When That Rough God Goes Riding

by Greil Marcus

  As he sings, a chorus behind him urges him on, resolutely, as if they understand the mission that the singer, caught in his trance, only senses. “Listen to the lion,” they chant, drawing out the last word—but what is strange is that in the chorus, among three male voices, you hear Morrison himself, singing at himself.

  As this happens they truly are two different, separate persons. It’s more than, say, the conscious mind calling out to the subconscious; as the listener, you hear, you recognize, in a way that is tactile before it is anything else, two different bodies. “Listen to the lion,” commands the chorus, but the singer already is the lion. Awwrgh, arrgh, ooo, ah, ooo, mmm, ungh, ooo, ungh, arrgh, ah, ah, off his feet in the dance—and then, not in exhaustion but with the clarity of a sudden change in the light, the singer removes his animal head to lead a fleet of ships. “And we sailed,” he repeats five times, “away from Denmark, way up to Caledonia.”

  Caledonia is not just a misspelling of “Caldonia,” a number-one race music hit for Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five in 1945 and a blues standard ever after—even if, purposefully misspelling the name, Morrison recorded a happily delirious version of the tune and put it out as a single in 1974, with his band credited as the Caledonia Soul Express: “CALDONIA! CALDONIA!” he shouted, as so many had before him, “WHAT MAKES YOUR BIG HEAD SO HARD!” No, Morrison will explain if you ask, as he explained to Jonathan Cott, “Caledonia used to be Scotland. This funny thing happened a long time ago—a lot of people from Northern Ireland went over to Scotland to settle, and vice versa. They changed spaces ... So a lot of people from Northern Ireland are of Scottish descent. And my name suggests that I am.”4 But, Morrison would sometimes say, there was more to it than that. In the early seventies, as he tried to find a name for what he did, settling for a time on “Caledonia soul music,” he came upon the notion that finally the blues came not from Africa but from Scotland. The true source of the blues was in the border ballads and folk songs, from “The Cuckoo” to “Barbara Allen,” from “She Moves through the Fair” to “Nottamun Town,” that, carried by settlers from Britain to the Appalachians, made up the oldest, deepest, and most persistent American music there is—“Real American Music,” as Emma Bell Miles, an educated, middle-class city lady turned mountain woman, wrote in 1904 in Harper’s. Thus, Morrison might whisper, in a song or in an interview, he was always an American, just as, his ancestors sailing from Scandinavia to Scotland, he was fated to become Irish. That here came from there, that there are no separations, that all parts of himself and his music are one. Picking up the notion from Morrison, Mark Knopfler might have caught it best by throwing it away. There’s a Scottish piper and highland drums in his 2000 “What It Is,” a heartbreakingly hard-boiled history lesson—when he bends the line “The ghost of Dirty Dick is still in search of Little Nell” against a thief-in-the-night fiddle part, it breaks my heart, anyway—and buried in Knopfler’s muttering is “the Caledonian blues.” When in 1970, at the heart of Moondance, the album that brought Morrison an audience that would stay with him, he let the words “Ere the bonnie boat was won / As we sailed into the mystic” float the music, this might have been what he meant.

  The most remarkable aspect of this crackpot theory is that it might be true. Certainly that is how the Virginia novelist Sharyn McCrumb sees it. “The first Appalachian journey,” she writes, citing the geologist Kevin Dann’s 1988 study Traces on the Appalachians: A History of Serpentine in the Americas, “was the one made by the mountains themselves.”

  The proof of this can be found in a vein of a green mineral called serpentine which forms its own subterranean “Appalachian Trail” along America’s eastern mountains, stretching from north Georgia to the hills of Nova Scotia, where it seems to stop. This same vein of serpentine can be found in the mountains of western Ireland, where it again stretches into Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and the Orkneys, finally ending in the Arctic Circle. More than two hundred and fifty million years ago the mountains of Appalachia and the mountains of Great Britain fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Continental drift pulled them apart, at the same time it formed the Atlantic Ocean.

