When That Rough God Goes Riding

by Greil Marcus

THE LAST LAUGH, ON MARK KNOPFLER, SAILING TO PHILADELPHIA. 2000

  Ever since Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing,” his first record and a worldwide hit, Mark Knopfler has had a touch. Usually it’s the ability to find a doomy, fatalistic melody and let it send a man who gives off the feeling of someone who never stops looking over his shoulder down the street. When it works—on “Romeo and Juliet” and “Wild West End” on Dire Straits’ 1980 Making Movies, or the single “What It Is,” from Sailing to Philadelphia—you could be walking in the footsteps of Michael Caine’s Jack Carter.

  Anyone who bought Sailing for Philadelphia hoping for more of what he or she was hearing on the radio was not going to be happy. It was a famous-names showcase, and the first thing that caught your ear was James Taylor on the title song, in his wounded-puppy “You’ve Got a Friend” mode. Elsewhere there were the Christian pop singers Chris Rodriquez and Tim Davis, the Americana duo Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford of the once-wonderful British pop group Squeeze.

  The first four songs on the album were so bland you could forget you were listening to it. The first verse of “The Last Laugh,” crooned by Knopfler, was no different. And then, one minute into the song, there was Van Morrison.

  A single word—the “learned” in “Games you thought you’d learned”—is enough to take you off the record, into a country whose only maps are in Morrison’s pockets. This is a place made of regret, where the deepest impulse is to return to the scene of the crime, so everything can be made right. If you can’t do that, can’t you sing a song that the person you wounded might hear, and wouldn’t that be almost as good? But what if the wrong was done to you, by someone who likely hasn’t thought of you since? If that person heard you, coming out of a radio they didn’t turn off because they like Mark Knopfler, would anything happen in their heart?

  Knopfler’s song itself is nothing—but all of these questions are put into the air as Morrison draws them from his chest. It’s not that so much is being expressed; it’s that the fullness of Morrison’s voice as he steps up to the song immediately erases the limits that Knopfler himself has already established as to what could be expressed. Now the possibility that anything could be said hangs in the air. It’s not a singer’s trick; it doesn’t always happen when Morrison steps through someone else’s door. On the Chieftains’ 1995 The Long Black Veil—featuring Mick Jagger on the title song with a voice that a resident of a certain mountain county in Virginia claims can be traced to just that place, Sinéad O’Connor on “The Foggy Dew” and “She Moved Through the Fair,” Marianne Faithfull on the ancient “Love Is Teasin’,” Tom Jones on “The Tennessee Waltz,” and for that matter Mark Knopfler on “Lily of the West”—Morrison has nothing to offer “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You” other than to reveal how little the song might tell a singer. In Mike Figgis’s 2003 film Red, White & Blues, about the British blues world, Morrison raises his guitar and launches into “Rambler’s Blues.” Formally he’s masterful; he’s also scholastic, more writing about the song than singing it, and his writing misses the song. Tom Jones hovers in the background; after a minute or so you wish he’d open his mouth and take the song away.

  There’s no saying why in “The Last Laugh” Morrison finds a story to tell. Maybe he heard someone had to save the song, even if he hadn’t yet heard if it was worth it. Maybe it was the line “You’ve neither lost or won” or simply “Out on the highway,” which opens into that whole country, and suddenly the whole song is bigger, fuller, wanting more from Knopfler, as he moves into a guitar solo, than he can give, and more from the listener.

  One of those things: you put a man next to a microphone, hand him a sheet of words, and soul comes out.

  Mark Knopfler, “The Last Laugh,” Sailing to Philadelphia (Warner Bros., 2000).

  The Chieftains, The Long Black Veil (BMG, 1995).

  Van Morrison, “Rambler’s Blues,” in Mike Figgis, Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: Red, White & Blues (Hip-O, 2003).

