Celebrating Van Morrison in advance of his 79th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.
It is unfortunate that my only clear image of the great Van Morrison is at The Band’s Last Waltz, where the pudgy Morrison, resplendent in an awful brown pants suit speckled with sequins, ends a sublime version of “Caravan” with a series of ludicrous leg kicks, all of which are unintentionally hilarious. I always have to remind myself that Morrison—with his “little fireplug body” to quote Lester Bangs—is one of the Immortals, and that his 1968 album Astral Weeks is one of the best rock LPs ever recorded and certainly in my Top Ten, and this despite the fact that I don’t even like half of its eight songs.
Less an LP than a spiritual attempt to storm Heaven, Astral Weeks showed Van Morrison to be a seeker in search of some unreachable mystical plane—like John Coltrane, only playing a kind of jazz-folk hybrid instead of free jazz. His vocal phrasing speaks to this search; he repeats words, stuttering and stammering and scatting his way to a breakthrough to some otherworldly place, while the mostly jazz musicians behind him play ethereally lovely melodies that provide the perfect counterpoint to his quest. I will go out on a limb and say this is more than just Morrison’s masterpiece—it’s the most spiritual rock LP ever produced, and Morrison the visionary’s most perfect expression of his attempt to utter the unutterable.
Astral Weeks was Morrison’s second LP. Recorded in 1967 with a crew of jazzmen only one of whom he’d met or played with, he told them to more or less wing it, and they did, to remarkable effect. Not everybody liked this approach; “No prep, no meeting,” said double bassist Richard Davis, whose remarkable playing dominates the contributions of his fellow musicians. “He was remote from us, ’cause he came in and went into a booth… And that’s where he stayed, isolated in a booth. I don’t think he ever introduced himself to us, nor we to him…”
The Velvet Underground’s John Cale—who was recording in an adjoining studio—echoed Davis’ comments about Morrison isolating himself from his fellow players, saying, “Morrison couldn’t work with anybody, so finally they just shut him in the studio by himself. He did all the songs with just an acoustic guitar, and later they overdubbed the rest of it around his tapes.” But this is untrue; Morrison WAS in a separate booth, but the other musicians were playing along in another room, all but the strings and horns that is, which were recorded after the songs had been recorded.
The LP has an autumnal tone; he is mostly looking back to his days in Belfast, especially on the song’s two “story” songs, “Cyprus Avenue” and “Madame George.” Both are heartbreaking in their own ways, and the latter in particular demonstrates how he used jazz phrasing and trance-like repetition in an attempt to transcend the surly bonds of this mortal coil. And it’s a beautiful thing, this failure to attain the unattainable; he may never get to where he wants to go, but then again, none of us ever does.
The LP opens on a majestic note with the cryptic but obviously spiritual title track. Morrison’s venture into the slipstream is lovely, and if it’s difficult to follow the train of his logic it’s clear he wants to be born again. Accompanied by a lovely flute, Davis’ great double bass, lots of acoustic guitar, and strings, Morrison slowly lets the momentum build, and build, and build, tossing off seeming non sequiturs until he’s practically speaking in tongues. Then, having reached an apotheosis, he lets us down easy, repeating that he’s “nothing but a stranger in this world.” “In another time/In another place” he repeats as the song slowly fades away, and by the time it’s over he’s whispering.
“Beside You” is one of the album tracks that don’t thrill me; slow and meditative, I’ve never dug its mood or melody. It features a lovely guitar and great vocals by Morrison, including some trance-like repetition (“You breathe in you breathe out you breathe in you breathe out”), but it doesn’t hit home because the song is too static and simply not lovely enough. As for “Ballerina,” it’s lovely and sensual but a bit too fey for my tastes. The horns are nice, and Davis comes in at just the right places, but it has never moved me the way, say, “Astral Weeks” does. “Ballerina” goes out on a mildly ecstatic note, thanks to Davis’ majestic bass, some great guitars, and the strings and horns, but to my way of thinking it’s a case of too little too late.
