When That Rough God Goes Riding

by Greil Marcus

  Hold

  Hold

  Hold

  Hold

  Hold

  Hold

  Hold it—

  The second chorus clamps down, the desperation in the title phrase so intense you can’t imagine where it is that’s left to go. Everyone pulls back—and inexplicably, as if maybe each and every one of them has gone as far as they can (maybe everyone needs a drink, needs a cigarette), they leave the song to the saxophonist.

  It might be the worst instrumental break in the history of the form. Meandering, tripping over his own feet, bumping into the amplifiers, hitting sour notes again and again, the saxophonist takes you out of the song, out of the music, out of the building, into the street, and not up to your room with Gloria following to knock on your door as soon as you’ve closed it, merely back to your car, which has a smashed right window and a ticket on the windscreen.

  But a certain gravity has already made itself felt; you can’t see it, you can’t necessarily feel it even if you try to call it back, but as soon as the band returns it’s as if it never left. They begin right where they left off, at the edge of the same cliff; if anything they’re closer to the edge. As Morrison presses on, the guitarist begins to chime, quietly, tiny high notes building toward a finale that is already present as an inevitability, a presence that already gainsays whatever might be left to be said.

  The chiming gets louder. Morrison begins to pound single words, one sequence after another. “Even even even even even” shoots out like white water, but “Watch it! Watch it! Watch it!” pulls against the momentum of the band—it couldn’t be more sudden or complete if Morrison were holding up the flat of his hand. In the drama in which Morrison has trapped you, at first it might seem that he’s doing this to forestall the fate of the person to whom the song is addressed: to save her, to save him. But as soon as that thought appears, if it does, it turns on itself. What you’re hearing is the singer’s rage that it’s too late, his bitterness that no one listened, no one heard, that it didn’t have to end this way.

  They reach the chorus again. It goes on, doubled, tripled, “You can’t stop, you can’t stop, you can’t stop now,” the backing singers turning a somersault, “Can’t stop now, can’t stop now, Friday’s child,” for a full minute and a half, and it’s transporting, but it doesn’t matter. The song had already ended, back there in the middle of the curse, the singer pleading with his charge to hold on to what she or he had, knowing he or she had already given it away.

  There’s applause. Morrison goes right into “Que Sera, Sera”—“I asked my mother, what shall I be”—which turns out to be an introduction to “Hound Dog.”

  Control, dir. Anton Corbijn (2007; Genius DVD, 2008).

  Lisa Stansfield, “Friday’s Child,” on No Prima Donna: The Songs of Van Morrison (Polydor, 1994).

  Them, “Friday’s Child,” collected on The Story of Them Featuring Van Morrison (Polydor, 1998).

  Van Morrison, “Friday’s Child,” on The Inner Mystic: Recorded Live at Pacific High Studios, California, Sept. 1971 (Oh Boy/ Odyssey bootleg of complete Pacific High Studios concert, as broadcast 1971 on KSAN-FM, San Francisco).

  MADAME GEORGE. 1968

  “With a record as evocative as Astral Weeks,” Josh Gleason said to Van Morrison in 2009, for a high-profile NPR piece on the occasion of the release of Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl, “there’s a nagging desire to understand what in your life inspired it—to know where the songs come from, what they mean.”

  “No, no, no, because, it’s not about me,” Morrison said with a vehemence that didn’t sound defensive—as his denials, of anything, so often do. “It’s totally fictional. These are short stories, in musical form—put together of composites, of conversations I heard, things I saw, and movies, newspapers, books, and comes out as stories. That’s it,” he said, though already his tone had shifted to that of utter wonder that people won’t accept this. “There’s no more.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d had to answer the question, which he’d never done in a manner anyone liked. “Did you have anyone in particular in mind?” the folk singer Happy Traum asked Morrison in 1970; it was Morrison’s first Rolling Stone interview. “Did you know anyone like that?” “Like what?” Morrison said, his guard up in an instant. “What’s Madame George look like? What are you trying to say ... in front. So I know.” “It seems to me to be the story of a drag queen,” Traum said reasonably. “Oh no,” Morrison said. “Whatever gave you that impression? It all depends on what you want, that’s all, how you want to go. If you see it as a male or a female or whatever, it’s your trip. How do see it? I see it as a ... a Swiss cheese sandwich.”“Everybody gives me a quizzical look, a question mark stare, and they think I know what they’re talking about,” Morrison said after a moment, stepping back, trying to explain. “‘What about like blah blah blah ... ’ and they expect me to go ‘Yeah!’ It’s just not that simple.”

