by Greil Marcus
The thought passed in an instant as Morrison sang “And my love comes tumbling down” one more time, now no distance at all between that and Pickett’s deliberate, unstoppable pledge:I’m going to wait til the midnight hour
That’s when my love comes tumbling down
It was the sort of reverie that comes at those times in a show when in the audience you feel as if you are seeing all around the event as it happens, the past not past at all, more voices than those on the stage singing the song. Then Morrison raised his harmonica, as if to ornament his words, and flew like his own missile into “Mystic Eyes.” It was shocking, blood in the sylvan glade, the headless horseman in the Kentucky Derby riding the wrong way, and it lasted only long enough for it to be uncertain if it had happened at all.
Roddy Doyle, The Commitments (Dublin: King Farouk, 1987; New York: Vintage, 1989).
The Commitments, dir. Alan Parker (1991, DVD 1999, 20th Century Fox). Johnny Murphy played Joey “The Lips” Fagan.
Wilson Pickett, “In the Midnight Hour” (Atlantic, 1965).
BEHIND THE RITUAL. 2008
“Don’t need no juice to unwind,” Van Morrison says in “Don’t Go to Nightclubs Anymore,” early on on Keep It Simple, his last album of new songs to be released as I write. Then he says the same thing in different ways three more times. Go ahead, knock this bottle off my shoulder! But the only song on Keep It Simple that makes its own time and place is anything but simple.
“Behind the Ritual”—you could make up a picture of Morrison as Michelangelo’s Adam holding out his hand to God’s, with the opposite of Adam’s cool gaze on his face, and get away with using it for the cover of a third of all the albums he’s ever made. The religious yearning in his music that first surfaced explicitly in “Astral Weeks” has been a constant ever since, like references to backstreet jelly roll or gardens all wet with rain. It can be as airborne as it is on “Full Force Gale” in 1979—when Morrison says, “I’ve been lifted up again / By the Lord,” Toni Marcus’s fiddle can make it feel as if you’ve been lifted high enough to at least glimpse what the singer is seeing—or as entombed as it is all over Avalon Sunset ten years later, an album that leads off with a duet with the 1950s British rock ’n’ roll pioneer and noted evangelical Cliff Richard. It smothered Morrison’s voice for nearly two decades. But here it’s never clear what the ritual is or what it promises.
“Behind the Ritual” takes seven minutes to end the album—to inhale it like smoke and make it disappear. It starts with Morrison strumming a ukulele and the drummer moving slowly from a woodblock to traps. The words are slurred, or maybe it’s that the old man singing them is singing them as clearly as he can, testing his tongue against his pursed lips, like someone whose fingers are so webbed with arthritis he has to draw words instead of writing them. Morrison lifts his saxophone, and gets the lucidity he can’t find on his own.
It all burns off like fog. He’s taken you into an alley, the same alley, he seems to be saying, where Uncle John met Long Tall Sally, but also a place where boys just into their teens once gathered to do all the things the stolid singer in “Don’t Go to Nightclubs Anymore” says he doesn’t do, doesn’t want, doesn’t need: drinking, smoking, bragging about girls they haven’t touched and the snappers they’re going to give them, talking jive, saying fuck and shit when someone mentions church. Now that stolidity—the granite face on the front of the album that has “Behind the Ritual” on it—has been replaced by desire, and desire bleeds all over the music. “Given the courage, we live by moments of interference between past and present, moments in which time comes back into phase with itself,” the historian Roger Shattuck wrote in 1958. “It is the only meaning of history. We search the past not for other creatures but for our own lost selves.”
It is the deepest nostalgia, where some things you did, some things you saw, and some things you heard about replace any sense of life as it is, its true burdens, struggles, paradox, failures, betrayals. You can argue against the idea, but you can’t argue against music if it moves you, you can only listen or change the station or turn off the radio and say you don’t do that sort of thing anymore. But you can also get the feeling, as Morrison leads his old self back into the alley, sits down with the boys, drinks their wine, offers them his, whispering, because what they do is secret, not the act so much as the warmth of friendship and of the forbidden that the act leaves in the air like perfume, that this is the mystic, this is the astral plane, nothing given by God or located in another dimension, but memory, true or false.
It’s true if the singer can make it true. Morrison circles the words like faces that are slipping their names, bits of tunes that won’t let you sing them. He circles the people he finds in the alley in the same way, talking them into being. What he’s summoning is all in the past, but you can sense that the drama has yet to play itself out. It’s an adventure, and no one knows, no one could understand. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” says one of the boys out of Henry V, and Morrison answers him out of Julius Caesar: “How many ages hence / Shall our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown?”
