When That Rough God Goes Riding

by Greil Marcus

  Thomas De Quincy, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821; New York: Penguin, 1981), 64.

  Breakfast on Pluto, dir. Neil Jordan (2005, Sony Pictures Classics). With Cillian Murphy as Kitten, Eva Berthstle as his mother, Eily Bergin, Liam Neeson as Father Liam, Ruth Negga as Charlie, Laurence Kinlan as Irwin, Gavin Friday as Billy Hatchett, Stephen Rea as Bertle the magician, Bryan Ferry as Mr. Silky String, and Sid Young as Patrick in London.

  Rubettes, “Sugar Baby Love” (1974), on Breakfast on Pluto—Original Soundtrack (Milan, 2006). Also includes Harry Nilsson’s “Me and My Arrow” and “You’re Breakin’ My Heart,” Joe Dolan’s “You’re Such a Good Looking Woman,” Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey,” “(How Much Is) That Doggy in the Window?” by Patti Page, “Caravan” by Santo and Johnny, “Feelings” by Morris Albert, “The Windows of Your Mind” by Dusty Springfield, “Wig Wam Bam” by Gavin Friday, “Sand” by Friday and Cillian Murphy, T-Rex’s “Children of the Revolution,” and nothing by Van Morrison.

  Liam Neeson, “Coney Island,” on No Prima Donna: The Songs of Van Morrison (Polydor, 1994).

  Sinéad O’Connor, “Black Boys on Mopeds,” on I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got (Capitol, 1990).

  THE HEALING GAME. 1997

  The black-and-white photo that appears on the face of The Healing Game—and on the disc itself, and on the back of the CD box, insisting that you look at it again and again, that you think about it—shows a short, very stocky middle-aged white man on the street, and a taller black man behind him. Both are well-dressed, in dark clothes, with dark hats. The short man, Van Morrison, is wearing blackout glasses and an expensive white shirt buttoned to the neck; the taller man, the flugelhorn player Haji Akbar, who wears a white shirt and a striped tie, gazes over Morrison’s left shoulder, as if on the lookout for trouble. It is, you can imagine without trying, a mob boss and his number one on their way to settle a score. The expression on Morrison’s face, all stone, is appallingly determined and cold.

  If this is the mood you carry with you as the music starts, straight away the music tells you you’re right: the first lines of “When That Rough God Goes Riding,” the first song, describe “mud-splattered victims ... all along the ancient highway,” and you catch the echoes of a vendetta as old as the highway, some internecine tribal conflict that will never be settled. If as the Sex Pistols rammed it home in 1976 in “Anarchy in the UK” Morrison’s verses call forth the conflict in Northern Ireland between the UDA and the IRA—and London’s war against Catholic Belfast, the war that began with Cromwell and continued, as Morrison sang in 1997, under Tony Blair—the war John Lennon sang about under Edward Heath, the war Gang of Four sang about under James Callaghan—the chorus is mythic, outside of any historical time.

  As soon as the scene is set everything changes, even if the story being told holds to its violence. With the first verse done, Morrison, his voice thick and heavy, glides like an athlete into the chorus, and a tremendous feeling of warmth, of being in the right place at the right time, takes hold. It carries the listener into a musical home so perfect and complete he or she might have forgotten that music could call up such a place, and then populate it with people, acts, wishes, fears. The deep burr of Morrison’s voice buries the words, which cease to matter; you might not hear them until the tenth time you play the album, or long after that. “It’s when that rough god goes riding,” he sings, drawing the words both from Yeats and down in his chest, and you might never know it’s the angel of death that has you in its embrace. “I am this serpent filled with venom,” Morrison sings later in “Waiting Game”—but here his voice, like Vito Corleone’s voice as Robert De Niro plays him, is so filled with quiet, earned authority that you trust it, you ask it to keep speaking to you, to offer you its comfort, even as the man behind it pushes a pillow into your face. The very slowness of the introduction to the song—at first, only piano, the lightest percussion, and Morrison’s slurred harmonica, then the way he waits behind syllables even as he voices them—validates everything to follow: validates it musically, emotionally, morally. These first passages create a setting that allows the singer to contemplate the world around himself, and, perhaps for the first time in Morrison’s music, to judge it. “I am the god of love and the god of hate,” he sings—that is validated. As Morrison all but swallows the words, then lets them shudder in his mouth, it doesn’t feel like a grand claim; it feels like what it means to be in the world.