  PART THREE

  A BELIEF IN THE BLUES AS A KIND OF CURSE ONE PUTS ON ONESELF

  COMMON ONE. 1980. BEAUTIFUL VISION. 1982. INARTICULATE SPEECH OF THE HEART. 1983. LIVE AT THE GRAND OPERA HOUSE BELFAST. 1984. A SENSE OF WONDER. 1984. NO GURU, NO METHOD, NO TEACHER. 1986. POETI C CHAMPIONS COMPOSE. 1987. IRISH HEARTBEAT, WITH THE CHIEFTAINS. 1988. AVALON SUNSET. 1989. ENLIGHTENMENT. 1990. HYMNS TO THE SILENCE. 1991. TOO LONG IN EXILE. 1993. A NIGHT IN SAN FRANCISCO. 1994. DAYS LIKE THIS. 1995. HOW LONG HAS THIS BEEN GOING ON. 1996 TELL ME SOMETHING. 1996

  How do you write off more than fifteen albums and more than fifteen years of the work of a great artist? You might do the same with Bob Dylan’s records from Street Legal in 1978 right up to the bend in the road of Good As I Been to You in 1992—or I might, anyway, remembering how everything from Slow Train Coming to Infidels to Empire Burlesque to Knocked Out Loaded to Down in the Groove to Oh Mercy to Under the Red Sky was marked by a Rolling Stone review celebrating it as yes, finally, not like the last one, this is the real comeback! and with the actual turn toward something crawlingly alive missed for the lack of a signpost. But that was a singer who for a long time had nothing to sing about. Something different was happening with Van Morrison.

  “What defines great singing in the rock and soul era,” Jonathan Lethem wrote in 2008, “is some underlying tension in the space between singer and song. A bridge is being built across that void, and it’s a bridge we’re never sure the singer’s going to manage to cross. The gulf may reside between vocal texture and the actual meaning of the words, or between the singer and the band, the musical genre, the style of production, what have you ... ” But what if there is no tension—not because the singer has momentarily lost it, but because his goal has been to transcend it, and he’s succeeded?

  In 1975 I found myself passing the road leading to Van Morrison’s Marin County house; it was posted with a sign reading “Van Morrison Self-Improvement Camp.” He was working on it at the time. His career remained a kind of war, with producers, managers, himself. His music was a Möbius strip: no new work had ever made his past work inaccessible; none of his best work had caused anything else to sound dated or immature. His mistakes didn’t subvert the shape of his story, because scars and wounds were part of it. He might stand still on stage, but you never knew where you, as part of the audience, stood with him, or vice versa. His relationship to the audience seemed somehow accidental, or worse. There was a show in Berkeley in 1973 that began with cutting versions of Morrison’s own “St. Dominic’s Preview,” Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Help Me,” and Muddy Waters’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” and then careened out of control. Morrison had been standing in a dim blue light—not bright enough to see his face, but bright enough to see he had one. He broke off the Waters song and ordered “the spotlight” out. He didn’t have his shades, he said. He wasn’t in L.A., whatever that meant. He continued in complete darkness. It seemed appropriate—mercurial weirdness was part of his appeal. But out of the dark came a throwaway version of “Listen to the Lion,” a flat “Caravan,” and then the announcement of the last song: “Misty.” “As I wander through this garbage world alone,” Morrison sang, leaving the garbage world—the audience—alone.

  God knows it was a memorable show. There was nothing obvious about it. Lethem’s bridge came into view, suspense over whether Morrison might cross it grew, he didn’t cross it, and that failure stuck more than the triumphs of countless other good performers, who leave you feeling you’ve seen something unforgettable, something you can hardly remember a week later. Morrison’s resistance to an audience in those years was palpable, so concrete you could feel it pressing on your chest, as if to say, Where is it written that just because I want to come out on stage with the musicians I trust and take my songs where they’ve never been before there has to be someone there to watch?

