When That Rough God Goes Riding (14 page)

In
Control
, Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film about the late-1970s Manchester band Joy Division, the four young men take the stage for the first time, the actors themselves playing and singing—and when they finished “Transmission” I realized half a minute had gone by and I hadn’t taken a breath. What Sam Reilly as the singer Ian Curtis had done with his face even more than his voice was as shocking as anything I’d ever seen on a screen.

That’s what happens here. The out-of-nowhere assaults in “Just Like a Woman,” those split-second explosions of rancor and desire, will here be the whole song.

The ensemble drops back, again leaving only the piano player and the drummer, but its arrival was so thrilling it remains as a shadow, a threat that could return at any time. A saxophonist has begun to noodle behind Morrison, like someone wandering in from another room, too stoned to notice he’s barged into someone else’s song. “You got,” Morrison shouts, his volume high, a sense of abandon pushing against his control of every word, the tension between abandon and control turning each word into a bomb, with the feeling that the singer is himself frightened by his own words, “to hold on,”

The second chorus clamps down, the desperation in the title phrase so intense you can’t imagine where it is that’s left to go. Everyone pulls back—and inexplicably, as if maybe each and every one of them has gone as far as they can (maybe everyone needs a drink, needs a cigarette), they leave the song to the saxophonist.

It might be the worst instrumental break in the history of the form. Meandering, tripping over his own feet, bumping into the amplifiers, hitting sour notes again and again, the saxophonist takes you out of the song, out of the music, out of the building, into the street, and not up to your room with Gloria following to knock on your door as soon as you’ve closed it, merely back to your car, which has a smashed right window and a ticket on the windscreen.

But a certain gravity has already made itself felt; you can’t see it, you can’t necessarily feel it even if you try to call it back, but as soon as the band returns it’s as if it never left. They begin right where they left off, at the edge of the same cliff; if anything they’re closer to the edge. As Morrison presses on, the guitarist begins to chime, quietly, tiny high notes building toward a finale that is already present as an inevitability, a presence that already gainsays whatever might be left to be said.

The chiming gets louder. Morrison begins to pound single words, one sequence after another. “Even even even even even” shoots out like white water, but “Watch it! Watch it! Watch it!” pulls against the momentum of the band—it couldn’t be more sudden or complete if Morrison were holding up the flat of his hand. In the drama in which Morrison has trapped you, at first it might seem that he’s doing this to forestall the fate of the person to whom the song is addressed: to save her, to save him. But as soon as that thought appears, if it does, it turns on itself. What you’re hearing is the singer’s rage that it’s too late, his bitterness that no one listened, no one heard, that it didn’t have to end this way.

They reach the chorus again. It goes on, doubled, tripled, “You can’t stop, you can’t stop, you can’t stop now,” the backing singers turning a somersault, “Can’t stop now, can’t stop now, Friday’s child,” for a full minute and a half, and it’s transporting, but it doesn’t matter. The song had already ended, back there in the middle of the curse, the singer pleading with his charge to hold on to what she or he had, knowing he or she had already given it away.

There’s applause. Morrison goes right into “Que Sera, Sera”—“I asked my mother, what shall I be”—which turns out to be an introduction to “Hound Dog.”

“With a
record as evocative as
Astral Weeks
,” Josh Gleason said to Van Morrison in 2009, for a high-profile NPR piece on the occasion of the release of
Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl
, “there’s a nagging desire to understand what in your life inspired it—to know where the songs come from, what they mean.”

