by Greil Marcus
For me there is always a sense of worry when I put the album on again. Will it sound as true, will it sound as good as before, will there come a time when I will be listening to the end of “Madame George” and suddenly it’s already there, I’ve heard it, it has nothing left to tell me—and that has never happened. It has never worn out. It’s never given itself up.
Is that because it has no ending? When I think idly about Astral Weeks, walking down the street, something in the air or in the carriage of the person next to me reminding me of a turn of phrase or a pause somewhere on the album, it doesn’t end with “Slim Slow Slider,” the last song of the eight that comprise it. It ends with “Madame George,” which is only the fifth song—and that is because of what happens after Richard Davis hits that note that, for him, has said all the song had left to say.
The scene has been set, and all the players have wandered into it. In George’s apartment, with the frayed damask cushions and the heavy drapes making the air close, the boys watch as George changes the LPs and 78s on the box, handling each so carefully, thumbs never touching the grooves, strange records by Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker that speak a different language, they watch as George turns her Ouija board, they watch her smoke, they watch when in panic she thinks the police are near and rushes to throw her dope out the window—“down into the street below.” Even when the boys are doing all these things themselves—playing with the Ouija board, speaking the secret jazz language, which in this place is their language, the language they speak to each other as if “Kokomo” or “I Cover the Waterfront” are clues to real life and a code to keep the square world at bay, smoking dope, gathering it up to toss it away—they feel as if they’re watching.
There is the long section when all the boys turn their back on her and walk away—into adulthood, responsibility, idleness, dope-dealing, addiction, wealth, respectability, renown, and, never, what she already represents, with the makeup caking on her eyes, the sweat rotting the foundation, the wig slipping, her speech slurring, the laughter too loud, the need in the way she waves you goodbye (“Hey love, you forgot your glove”) too obvious: death. The singer has to get all the way away, taking a train out of the city, maybe even leaving the country, the pennies he throws out of the window onto the bridges below at once a way of pretending he’s still a little boy and an echo of George’s dope falling to the street, all one long fall. Here are the great passages of repetition, where you cannot imagine the song can end. Dry your eye dry your eye dry your eye dry your eye dry your eye dry your eye dry your eye and on thirteen times, more, as if it’s all been a breath being drawn, a pause to launch the more bitter, withdrawing, fleeing And the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves the glove, all with the burr of a trumpet coming down like an execution, the blade of the guillotine raised and dropped again and again long after the head has been passed from hand to hand in the crowd. And this is only prelude to what Morrison will do with the word “goodbye,” what he will do murmuring, singing ooos and woos as if he’s found them on the copy of “Earth Angel” that one day a DJ forgot to take off the turntable, a record that played on after the DJ was fired and after the station shut down, a signal in the ether sustained by its own power.
One day in 2000 I walked into the Portland Art Museum to find the Dick Slessig (as in dyslexic) Combo—Carl Bronson, bass, Mark Lightcap, guitar, Steve Goodfriend, drums—half an hour into a performance of what would turn into ninety minutes before I realized that the nearly abstract, circular pattern they were offering as the meaning of life—it was all they were playing, anyway—was from George McCrae’s 1974 Miami disco hit “Rock Your Baby.” Or rather the pattern wasn’t from the tune, it was the tune, the thing itself. Variation was never McCrae’s point (the big moment in “Rock Your Baby,” the equivalent of the guitar solo, is when he barely whispers “Come on”); finding the perfect, selfrenewing riff was. “I could listen to that forever,” I said to Bronson when he and the others finally stepped down for a break. “We’d play it forever if we were physically capable,” he said.
They were also playing “Madame George.” When Morrison dives into the words, the syllables, that will seem to divest him of flesh, leaving only a word, the word repeating until it has remade a body of flesh to hold it, until it can walk like a man, the feeling is that the singer has lived this out many times before, the word always evading him, until the day when it happened that certain people came together in the right place at the right time and the body was, for the ten minutes it took to play the song, found.
