When That Rough God Goes Riding

East Belfast was militantly Protestant, but Morrison's parents were freethinkers; even after his mother became a Jehovah's Witness for a time in the 1950s, his father remained a committed atheist. The real church in the Morrison household was musical. There was always the radio ("My father was listening to John McCormack"); more obsessively, there was "my father's vast record collection," 78s and LPs by the all-American Lead Belly, and within the kingdom of his vast repertoire of blues, ballads, folk songs, protest songs, work songs, and party tunes that dissolved all traditions of race or place, the minstrel and bluesman Jimmie Rodgers, cowboy singers of the likes of Eddy Arnold and Gene Autry, the balladeer Woody Guthrie, the hillbilly poet Hank Williams, the songsters Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the gospel blues guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe—and later Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, John Lee Hooker, Big Joe Williams, all of them magical names. Thus when the thirteen-year-old singer, guitar banger, and harmonica player Van Morrison went from the Sputniks to Midnight Special, named for one of Lead Belly's signature numbers—and after that from Midnight Special to the Thunderbolts, a would-be rock 'n' roll outfit that tried to catch the thrills of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, and from the Thunderbolts to the Monarchs Showband, a nine-man outfit with a horn section, choreographed shuffles, and stage suits that would play your company dinner, your Christmas party, your wedding, and which in the early '60s toured Germany offering Ray Charles imitations to homesick GIs, only a patch of the map Morrison carried inside himself had been scratched.

In 1964, in Belfast, with the band Them, Morrison began to find his style: the blues singer's marriage of emotional extremism and nihilistic reserve, the delicacy of a soul singer's presentation of a bleeding heart, a folk singer's sense of the uncanny in the commonplace, the rhythm and blues bandleader's commitment to drive, force, speed, and excitement above all. The group's name, calling up the 1957 horror movie about giant radioactive ants loose in the sewers of Los Angeles, was full of teenage menace: ran ads in the Belfast Telegraph. With Morrison pushing the combo through twenty minutes of his own "Gloria," night after night in the ballroom of a seamen's mission called the Maritime Hotel, Them began to live up to its name.

Cut to three minutes or less on 45s, the band's songs would soon bring Morrison a taste of fame. In 1965, in London—"Where," the liner notes to Them's second album quoted Morrison, "it all happens! ..."—the group crumbled, but Morrison recorded under their name with a few members of the band and a clutch of studio musicians. Though Morrison would disavow them as the most paltry reductions of what had happened at the Maritime—"It wasn't even Them after Belfast," Morrison told me one afternoon in 1970, as he told others before and since—Them made two unforgettable albums, harsh in one moment, lyrical in the next. In 1965 and 1966 Them scored modest hits on both sides of the Atlantic: "Gloria" (covered by the Chicago band the Shadows of Knight, who had the bigger hit in the U.S.A., except on the West Coast), "Here Comes the Night," "Baby Please Don't Go," "Mystic Eyes."

To those who were listening, it was clear that Van Morrison was as intense and imaginative a performer as any to have emerged in the wake of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—who, he claimed of the latter band in angry, drunken moments, stole it all from him, from him! Yet it was equally clear, to those who saw Them's shows in California in 1966—at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, and at the Whisky A-Go-Go in Los Angeles in 1966, where the group headlined over Captain Beefheart one week and the Doors the next—that Morrison lacked the flair for pop stardom possessed by clearly inferior singers, Keith Relf of the Yardbirds, Eric Burdon of the Animals, never mind Mick Jagger, who in those days were seizing America's airwaves like pirates, if not, as with Freddie and the Dreamers or Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, conning the nation's youth like the King and the Duke bamboozling Huck and Jim. Morrison communicated distance, not immediacy; bitterness, not celebration. His music had power, but too much subtlety for its power not to double back into fear, loss, fury, doubt.

What he lacked in glamour he made up in strangeness—or rather his strangeness made glamour impossible, and at the same time captivated some who felt strange themselves. Morrison never covered Randy Newman's "Have You Seen My Baby?"—"I'll talk to strangers, if I want to / 'Cause I'm a stranger, too"—he didn't have to. He was small and gloomy, a burly man with more black energy than he knew what to do with, the wrong guy to meet in a dark alley, or backstage on the wrong night. He didn't fit the maracas-shaking mode of the day. Instead, in 1965, he recorded a ghostly version of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" that outran Bob Dylan's original, and then turned the fey Paul Simon rewrite of Edward Arlington Robinson's 1897 poem "Richard Cory" into a bone-chilling fable of self-loathing and vengefulness.