  Eight years later he was again talking to Rolling Stone, this time with Jonathan Cott, whose technique as an interviewer has always been to elicit the most direct responses by throwing out the most off-the-wall questions, usually asking his subjects if they agreed with the sentiments expressed by, say, the Hasidic rabbi Dov Baer, “the Mazid of Mezeritch.” In this instance Cott stayed closer to home: “A friend of mine thinks Madame George is a perfume—you sing the name as ‘Madame Joy,’ and then there’s that scent of Shalimar.” “It seems to me to be the story of a drag queen,” Morrison said, as if he were Happy Traum and Cott were Morrison, except that he was laughing, and despite the fact that he had already told someone else that Cott’s friend might as well claim the prize: “The original title was ‘Madame Joy’ but the way I wrote it down was ‘Madame George.’ Don’t ask me why I do this because I just don’t know.” “The question is,” Cott went on, missing a step, “who’s singing the song?” “The question might really be,” Morrison said, in a friendly manner, but with a gesture toward another plane of meaning that could not have been more pronounced if he’d knocked the writer’s notepad out of his hand, “is the song singing you?”

  This was nearly three decades before the one-time rock critic Tom Nolan—perhaps following Morrison’s suggestion to his biographer John Collis that “Madame George” might have had something to do with his great-aunt Joy, who he, Morrison, thought might have been clairvoyant—argued for the Wall Street Journal that Madame George was in truth George “Georgie” Hyde-Lees, the wife of William Butler Yeats, known conventionally as Madame George Yeats, who died in 1968, the year “Madame George” appeared. She was a spiritualist who sparked Yeats’s work with automatic writing dictated by the dead, a technique Morrison, who in 1984 recorded Yeats’s “Crazy Jane on God” in a cracked voice, has used when blocked, cutting up copies of People magazine, rearranging parts of headlines and text, divining a line for a song ... and never mind that the given name of both Van Morrison and his father is George. If the character cannot be permitted to be made up, if it must be real—to borrow a phrase from another Irishman, well, as well her as another.

  The tyranny of tying anything an artist might do or say to his or her own life, to give it the weight of the real, and switch off the lights on the weightlessness of the imagination—a philistine fear of art that found its most spectacular form in the JT Leroy hoax, which only seemed to convince people that while taking fiction for autobiography remained the highest form of understanding, it was worth making sure that the person whose autobiography one was plumbing actually existed—was summed up all too well by John Irving in 1979. We were talking about the scene in The World According to Garp where Garp’s son Walt is killed, and about the many readers who’d written to him, saying, “I lost a child, too”—believing that any story that hit them so hard had to be true. “How do you respond to those letters?” I asked him. “Do you have any answer to those letters?” “I always answer those letters,” he said. “Those are the serious ones; those are the ones that matter.�
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  I have had two or three friends who went through that, and their reactions were very matterful to me—and I guess the letters that I really felt drawn to respond to were those from people who, in that old way, again, would write me one letter, assuming that this had to be my experience, too. And when I would write back—sort of a condolence and a thank-you for responding to the book—I felt I had to say, no, this is not my misfortune. Then I developed a number of ways of saying, well, it’s enough to have had children to imagine what it would be like to lose them. But this, of course, assumes an imagination of immense paranoia on the part of everyone, which everyone may not have.

  I found people writing back to me a second time, some of them unable to conceal their resentment: they felt tricked. They felt they had been taken in by the book. They came to the book with open arms, saying this is genuine, this is true, that hurt in all the real ways—and then to find out that it was only imagined—

  I live by my imagination, and yet even I can be influenced by how the imagination is mistrusted by the rest of the world, by the way fiction is discredited by non-fiction. I’ve been on airplanes and people say, “Hi, Ken, Kansas City, what do you do?” I say, “Oh, I write.” “Oh, what do you write?” “Novels.” “Oh, ah, fiction ... ” Immediately: you know what I mean! It’s just this shitting on from the word go.

