When That Rough God Goes Riding

by Greil Marcus

  What was missing, perhaps, was a sense that the song was taking place in a world that was not quite the real world, and that the person to whom the song was addressed was in danger; that was what the song said when Van Morrison recorded it with Them late in 1965. When it appeared in 1966 on the group’s second album, Them Again, it was first of all strange. As they listened to Them, people who already knew the song by heart weren’t certain they had ever heard it before. You can imagine Bob Dylan might have felt the same—or at least as he might have when he first heard Sam Cooke sing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It’s one thing to send a song out into the world on the strength of a voice made of conviction; it’s another to have it come back to you as an eagle.

  “The feeling that music can create in a listener doesn’t come from our opinion or image of the artist who makes the music, if our response is at all genuine,” Jon Landau wrote of the Doors and the Memphis soul duo Sam and Dave in 1968. “It doesn’t come from the artist telling us what he’s trying to do or acting it out. It is there in the way he says the words more than in what the words say. And if Jim Morrison screams at us to ‘Break on through to the other side,’ well, Sam and Dave don’t have to tell us about it because their music is on the other side.” That’s where Them is with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

  It begins like the first page of a detective novel, with three clipped, odd bass patterns, like a knock on the door, but with an odd fatalism: the cadence says that the person knocking is going in whether anyone opens the door or not, or that he already knows what he’s going to find. “I knocked two longs and two shorts as instructed,” the notes say, as Raymond Chandler says in The Little Sister. “Nothing happened. I felt jaded and old. I felt as if I’d spent my life knocking at doors in cheap hotels that nobody bothered to open. I tried again. Then turned the knob and walked in,” but this time when Philip Marlowe walks in he finds that behind the door of Room 332 in the Van Nuys Hotel is a black hole.

  It’s a scene set by dark and shapeless notes from an electric piano; they sweep you off your feet. As Morrison comes in, singing deliberately, there are sharp, bright notes from an acoustic guitar, a deepening of the piano sound from an electric guitar, what could be a single chord from an organ sustained for the whole performance, but what’s uncanny is that while the emotional pressure of the performance continues to rise, Morrison bearing down harder verse by verse, the overwhelming sense of displacement, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, comes entirely from the piano, and the way that throughout the performance it remains altogether on the same plane. It’s this that creates an atmosphere of unrelieved suspense and jeopardy.

  You’re catching no more than a glimpse of an ongoing drama. The detective walks right in, but then he vanishes, and the people in the room—the person speaking, the person he or she is speaking to—are not leaving, and not because, as with the person Marlowe finds—Beyond the little hallway the room widened towards a pair of windows through which the evening sun slanted in a shaft that reached almost across the bed and came to a stop under the neck of the man that lay there. What it stopped on was blue and white and shining and round. He lay quite comfortably half on his face with his hands down at his sides and his shoes off. The side of his face was on the pillow and he seemed relaxed. He was wearing a toupee. The last time I had talked to him his name had been George W. Hicks. Now it was Dr. G. W. Hambleton. Same initials. Not that it mattered anymore. I wasn’t going to be talking to him again. There was no blood. None at all, which is one of the nice things about an expert ice-pick job

  —they’re dead. They’re in a limbo Dylan’s recording hardly hints at, which is why in his performance “Drawing crazy patterns on your sheets” is unsurprising and why when Morrison sings the line it’s frightening.

  It wasn’t a story for the asking. Invited on stage for an encore at a Bob Dylan show at Wembley Arena in London in 1984, Morrison took up the song once more. “After it’s written, I release the words”—that can be true for anything Morrison sings. It doesn’t matter whose words they are. But with Dylan’s band locked into a hand-clapping beat, a wail that lifted “crying” out of “Crying like an orphan in the sun” only gave the word an instant’s flight. Even against Chrissie Hynde’s high, keening shouts on the title phrase at the end of every verse the singalong crowd’s insistence that the song not only couldn’t but shouldn’t speak anything other than a dead language ruled.

  Jon Landau, “Soul Men,” Rolling Stone, 20 January 1968, 18.

  Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (1949; New York: Pocket Books, 1963), 36, 38.

  Bob Dylan, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” on Bringing It All Back Home (Columbia, 1965).