In 1966 Morrison abandoned the last remnant of Them—its name—and put himself altogether under the wing of the legendary New York record man Bert Berns, renowned for writing or producing Solomon Burke's "Cry to Me," Erma Franklin's "Piece of My Heart," Garnett Mimms's "Cry Baby," and the Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout," not to mention "Here Comes the Night." In 1967 they made the single "Brown-Eyed Girl," after which Berns, working from sometimes unfinished recordings, rushed out a dark, cracked-blues album called Blowin' Your Mind! (the phrase was already as out-of-date as the soupy psychedelic jacket); the signature number was the nearly ten-minute "T. B. Sheets," which was exactly what it was about. Who wanted to listen to an endless cynical number about a woman dying of tuberculosis, closer to a bilious stand-up routine than a song, when the air was filled with "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)"?

The bright, bouncy "Brown-Eyed Girl" was Morrison's least convincing recording and his first top-ten hit single—and, except for "Domino" in 1970, so far his last. Though "Brown-Eyed Girl" has stayed on the radio ever since, at the time Morrison himself was quickly forgotten; he had both trivialized himself and blown himself up. His career was all but destroyed. When Nik Cohn's Pop from the Beginning, the first good rock 'n' roll history, appeared in 1969, even when a revised edition came out in 1973, neither Them nor Morrison were even mentioned.

Consumed by resentment over the swindle of stardom, fame, records, money, debt, and oblivion, caught in a trap of performing and publishing contracts after Berns's death at the end of 1967, Morrison found himself in Boston, where late-night DJs soon got used to a character with an incomprehensible Irish accent drunkenly pestering them for John Lee Hooker music. One night Morrison was booed off the stage when Peter Wolf, then the leader of a local band called the Hallucinations, brought him out of the audience to front their version of "Gloria." "Don't you know who this is?" Wolf shouted at the hissing crowd. "This man wrote the song!" But they didn't know. In 1967, when you said Morrison you meant the Doors, who, one could have read at the time, were at work on "their new masterpiece": their version of "Gloria."

Morrison returned to Belfast, apparently a burnt-out victim of the pop wars. There he wrote a set of songs about childhood, initiation, sex, and death, which finally took form as Astral Weeks. It was as serious an album as could be imagined, but it soared like an old Drifters 45, "When My Little Girl Is Smiling" or "I Count the Tears." From there Morrison's music opened onto the road it has followed since: a road bordered by meadows alive with the promise of mystical deliverance and revelation on one side, forests of shrieking haunts and beckoning specters on the other, and rocks, baubles, traps, and snares down the middle. With his wife, he moved to the musicians' pastoral bohemia of Woodstock, then to the San Francisco Bay Area, celebrated a domestic paradise, and pledged to walk down Broadway in his hot pants. Then his paradise fell to pieces, and his music shot back and forth between false promises and affirmations too hard-won to deny, from upstate New York to Marin County under a Belfast cloud, idyll and civil war, inspiration and boredom, the platitudes of a New Age seeker and the bad news of someone convinced that no one is listening, down ten, twenty, thirty, forty years, by now almost half a century, to find a man now brooding in his present-day redoubt in Bath, dreamy site of Roman spas, John Wood's eighteenth-century Druidic power spot Bath Circus, and Morrison's own Exile Productions. "The only thing that matters is whether you've got it or not," he once said. "The only thing that counts is whether you're still around. I'm still around." Yes, and so what? As a physical fact, Morrison may have the richest and most expressive voice pop music has produced since Elvis Presley, and with a sense of himself as an artist that Elvis was always denied. But what is that voice for?