“No, no, no, because, it’s not
about
me,” Morrison said with a vehemence that didn’t sound defensive—as his denials, of anything, so often do. “It’s totally fictional. These are
short stories
, in musical form—put together of composites, of conversations I heard, things I saw, and movies, newspapers, books, and
comes out
as stories. That’s it,” he said, though already his tone had shifted to that of utter wonder that people won’t accept this. “There’s no more.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d had to answer the question, which he’d never done in a manner anyone liked. “Did you
have anyone in particular in mind?” the folk singer Happy Traum asked Morrison in 1970; it was Morrison’s first
Rolling Stone
interview. “Did you know anyone like that?” “Like what?” Morrison said, his guard up in an instant. “What’s Madame George look like? What are you trying to say ... in front. So I know.” “It seems to me to be the story of a drag queen,” Traum said reasonably. “Oh no,” Morrison said. “Whatever gave you that impression? It all depends on what you want, that’s all, how you want to go. If you see it as a male or a female or whatever, it’s your trip. How do see it? I see it as a ... a Swiss cheese sandwich.”“Everybody gives me a quizzical look, a question mark stare, and they think I know what they’re talking about,” Morrison said after a moment, stepping back, trying to explain. “‘What about like blah blah blah ... ’ and they expect me to go ‘Yeah!’ It’s just not that simple.”

Eight years later he was again talking to
Rolling Stone
, this time with Jonathan Cott, whose technique as an interviewer has always been to elicit the most direct responses by throwing out the most off-the-wall questions, usually asking his subjects if they agreed with the sentiments expressed by, say, the Hasidic rabbi Dov Baer, “the Mazid of Mezeritch.” In this instance Cott stayed closer to home: “A friend of mine thinks Madame George is a perfume—you sing the name as ‘Madame Joy,’ and then there’s that scent of Shalimar.” “It seems to me to be the story of a drag queen,” Morrison said, as if he were Happy Traum and Cott were Morrison, except that he was laughing, and despite the fact that he had already told someone else that Cott’s friend might as well claim the prize: “The original title was ‘Madame Joy’ but the way I
wrote it down was ‘Madame George.’ Don’t ask me why I do this because I just don’t know.” “The question is,” Cott went on, missing a step, “who’s singing the song?” “The question might really be,” Morrison said, in a friendly manner, but with a gesture toward another plane of meaning that could not have been more pronounced if he’d knocked the writer’s notepad out of his hand, “is the song singing you?”

This was nearly three decades before the one-time rock critic Tom Nolan—perhaps following Morrison’s suggestion to his biographer John Collis that “Madame George” might have had something to do with his great-aunt Joy, who he, Morrison, thought might have been clairvoyant—argued for the
Wall Street Journal
that Madame George was in truth George “Georgie” Hyde-Lees, the wife of William Butler Yeats, known conventionally as Madame George Yeats, who died in 1968, the year “Madame George” appeared. She was a spiritualist who sparked Yeats’s work with automatic writing dictated by the dead, a technique Morrison, who in 1984 recorded Yeats’s “Crazy Jane on God” in a cracked voice, has used when blocked, cutting up copies of
People
magazine, rearranging parts of headlines and text, divining a line for a song ... and never mind that the given name of both Van Morrison and his father is George. If the character cannot be permitted to be made up, if it must be real—to borrow a phrase from another Irishman, well, as well her as another.

The tyranny of tying anything an artist might do or say to his or her own life, to give it the weight of the real, and switch off the lights on the weightlessness of the imagination—a philistine fear of art that found its most spectacular form in the JT Leroy hoax, which only seemed to convince people
that while taking fiction for autobiography remained the highest form of understanding, it was worth making sure that the person whose autobiography one was plumbing actually existed—was summed up all too well by John Irving in 1979. We were talking about the scene in
The World According to Garp
where Garp’s son Walt is killed, and about the many readers who’d written to him, saying, “I lost a child, too”—believing that any story that hit them so hard had to be true. “How do you respond to those letters?” I asked him. “Do you have any answer to those letters?” “I always answer those letters,” he said. “Those are the serious ones; those are the ones that matter.”