The ending, as it begins again with Davis’s moral exit, is so long, so drawn out, so dramatic and scary, I get chills thinking about it, let alone listening to it. As the train pulls off, it seems a whole body of memory is dropping away, has been cut off to drift away on the sea. In the trick your mind plays on you, the drama “Madame George” enacts might be the end of the record because nothing could follow it. That’s the end of the story—and yet because of the way that ending is so drawn out, each repeating word or syllable doubling back on itself, the song doesn’t ever really end, and in fact the ending is false. As you listen you hear that no one present, not the singer, the producer, the musicians, not even Richard Davis can actually make the song stop, and so as you listen, and reach the end, and there is a pause before the next song, “Madame George” seems to be still playing. When you merely let the song play in your mind, catching perhaps for the first time that at the very end the boy remembers that it was Madame George herself who put him on the train, telling him, so flatly, as if she herself has to return him to whatever life it is he’ll lead, “This is the train,” him crying out to her, long after the train last left the city behind, then telling himself to say goodbye, say goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye, say goodbye, get on the train, but always commanding himself to say it, saying it always to himself, never to Madame George, and because he cannot say the words out loud, she can’t hear them, so he has to keep saying it, and in that way too the song doesn’t end. Is it any wonder that people try to fix something so unfixed, so free of its own body as the Dick Slessig Combo’s version of “Rock Your Baby” is free of “Rock Your Baby,” that people have tried for more than forty years to contain it, to say exactly what it is, who it is, and what it isn’t—which is to say whatever it might be to whoever might hear it? “I can remember to the day when I stopped teaching Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse ,” John Irving said in 1979. “I loved that little part called ‘Time Passes.’ . . . It’s the difference between a novel of manners and a novel of weight, a novel of some kind of history, where it says, ‘Hey look, “time changes.”’”
I became so angry when I had to teach that book after Quentin Bell’s biography came out. Not because the book is lousy. It isn’t. But because the students were so willing to use that biography as an explanation for everything they read—and so many people read fiction that way it nauseates me.
It’s difficult to tell people what the reason for that is without insulting them—because the real reason is that people with limited imaginations find it hard to imagine that anyone else has an imagination. Therefore, they must think that everything they read in some way happened . For years, I’ve sat with students, knowing full well that the worst, most dreck-ridden piece of their story is in the story because “That’s just the way it happened.” And I say, “Why is this dreadful scene, why is this stupid person here?” And the student says, “Oh, that’s not a stupid person, that’s my mother, and that’s exactly what she said.”
“They felt they had been taken in,” Irving had said. But that’s what art does—that’s how it takes you somewhere else. And the phrase has its meanings. To be taken in means to be accepted into the brotherhood, the secret society, where all recognize the same signs. It means to be bereft, helpless, and then to be received off the street into a place where you will be cared for. It means to be
fooled. And that is the bedrock meaning, the speech “Madame George” speaks: if you don’t make the song happen to the person who knows nothing, who has never heard of your characters and has no reason to care about them, no matter how real they might be, the song didn’t happen. And if you do make it happen, it did.
Josh Gleason, “Van Morrison: Astral Weeks Revisited,” Weekend Edition, NPR, 28 February 2009.
Happy Traum, interview with Van Morrison, Rolling Stone, 9 July 1970, 33.
Jonathan Cott, “Bob Dylan,” Rolling Stone, 26 January 1978, in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. Cott (Wenner Books, 2006), 187.
———“Van Morrison: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, 30 November 1978, 52.
“The original title was ‘Madame Joy’”: Ritchie Yorke, Van Morrison: Into the Music (London: Charisma, 1975), 60–61.
“It may have something to do”: John Collis, Inarticulate Speech of the Heart (New York: Da Capo, 1996), 107.
Tom Nolan, “Who Was Madame George?” Wall Street Journal online, 14 April 2007.