"When I was very young," the late Ralph J. Gleason wrote in 1970 in a review of Morrison's album Moondance, "I saw a film version of the life of John McCormack, the Irish tenor, playing himself. In it he explained to his accompanist that the element necessary to mark the important voice off from the other good ones was very specific. 'You have to have,' he said, 'the yarragh in your voice'"—and to get the yarragh, for Morrison, you may need a sense of the song as a thing in itself, with its own brain, heart, lungs, tongue, and ears. Its own desires, fears, will, and even ideas: "The question might really be," as he once said, "is the song singing you?" His music can be heard as an attempt to surrender to the yarragh, or to make it surrender to him; to find the music it wants; to bury it; to dig it out of the ground. The yarragh is his version of the art that has touched him: of blues and jazz, for that matter of Yeats and Lead Belly, the voice that strikes a note so exalted you can't believe a mere human being is responsible for it, a note so unfinished and unsatisfied you can understand why the eternal seems to be riding on its back.

Morrison will take hold of the yarragh, or get close to it, raise its specter even as he falls back before it, for the moment defeated, with horns, volume, quiet, melody and rhythm and the abandonment of both, in the twist of a phrase or the dissolution of words into syllables and syllables into preverbal grunts and moans. He will pursue it perhaps most of all in repetition, railing or sailing the same sound ten, twenty, thirty times until it has taken his song where he wants it to go or failed to crack the wall around it. The yarragh is not, it seems, something Morrison can get at will, or that in any given year or even decade he is even looking for; the endless stream of dull and tired albums through the 1980s and '90s, carrying titles like warning labels—Beautiful Vision; Poetic Champions Compose; Avalon Sunset; No Guru, No Method, No Teacher; Inarticulate Speech of the Heart; A Sense of Wonder; Enlightenment—attest to that. So do a string of records where Morrison seems to attempt to reduce whatever might be elusive, undefinable, and sui generis in his music to parts that can never recombine into a whole, as he recorded jazz and jump blues with his sometime accompanist Georgie Fame, country with Linda Gail Lewis, Jerry Lee's sister, traditional Irish songs with the Chieftains, and, most touchingly, even skiffle with Lonnie Donegan himself, back in Belfast, two old men standing up to the crowd to sing "Midnight Special," not so far from where, once, one of them named a band after it. Those are episodes in a career. It's the fragments of music as broken and then remade by the yarragh that this book is looking for. "The only time I actually work with words," Morrison said in 1978, "is when I'm writing a song. After it's written, I release the words; and every time I'm singing, I'm singing syllables. I'm singing signs and phrases."

The quest for the yarragh—for moments of disruption, when effects can seem to have no cause, when the sense of an unrepeatable event is present, when what is taking place in a song seems to go beyond the limits of respectable speech—is also a performer's quest to evade and escape the expectations of his audience. It's a struggle to avoid being made irrelevant and redundant, a creature tied as if by chains to his hits of forty, thirty, twenty years earlier, even to the song that hit last month—forbidden, by the laws of the pop mind and the pop market, from ever saying anything he hasn't said before. The result is a distrust of the audience, coming out, on any given night, in anger, insult, drunkenness, disdain directed at the singer's own songs as much as toward whatever crowd might be present. From the time of his first hits Morrison has, in a way, set himself against any possible audience: he does his work in public, but with his back turned, sometimes literally so—and it might go back to those nights in the Maritime Hotel in 1964. "Out of nowhere, these kids began showing up," Morrison said in 1970, and I remember the way his eyes sparkled in a set, stolid face as he talked: "Sometimes, when it all worked, something would happen, and the audience and musicians would be as one." That was because no one knew what might happen—and no one knew what was supposed to happen. Before a song is recorded, there is no right way; afterward, especially in the pop glare, audiences know what to expect and expect what they know.

Van Morrison, then, is a bad-tempered, self-contradictory individual whose work is about freedom. How do you get it? What do you do with it? How do you find it when it disappears—and what is it? Is the yarragh the means to freedom, or is it, when you can find it, the thing itself? When Morrison reaches the moments of upheaval, reversal, revelation, and mirror-breaking that are this book's subject—in his music and, sometimes, in what other people have done with his music, finding, as Neil Jordan would do with Morrison's music in his film Breakfast on Pluto, a yarragh behind the yarragh, or dramatizing it as Morrison might not—all of those questions are thrown into relief.

It becomes plain that any summing up of Morrison's work would be a fraud. That is what makes his failures interesting and his successes incomplete; it's what allows the most valuable instances of his music to exist less in relation to other instances in his career in any historical sense than in a kind of continual present. It's that territory I will try to map.