by Greil Marcus
As I write, you page down to Thomas’s 134 MySpace friends, including Nina Simone, Pablo Neruda, Miles Davis, Patti Smith, Sun Ra, Jack Kerouac, Alicia Keys, Janis Joplin, Suicide, James Brown, and Guy Debord, whose 1973 film La Société du Spectacle is the clear inspiration for Biomass’s “No Mo’ Freedom” video. It’s something to contemplate: What if these people, almost all of them dead, really had heard Mattie May Thomas? What if those living still haven’t? How lucky they are to have that ahead of them.
8 A mother’s curse on her blues-singing daughter, from Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (New York: Bantam, 1976).
9 Sigman also wrote a spoken introduction: “Remember this: Where love’s concerned, at times you’ll think your world has overturned. But if he’s yours, and you’re his, remember this—”
10 A photo taken at a Bang Records launch party for Morrison—a launch party held on a boat—shows a tipsy Morrison, a beaming Janet Planet, the Brill Building songwriter and Berns associate Jeff Barry, Berns himself as a ringer for Gene Vincent, and a big man with a bigger cigar sticking out of his mouth like a screwdriver—the most mobbedup-looking picture of the New York record business I’ve ever seen.
11 While agreeing to include two Berns estate–owned compositions, which turned out to be “Madame George” and “Beside You,” a version of which Morrison had also recorded with Berns, on any new album.
12 Specifically “Robh thu ’sa’ bheinn? (Were You in the Mountains?),” a Gaelic waulking song from the isle of Barra, off the coast of Scotland, sung by one “Mary Morrison and a group of old women”: “They sing to aid their labour as they pound homemade cloth, ‘waulking’ it round in a sunwise direction against a board.”
13 The movie was directed by Alan Parker and produced by Lynda Myles, who, when in 2009 I asked about Morrison’s involvement, wrote: “VM came over to see Alan and met in Alan’s hotel room in London. He arrived with his manager, having been sent pages of the script in advance. The manager said that VM required a club sandwich. There was no small talk while this was delivered and VM ate the sandwich. The manager kept saying how keen VM was to be in the movie. Van continued to eat the sandwich. He was asked to read but refused. When Alan asked why not, VM said ‘because it’s shit.’ The meeting was then basically abandoned.”
Copyright © 2010 by Greil Marcus
“It’s All in the Game” lyrics by Carl Sigman,
music by Charles Gates Dawes. Copyright © 1951 (renewed) by
Music Sales Corporation. International copyright secured.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
eISBN : 978-1-610-39018-7
1. Morrison, Van, 1945–—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Rock
music—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML420.M63M37 2010
782.42164092—dc22
2010001656
