Marcus Listening to Van Morrison

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ISBN: 978-0-571-25447-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

'Van Morrison,' says Greil Marcus, 'remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music.' When Astral Weeks was released in 1968, it was largely ignored. When it was re-released as a live album in 2009 it reached the top of the Billboard charts, a first for any Van Morrison recording. The wild swings in the music, mirroring the swings in Morrison's success and in people's appreciation (or lack of it) of his music, make Van Morrison one of the most perplexing and mysterious figures in popular modern music, and a perfect subject for the wise and insightful scrutiny of Greil Marcus, one of America's most dedicated cultural critics. This book is Marcus's quest to understand Van Morrison's particular genius through the extraordinary and unclassifiable moments in his long career, beginning in 1965 and continuing in full force to this day. In these dislocations Marcus finds the singer on his own artistic quest precisely to reach some extreme musical threshold, the moments that are not enclosed by the will or the intention of the performer but which somehow emerge at the limits of the musician and his song.

Greil Marcus was born in San Francisco in 1945. He is the author of Mystery Train, Invisible Republic, Lipstick Traces,Double Trouble and Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010 and the editor of Lester Bangs's Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. In 1998 he curated the exhibition '1948' at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. He writes the Real Life Rock Top 10 column for The Believer and teaches at the New School in New York. He was described by John Rockwell in the New York Times as 'a writer of rare perception and a genuinely innovative thinker'. Greil Marcus lives in California.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Marcus, Greil

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

In 1956, the stiff and tired world of British pop music was turned upside down by Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line,” a skiffle version of a Lead Belly song, played on guitar, banjo, washboard, and homemade bass. Like thousands of other teenagers, John Lennon put together his own skiffle band in Liverpool that same year; Van Morrison, born George Ivan Morrison in 1945 in East Belfast, in Northern Ireland, formed the Sputniks in 1957, the year the Soviet Union put the first satellite into orbit and John Lennon met Paul McCartney. Morrison would never find such a comrade, and, unlike the Beatles, he would never find his identity in a group. Whether in Ireland, England, or the United States, he would always see himself as a castaway.

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,...