by Greil Marcus
They recorded live, Morrison saying nothing to the musicians in terms of banter or instruction, and saying everything in the cues of his chords, hesitations, lunges, silences, and in those moments when he loosed himself from words and floated on his own air. But that’s too simple. When you listen, you hear the musicians talking to each other; more than that, you hear them hearing each other.
In the first notes of “Sweet Thing,” Morrison opens the tune with his acoustic guitar; as soon as a listener has something to grab onto, Richard Davis restates Morrison’s theme, with the barest increase in force that makes all the difference. Davis was born in Chicago; he was a veteran of sessions with Eric Dolphy and Roland Kirk. This day it’s as if Davis is sweeping into the song to dance Morrison even farther into it—into Astral Weeks’ great swirl. Someone other than Morrison is now leading the listener into the bower of the song, a hillside where you can tumble down like Jim and little Sabine in Jules and Jim; that gives Morrison the freedom to forget the shape of the song, what it needs, what it wants, and trust himself. He’ll sing the song; someone else will play it.
After the sessions were finished, Merenstein, with Morrison and the conductor Larry Fallon consulting, overdubbed strings and horn parts. Sometimes the songs are unimaginable without them, and the added sounds so layered into the original instruments as to be part of them, as on “Sweet Thing”; sometimes they’re gratuitous, especially the strings on “Cyprus Avenue” and the gypsy violin on “Madame George,” but after forty years they tune themselves out. When the music is at its most contingent—when Merenstein’s argument about how the record might never have happened at all becomes an awareness that the fate of a song, whether or not it will achieve the finality you in fact know it will, rests on the way Richard Davis steps out of a rest and whether or not Morrison will know what Davis has just done and what he himself can now do to live up to it—it’s scary, because the inevitability of the music is also its unlikeliness. Early on, there’s a rupture in “Sweet Thing” when Morrison hollers—a long, happy hoyyyyyyyy, the singer shot out of the cannon of his own breath—and the scene the sound makes is so complete, the musicians around Morrison filling in the “gardens all wet with rain” he’s already described, that you realize no one has to go back to the song at all. Near the end of “Madame George”—almost two minutes from its actual end, but at the end of the song as a written piece, a story told in lines and verses, one after the other—there’s a pause, and then, at seven minutes thirtyfour seconds, a single thick, weighted bass note from Davis that is as final a sound as any song could hold without dropping dead on the spot. The story is over, the note says; everything that is going to happen has happened; everyone has been left behind; everyone is dead, and all that remains is looking back. Morrison goes on, drawing a seemingly endless loop of loss, regret, reverie, and escape around himself—as he does so, you are actually hearing him change from a child into a creature who may not yet be a man but who is not a child, who may no longer even be human, rather a figment of his own false memories—but Davis is finished. Every note he plays after that last one is sweeping up, closing the windows, locking the door. At this point the song is as much his as Morrison’s; both have their own ideas about what it’s for, what it’s about, who Madame George is, and why anyone should care: why in their different ways they are going to make you care. At its highest pitch, the album has become a collaboration between Morrison and Davis, or a kind of conspiracy, one that takes advantage of the producer and the other musicians but excludes them from the real conversation—excludes them, but somehow not the listener. In the blues term for the shadow self that knows what the self refuses to know, here Davis is Morrison’s second mind; there Morrison is Davis’s. You are listening in, but you can never be sure you heard what you thought you heard.
There is death all over the music—an acceptance of death. Save for one couplet, the last words on the album are a farewell, in the form of a closing door: “I know you’re dying—and I know, you know it too.” Davis rattles the door in its frame. But usually death is not so close. It’s something you see in someone’s face, maybe years off, but already looming. You freeze up—or you realize you have no time to waste. You begin asking what it is you really want. In the title song the singer asks to be born again—“There you go,” he says to himself in the mirror, or to the person who he expects will save him, “talking to Hudie Ledbetter.” Lead Belly died in 1949, almost twenty years before, only four years after the person singing was born, but he’s here now, and he’ll answer you if you know how to ask. And for a moment you do. “Would you, kiss my eyes”—what a surrender of body and soul are in those lines! It’s an opening into what Lester Bangs called the “mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work.” It’s an acceptance both of death and of anything else that might happen, like the magical appearance of a long-dead avatar to tell you that, yes, you are his true heir, you are the child he never had. And magic, as the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood wrote in 1937,is a representation where the emotion evoked is an emotion evoked on account of its function in practical life ... Magical activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanism of practical life with the emotional current that drives it. Hence magic is a necessity for every sort and condition of men. A society which thinks, as ours thinks, that it has outlived the need for magic, is either mistaken in that opinion, or else it is a dying society, perishing for lack of interest in its own maintenance.
Which is a way of saying, with unusual repetitions kin to those that in Morrison’s music always signify freedom, a love of words, and a lack of fear for what they might say (“the emotion evoked is an emotion evoked”), that to be born again might be understood as magic, magic as everyday life: what you do to preserve the emotional current that drives everyday life. And that current may be, in the art historian T. J. Clark’s phrase, the sight of death—a sight that, when one is as attuned to contingency as the singer on Astral Weeks is, you see everywhere.