  Them, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” on Them Again (Parrot, US, Decca, UK, 1966), included on The Story of Them Featuring Van Morrison (Polydor, 1998).

  Van Morrison, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” London, 7 July 1984, on Whenever Bob Sheds His Light on Van (bootleg).

  PART TWO

  I’M GOING TO MY GRAVE WITH THIS RECORD

  ASTRAL WEEKS. 1968

  From the sightlines in Berkeley, California, where I lived then and live now, I recall 1968 as a year of horror and bad faith, fervor and despair. Most of all there was the sense of knowing that when you drew a breath you were breathing history along with the air, or the smoke—but that doesn’t mean you knew what history was, or would be. History was being made in the instant, which said nothing about what would be included in the books yet to be written, or left out of them, as if what goes in and what goes out stays the same. These names made history in 1968: John Carlos, Bob Beamon, Tommie Smith. They were shouted around the world. Which still echo, which is barely a name at all? “Still the spirit of ’68,” John Lydon, born to the world as Johnny Rotten, sang in 1979 with his band PiL, when 1968, not a concept but a year, a real time, seemed much farther away than, in this era of media anniversaries, it does now. The song was “Albatross”; the singer sounded beaten down by history, 1968 a huge bird around his neck, but he also sounded as if he knew the beating wings were the wind at his back.

  Berkeley was a lookout and a hideout. The great storm of student protest that would convulse the U.S.A. and nations around the world had begun there in 1964 with the Free Speech Movement. It was three months of daily speeches, marches, building occupations, and finally, played out in a Greek Theatre, high drama. That drama—a university in convocation with itself, everyone present, the leaders of the institution speaking quieting words, then a single student, standing to speak, immediately tackled and dragged out of sight, an act of violence actually revealing the face of power behind the face of reasonableness—brought that moment to a close and opened a field that in the years to come would be crossed by thousands. But in 1968 the spirit that animated a simple demand for the free exercise of rights students had assumed were theirs—because they had learned such a story in their classrooms and then, as if by instinct, began to put them into practice—had in the most familiar arena long since turned cheap and rote.

  When in May of 1968 a rally was held in Berkeley to celebrate the poorly understood but exciting revolt taking place in France, activists distributed leaflets denouncing the police violence that had dispersed the rally before the rally took place. When students at Columbia University in New York, protesting what they saw as the university’s colonialist appropriation of property in Harlem, shut the school down— with the novel technique of occupying one building, and then, when the police arrived, filing out, only to seize another building, and then another, and another—Berkeley radicals called on their fellows to “Do a Columbia”: not for any reason, not in the face of any injustice or insult, but for lack of anything better to do.

  With the Vietnam War all but rolling back across the Pacific to poison the United States itself, it was as if people turned to spectacular lies and glamorous trivialities to hide from themselves the fact that their imaginations had turned to ice. Truly enormous events taking place e
lsewhere did not travel. Word of Prague Spring, even the meaning of the Soviet invasion that crushed it, arrived only in fragments, and no speaker stood up to put the pieces together. News of the massacre of hundreds of students in Mexico City, just before the Olympic Games were to begin there, was suppressed from the start, and so profoundly that the facts would take nearly forty years to come out of the ground. But in the United States few if any looked; curiosity about the world withered.

  It’s clear now that the signal song of that year, the song with which all through the 1990s and into the twenty-first century Bob Dylan closed his concerts, was “All Along the Watchtower”—a modest, querulous song that ended with words that were anything but quiet, regardless of how simply they were sung: “Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howl.” The song occupied the moral center of Dylan’s album John Wesley Harding, which was released in the last week of 1967; like the rest of the music, those words of warning made their way onto and out of the radio slowly, like a rumor. Too slowly: when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis in April, and then, in June, in Los Angeles, Robert F. Kennedy, running for president, was shot and killed, the song did not play, even in the minds of those who watched the funerals on television. It did not give voice to the awful sense of disease, ruin, and damnation that seized the country so fully it could only be channeled into pathetic calls for gun control and a ludicrous riot in Chicago against a presidential nominating convention where, had he lived, Kennedy would have almost certainly lost. To play against these events, to play into them, the song needed the harsher, louder, wilder, even triumphant treatment Neil Young would give it in 1992—an arrangement Dylan himself immediately adopted—and that Van Morrison could have fashioned at any time.