  In Mary Gaitskill’s novel Two Girls Fat and Thin, a writer takes up the challenge of imagining whole worlds out of glimpses, out of a walk down the street:The evening was cool and vague. Justine watched everyone who walked past her, and irksome tiny acts about them entered her orbit and clustered about her head. A young couple approached her, the man with his square pink head raised as if he were looking over a horizon, his hands thrust angrily in his pockets, his slightly turnedout feet hitting the ground with dismal solidity, his cheap jacket open to his cheap shirt. The woman on his arm crouched into him slightly, her artificially curled hair bounded around her prematurely lined face, her pink mouth said, “Because it’s dishonest to me and to everybody and even yourself.” Justine looked headlong into the open maw of their lives; they passed, and the pit closed up again.

  It doesn’t matter if Gaitskill actually walked down a street where someone said the words that in her paragraph appear in quotation marks. A moment this closely observed has already gone beyond the limits of observation; it is already imagined. That is why any talk of the real, the lived, the experienced as a legitimation or validation of aesthetic response—really, nothing more than a permission for us to be moved by what we are in fact moved by—is a red herring at best. There are only two reasons people try to track Madame George down, to link her to a real person: because the character is itself powerful, full of allure, and because of our own fear of the imagination, our fear that we are vulnerable to some trifle somebody else merely thought up. But Morrison’s translation is better: are you letting the song sing you, or are you trying to sing the song?

  So let your imagination open up and drift. Let Madame George tell you who she is. Who do you think of? I think of Michael Jackson. I think of Marianne Faithfull, telling the same sixties stories—the sixties as the New Jerusalem, and she its consort, mother, and Merlin—over and over again, always with a glamour that is both grimy from use and full of its own imperious light, qualities you can hear in Faithfull’s own recording of “Madame George.” I think of the mother of one of my eighth-grade classmates. With her daughter as a front, she would hold parties for the class, fifteen of us from a Quaker school on the San Francisco Peninsula. She was the first bohemian I ever encountered: a single mother, when that was strange, if not a scandal, who dressed in silk, in long, loose dresses. She was heavily made up. While she never gave us alcohol, it was all around, fancy bottles displayed on tables and in cabinets, like a hint of future pleasures, and she always seemed drunk. She showed us her gun. She seemed to need to be around young people. At thirteen in 1958 this was seductive—and a relief to leave behind, to move on to high school, where, a few years later, one or two of my new classmates found their way to Ken Kesey’s acid farm, just up the road in La Honda, as she might have also, unless she faded away, chasing her own daughter’s youth until it too was used up.

  Morrison first recorded “Madame George” for Bert Berns’s Bang label in November 1967, as Blowin’ Your Mind! was climbing its way to #182 on the charts—a version not released until long after Berns’s death, and until long after the song, as it appeared on Astral Weeks, had achieved the kind of hermetic glow that transcends fame. Here it’s a production, as if at a party or a nightclub, with dead-end ambiance. Morrison is sarcastic, even sneering; behind him the Sweet Emotions do “the colored girls go” exactly as Lou Reed always heard it. The people in the audience, if this is a club, or on the couches and in the kitchen or in the doorways if it’s an apartment, are distracted, ignoring the singer, everyone talking and drinking. There’s bass, tambourine, and an electric guitar playing stripper blues like something out of the roadhouse scene in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, where women wander through the crowd naked and the floor is covered with a layer of cigarette butts that except for the dancers’ feet hasn’t been disturbed since the place opened. Morrison fights for space, draping cool over himself like an overcoat. It’s as if he needs to satirize the material to protect himself from it—or to protect the song from the crowd, which is to say the producer. “Then your self-control lets go / Suddenly you’re up against the bathroom door,” he says in lines that would be gone by the time he sat down with Connie Kay, Richard Davis, Lewis Merenstein. The crowd is egging him on, then yelling and shrieking. The music is busy and burdened. “We know you’re pretty far out,” Morrison says, as if his stand-up act is just about to completely dry up, as if all he’s really doing is schmoozing music business hustlers, as if he’d rather be anywhere else. “I’ve got a tape in Belfast with all my songs on that record”—from Blowin’ Your Mind!—“done the way they’re supposed to be done,” he said after a show in early 1969, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. That night his own acoustic guitar completed a combo of a stand-up bassist and the Astral Weeks hornman John Payne; Morrison sang every song from Astral Weeks along with “Who Drove the Red Sports Car” and “He Ain’t Give You None” from Blowin’ Your Mind! which now took on drifting, Astral Weeks rhythms. “It’s good and simple, it doesn’t come on heavy. ‘T. B. Sheets’ isn’t heavy, it’s just quiet. It was the producer who did it, and the record company. They had to cover it with the big electric guitar and the drums and the rest. It came out wrong and they released it without my consent.”