Van Morrison and automatic writing, Jonathan Taplin, audio commentary, The Last Waltz DVD.
“John Irving: The Rolling Stone Interview,” GM, Rolling Stone, 13 December 1979, 75, 71.
Mary Gaitskill, Two Girls Fat and Thin (New York: Poseidon, 1991), 225.
Marianne Faithfull, “Madame George,” on No Prima Donna: The Songs of Van Morrison (Polydor, 1994). Produced by Van Morrison and Phil Coulter—whose theme music is all over Breakfast on Pluto.
Dick Slessig Combo—included as Jessica Bronson and the Dick Slessig Combo present for your pleasure ... as part of the exhibition “Let’s Entertain: Life’s Guilty Pleasures” (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Oregon; Musée national d’art moderne, Paris [2000]; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; and Miami Art Museum [2001]). From the exhibition catalogue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2000): “Working with Carl Bronson, [Jessica Bronson] has designed a curvilinear bandstand that is lit from below so that it appears to float in a pool of light. The band will perform onstage on the opening night of the exhibition, leaving behind the lights and a looped compact disc of the performance for the duration of the exhibition. This empty stage with disembodied voices evokes notions of virtual pleasure and performance, the empty dreams of Hollywood, and the underbelly of spectacle. The machinery of fame—illumination, spectacle, performance—is laid bare, and the lack of a nice Hollywood ending suggests a disrupted narrative.” Not to me—or, I think, the musicians. Other Dick Slessig Combo performances include versions of Kraftwerke’s “Computer Love” and Bobby Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe”; a 2004 single (dickslessig.com) was made up of a forty-two-minute dreaming-and-waking drift through Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” paired with a twenty-two-minute trudge through Crosby Stills & Nash’s “Guinnevere.”
Van Morrison, “Madame George” (November 1967), plus “Goodbye George,” “Dum Dum George,” and other demo recordings (fall 1968), collected on Payin’ Dues (Charly, 1994).
———“Madame George,” Astral Weeks (Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, 1968).
SAINT DOMINIC’S PREVIEW. 1996
On the album of the same name, released in 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday in Derry, there was no escaping the immediacy of the song. Saint Dominic’s Preview—was it a mass held for those who wouldn’t see the next year? A special invitation-only pre-sale sale to empty Northern Ireland of everything it ever was before and was now ? For all that the phrase explained itself it might as well have been the Veedon Fleece, and that probably would have been in one of the sale bins if you knew how to look.
The cover of Saint Dominic’s Preview featured a theatrical shot of Morrison sitting on what might have been church steps, holding a battered guitar. Save for an oddly dandyish kerchief around his neck his clothes were worn, with even a gaping hole in one pant leg, a street singer playing for coins and truth, his head slightly lifted toward the sky, his face sad but thoughtful, you could even say wistful, philosophical, his eyes gazing into the future, into the past: Will this war never end? You could buy a photocopied broadside called “The Troubles” off him for a dollar.
Even though Van Morrison has never written or sung a song with the phrase in it—no blues song, not even the cabaret blues “Trouble in Mind,” planting the probably nineteenth-century southern verse “Sun gonna shine in my back door some day, wind gonna rise up, blow my blues away” in a twentieth-century New York penthouse—the portrait was as corny as it was contrived, and more fake. Morrison had worked for years to say nothing about the Troubles. The Sex Pistols might use the letters “IRA” in “Anarchy in the UK” like a bomb, but the acronym had never passed Morrison’s lips in public, and for all one knows never will. In In The Name of the Father, Daniel Day-Lewis’s Gerry Conlon is an out-of-control prankster IRA hangeron in Belfast sent to London by his father because the IRA will kill him for his unreliability, then falsely imprisoned for an IRA London bombing. He has a poster on the wall of his cell to keep him alive, to affirm his innocence and his defiance: Johnny Rotten, not Van Morrison.
