and recorded the song, Them had yet to put out its second album. “Gotta walk away,” he sang, tailing off, as if leaving the past behind was the same as building a palace for it.
All through his working life Morrison has fixed touchstones, talismans, charms—as if, from the time he was a boy, he saw the future as a forest, a wilderness of tangles and snares, and so like Hansel scattered crumbs that he might find his way back to a true home, except that his crumbs were old Ray Charles records. As the years have gone on he has turned ever more frequently to songs he treasured as a boy—not for lack of his own songs, or even for fun or out of affection, but as if to validate his own songs, anchor them, or test the truth of his songs against songs that, the feeling must be, can’t lie. Even as his musical heroes have appeared in his songs as characters—Ray Charles, Lead Belly, Jackie Wilson, Billie Holiday, Sonny Boy Williamson, Charlie Parker, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Mahalia Jackson, Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Lester Young, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jay McShann, John Lee Hooker, Jerry Lee Lewis, Muddy Waters—he has covered John Lee (the first Sonny Boy) Williamson’s “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” and “Take Your Hand Out of My Pocket” by Rice Miller, the second Sonny Boy Williamson, Bobby Bland’s “I’ll Take Care of You,” Waters’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me,” Charles’s “Lonesome Avenue,” “Georgia On My Mind,” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” but most often in a bland, passive way, as if to take nothing from them. And that is to say nothing of How Long Has This Been Going On, Morrison’s 1996 album with Georgie Fame, filled with compositions by the jump blues king Louis Jordan, King Pleasure and Lester Young, Mose Allison, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, and Ira and George Gershwin’s title song; from the same year, Tell Me Something, an entire album of Mose Allison numbers; You Win Again, his 2000 album with Lynda Gail Lewis, shooting back and forth between covers of records by Hank Williams, John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley, Smiley Lewis, and Jerry Lee Lewis; and, with The Skiffle Sessions, recorded at Whitla Hall in Belfast in 1998, Morrison’s reunion in spirit and flesh with Lonnie Donegan, with Dr. John and longtime British jazzman Chris Barber along for the ride, Lead Belly everywhere: “Alabamy Bound,” “Frankie and Johnny,” “Good Morning Blues,” “Goodnight Irene,” “Midnight Special.”
Walking side by side in this never-ending stroll through the bowers of days when all was cool, when the sound of another voice, a young person’s first apprehension of art, could make it seem as if he and the world were one—when the terrors of childhood and the alienations of adolescence disappeared in that moment when you understood just how Ray Charles pressed down so hard on the chorus of “Lonely Avenue,” and why—is the alienation that will not disappear: the alienation from the world in which you have to live. It’s the cheats and liars and frauds and thieves and parasites and writers and suck-ups and managers and promoters and record companies and the people you called friends, all of them, but more than anything it’s the so-called modern world, throwing itself in your face every day, so proud of itself, so sure of itself, so sure and proud that it has left the past behind, and you with it, unless you’re ready to play a game you don’t remotely comprehend.
It’s no secret that when one reaches his or her forties, maybe fifties, almost certainly his or her sixties and seventies, the world as it presents itself in advertisements, talk, technology, dress, movies, music, money, and perhaps most of all manners, the way in which people walk down the street, the way they say hello or goodbye or don’t bother to do either, becomes an affront to one’s entire existence. One may reach a point, as the historian Robert Cantwell puts it so gracefully, when one’s “life begins to go into the past”—that, or your whole fucking frame of refe
rence.
Morrison has sung about the parasites in song after song, from his whole string of demos in 1968 to “The Great Deception” in 1973, across the last twenty-five years in the likes of “New Biography” (someone’s written another book about him), “A Town Called Paradise” (“copy cats stole” his words, songs, melodies), the self-explanatory “Big Time Operators” and “They Sold Me Out,” and the no-one-listens-anyway anthem “Why Must I Always Explain,” which is a good song. But he has sung far more powerfully about escape, about running from the modern world, vanishing from it as if you were never there. On Hymns to the Silence, a twenty-one song set illustrated with photographs of grubby Belfast streets released in 1991, the theme was as ever-present as Lead Belly on The Skiffle Sessions—or rather it was Lead Belly, Lead Belly changed from flesh to idea. “I’m Not Feeling It Anymore,” with “Have to get back,” sung with bitter acceptance, as if there’s nothing left to feel; “On Hyndford Street,” with “Take me back, take me way, way, way back” the opening for an entire catalogue of a teenager’s discovery of the world, reading “Mr. Jelly Roll” and “Mezz Mezrow’s ‘Really the Blues,’” and “‘Dharma Bums’ by Jack Kerouac / Over and over again.” But none of that is really any preparation for Morrison’s nine minutes and eleven seconds of “Take Me Back.” Wait, wait, you could be forgiven for asking, didn’t we already hear that?