  The mountains’ family connection to Britain reinforced what I had felt about the migration patterns of the early settlers. People forced to leave a land they loved come to America. Hating the flat, crowded eastern seaboard, they head westward on the Wilderness Road until they reach the wall of mountains. They follow the valleys south-southwest down through Pennsylvania, and finally find a place where the ridges rise, where you can see vistas of mountains across the valley. The Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the Cornishmen—all those who had lives along the other end of the serpentine chain—to them this place must have looked right. Must have felt right. Like home. And they were right back in the same mountains they had left behind in Britain.

  “Caledonia Soul Music,” an eighteen-minute piece recorded in 1970, passed on to the FM station KSAN in San Francisco, played often, and never released, can contain all of that without distortion. With almost no words, it is all suggestion, and the music is so bottomless that any words one might bring to it from somewhere else can seem true, just as the right melody, the right voice, can make banal lyrics seem unbearably profound. It’s the most complete and in a way the most modest statement of Morrison’s music: as if there were, somewhere, a form to which all of his best work aspired, a form that could never be realized, except that this time it was.

  Here Morrison is a bandleader, not a singer. Really his role is as a conductor, but he appears more as a pathfinder, issuing directions under his breath, his mission to lead everyone out of the forest and into the light, except that sometimes the light in the forest is too much to turn away from, and so as a pathfinder he tries to get the band lost. Thus after stolidly announcing the title as acoustic guitar, bass, and piano slowly open the theme, a mandolin behind them hinting at a story that for the time being will be untold, Morrison lets his lips murmur, and you can think he’s building up to words to sing. He isn’t. There’s a sigh: Yeah. They have all night.

  “Only rarely onstage do bands achieve reality,” David Thomas, the leader of Pere Ubu, the Cleveland band that in 1975 set out to find what, it seemed to them, no one else was looking for, once said. “Mostly it’s in rehearsals, in lost moments.” As with the Beatles in 1969, chasing all over the room for songs that were running from them like mice as they tried to make the album that would appear as Let It Be, seizing for a moment on Buddy Holly—after all, hadn’t they named themselves for his Crickets? It’s a mess, one stumble after another, and then John Lennon finds “Maybe Baby.” “We used to do it,” he says pathetically, as if there’s no chance they could do it now. George Harrison follows, and there’s an explosion of longing and loss, and now one song is another, there are no borders, they’re rolling in the meadows of melody, no difference at all between “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “Crying, Waiting, Hoping”—and then Lennon moves into “Mailman Bring Me No More Blues” and the rhythm is fixed, the others lock in behind him, the progression is firm, the words are clear, and all the life is gone. It’s like Dana Wynter turning her face to Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers just after she’s gone over to the other side.

  The reality that the Beatles found for a few unshaped, indelible seconds is what Morrison sustains for eighteen minutes. As he says softly every time the piece seems about to run away from itself, “Take it ... take it slow,” he could be shaking hands with Morton Feldman, the composer complaining that no matter how quietly anyone tried to play his music it was still “too fuckin’ loud and too fuckin’ fast.” Here Morrison is at once composer and audience. As the composer he knows what he wants, but as the audience he knows that when the composer knows where he or she wants to go but the musicians don’t, anything can happen, and what might happen can go beyond anyone’s intentions. So at the center of his circle of musicians, Morrison waits. At times the band is as bent on finality as the Rolling Stones in their 1966 “Going
Home,” an ordinary three-minute song that turned into eleven minutes that were never repeated; then Morrison takes them to the point where the idea of an ending makes no sense. “Get some horn,” Morrison might say, making the three words into a song in itself, and then from a saxophone comes a sound so warm you regret the fact that it will go away even as you grasp for it.