  At a show in San Francisco in 1978, Morrison encored with “Caravan.” He opened up space in the song, as if d
aring the crowd to anticipate his timing. He’d done this sort of thing for years, perhaps most shockingly in a passage captured on “... It’s Too Late to Stop Now ...,” his first live album, recorded in 1973 in a nightclub in Los Angeles and a theater in London. The last number—on a double album that unfolded like a single show—was “Cyprus Avenue,” from Astral Weeks. Morrison used a stop-time beat, allowing for long pauses between lines, spaces where he could try anything, crossroads where he could take the song in any direction. Inside the story of the song, the singer watched all the fourteen-year-old girls parading down the street on their way home from school: “And the leaves fall one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one—on the hometown fool.” He looks at one of the girls, the one he’s waited for. He thinks about what he wants to do to her. He makes no move to cross the street, to approach her, to speak to her, but he can’t help thinking about speaking to her, and as soon as he does think about it, he freezes. “And my tongue gets tied” is what he sang when he recorded the song. But that’s too easy. Now it’s “And my tongue gets t—, t—”—and the act is so convincing, the break in the song so violent, the drawbridge opening so that the only way to cross it is to back up, floor the accelerator, and pray, that the whole show is sucked into the suspended moment. It’s as if there’s no way out—in the instant, you might be plunged back into memories of the times you sat nervously with a stuttering friend, and how you ached with everything you had for him to get the word he was trying to say out of his mouth, to the point where you could see yourself reaching your hand down his throat and grabbing it. Onstage, someone in the band makes a cheek-popping sound, right on the beat. There’s nervous laughter in the crowd. A saxophone seems to walk around the stage, and you can imagine the player circling the singer, pointing at him, as if to ensure that no one misses his humiliation, which he can’t escape. “It’s too late to stop now!” are the triumphant last words of the show, but right now the singer can’t stop and he’d give anything if he could. “Every time I try to speak,” he wants to say, but it comes out “Evry tam, tr—, tr—, sp—” The saxophone stutters, the piano hits random notes, “Every,” he tries again. It comes out “errry,” and then, as it happens in real life, the curse is lifted: “And my insides shake,” clear and smooth, and then a rush, as if to outrun the stutter that only pauses to take a breath: “Justlikealeafonatree.” The whole crisis lasts barely more than twenty seconds, but while it’s happening it feels like a trap you’ll never get out of.

  At the show in San Francisco five years later, in the midst of “Caravan,” the stops in the music, the seemingly atonal, irrational bursts and jerks, were as dramatic and disconcerting as they were in that “Cyprus Avenue”; instead of titters, shouts, or even heckling, the crowd responded with unison clapping, as if to stop the music altogether, or force it back into a regular time. For the first time that night, save for an introduction of the band, Morrison spoke to the crowd. “Just shut up,” he said. “Just shut up. We do the work here, not you.”

  That was the highlight of the show. In some ways, looking forward, now, to the years that would follow, it was predictive, an acting out of things to come, because otherwise there was no tension in the show at all. It was formal. Everything was pitched to a middle range: desire and pleasure, never joy or rage. The band held strictly to arrangements, giving Morrison nothing to sing against. The people in the audience were pushing harder than the people on the stage.

  Outside of that strange “Caravan,” what Morrison was offering, as he turned songs over to background singers, pressed each number into a single dimension, and sang at his songs rather than from inside of them, was one true side of himself as a performer: the romantic of “Tupelo Honey,” the person who makes music of affection, sensuality, and acceptance. He wants peace of mind and ordered satisfaction most of all, and sings as if he already has them. But the singer who by 1978 had already caused some people to commit themselves to his music as if it was their quest as well as his had won them because of his distrust of conventional satisfactions and his inability to rest with any sort of peace. This was the person behind “Listen to the Lion” and “Mystic Eyes.” What he wants most is freedom, and what he has to say is that getting hold of freedom is perhaps not as hard as living up to it, standing up to it. When both sides of Morrison’s music come together, the result can be a sort of mystical deliverance. The listener is spared not a single fear, but he or she is somehow insulated from all fears—as is the performer. This is what happens on Astral Weeks, in “Almost Independence Day,” in the wild shrieks of the steel guitar on “St. Dominic’s Preview,” or the insistent fetishism of windowsill, letter box, door, and backstreet jellyroll—No, you don’t take off the left shoe first, you take off the right shoe!—in “And the Healing Has Begun.” But when only one side of the conflict is presented, one is only too aware of what is being held back—and what is held back will find its way out one way or the other, as it did this night, when Van the orderly romantic told his audience to shut up.