  The Mexican government wanted a clean Olympics, a clean show, and so did the world. That is why the massacres took place, why the government buried the event literally and figuratively, and why the cover-up was a complete success, with witnesses disappeared or conventionally murdered for years afterward to keep the peace. So the games went on as planned—except for John Carlos and Tommie Smith of San Jose State in California, American entrants in the two hundred–meter dash. Inspired by Harry Edwards’s Olympic Project for Human Rights, which had originally called for a boycott of the Olympics by all black athletes, they had a plan. They would run the race; they would win; they would mount the victory stand; and then, as the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” before the eyes of the entire world they would bow their heads and raise black-gloved fists in salutes of black power and black unity. With beads around their necks they would signify the deaths of those leaders like King who had been assassinated, and the nameless thousands gone who had been lynched and thrown from slave ships; with shoeless feet they would signify poverty; in their silence they would speak out. On October 16 the plan was realized: Smith finished first, tying the world record, and took the gold medal, Carlos finished third and took the bronze. As Peter Norman of Australia, who took the silver medal—and who, that night, would wear an Olympics Project for Human Rights badge in solidarity—stared straight ahead, Smith and Carlos gestured.

  They marked, or scarred, their national anthem as definitively as Jimi Hendrix would a year later at Woodstock. Though no one, as far as I know, drew the connection at the time, Hendrix’s furiously, exultantly distorted, bottomlessly complex recasting of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was not only a version of what Smith and Carlos did with it, his version may have been inspired by theirs.

  This event has never been forgotten. Carlos and Smith were treated as terrorists, as if their fists were guns and they had fired them. They were expelled from their team, sent home, and covered in obloquy. Though they never backed down, as the years passed neither man’s affirmation of what he had done matched the other’s. There were disagreements over whose idea the act was, over who owned it. As they do still, across the decades interviewers worked to draw out resentment and betrayal, to find a crack in the image of the two men on the stand that for all of the confusion added to it after the fact remains indelibly plain.

  On October 18, two days after Smith and Carlos were removed from the games, the American long-jumper Bob Beamon launched himself. He had never jumped farther than twenty-seven feet and four inches; he would never again jump farther than twenty-six feet and eleven and three-quarter inches. But this day, when he landed, he had become the first person in history to jump twenty-eight feet; he had become the first person in history to jump twenty-nine feet. He had traveled twenty-nine feet and two and one-half inches through the air. From 1935 to 1968 the world record in the long jump had increased by eight and a half inches; this day Bob Beamon broke the world record by almost two feet. When he saw his mark on the scoreboard, he fell to his knees and covered his face in shock.

  It was an act for which there are no parallels and no metaphors. There can be no statue for it, as, in 2005, at San Jose State University, a statue was unveiled celebrating the act performed in 1968 by John Carlos and Tommie Smith: figures of the two men on the victory stand, with Peter Norman’s place empty, so that, as Norman said when the statue was unveiled, “Anybody can get up there and stand up for something they believe in.” “We felt a need to represent a lot of people who did more than we did and had no platform,” Smith said. It was about human rights, Norman said: “The issue is still there today and they’ll be there at Beijing and we’ve got to make sure we don’t lose sight of that.”2

  Bob Beamon’s name is little mentioned today. For twentythree years, jumpers edged closer to his record, inch by inch; mathematically, it was finally broken by Michael Powell in 1991, but in the way that his act has never been matched, even in imagination it was never really surpassed. In 1968, almost everything became part of history even before people realized what had happened, and for the rest of their lives, they and others, many not born at the time, would argue over what they had done. But what Bob Beamon did was in a queer and ineradicable way outside of history, where it remains—and in that sense, in a way different from all the banners raised in 1968, it is an image of freedom against which there can be no argument at all.