  Nearly all of the songs on The Healing Game stay on this plane. The melodies build on themselves until they communicate like rhythms; the rhythms, slow and weighted, create a feeling of a definite pace being kept, a pace of readiness. As with Gene Austin’s unsettled, visionary 1928 “The Lonesome Road”—filled with specters from the oldest Appalachian ballads, and a backwoods, farmer’s kin to “Old Man River,” which appeared in the original theatrical production of Show Boat the year before6—it’s the pace of someone who’s seen almost everything, but who knows there might be someone waiting around the next turn. The volume is never raised. There’s no shouting. There’s a long walk ahead.

  The tunes open up like stories you know in your heart but haven’t thought of for years. This is soul music, with the passion of Frankie Laine’s “That’s My Desire” in 1947, the sadness rolling over a rock ’n’ roll beat in Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in 1952, the sympathy of Bobby Bland’s “I’ll Take Care of You” in 1959, the certainty of Irma Thomas’s “Ruler of My Heart” in 1963, the sweep of Aretha Franklin’s “Ain’t No Way” in 1968, the refusal to walk a step faster or a step slower of Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” in 1990—but without glamour, or even a hint of performance, of gestures extended or notes held for effect. The street this music moves on never disappears.

  With “Waiting Game” and the title song, which comes last, The Healing Game kept company with Neil Jordan’s 1992 film The Crying Game, that whole drama of Irish resistance, sexual uncertainty, murderous fate. It was Morrison’s best work in more than twenty years. Go back to 1979, for Into the Music, a buoyant, serious, playful, blazingly ambitious testament—against The Healing Game it sounds thin, poppy, ephemeral, though it isn’t remotely so when it’s allowed to claim its own air. Morrison’s records of the previous seventeen years fade into irrelevance against what he has to offer here. They don’t even make sense.

  The deep grounding of The Healing Game makes me think of the original Fleetwood Mac, the finest flowering of British blues, formed by Peter Green in 1967. As a blues guitarist, Green, who had earlier replaced Eric Clapton in John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, had by 1970 been and gone from places—places in the heart, places in the blues—Clapton would never get to. Compared to Them, Fleetwood Mac was a purist band, in quest of the spirit of the Mississippi blues of the 1920s and ’30s—though while Them was purist in its own way, in its refusal of the slightest suggestion of levity or even peace of mind, Fleetwood Mac made room for the most raucous rockabilly humor and mercilessly funny parodies of the British blues scene. It was a band of many parts—but while he remained Green was always its center. He played an occult blues, a fantasy blues, where in his most lucid songs and performances—in “Man of the World,” “Long Grey Mare,” “Albatross,” “Trying So Hard to Forget,” “Love That Burns,” his guitar playing alone on “Something Inside of Me”—every element was slowed down and emotions appeared only to decay.

  As a singer, he sang in his own voice. There was never any doubt that he was white and English—and, maybe, little doubt that he was Jewish. The remorse in his voice, you could think, wasn’t for the love he’d lost or the life that failed him—the predicament that, sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, the blues was invented to affirm. It was a sorrow over his conviction that as a white Englishman the blues would always be out of his reach. It was that conviction, though, that sense of displacement, that made his blues ring so true: a conviction that in Green’s highest moments gave the lie to itself. Over all the years I�
�ve listened to his “Love That Burns,” trying to keep up with the tragedy it enacts, waiting for the closing guitar part that comes when words have taken the singer as far as they can, but not far enough, forcing him to leave words behind and plead with his bare hands, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to play it twice in a row. It is just too strong.

  Morrison came from a similar place, with the same belief in the blues as a kind of curse one puts on oneself, but for a long desert in his career he fled from it, his voice hollowing out along with the placid, reassuring world his music described. Sometimes he fell back before his masters and performed merely as a product of his influences, coming to life the most when he sang with John Lee Hooker; he reached his dead end, with album after album, when he seemed most of all influenced by himself. His music was all self-reference, until solipsism ruled and awarded its crown: the solipsist is always king of his own kingdom, and who willingly gives up a crown? All of that is left behind on The Healing Game; as a singer of confidence and pride, Morrison sometimes goes almost as far into the dark as Green did.