The theme takes shape in steps. There is drinking in the alley, there’s making time with Sally, there’s dancing drunk in the alley, there’s making up rhymes in the alley, there’s turning and spinning in the night, verse after verse, each one a slight variation, a tiny step past the one before it. From the old man sharing a secret there’s another man, perhaps no less old but stronger, less afraid of himself, singing as if hoping someone outside of the alley will hear him, or to make certain the buildings rising up from the alley hear him and never forget. But he also wants to explain. It’s all one quest: behind the ritual, he says, you find the spiritual.
“Behind the ritual” now become the key words on which all other words turn, around which all the rhythms of the song will shape themselves. And as always in Van Morrison’s highest moments, the words come loose from their own song and remake it, leading the singer down their own path. “The only time I actually work with words is when I’m writing a song. After it’s written, I release the words”—and now the words circle the song and choose the words they want to marry. At one point, as if to free the words from their own bodies, to divest them of any chance to signify, to let the word begin again in sound and find its own way out, Morrison throws away them all—Blah blah blah blah blah blah
Blah blah blah blah blah blah
Blah blah blah blah blah blah
Blah blah blah blah blah blah
Blah blah blah blah blah blah
—but it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work because it isn’t needed. By now the words themselves are rituals. The words are already free, and immediately as they regain their form they cast their spell again: Getting hiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh, behind the ritual, so high—behind the ritual.
Behaaaaaand the ritual, the singer twisting the word, making it gnarled and threatening—behind the ritual, the singer wanted to tell you, is the spiritual, but now the ritual, gathering every Saturday night in the alley with a bottle of sweet wine, is the spiritual, and the spiritual, that state of grace, is this tawdry ritual. The words begin to come apart, away from the transcendent, from that sense that there is always something unknown, a revelation that will leave you changed, behind the holiest rituals: isn’t that what the church is for? No, it’s life and what you want from it between the time you wake and the time you sleep.
The song pulls the singer farther and farther away from the truths it’s rightfully his duty to tell you, the lessons you can learn from his mistakes, the peace of mind that is his and can be yours. But the voice is so expressive, so contained within itself and capable of going anywhere: “this music,” the director and one-time rock critic Wim Wenders wrote about Morrison in 1970, “gives you a feeling and a notion of what films could be like: perception that doesn’t always jump blindly at meanings and assertions, but rather lets your senses extend further and further.”
You never do get out of the alley with this song. You never get back to the rest of the album, or for that matter to the rest of Morrison’s career. It could stop right here. But over the course of that career one might have said the same thing a dozen times.
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (1958; rev. ed. New York: Vintage, 1968).
“The only time”: Jonathan Cott, “Van Morrison: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, 30 November 1978, 52.
Wim Wenders, “Van Morrison,” Filmkritik, June 1970, collected in Emotion Pictures (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 53–54.
Van Morrison, “Behind the Ritual,” on Keep It Simple (Lost Highway, 2008).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go to Dave Marsh, William, Paula, and Erik Bernstein, Jon Landau, Jonathan Cott, Ben Schafer of Da Capo, Clinton Heylin, the indefatigable Toby Gleason, Danielle Madeira of Another Planet, Joel Selvin, Josh Gleason, John Elrod, Lynda Myles, Marc Smirnoff, Devin McKinney, Scott Foundas, David Patton, and the gracious and forthcoming Michael Sigman; to Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, Marvin Garson and the late Sandy Darlington at the San Francisco Express-Times, the late Lester Bangs and the late Barry Kramer at Creem, Jon Carroll, Bill Broyles, and Nancy Duckworth at New West, David Frankel at Artforum , Bill Wyman at Salon, Graham Fuller at Interview, Alice O’Keefe at the New Statesman, and Jeffrey M. Perl of Common Knowledge; and to Emily, Cecily, Steve Perry, and Jenny, for the night at the Avalon Ballroom where this book first took shape.
INDEX
“Ain’t No Way” (Franklin)
Akbar, Haji
“Alabama Bound” (Lead Belly)
“Alabamy Bound” (Morrison)
“All Along the Watchtower” (Dylan)
Allison, Mose
“Almost Independence Day” (Morrison)
American Primitive II—Pre-War Revenants (Mattie May Thomas et al.)
“Anarchy in the UK” (Sex Pistols)
“And the Healing Has Begun” (Morrison)
Animals
Arlen, Harold
Armstrong, Louis
Arnold, Eddy
Arthur, Brooks
Astral Weeks (Morrison)
“Astral Weeks” (Morrison)
Austin, Gene
Autry, Gene
Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco, Calif.