When Lewis Merenstein says the album “had to happen because it had to happen,” that “if I would’ve gone somewhere else,” not to Boston that day, the album “wouldn’t have come out the way it did,” or even taken any shape at all, he is situating the album as an event: a unique and timeless act or occurrence, like Bob Beamon’s jump, something that could not have been predicted and could never be repeated. But that is only half of it. In “Astral Weeks,” “Sweet Thing,” “Cyprus Avenue,” “Madame George,” “Ballerina,” and “Slim Slow Slider,” there are everywhere in the music itself tiny events that are just as contingent; that single hoyyyyyyyy may be only the most immediately thrilling. These events take place in the breaks and holes in the music. They change what could have been a spot of dead air into a moment of anticipation. They turn the singer’s claims into truth, the singer testing that truth with repetitions of a phrase until, now an incantation, not description, the phrase may have sloughed off all ordinary meaning and acquired one without intent or desire. It’s the nearly countless “goodbye”s at the end of “Madame George” no longer necessarily signifying “fare thee well” or “I must take my leave” or “I’ll never see you again” but “I’m returning,” “I could never leave,” “I will never forget you.”
It’s this sense of event within a song, a verse, a line, or even what might occur in the space between one word and another, that raises the cast of drama that hovers over the whole of the album. “I based the first fifteen minutes of Taxi Driver on Astral Weeks,” Martin Scorsese said in 1978, just after the first major screening of his film The Last Waltz, sitting on the floor in his living room in the Hollywood hills, playing the album, hearing “Madame George” come up. “That’s the song,” he said—as in the moment Bernard Herrmann’s theme for Taxi Driver played from inside of “Madame George,” as “I Cover the Waterfront” played inside of that, and you could follow Travis Bickle, driving his hack from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. every night, talking to himself, “All the animals come out at night, who
res, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal,” as he drives under the spray of a broken hydrant and wishes for a rain that would wash all the sin off the streets, as he tries to talk up the ticket seller in a porn theater, as he sees his dream girl, describing her in his diary in words that could have come from “Sweet Thing”: “She was wearing a white dress / She appeared like an angel / Out of this filthy mess.”3 It’s all foreshadowing, as on Astral Weeks almost everything is memory, but the sense of tension is the same. Accompanying every shout of exaltation on Astral Weeks, every breath of comfort, there is a murmur of jeopardy and danger that makes you afraid for the people in the songs—afraid for Madame George, afraid for the singer who leaves her behind as if she’s already dead, afraid that the singer so transformed by his self-raised specter of rebirth may not make it as far as, on the first track on Astral Weeks, its title song, he actually does. It’s this that over the years has led so many people to take the album as a kind of talisman, to recognize others by their affection for it, to say “I’m going to my grave with this record, I will never forget it.”
“To this day it gives me pain to hear it,” Merenstein said in 2009 of the record he produced, then pulling away from what he’d just said: “Pain is the wrong word—I’m so moved by it.” But pain is exactly the right word: the pain, the fear, of knowing that to acknowledge that the music exists at all is to acknowledge that, because it might not have, it doesn’t.
What lessons can it teach, what last words might it leave on anyone’s lips? What does it say, where did it come from? In 2009, as Van Morrison was setting out to re-create Astral Weeks on stages around the world, with charts indicating every half-note, every caesura, every skipped beat, so that Jay Berliner and Richard Davis (who finally bowed out) could replay their parts exactly as they had more than forty years before, I was asked these questions, and I realized I didn’t care. What happens on Astral Weeks beggars those questions. It was forty-six minutes in which possibilities of the medium—of rock ’n’ roll, of pop music, of what you might call music that could be played on the radio as if it were both timeless and news—were realized, when you went out to the limits of what this form could do. You went past them: you showed everybody else that the limits they had accepted on invention, expression, honesty, daring, were false. You said it to musicians and you said it to people who weren’t musicians: there’s more to life than you thought. Life can be lived more deeply—with a greater sense of fear and horror and desire than you ever imagined.
That’s what I heard at the time, and that’s what I hear now. There is a difference. I no longer altogether trust the sort of explanations that along with other people I used to pursue so passionately—not, of course, philistine, literal explanations, of course not, but imaginative, contextualizing explanations that made both a work and its setting richer for the introduction of the one to the other. I’ve played Astral Weeks more than I’ve played any other record I own; I wouldn’t tell you why even if I knew. In the face of work that became part of my life a long time ago and remains inseparable from it, whether it’s The Great Gatsby or Astral Weeks, what I value most is how inexplicable any great work really is.
Dick Schaap, The Perfect Jump (New York: New American Library, 1976).
Hank Shteamer, “In Full: Lewis Merenstein, Producer of Astral Weeks,” 3 March 2009, Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches, http://darkforcesswing.blogspot.com.
Barry Franklin, “Crawdaddy?” 1968, unpublished. Courtesy Barry Franklin.
Brooks Arthur, to Josh Gleason, “Van Morrison: Astral Weeks Revisited,” Weekend Edition, NPR, 28 February 2009.