Morrison opens with a few seconds of harmonica so wistful you might be tempted to shut the song off right there, but the pace is too slow, already too distant—the music is not giving itself away. The harmonica continues to push, as if through fog. There’s a sense of defeat. “Well, I remember,” the singer says. “When life made more sense.” Morrison will sing variations on this line (“Take me back, take me back, take me back, take me way, way, way back, way back, to when, when I understood”) across the length of the song, and it’s more painful every time. The singer has been forced to make this confession: to admit that the world no longer has a place for him, a place he may not deserve. He has made a wasteland, alluring, even beautiful, and dead; that is where the yarragh is in this song.
He drops down into a whisper, only a hint of piano and guitar behind him, and the music, now in a realm the modern world can’t enter, a place of almost silence, ends without a marker, a note to tell you it has ended; it merely isn’t there anymore. And it’s as if you’ve fallen asleep for less than a second; nothing close to nine minutes seems to have passed.
But that was only the song’s first life, and not its real life. That comes five years later, in the movie Georgia.
Released in 1995, the film pits Jennifer Jason Leigh’s notalent junkie punk singer Sadie against Mare Winningham’s Georgia, Sadie’s sister and a folk singer all but worshipped by her legions of fans. Georgia’s voice—which is also that of Winningham, who has made her own albums—is all mellifluousness to Sadie’s—Leigh’s—horrid cracks and discords. The heart of the picture comes at a big AIDS benefit. Winningham appears to sing “Mercy,” an uplifting ballad; her simple, modest “Hello” to the crowd brings a torrent of applause. “Mercy will you follow me,” she sings, and the audience knows the answer: how could it resist? Then comes Sadie with nine drunken minutes of Morrison’s “Take Me Back”—weirdly, exactly nine minutes and eleven seconds of “Take Me Back.” Her seizing of the stage for an endless, norange, flat, mindless assault on the defenseless song is presented in the film not as music but as a psychotic breakdown. It’s meant to be as excruciating for the audience in the movie theater as for the people in the movie’s concert hall; plainly, Sadie will keep singing until she or the song drops dead. Ultimately her sister appears on the stage like a fairy godmother, softly strumming her guitar, easing the madwoman off the stage.
Watching this car crash, you can’t tell if this is the actor Leigh singing as Sadie or simply Leigh doing the best she can, and it doesn’t matter. Sadie has nothing to bring to the song but the death wish that Morrison’s song as he wrote it contains, something which, as Morrison recorded the song, is smothered by artistry, by a voice that cannot hide either the imagination inside of it or the command behind it. Leigh has nothing to bring to the song but will: no lift, no tone, no tricks. In Jonathan Lethem’s phrase, she’s an animal wandering through a karaoke machine, tangled in the gears and wires. All she can do is turn a concert hall into the street behind it where a junkie like her shows you her teeth as she asks for change, and then if you stop tries to tell you the story of her life. But she sings with the same upand-down, back-and-forth refusal of time that women have always brought to songs, specifically work songs—and as the late musicologist Wilfred Mellers wrote of such music, 12 “Through repetition it carries the singers beyond the body’s thrall. It at once affirms and transcends the physical, inducing a state of trance, even ecstasis, when the women begin to yell a magical ‘music of the vowels,’ which is beyond literate sequence and consequence.”
What a remarkable thing to say: beyond consequence. But once the idea is there, you can hear Leigh travel beyond consequence—or rather, when the consequences of her performance arrive, they seem false, perhaps because Leigh’s Sadie has touched the ecstasy Mellers calls down. Railing her takemebacks like someone hammering a single nail so many times she’s now hammering through the wood, there are moments when the words come loose from themselves, and the singer is loosed from meaning, from purpose, from having to justify her existence to anyone at all—for seconds as the song grinds on, she is free. The song cracks open; a horde of beetles swarms out of it, and behind them all the naked, tortured men and women out of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Then Winningham’s Georgia finally gets her sister to finish the song, to shut up. There’s the barest ripple of clapping, no more than a sign of relief. Leigh—Sadie—immediately falls back into her crazy-pathetic persona, but in a way you don’t want to believe, as if she’s ashamed of what she’s done. “Thank you!” she says, her words smeared. “God bless! You’re the real goods! Keep drinkin’—around the edges—I love you. I love you, Georgia,” she says, sounding as if she’s begging forgiveness for burning Georgia’s doll collection in the fireplace when they were kids—and with the mere mention of Georgia’s name there’s lots of applause.