  “You got it,” Morrison says. Everywhere, pieces of music are hiding within the foreground sound, stepping out at any time. The drift of the music, a sort of nineteenth-century campfire lullaby, a crew looking for the headwaters of the Ohio but for a night allowing the music to let them believe they’ve already found it, is so complete that when in a flat, dumbly unmusical voice Morrison announces that “John will play a taste of mandolin” (The kitchen will close in ten minutes) it sounds like a joke on the credulousness of the musicians themselves: Can you believe it? They thought I was serious! But John Platania takes up the cue, quietly ringing out a calm, head-down progression over drums, bass, a bare piano, a spectral saxophone, as Morrison mutters and hums—and then, perhaps two minutes in, he hits what is almost a discord and the notes lift in volume. “Ahhhhh!” Morrison responds, involuntarily, as pure reflex, feeling the music in his stomach, the yarragh as pure pleasure.

  There’s a way everything he did before this moment was to reach the point where as a musician who is also a listener, he would find that sound, and everything he has done since an attempt to find it again.

  Jonathan Cott, “Van Morrison: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, 30 November 1978, 51, 54.

  Sharyn McCrumb, “A Novelist Looks at the Land,” Appalachian Voice, Late Winter 2005.

  “Only rarely do bands”: David Thomas to GM, 17 February 1998.

  Mark Knopfler, “What It Is,” on Sailing to Philadelphia (WEA/ Reprise, 2000).

  Beatles, “Maybe Baby,” et al. Devin McKinney: “State of the art bootleg versions are on Disc 4 of the January 29 [1969] installment of A/B Road, the 83-disc collection of Get Back sessions from Purple Chick (2004).” So there.

  Van Morrison, “Almost Independence Day” and “Listen to the Lion,” on St. Dominic’s Preview (Warner Bros., 1972).

  ———with the Caledonia Soul Express, “Caledonia” (Warner Bros., 1974), included on Catalog Strays 1965–2000 (Wild Card bootleg).

  ———“Caledonia Soul Music,” included on No Stone Unturned (Head bootleg).

  MOONSHINE WHISKEY. 1971

  It’s the way he affirms “I’m gonna put on my hot pants” as if he’s trying to twist himself into them. But were they pink?

  Van Morrison, “Moonshine Whiskey,” on Tupelo Honey (Warner Bros., 1971).

  JUST LIKE A WOMAN. 1971

  It’s an affront, this performance—to the song if not the songwriter. And where does someone get the nerve to take on a song like this?

  In 1966, on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, the arrangement was a web, a cocoon for the singer. The more he filled in the story, the hazier it became. The touch was soft, the music sweet. By the end, it didn’t matter if knowledge won out over regret. The final “I / Just can’t fit” was a sad wave goodbye. It was a great make-out song.

  By 1971, when Van Morrison and his Caledonia Soul Orchestra went into Wally Heider’s Pacific High Studios in San Francisco to play a show for a live broadcast on KSAN, the Bay Area’s leading independent contemporary music station, he was a hometown star. The year before, having flown in for a show from his home in Woodstock, he’d spent a day driving from San Francisco to Marin County to Berkeley and back to San Francisco; the radio was on and he was all over it. Just as “Gloria” dominated the AM airwaves in the Bay Area in 1965—the next year the local Top 40 station KFRC held a poll to determine the three hundred greatest records of all time (the previous fifteen years), and “Gloria” was in the top ten along with the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” and two versions of “Louie Louie”—by 1970 Morrison, an indistinct name almost everywhere else, probably got more airplay on KSAN than anyone else. “Madame George.” “Brown-Eyed Girl.” “T. B. Sheets.” “Here Comes the Night.” Practically everything from the 1970 Moondance, except for the TV-commercial jazz of the title song: “Come Running,” “Caravan,” “Crazy Love,” “Into the Mystic,” “Brand New Day,” “Glad Tidings.” All in an afternoon. You could almost see the lightbulb going on over Morrison’s head.

  In 1968, Morrison married a Bay Area native who called herself Janet Planet and moved with her from Cambridge to Woodstock—as she would say later, to meet Bob Dylan. Morrison, she said, considered him his only peer. Now Morrison had a home in Marin County. Nationally his albums were charting in the high twenties or low thirties; here he was number one. He could do no wrong.