Whatever the intentions behind it, the cover of Saint Dominic’s Preview worked as a setup, convicting the album’s title song of falsity and bad faith—a song that in fact would name Belfast, and with a bitter regret weighting the word with all of its history, which is to say all of its killings—in advance. But the song was written and recorded before the cover was made, and it had fixed the game in advance: there was no false face it could not erase.
The song was stirring. It was exhilarating. The singer’s commitment to his every word passed over to the listener even if the listener had never wasted a thought on Northern Ireland; there was a sense of engaging with the world on your own terms. As the scene shifted from Belfast to San Francisco to New York, shifted in phrases that barely made more narrative than a single word, as the story went from people being shot down in one street to people looking away from others as they walked down another to a rock ’n’ roll singer at a party to promote his new album, what could have been felt as a slide from the profound to the trivial remained a story that stayed on its feet, that surrendered not a single measure of moral right from one side of the story to the other. When the song ended, you could feel you’d been around the world.
The specificity of the bare nod to Belfast went off like a gun. If, as more than one person has written, the title of Seamus Heaney’s 1975 poem “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” summed up both the aesthetic and the everyday life of avoidance in Northern Ireland in that time, when the cause writing your name on a bullet could as well be that of your presumed fellows as of your fated enemies, if not chance itself, could Morrison’s work up to this moment have been a version of that poem itself, with “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” boiled down, in the manner of a song, to nothing more than its phrase, sung over and over in endless variation? “Is there a link between that attitude, which Morrison seems to embody,” a friend wrote, “and the yarragh? Can’t we understand aspects of the yarragh as being at once a safe place beyond language”—when the wrong words could get you killed, or, with you safe at home in Marin County or New York or England, get someone who sang your song in the wrong place at the wrong time killed—“and an attempt to stretch for the sublime when the world, and Belfast is a world whether you’re there in the flesh or not, is crowding you very tightly, and even a gut cry, a howl beyond words, is an embrace of the failure of language, a celebration of the faith that some things not only should not but can’t be spoken of or even named?”
When Morrison performed the song on television twenty-four years later, the context was no longer clear. In 1972, the description of life in the Bay Area that Morrison offered in “Saint Dominic’s Preview”—a utopia of sun, sloth, and solipsism, where nothing was more important than a refusal, in his words, to feel anybody else’s pain, where the best struggled to get outside their empty shells, and failed—was so acute it wrote the script for a movie t
hat wouldn’t be shot for six years. Asked in 2000 why in 1978 he’d chosen to remake Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and why he’d set it not in the film’s original California Valley town but in San Francisco, Phil Kaufman, the director, didn’t hesitate for a second: “I was living in San Francisco, it was the beginning of the New Age movement, and all I saw were pods.” But in 1996 that was all a long time ago—even if the British torture of IRA militants, IRA bombs in London and UDA bombs in Belfast, each side executing not only the enemy but its own suspects, informers, collaborators, unreliables, anyone unlucky enough to have joined the right side at the wrong time, went on. For that matter, it had been awhile since a record company had put on a big bash for Van Morrison. The song had to make its own stage and raise its own curtain.
In 1996, the piece begins with a guitarist picking out a modal theme, a minor key that quickly loses itself in all that it might say: this could be the beginning of anything, a train song, a cowboy ballad, “Little Maggie.” When Morrison begins to sing, about cleaning windows in Belfast, about Edith Piaf, a violin comes in, and the territory opens up—to San Francisco, then immediately across the country, in the old folk phrase “A long way to Buffalo,” then across the ocean to Belfast again, and without your noticing the journey has turned strange, and the stakes have been raised. You can’t tell when it was that Morrison began to push, when his voice lowered, when he began to play with the harsh vowels of his own gruff tone, when a hint of violence crept in—so that when he caught the history of a country as he pushed down with “Hoping that Joyce, don’t blow the hoist,” you realize you know exactly what he was talking about, even if time and place were now unfixed, even if you couldn’t have explained “don’t blow the hoist” to save your life.