  As I hear it now, and as I think I heard it then, Astral Weeks, recorded in three days in September and October 1968 in New York City, and released on the Warner Bros.–Seven Arts label in November, caught the same spirit. In historical terms it didn’t make sense. It didn’t, in the smallminded way art and politics are so often linked, reflect the great events of the day, any more than Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, Astral Weeks’ true kin, did. John Wesley Harding might have been a testament that, as Jon Landau put it in 1968, “Dylan has felt the war,” but in its quiet, its lack of hurry, its insistence on setting its own pace, its refusal even to acknowledge that the person whose name was on the album cover had ever done anything before, it like Astral Weeks refused to speak the language of the time, and in the way that the time has been rewritten into a single rotting cliché of VIETNAM STUDENT RIOTS LBJ LSD SEXUAL REVOLUTION BLACK POWER NIXON neither John Wesley Harding nor Astral Weeks can be translated back into that language. “It did come out at a time when a lot of things a lot of people cared about passionately were beginning to disintegrate, and when the self-destructive undertow that always accompanied the great sixties party had an awful lot of ankles in its maw and was pulling straight down,” Lester Bangs wrote in 1978 about Astral Weeks. “So, as timeless as it finally is, perhaps Astral Weeks was also the product of an era.” But it wasn’t any yearning for the strife and revelations of another time that accounted for the fact that a few years ago, in a class I was teaching, four students out of sixteen, none of them older than twenty-one, named it as the album they most loved. How did it reach these people, just in the sense of from here to there, of roundabout? How did it enter their lives, music that was made well before they were born and yet spoke a common language? The record spoke to these people then; as far as they cared it was made for them, they understood its language as soon as they heard it. No
one had to translate it for them, no one had to contextualize it, no one had to offer them any lectures about the music or the politics of the late sixties or the career of Van Morrison.

  If Astral Weeks caught the spirit of Bob Beamon’s event, then it also partook of it. As I understand history, Bob Beamon’s jump would not have happened as it did if the skies had been different that day in Mexico City, if he had received a call from his wife that morning, or a different call than he did, or if that day’s paper that morning had carried a different story, and the same must have been true when the producer Lewis Merenstein brought Van Morrison into a studio with a few New York City jazzmen: the bassist Richard Davis, the drummer Connie Kay, the guitarist Jay Berliner, the percussionist and vibraphonist Warren Smith, Jr., and the flautist and soprano saxophonist John Payne. The music that resulted wasn’t jazz. It wasn’t blues. It wasn’t rock ’n’ roll in any ordinary or hyphenated manner, but it fit perfectly on the radio in between Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” or Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” It was closer to folk music, and closer to “Barbara Allen” or the Irish ballad “Raglan Road” than “We Shall Overcome” or even “Goodnight Irene.”

  Merenstein had received a call from Warner Bros.: We’ve signed Van Morrison, go up to Boston, see what he’s got. Pretty much all anybody knew, and all anybody wanted, was “Brown-Eyed Girl,” from Blowin’ Your Mind! which my friend Barry Franklin described at the time as “two minutes and twenty-six seconds of ‘Sweet Pea’ and thirty-two minutes of ‘T. B. Sheets.’” (“Is the B. in ‘T. B. Sheets,’” he asked, “the same B. which appeared in ‘Johnny B. Goode’?”) Morrison played Merenstein his song “Astral Weeks”: “thirty seconds into it,” Merenstein told Hank Shteamer in 2009, “my whole being was vibrating.” And the moment could not have been any different, Merenstein said, not the call going to Tom Wilson, the producer of “Like a Rolling Stone,” who was standing nearby when the phone rang, not Connie Kay catching Napoleon’s cold: “Something as timeless as forty years had to happen because it had to happen. I had to be the one to do it. Not that producer, not that producer, regardless of their accomplishments. It had to be Richard, not that bass player. I don’t want to sound existential, but there was Van, and that was it; there was no band ... there were no arrangements ... the direction was him singing and playing—that was where I followed. That’s why it came out the way it did. If I would’ve gone somewhere else, it wouldn’t have come out the way it did. So there obviously was a direction from somewhere in the sky.” “This is not an exaggeration, this is not just trying to be poetic,” Brooks Arthur, the recording engineer for Astral Weeks, said in 2009. “A cloud came along, and it was called the Van Morrison sessions. We all hopped upon that cloud, and the cloud took us away for a while, and we made this album, and we landed when it was done.”