  That night in San Francisco, with an audience in the studio, he sang Woody Guthrie’s “Dead or Alive.” He sang “Hound Dog” and Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me” and Fats Domino’s “Blue Monday” along with songs from Moondance and the new Tupelo Honey. He sang “Friday’s Child,” an all but unknown song he’d recorded with Them. All in all it was a happy night, which made the perversity of Morrison’s “Just Like a Woman” that much more stark.

  With Dylan’s original the music is like a wheel. With every break between chorus and verse the song returns to its beginning, and a feeling of calm settles over the traumas the people in the song have already left behind. It’s not just a great make-out song: at the end, when the singer imagines himself and his old lover meeting again, at some party where nobody knows what they once were to each other, it’s a seduction song. “You break just like a little girl.” Oh! No one understands me like you do!

  All of that is stripped away when Morrison starts in on the tune. He takes the first lines flatly, simply, as if he has too much respect for the words to sing them. The backing—guitar, piano, light drums—is perfunctory, until it’s stiff, its stiffness soon enough turning hackneyed, with Morrison using the instruments as one to smash down after each word of the chorus:And she! wham Makes! wham Love! wham

  There are melodramatic touches, as in almost any TV drama or bad movie where any important phrase is paused and repeated—No matter what happens, I’ll be there for you—I’ll be there for you, except that here it’s “Queen Mary, she’s, she’s my friend,” or “It was your, your world”—all but semaphore flags to alert the audience that something terribly important is being said, to drive home the actor’s or the singer’s sincerity, to the point that any phrase that might smell of portentousness is guaranteed to perfume the room.

  Is it all a setup, a man casing a joint in respectable clothes because tomorrow he’s going to rob it blind? That’s a question the performance refuses to answer; you have to answer it yourself. As Morrison moves into the second verseIt was raining from the first

  And I was dying of thirst

  he seems even more stolid than before. He could be giving a speech. The band is still merely following along, the piano perhaps slightly brighter than before. But then the pianist adds a triplet, and the music exerts the smallest pull on the singer. You might not even notice—but unconsciously, your memory registers the moment. There’s a shift—And your long-time curse hurts but what is worse Is this pain in here

  —and there’s a lilt in the last phase, an opening toI can’t remain in here

  and as you feel Morrison draw a breath you feel the band rush forward to draw it for him—I can’t stay in here

  —the “stay” shredding in his mouth as the words are blown out of their own song by a scream that is somehow more controlled, more melodic, than anything before, the melody now armed with passion behind it or the fright it createsAIN’T IT CLEAR

  and you feel that nothing could rise higher than this fire until the next word does, and the next word is “I,” five times, not repeated but each exploding syllable modulated into the nex
t until it is all one unholy word, a plea the singer is addressing to himself. What just happened? Is there anybody left alive?

  And then, in the most perverse gesture of all, Morrison produces the next lines, again flatly, as if he could care less. He ornaments a phrase with that TV-script repetition that mocks you for buying the phony emotion behind the delivery in the first placeI believe I believe I believe I believe I believe

  it’s time for us to

  and so floridly that when he finishes with a curtQuit.

  there really is a period after the word.

  And then he does it all again. You want to say you won’t be fooled this time, but you are. After the song is blown apart for the second time, you want him to say he meant every ache, every cut, but he doesn’t.

  He does get out of the song in a way that humanizes what he’s done, that puts the singer in the song, for the first time one of its characters, not its assassin: “You were weird, and I was weird, too.” You play the song again, trying to make it happen as your own heart has played it.

  Bob Dylan, “Just Like a Woman,” on Blonde on Blonde (Columbia, 1966).

  Van Morrison, “Just Like a Woman,” on The Inner Mystic: Recorded Live at Pacific High Studios, California, September 1971, as broadcast on KSAN-FM, San Francisco (Oh Boy/ Odyssey bootleg).

  Janet Planet, see Michael Gray, Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (New York: Continuum, 2006), 465.