Jon Landau, “John Wesley Harding,” Crawdaddy! May 1968, collected in It’s Too Late to Stop Now (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Press, 1972), 52.
R. J. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1937), quoted in Wilfred Mellers, A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (New York: Oxford, 1985), 33.
Lester Bangs, “Astral Weeks” (from Stranded, ed. GM, 1979), in Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, ed. GM (New York: Knopf, 1987), 21, 20.
Martin Scorsese, to GM; see “Save the Last Waltz for Me,” GM, New West, 22 May 1978, 95.
PiL (Public Image Ltd.), “Albatross,” Metal Box (Virgin, 1979). Originally three twelve-inch 45s in a film can; the 1990 reissue was one CD in a four-and-three-quarter-inch tin: a PiL box.
Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower,” John Wesley Harding (Columbia, 1967).
Neil Young, “All Along the Watchtower,” on Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration (Columbia, 1993). A tribute show from Madison Square Garden, with, most notably, Johnny Winter on “Highway 61 Revisited,” Roger McGuinn with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Lou Reed on “Foot of Pride,” and Sinéad O’Connor on Bob Marley’s “War” (leave it to her to break the rules), not to mention quite a few real stinkers.
Jimi Hendrix, “Star-Spangled Banner,” on Jimi Hendrix—Live at Woodstock (MCA, 1999). The best account of what happened when Hendrix played the anthem is Jeff Bridges’s Bob Dylan–written rant in the film Masked and Anonymous, dir. Larry Charles (Sony Pictures Classics, 2003). “I don’t know, man. All I did was play it,” Hendrix said on the Dick Cavett Show not long after Woodstock. “I’m American, so I played it. I used to sing it in school. They made me sing it in school, so it was a flashback.” Cavett, as Michael Ventre reported in 2009 for MSNBC, “interrupted the interview to point out to the audience, ‘This man was in the 101st Airborne, so when you send your nasty letters in ... ’ Cavett then explained to Hendrix that whenever someone plays an ‘unorthodox’ version of the anthem, ‘You immediately get a guaranteed percentage of hate mail.’ Hendrix then respectfully disagreed with Cavett’s description. ‘I didn’t think it was unorthodox,’ he said. ‘I thought it was beautiful.’”
John Lee Hooker, with Van Morrison, “I Cover the Waterfront,” from Mr. Lucky (Virgin, 1991), included on the posthumous Hooker collection The Best of Friends (Shout! Factory, 2007), along with another Hooker-Morrison number, “Don’t Look Back.” The two also recorded “I’ll Never Get Out of These Blues Alive” for Hooker’s album of the same name (Crescendo, 1972), but the affinity was always personal, not musical. The laconic, reflective ethos Hooker brought to his music in his later years never really meshed with Morrison’s instincts for the blues; no matter how he might have tried to keep it caged, urgency would almost always win out.
Van Morrison, Astral Weeks (Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, 1968).
—Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl (Listen to the Lion, 2009).
ALMOST INDEPENDENCE DAY. 1972. LISTEN TO THE LION. 1972. CALEDONIA SOUL MUSIC. 1970
In 1972, Van Morrison closed each side of what might be his richest album, St. Dominic’s Preview, with a song over ten minutes long.
One was “Almost Independence Day.” Notes from Morrison’s acoustic guitar twisted into a harsh minor key, then seemed to raise a flag as a skiff pushed off; a synthesizer made the sound of a tugboat pushing through fog, and kept it constant. As it went on, it seemed as if the song itself more than the singer was gazing out over San Francisco Bay to watch the fireworks; as that happened, the Fourth of July receded, and what was left was an unsettled, unclaimed, unfounded land where the event that settled it, named it, found it, had yet to take place.
The other long song was if anything stronger. “Listen to the Lion” was made as a field for the yarragh, an expanse over which, as a thing in itself, it could go wherever it might want to go, disappearing and reappearing at any time—but more than that “Listen to the Lion” was a song about the yarragh.
Writing about Morrison in 1978, Jonathan Cott quoted Yeats on the ancient Celts, living “in a world where anything might flow and change, and become any other thing ... The hare that ran by among the dew might have sat up on his haunches when the first man was made, and the poor bunch of rushes under their feet might have been a goddess laughing among the stars; and with but a little magic, a
little waving of the hands, a little murmuring of the lips, they too could become a hare or a bunch of rushes, and know immortal love and immortal hatred.” With that little murmuring of the lips becoming a torrent of wind off a lake, after what appears to be a conventional song, though a particularly pious one (“I shall search my very soul ... for the lion”), for one minute after another Morrison cries, moans, pleads, shouts, hollers, whispers, until finally he breaks with language and speaks in tongues, growling and rumbling. The feeling is that whoever it is that is singing has not simply abandoned language, but has returned himself to a time before language, and is now groping toward it. The organs of speech have not yet been fixed in the mouth and the throat, because there is no speech. Speech might come from the chest, the stomach, the bowels—and there, in a transporting minute, is where the singer seems to find it, guttural sounds now swirling and spinning around the singer in bodies of their own. “They too could become a hare”—now Morrison has loosed the lion inside himself.