  Morrison and Berns had been fighting over the record, and everything else—Blowin’ Your Mind! advances eaten up by expenses, royalties deferred against returns, management contracts, publishing contracts, production contracts—when Berns dropped dead of a heart attack at the end of 1967. There were people who thought Morrison had yelled him to death. There were threats from people who knew how to make good on them,10 and there was the demand from Berns’s widow that Morrison produce the thirty-six new songs he had owed Berns’s publishing company, and that he now owed her.

  Thus one day in 1968, not long before he began recording Astral Weeks, in order to escape his contracts with Berns and retrieve the freedom to record again on his own terms,11 Morrison sat down with his guitar and Lewis Merenstein and taped thirty-one numbers, seemingly in approximately the thirty-five minutes it takes to play them: “Twist and Shake,” “Shake and Roll,” “Stomp and Scream,” “Scream and Holler,” and “Jump and Thump,” five variations on Berns’s Isley Brothers hit “Twist and Shout”; “Hang On Groovy,” a flip of the bird to Berns’s hit “Hang On Sloopy” with the McCoys; the likes of “Just Ball,” “Ringworm,” “Blow in Your Nose,” “Nose in Your Blow,” “You Say France and I Whistle,” “I Want a Danish,” and “The Big Royalty Check.” But there are two performances that don’t parody themselves. One is “Goodbye George,” if only for the stately “Like a Rolling Stone” chords that
open it. “Goodbye, George,” Morrison sings soulfully. “Here comes—” The song seems about to turn into a farewell to Berns himself—until “Here comes” is followed not by “the night” but “number forty-five, in Argentina.”

  But with the next cut, “Dum Dum George,” the melody of “Madame George” as it would emerge on Astral Weeks is instantly and completely in place. This and the real song begin in the same mood, with the same count—even if Morrison is dismissing Lewis Merenstein’s entreaties before either had the chance to make anything more of them than this. “This is the story of Dum Dum George,” Morrison says as the theme continues. “Who came up to Boston, one sunny afternoon”—and there is that “Madame George” minor-key drop. “He drove up from New York City ... and he was freaky. And he wanted to record me. And I said, ‘George, you’re dumb.’ And he said, ‘I know. Why do you think I make so much money? I want to do ... a record ... that’ll make number one.’ Dumb dumb.” Ilene Berns listened to the tape and let the other five compositions Morrison owed her slide.

  It’s spooky to hear the song find its voice ahead of the moment when that voice would take shape. “That’s what we got on tape,” Morrison said in 2009 of the Astral Weeks sessions that followed. “Another performance might have been totally different. That was that performance, on those days.” That sense of accident and serendipity takes over. “Madame George” as one can hear it today sounds most of all unlikely, not something that could be traced to anything in the singer’s immediate circumstances, his past, his idols (though Lead Belly’s “Alabama Bound” is here too, as it is all over Morrison’s music). The possibility that the throwaway one minute and twenty-seven seconds of “Madame George” that Morrison recorded before encountering musicians with whom he would make Astral Weeks might be all there was hits home in the same way that one might worry that the day would come when one would put on “Madame George”—or any song one thought was as rich as life itself—and it would turn up dead.