Having covered two of the song’s I don’t like much, I might as well toss in the third and fourth; album closer “Slim Slow Slider” is a slight bit of fluff compared to the more ambitious tunes on the album, and its slow and lackluster melody, which features acoustic guitars, Davis’ omnipresent bass, and flute, is nothing to write home about. Meanwhile, the spritely “The Way Young Lovers Do” has a cheesy horn section I can’t stand—vaguely mariachi, it reminds me of bad film soundtrack music, or a Vegas show tune—and Morrison, while in good voice, plumbs no spiritual depths; about the best I can say about this one is that while it would have fit on some of his more pop-oriented LPs, simply doesn’t fit here.
Ah, but to get to the great songs! “Sweet Thing” is definitely in my Top Ten songs of all time; sublimely beautiful, its acoustic guitars and Davis’ bass sweep you along in a meditation on young love that brings the best out of Morrison, who declares in ecstasy, “And I will never grow so old again/And I will walk and talk/In gardens all wet with rain.” The flute is fantastic, Morrison throws out some strange but transcendent lyrics (“And I shall drive my chariot/Down your streets and cry/’Hey, it’s me, I’m dynamite/And I don’t know why’”) and if you’ve got a heart this song will remind you of your youth, of hope and beauty and longing and the sense that all things were, once upon a time, possible. Which makes it all the more heartbreaking; his “sugar baby” with the “champagne eyes” is gone, lost in the flow of time’s passage that Morrison immerses himself in on Astral Weeks.
As for “Cypress Avenue” it’s probably the greatest and most moving song ever written about illicit sexual obsession, with Morrison singing about being “captured in a car seat,” watching the object of his love—who is “so young and bold/14-years-old”—on Cypress Avenue. Evidently the music critic Lester Bangs used to get into arguments for calling his hero a pederast, and who knows? What is important is the otherworldly melody, and Morrison’s very real torment (“I may go crazy/Before that mansion on the hill”) as he aches for what he can’t have. A flute, the strings, strummed guitars, and Davis’ remarkable bass follow Morrison as his longing grows until he’s stuttering, about the rainbow ribbons in her hair and how he’s caught one more time in his plight. He repeats, “Way up on way up on way up on,” then takes the song out repeating “baby” over and over again.
As for “Madame George,” it’s slow and lovely and paints a sympathetic portrait of an aging transvestite, who opens his home to the little reprobates of Cypress Avenue, who repay him with coldness and indifference. And, if I’m reading it right, Morrison is singing about one young man there who actually feels for Madame George, and who falls “into a trance, sitting on a sofa playing games of chance/With your folded arms and history books you glance/Into the eyes of Madame George.” Like a latter-day James Joyce Morrison fills the song with details of Dublin life, but it all ends in sadness, with a “No” instead of that great Joycean “Yes,” as Morrison lets the song build, singing, “Say goodbye to Madame George/Dry your eye for Madame George/Wonder why for Madame George.”
But the song reaches its apotheosis as Morrison’s young protagonist gets up to leave and Madame George “Jumps up and says/’Hey love—you forgot your glove,’ which sends Morrison into a mesmerizing trance, as he sings, “And the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love that loves to love the love that loves,” which is as close as I can get to transcribing this outpouring of sheer seeking after the ultimate, the mystical maximum, after which Morrison follows the youth fleeing Madame George’s flat out onto Dublin’s back streets while Morrison repeats, “Dry your eye your eye your eye your eye, etc.” “Get on the train,” he sings as the song ends, repeating, “This is the train/This is the train/This is the train,” and we’re left not knowing what becomes of Madame George, or the boy, although it seems unlikely they’ll ever see one another again, but certain they’ll both gather their fair share of sorrow, just as everyone does in this world.
Astral Weeks is Morrison’s landmark, despite its weak points, because while he would go on to write spiritually infused pop songs and put out plenty of more consistent LPs than Astral Weeks he would never stretch so hard to achieve the infinite, to sing the unsingable and speak the unspeakable, as he does here. Like John Coltrane he is aiming straight for Heaven, by using repetition until it becomes a mantra that becomes a trance and then a star, new to the firmament, but unlike Coltrane he is setting his attempts to attain infinity in a very finite place, namely Cypress Avenue in Dublin. He is fusing the infinite to the finite and the result is an album which, if it doesn’t move you, makes me wonder about your humanity. He may not have achieved the impossible, but he gave it his best shot, and listening to him makes me feel like that poor Humbert Humbert captured in his car seat, mesmerized by something that no one can have.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