  Morrison dominates each song on The Healing Game—but the word song seems much too small. Like the rough god he sings about, Morrison is astride each incident in the music, each pause in a greater story, but often the most revealing moments—the moments that reveal the shape of a world, a point of view, an argument about life—are at the margins. It might be Pee Wee Ellis’s twisting saxophone, or the backing vocals of Katie Kissoon, or the side-singing of Georgie Fame, but each of them brings a certain realism to the setting. Morrison is the philosopher, the man of knowledge and experience; the others are the street he walks on. Ellis’s work is too individualistic to rest as mere accompaniment—from the first minutes of The Healing Game, his baritone sax and Leo Green’s tenor are part of a loose, casual interplay with Morrison and the other singers, a conversation of asides and pointed fingers. He can make you forget you’re listening to a self-evident, self-presenting master, and Morrison, often mumbling, sometimes stepping back from his own lines, as if to question himself, gives Ellis his room. Kissoon and Fame are slight singers, ordinary in every respect; they sing and talk like passers-by, like stand-ins for listeners. In the furious “Burning Ground,” which is about getting rid of a body, it’s clear who’ll be doing the dirty work—Morrison wouldn’t give up the pleasure to anyone else. Sounding as gleeful as the Kray Twins—the London gangsters who, with a plan to blackmail Brian Epstein over his homosexuality, supposedly once tried to take over management of the Beatles—Morrison orchestrates the action and gets the kicks. The listener gets to watch.

  “I’m not going to fake it, like Johnny Ray,” Morrison declaims in the middle of the otherwise unbroken, insistently measured “Sometimes We Cry.” It’s a cruel dismissal of a once-groundbreaking singer who died miserable and forgotten, just seven years before Morrison put another nail in his coffin—but there’s such strength in Morrison’s tone it can make you wonder what the cruelty is about.

  It was in the early 1950s that Ray, with an emotionalism that was shocking in its nakedness, set the stage for the rock’n’ roll performers, black and white, Bobby Bland no less than Elvis, James Brown no less than David Bowie, who would follow him. “Sometimes We Cry” isn’t casually titled—Ray’s “Cry” was number one in 1951 for eleven weeks; the flipside, also a huge hit, was “The Little White Cloud That Cried.” He was white, frail, with the energy of a dying man reaching out to grab your neck. “He’d hunch into himself,” Nik Cohn wrote in 1969 in Pop from the Beginning,choke on his words, gasp, stagger, beat his fist against his breast, squirm, fall forward on to his knees and, finally, burst into tears. He’d gag, tremble, half strangle himself. He’d pull out every last outrageous ham trick in the book and he would be comic, embarrassing, painful, but still it worked because, under the crap, he was in real agony, he was burning, and it was traumatic to watch him. He’d spew himself up in front of you and you’d freeze, you’d sweat, you’d be hurt yourself. You’d want to look away and you couldn’t.

  Even if it began as a show, the tears coming every night like Pete Townshend smashing his guitar, soon enough the desperation Ray sparked in his audience blew back at him, and some nights, in the face of the crowd, he would truly break down. Then his moment passed. His career collapsed with arrests in men’s rooms and attempts to go straight, both musically and as a public figure. His obloquy wasn’t far from that of Peter Green, who at the height of Fleetwood Mac’s popularity walked away from the band into religious insanity, electroshock, institutionalization, years living on the streets or in the woods, returning finally with his guitar, his voice, and no spirit, no insight into the music he played, a once-handsome man covered in fat and matted hair. So how did Johnny Ray fake it? What was it that he held back? Was it that, exposed to everyone for who he really was, he tried to pretend he was just like everybody else—a pathetic surrender that was itself no less fake than his performance? Johnny Ray had an act, Morrison seemed to be saying, and I don’t. He tried to pretend that he was just like everybody else; I never have and never will.

  In the interstices of The Healing Game, in the spaces between the words as Morrison sings them and the notes as he hits them, you can believe it. The depth and mastery of the music Morrison left on that album is such that, for me anyway, it calls up only one real familiar.