For nine minutes and eleven seconds, though, in a trance of terrible singing, Leigh has taken you right out of her notvery-good movie. While you were out, you were somewhere oddly quiet—a place that with “Take Me Back” Van Morrison marked on a map and Sadie the punk found.
Robert Cantwell, “Twigs of Folly” (1997, unpublished).
Wilfred Mellers, A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (New York: Oxford, 1985), 32, 33.
Jonathan Lethem, “The Fly in the Ointment,” in Best Music Writing 2009, ed. GM (New York: Da Capo, 2009), 186.
Miss Mary Morrison and Calum Johnston, Kate Buchanan, and Flora Boyd, “Robh thu ’sa’ bheinn?” on Scottish Tradition 3: Waulking Songs from Barra (School of Scottish Studies: University of Edinburgh, Greentrax, 1993, recorded 1965–1967). Earlier traditional recordings by Mary Morrison, made by Alan Lomax in 1951, can be heard, along with contemporaneous recordings by Penny Morrison, on World Library of Folk and Primitive Music: Scotland (Rounder, 1998).
Jennifer Jason Leigh, “Take Me Back,” from Georgia—Original Soundtrack (Discovery, 1996). Also includes covers by Sadie’s punk band, which includes Joe Doe of X, of the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again” (Doe) and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (Doe, Leigh, and Smokey Hormel), and of Lou Reed’s “Sally Can’t Dance” (Doe and Leigh), plus, most startlingly, Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times (Come Again No More)” by Mare Winningham (at the beginning, making you feel they never arrived) and by Leigh (at the very end, as if there’ll never be anything else, and shouldn’t be).
Them, “The Story of Them” (Decca, 1967, UK), included on The Story of Them Featuring Van Morrison (Polydor, 1998).
Van Morrison, “Take Me Back,” Hymns to the Silence (Polydor, 1991).
———with
Georgie Fame & Friends, How Long Has This Been Going On (Verve, 1996).
———Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison (Verve, 1996).
———and Linda Gail Lewis, You Win Again (Virgin, 2000). “Sometimes you make mistakes,” Morrison said to Dave Marsh in 2009 when Marsh asked about the Fame and Allison and Lewis albums. “And sometimes you’re bored.”
———and Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber, The Skiffle Sessions—Live in Belfast 1998 (Virgin, 2000).
MYSTIC EYES. GREEK THEATRE, BERKELEY. 2009
At a concert where Morrison has played his way through all of Astral Weeks, surrounded by a four-person string section with a lead violinist, two drummers, guitarist Jay Berliner from the original sessions in 1968, an electric guitarist, a bass player alternating between bass guitar and bass fiddle, keyboard player (piano, organ, harpsichord), two female backup singers, a one-man horn section, a woman on acoustic guitar and steel guitar, with Morrison himself moving between alto sax, piano, acoustic guitar, harmonica—he finishes “Madame George,” the last song of Astral Weeks as he will present it tonight, and floats into fragments of “Listen to the Lion,” that long, speaking-in-tongues song from 1972. “All ... my ... love ... comes tum-bling down,” he chants. Suddenly it seems to be absolutely clear, the most obvious thing in the world, that from its first notes to its last Astral Weeks is nothing more than a version of Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour”: “Not a song, but an epic,” Jon Landau wrote in as good a line as music writing has left behind. Nothing more, and perhaps nothing less. I thought of the film of Roddy Doyle’s novel The Commitments, the story of a teenage Dublin soul band, taking their stand in the late 1980s, when nobody knows and nobody cares, but the Commitments will make them care. (Morrison himself was solicited for the role of Joey “The Lips” Fagan, an old trumpeter the kids bring in to have someone to look up to, some link to a past they can create but not remember.)13 Now it’s the night of their big show, Wilson Pickett himself is in town, they do everything they can to get him to come to their show, to bless them with his presence, to give them a face to look into that they will never forget as surely as Wilson Pickett will forget theirs. The show ends; he isn’t there. But it was a great show. The boys and girls in the Commitments justified their existence—their existence on earth, not merely their momentary existence as a soul band. And as they scatter, as they raise their glasses, the film finds Mr. Pickett—no actor, the man himself. His own show is done; tells his limo driver to take him to this other show, this band, what are they called? Of course he’d sung “In the Midnight Hour” that night. Where else would Van Morrison have first heard Astral Weeks?