In Mary Gaitskill’s novel
Two Girls Fat and Thin
, a writer takes up the challenge of imagining whole worlds out of glimpses, out of a walk down the street:

It doesn’t matter if Gaitskill actually walked down a street where someone said the words that in her paragraph appear in quotation marks. A moment this closely observed has already gone beyond the limits of observation; it is already imagined. That is why any talk of the real, the lived, the experienced as a legitimation or validation of aesthetic response—really, nothing more than a permission for us to be moved by what we are in fact moved by—is a red herring at best. There are only two reasons people try to track Madame
George down, to link her to a real person: because the character is itself powerful, full of allure, and because of our own fear of the imagination, our fear that we are vulnerable to some trifle somebody else merely thought up. But Morrison’s translation is better: are you letting the song sing you, or are you trying to sing the song?

So let your imagination open up and drift. Let Madame George tell you who she is. Who do you think of? I think of Michael Jackson. I think of Marianne Faithfull, telling the same sixties stories—the sixties as the New Jerusalem, and she its consort, mother, and Merlin—over and over again, always with a glamour that is both grimy from use and full of its own imperious light, qualities you can hear in Faithfull’s own recording of “Madame George.” I think of the mother of one of my eighth-grade classmates. With her daughter as a front, she would hold parties for the class, fifteen of us from a Quaker school on the San Francisco Peninsula. She was the first bohemian I ever encountered: a single mother, when that was strange, if not a scandal, who dressed in silk, in long, loose dresses. She was heavily made up. While she never gave us alcohol, it was all around, fancy bottles displayed on tables and in cabinets, like a hint of future pleasures, and she always seemed drunk. She showed us her gun. She seemed to need to be around young people. At thirteen in 1958 this was seductive—and a relief to leave behind, to move on to high school, where, a few years later, one or two of my new classmates found their way to Ken Kesey’s acid farm, just up the road in La Honda, as she might have also, unless she faded away, chasing her own daughter’s youth until it too was used up.

Morrison first
recorded “Madame George” for Bert Berns’s Bang label in November 1967, as
Blowin’ Your Mind!
was climbing its way to #182 on the charts—a version not released until long after Berns’s death, and until long after the song, as it appeared on
Astral Weeks
, had achieved the kind of hermetic glow that transcends fame. Here it’s a production, as if at a party or a nightclub, with dead-end ambiance. Morrison is sarcastic, even sneering; behind him the Sweet Emotions do “the colored girls go” exactly as Lou Reed always heard it. The people in the audience, if this is a club, or on the couches and in the kitchen or in the doorways if it’s an apartment, are distracted, ignoring the singer, everyone talking and drinking. There’s bass, tambourine, and an electric guitar playing stripper blues like something out of the roadhouse scene in
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
, where women wander through the crowd naked and the floor is covered with a layer of cigarette butts that except for the dancers’ feet hasn’t been disturbed since the place opened. Morrison fights for space, draping cool over himself like an overcoat. It’s as if he needs to satirize the material to protect himself from it—or to protect the song from the crowd, which is to say the producer. “Then your self-control lets go / Suddenly you’re up against the bathroom door,” he says in lines that would be gone by the time he sat down with Connie Kay, Richard Davis, Lewis Merenstein. The crowd is egging him on, then yelling and shrieking. The music is busy and burdened. “We know you’re pretty far out,” Morrison says, as if his stand-up act is just about to completely dry up, as if all he’s really doing is schmoozing music business hustlers, as if he’d rather be
anywhere else. “I’ve got a tape in Belfast with all my songs on that record”—from
Blowin’ Your Mind!
—“done the way they’re supposed to be done,” he said after a show in early 1969, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. That night his own acoustic guitar completed a combo of a stand-up bassist and the
Astral Weeks
hornman John Payne; Morrison sang every song from
Astral Weeks
along with “Who Drove the Red Sports Car” and “He Ain’t Give You None” from
Blowin’ Your Mind!
which now took on drifting,
Astral Weeks
rhythms. “It’s good and simple, it doesn’t come on heavy. ‘T. B. Sheets’ isn’t heavy, it’s just quiet. It was the producer who did it, and the record company. They had to cover it with the big electric guitar and the drums and the rest. It came out wrong and they released it without my consent.”