  Mattie May Thomas was a prisoner at the state penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi, when on 1 June 1939 the folklorist Herbert Halpert arrived to make recordings. Thomas and other women were gathered in a sewing room. “A made-up song, just about being in prison, alone,” Thomas said to introduce what she, or Halpert, titled “Workhouse Blues.” Was it made up? All the lines were commonplace, taken from the vast pool of floating verses from which people made their own songs. Thomas began around the time the blues took shape—“In the empty belly, black man, in the year nineteen hundred and nine, I was a little young hobo, all up and down the line”—and then leaped back to the brags, taunts, and japes that were circulating in Davy Crockett’s day, a lot of them out of his mouth, or put in it:I wrassled with the lions, black man, with the lions on

  the mountains high

  I pulled they hair out, black man, hair out strand by

  strand

  Leaping spiders, lord, began to bite my poor heart

  But let me tell you, baby, they crawled away and died

  I wrassled with the hounds, black man, hounds of hell

  all day

  I squeeze them so tight, until they faded away

  I swim the blue sea, with the mountains on my back

  I mean I conquered all the lions and I even turned they

  power back

  Whoever Mattie May Thomas was, she was not a folk singer, in any meaning of the term.7 Coming out of white frontier settlements, the words were men’s words; simply by claiming what is not supposed to be hers, she takes title. That is the folk process. But the voice is not. It’s plainly a professional voice, a nightclub singer’s, “the devil coming out of your own mouth”:8 clear, strong, claiming its own demons, using folkloric words to affirm that the frights and triumphs they describe happened to her and no one else. Like Morrison, Thomas presses words like bricks, then flies over verses toward some unreachable shore of release.

  Emotional release, for both, but for Thomas standing for true release, from prison, and that release symbolizing the shared slaves’ dream, shared as fable and prophecy, of flying back to Africa. For Morrison, his own dreams of a Viking’s voyage from Denmark to Caledonia and then a magic transport from the old world to the new and back again with ancient songs for a skyway. But if both voices are unique and capable of transcendence, Thomas not at all and Morrison at his fair best never jettison the ordinary, the inescapable, the squalid, the real. For both, it’s all in the refusal to be rushed. Ordinary life, after all, guarantees only death and oblivion. Morrison has faced oblivion; though she is almost certainly dead, somehow Mattie May Thomas escaped it, and Morrison may not. In
their tone they both say the same thing. Death has waited all these years; it can wait another day.

  Nik Cohn, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, revised edition of Pop from the Beginning (1969; New York: Grove, 1973), 13–14.

  “Crime Leaders Kray Twins Schemed to Take Over as the Beatles’ Managers,” Entertainment Daily, 21 June 2009.

  Sex Pistols, “Anarchy in the UK” (EMI, 1976).

  John Lennon, John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “The Luck of the Irish,” on Some Time in New York City (Apple, 1972).

  Gang of Four, “Armalite Rifle” (Fast, 1978).

  Gene Austin, “The Lonesome Road” (1928) collected on Gene Austin—The Voice of the Southland (ASV, 1996). Gene Austin’s number one hits between 1925 and 1929 included songs that for good or ill have stuck in the American memory: “Yes Sir! That’s My Baby,” “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue,” “Forgive Me,” “My Blue Heaven,” “Ramona,” and “Carolina Moon.” “The Lonesome Road” reached #10; I have never played it for anyone, over eighty or under twenty, who didn’t drift off to another place while listening, or who failed to say “What was that?” when it was over. Judy Garland and Bobby Darin performed a bright and soulful version on The Judy Garland Show, taped and broadcast just eight days after the assassination of President Kennedy; see The Judy Garland Show That Got Away (Hip-O DVD, 2002).

  Fleetwood Mac, “Albatross,” “Long Gray Mare,” “Love That Burns,” “Trying So Hard to Forget,” (1968), and “Man of the World” (1969), collected on The Original Fleetwood Mac—The Blues Years (Castle, 1990). Green’s work on Fleetwood Mac member Danny Kirwan’s “Something Inside of Me” is best heard on Fleetwood Mac’s Shrine ’69, a live recording from Los Angeles (Rykodisc, 1999).