  Perhaps the real harbinger of what was to come came with “Help Me.” “I’ve transcended myself,” Morrison shouted at one point; here he was back in the pit, switching back and forth between his harmonica and the words of the song, long, harsh, overblown, pure sleazy 1967 Fillmore Auditorium white blues but the feeling of blood on the floor just the same, like Dennis Hopper reciting Roy Orbison’s rewrite of the song, “In Dreams,” in Blue Velvet (“In dreams—I walk with you—In dreams—I talk—to you”): “When you walk, walk with me—when you talk, talk with me! You gotta help me—I can’t do it all by myself!” Morrison wasn’t asking the crowd for encouragement, as most singers would do with this song—just as Dennis Hopper’s Frank couldn’t have cared less what Kyle MacLachan’s Jeffrey made of what he was spewing in his face. Morrison’s plea was aimed at someone, or something, much harder to reach.

  Over the next fifteen years, that plea would be almost constant—a hole in the nearly seamless fabric opening up with the fatalism of “Raglan Road” on Irish Heartbeat, all sides of Morrison’s music coming together as if in the ultimate and yet transcendently raceless minstrel show of A Night in San Francisco, John Lee Hooker, Georgie Fame, the bluesmen Junior Wells and Jimmy Witherspoon, the saxophonist Candy Dulfer, and Morrison’s own daughter Shana Morrison along for the ride. The romantic would be replaced by the seeker, and the seeker would replace the antiromantic’s refusal of an audience with an insistence that no one be permitted to miss the point. You couldn’t tell religion from therapy. “Were you healed tonight?” someone shouts to the crowd as the last number on A Night in San Francisco railed to a close—it was “Gloria” pulled out of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ 1960 “Shakin’ All Over,” perhaps the first true British rock ’n’ roll hit, as if by cesarean section.

  As a soul man Morrison had been a lyric poet; he could suggest Yeats. In 1980, on Common One, he began to insist on the connection, which meant the songs didn’t remotely suggest it. With two of the six numbers passing by at more than fifteen minutes—by far the longest pieces he’d ever released—Morrison had time to claim his roots; he pretty much had time to research them, write up his findings, publish them in a book, and watch it go out of print. Instead he name dropped. “Yeats and Lady Gregory corresponded, corresponded, corresponded”—his familiar obsessive repetition no longer changing the shape of the words, making them speak in new tongues, but telling you Yeats and Lady Gregory wrote a lot of letters. “James Joyce wrote streams of consciousness books.” “Did you ever hear about Wordsworth and Coleridge? Did you ever hear about William Blake?”

  Since as a lyric poet, or even a lyric poetaster, Morrison was a soul man, this shouldn’t have mattered. In 1974, on the hypnotizing “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River,” Morrison was searching for the Veedon Fleece—what he named the album the song came from—and no one has ever figured out what that was.5 The Veedon Fleece seemed to float above the churning music, which soon enough—a
lift from an acoustic guitar, a piano thinking it over even as the boat is untied, drums on the offbeat, a flute as second mind, strings as a single rhythm instrument—was that river itself. There was a feeling caught in Once Upon a Time in the West, not even the movie, merely the title; suspense rose like a cloud. “The real soul people, the real soul people,” Morrison chanted, pointing toward “the west coast,” though he didn’t say of what; as he summoned William Blake and the Eternals they were a band, just as the Sisters of Mercy he called for would become one, and together they sought the Veedon Fleece, but now the bridge was underwater, every shape shifting as you tried to see your way to the bottom. The nearly nine minutes of the song went by like wind.

  On Common One, as on so many of the albums to follow, the singing was so characterless and the sax-and-trumpet ensemble playing so faceless that the mention of a famous name became an event, something to hang on to—as it would be for so long for someone with nothing to say and an infinite commitment to getting it across. The tedium was almost heroic in its refusal to quit.

  Near the end of “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River,” the music loosens to the point that it begins to break up, its elements separating. The song isn’t falling apart—each part is moving off as a song in itself. You don’t know where the song is. Strings shake, giving off the long horn of a storm warning, a yarragh if anything is. But for all Morrison returned to this river between 1980 and 1996 it could have had corpses floating on it. Even from a bridge you wouldn’t want to look.

  Jonathan Lethem, “The Fly in the Ointment,” collected in Best Music Writing 2009, ed. GM (New York: Da Capo, 2009), 186–187.

  Van Morrison, “Cyprus Avenue,” on “... It’s Too Late to Stop Now ...” (Warner Bros., 1974).

  ———“You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River,” on Veedon Fleece (Warner Bros., 1974).