Avalon Sunset (Morrison)
“Baby Please Don’t Go” (Hopkins)
“Baby Please Don’t Go” (Them)
Baer, Dov
“Ballerina” (Morrison)
Band
Bangs, Lester
Barber, Chris
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic,”
Beach Boys
Beam on, Bob
Beatles
Beautiful Vision (Morrison)
Beefheart, Captain
“Behind the Ritual” (Morrison)
Belfast Telegraph
Berliner, Jay
Berns, Bert
Berry, Chuck
“Beside You” (Morrison)
“Big Mac from Macamere” (Thomas)
Biomass
Blair, Tony
Blake, William
Bland, Bobby
Bledsoe, Jules
Blonde on Blonde (Dylan)
“Blowin’ in the Wind” (Cooke)
Blowin’ Your Mind! (Morrison)
“Blue Monday” (Domino)
Blue Velvet (Lynch)
Blues Breakers
Bogart, Humphrey
Boggs, Dock
Bowie, David
“Brand New Day” (Morrison)
Breakfast on Pluto (Jordan)
“Bright Side of the Road” (Morrison)
“Bring It On Home to Me” (Cooke)
Bronson, Carl
Brown, James
“Brown-Eyed Girl” (Morrison)
Burdon, Eric
Burke, Solomon
“Burning Ground” (Morrison)
Butterfield, Paul
Byrds
Cagney, James
Cale, John
Caledonia Soul Express
“Caledonia Soul Music” (Morrison)
Caledonia Soul Orchestra
Callaghan, James
Camelot
“Can’t Help Falling in Love” (Presley)
Cantwell, Robert
“Caravan” (Morrison)
Carlos, John
Chandler, Raymond
Charles, Bobby
Charles, Ray
Chieftains
Chronic City (Lethem)
Clapton, Eric
Clark, Petula
Clark, T. J.
Cocks, Jay
Cohn, Nik
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Collingwood, R. G.
Collins, Edwyn
Collis, John
“Come Running” (Morrison)
The Commitments (Doyle)
The Commitments (Parker)
Common One (Morrison)
“Coney Island” (Morrison/Neeson)
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (De Quincey)
Conlon, Gerry
Control (Corbijn)
Cooke, Sam
Coolidge, Calvin
Corbijn, Anton
Corregidora (Jones)
Cott, Jonathan
“Crazy Jane on God” (Yeats/Morrison)
“Crazy Love” (Morrison)
Crickets
Cromwell, Oliver
“Cry Baby” (Mimms)
The Crying Game (Jordan)
“Cry to Me” (Burke)
Curtis, Ian
“Cyprus Avenue” (Morrison)
“Dangerous Blues” (Thomas)
Dann, Kevin
Das, Andrew
Davis, Richard
Davis, Tim
Dawes, John G.
Days Like This (Morrison)
De Quincey, Thomas
“Dead or Alive” (Guthrie)
DeShannon, Jackie
Diamond, Neil
Dick Slessig Combo
Diddley, Bo
Dietrich, Marlene
Difford, Chris
Dire Straits
Dolphy, Eric
“Domino” (Morrison)
Domino, Fats
Donegan, Lonnie
“Don’t Go to Nightclubs Anymore” (Morrison)
Doors
“Downtown” (Clark)
Doyle, Roddy
Drifters
Dulfer, Candy
Dylan, Bob
Edwards, Harry
“Eight Days a Week” (Beatles)
Ellis, Pee Wee
Enlightenment (Morrison)
Epstein, Brian
“Fair Play for You” (Morrison)
Faithfull, Marianne
Fallon, Larry
Fame, Georgie
Farber, Manny
Feldman, Morton
Figgis, Mike
Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Calif.
Fleetwood Mac
Fontana, Wayne, and the Mindbenders
Franklin, Aretha
Franklin, Barry
Franklin, Erma
Freddie and the Dreamers
Free Speech Movement
“Friday’s Child” (Them/Stansfield/ Morrison)
“Full Force Gale” (Morrison)
Gaitskill, Mary
Gang of Four
Garcia, Jerry
Georgia (Grossbard)
Gershwin, Ira and George
“Glad Tidings” (Morrison)
Gleason, Josh
Gleason, Ralph J.
“Gloria” (Them)
“Going Home” (Rolling Stones)
Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet
Goldman, Mac
Goldsboro, Bobby
Good As I Been to You (Dylan)
Goodfriend, Steve
Grateful Dead
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
Greek
Theatre, Berkeley, Calif.
Green, Leo
Green, Peter
Guthrie, Woody
“Gypsy Woman” (Impressions)
Hallucinations
Halpert, Herbert
Harper’s magazine
Harrison, Billy
Harrison, George
“Have You Seen My Baby?” (Newman)
Hawkins, Ronnie
Hawks
“He Ain’t Give You None” (Morrison)
The Healing Game (Morrison)
“The Healing Game” (Morrison)
Heaney, Seamus
Heath, Edward
Heider, Wally
“Help Me” (Williamson/Morrison)
Hendrix, Jimi
Henry V (Shakespeare)
“Here Comes the Night” (Them)
Herrmann, Bernard
Holiday, Billie
Holly, Buddy
Hooker, John Lee
Hopkins, Lightnin’
Hopper, Dennis
How Long Has This Been Going On (Morrison)
“How Many More Years” (Wolf)
Howlin’ Wolf
Hutchison, Frank